The subversion of gravity in Jackson Pollock's abstractions

Art Bulletin

Volumn 90, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 616-639

  Cernuschi, Claude ^a   Herczynski, Andrzej ^a  

^a BOSTON COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65749141809     PISSN: 00043079     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2008.10786416     Document Type: Review

References (112)

1. Paul Brach, "From a symposium, 'Jackson Pollock: Portrait and a Dream,' Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY," in Such Desperate Joy: Imaging Jackson Pollock, ed. Helen A. Harrison (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000), 277.
2. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 242-329.
3. Jackson Pollock, interview by William Wright (1950), broadcast on WERI (Westerly, R.I.), 1951, reprinted in Pepe Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, Reviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 21.
4. Intriguingly, there is a photograph of an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1955 (Francis O'Connor and Eugene Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978], vol. 4 [hereafter referred to as CR4], 275), where White Cockatoo: Number 24A, 1948 (CR2, cat. no. 194 [hereafter referred to as CR2: 194]) is shown exhibited on the ceiling. But this may have been an anomalous example, which the gallery may have decided to exhibit this way one time only. The painting, as far as can be discerned, was not intended to be exhibited this way, nor has been ever since.
5. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 84.
6. T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 325.
7. The most famous example is that of the Greek painter Nealkes, who, unable to reproduce a horse foaming at the mouth to his satisfaction, flung paint at his work in frustration, only to obtain the very effect he desired. In many ways, Nealkes could be seen as providing a precedent for Pollock, at least insofar as he relinquished a certain degree of control, as well as severed the artist's dependence on the physical contact between the brush and the canvas. Closer in time is Man Ray, who, in using spray paint in his aerographs, also eliminated any physical contact between the artist and the canvas (see Aerograph, 1919, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart).
8. Frank O'Hara, Jackson Pollock (New York: Braziller, 1959), 26.
9. B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), xiii.
10. Thomas Hart Benton, quoted in Stephen Polcari, "Jackson Pollock and Thomas Hart Benton," Arts Magazine 53 (March 1979): 123.
11. John Dewey, Art and Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1934), 54.
12. For a penetrating discussion of this idea, see E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 179ff.
13. Pollock, interview by Wright, 21.
14. B. H. Friedman, "An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock," in Jackson Pollock: Black and White (New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, 1969),
15. reprinted in Karmel, Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, Reviews, 38.
16. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (Northampton, Mass.: Tundra Publishing, 1993), 111-13.
17. This connection was elucidated by Ellen G. Landau in "Action/Re- Action: The Artistic Friendship of Herbert Matter and Jackson Pollock," in Pollock Matters, ed. Landau and Claude Cernuschi (Chestnut Hill, Mass.: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2007), 9-57.
18. For additional information on Pollock's relation to photography, see David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 122-23;
19. idem, "Pollock Drawing: The Mind's Line," in No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper, ed. Susan Davidson (New York: Guggenheim Publications, 2005), 31-33;
20. and Caroline Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 242-50.
21. William M. Ivins Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 152-53.
22. Interestingly, Pollock was known to have admired Darcy Thompson's book On Growth and Form (New York: Macmillan, 1948), which included several examples of strobe photography.
23. See Martin Kemp, "Doing What Comes Naturally: Morphogenesis and the Limits of the Genetic Code," Art Journal 55 (Spring 1996): 30.
24. Pollock, interview by Wright, 22.
25. In his essays, William Rubin made a similar observation: "marks have no inevitable relationship to the speed, character or range of the body-movements that produce them. Similar marks can be made in quite different ways just as similar body and wrist movements can lead to quite different marks." Rubin, "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition," Artforum 5 (February 1967),
26. For a comprehensive discussion of this phenomenon, see Neil M. Ribe, "Coiling of Viscous Jets," Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, Series A, 460 (November 2004): 3223-39.
27. Respectively, CRS (catalogue raisonné supplement) no. 24 and CR4: 977.
28. For a fluid-mechanical model of the paint jets created by the artist, a computational simulation of some of the effects he generated, and a review of the relevant physics literature, see S. Lee, S. Olsen, and B. Gooch, "Simulating and Analyzing Jackson Pollock's Paintings," Journal of Mathematics and Art 1 (June 2007): 73-78.
29. See Claude Cernuschi and Andrzej Herczynski, "Cutting Pollock Down to Size: The Boundaries of the Poured Technique," in Landau and Cernuschi, Pollock Matters, 73-89.
30. See also Robert Morris, "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated," in Looking Critically: 21 Years of Artforum Magazine, ed. Amy Baker Sandback (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984), 88-92;
31. Rosalind Krauss, "The Crisis of the Easel Picture," in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 155-80;
32. and Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
33. Elizabeth Frank, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), 114;
34. and Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 335.
35. Friedman, "An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock," 38.
36. See Nicholas Eastaugh, "What It Says on the Tin: A Preliminary Study of the Set of Paint Cans and the Floor in the Pollock-Krasner Studio," in Landau and Cernuschi, Pollock Matters, 143-54.
37. Referring to the constitution of these paints and thinners, Krasner added, "I don't know what it was." Lee Krasner, "Jackson Pollock at Work: An Interview with Lee Krasner," by Barbara Rose, in Karmel, Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, 43.
38. Jackson Pollock, handwritten statement, in Karmel, Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, 24.
39. Numerous animals (from bacteria to turtles, sharks, and pigeons) can in fact orient themselves with respect to Earth's magnetic field but, apparently, humans lack this ability. The mechanism of magnetoreception in living organisms is poorly understood but is a subject of intense research; see Sonke Johnsen and Kenneth J. Lohmann, "Magnetoreception in Animals," Physics Today 61 (March 2008): 29-35.
40. See Pepe Karmel, "A Sum of Destructions," in Varnedoe and Karmel, Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, 75.
41. In parallel, Louis also left himself open to change the orientation of his canvases after they were completed; see John Elderfield, Morris Louis (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 35.
42. For an analysis of El Lissitzky's similar proclivities, see Yve-Alain Bois, "El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility," Art in America 76, no. 4 (1988): 160-81.
43. The question as to whether a dominant symmetry-breaking axis should be imposed or overall symmetry preserved was faced by artists working within the confines of rotationally symmetrical spaces - either circular ceilings or hemispheric cupolas. In Pietro da Cortona's Assumption of the Virgin (S. Maria in Vallicella, Rome, 1647-51), for instance, the focus on the Virgin imposes a privileged line of sight, thereby breaking the rotational symmetry of the hemispheric dome. In Andrea Mantegna's ceiling of the Camera degli Sposi in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua (1474), by contrast, the overall symmetry of the design is preserved: as one rotates underneath the fresco, no perspective seems privileged over any other. A similar problem, to bring the matter down to earth, faced clock designers from the very beginning of horology. Whereas the Roman numerals of early clocks are oriented symmetrically with respect to the center, Arabic numerals of later clocks are often aligned vertically, breaking the rotational symmetry of the circular dial.
44. Consequently, these round pieces run afoul of their likely prototype - José Clemente Orozco's Man of Fire (1938-39) - a fresco that, although not rotationally symmetric, nonetheless avoids a single privileged compositional axis.
45. Artists such as Piet Mondrian (Counter-Composition, 1924),
46. Ivan Puni (Still Life with Hammer, 1915),
47. Kenneth Noland (Autumn Spirit, 1965),
48. and Richard Serra (Boston Road, 1974), of course, explored other alternatives to the four canonical orientations of rectangular canvases.
49. Jackson Pollock, "My Painting," Possibilities 1 (Winter 1947-48),
50. Rubin, "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition," 131.
51. See, for example, CR2: 224, 225, 228, 236.
52. A 1951 photograph of Pollock's studio, CR4, p. 261, shows a number of paintings executed on a single roll of canvas. Among them is Black and White Painting II (CR4: 330), a piece that was presumably executed with a different orientation from the one in which it is presently exhibited. Even if the reductive evocation of a human head is reversed, the artist obviously favored (though at which point is unclear) this particular reorientation, as evidenced by the placement of his signature. Breaking with his practice of painting from all four sides of the canvas, Pollock, as the photograph indicates, must have painted these pieces predominantly from one side.
53. quoted in Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1989), 591.
54. For a detailed discussion of the applicability of fractal geometry to the analysis of Pollock's poured abstractions, and of the structural connection between his work and naturally occurring patterns, see Claude Cernuschi, Andrzej Herczynski, and David Martin, "Abstract Expressionism and Fractal Geometry," in Landau and Cernuschi, Pollock Matters, 91-104.
55. Other discussions of this topic include Richard P. Taylor, "Order in Pollock's Chaos," Scientific American, December 2002, 116-21;
56. Taylor, Adam P. Micolich, and David Jonas, "Fractal Analysis of Pollock's Drip Paintings," Nature 399 (June 1999): 422;
57. Taylor, Micolich, and Jonas, "Fractal Expressionism," Physics World 12 (October 1999): 25-28;
58. Taylor, Micolich, and Jonas, "The Construction of Jackson Pollock's Fractal Drip Paintings," Leonardo 35 (2002): 203-7;
59. J. R. Mureika, G. C. Cupchik, and C. C. Dyer, "Multifractal Fingerprints in the Visual Arts," Leonardo 37, no. 1 (2004): 53-56;
60. Mureika, Dyer, and Cupchik, "Multifractal Structure in Nonrepresentational Art," Physical Review E 72 (2005): 046101;
61. and Katherine Jones-Smith and Harsh Mathur, "Revisiting Pollock's Drip Paintings," Nature 444 (November 2006): E9-E10.
62. Pat Steir, quoted in Paul Gardner, "Pat Steir: Seeing through the Eyes of Others," ArtNews 84 (November 1985): 88.
63. Pat Steir, quoted in Anne Waldman, "Pat Steir," Bomb 83 (Spring 2003): 36.
64. Another such exception is Number 6, 1948: Blue, Red, Yellow (1948, CR2: 209).
65. Kenneth Noland, quoted in Elderfield, Morris Louis, 33.
66. Pat Steir, quoted in Hilary Stunda, "April Gornik and Pat Steir," ArtNews 200 (February 2000): 169.
67. Pollock, handwritten statement, 24.
68. Linda Benglis, quoted in Rosalind Constable, "New Sites for New Sights," New York Magazine, January 12, 1970, 44.
69. Richard Serra, quoted in "Interview: Richard Serra & Bernard Lamarche-Vadel," in Richard Serra: Interviews, Etc. 1970-1980, ed. Clara Weyergraf (Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum, 1980), 140.
70. Eva Hesse, "An Interview with Eva Hesse," by Cindy Nemser, in Sandback, Looking Critically, 94.
71. Richard Serra, "Basel, January 18, 1994," in Richard Serra Intersection Basel, ed. Martin Schwander (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag Düsseldorf, 1996), 75.
72. Pollock, "My Painting," 17.
73. See Robert Goodnough, "Pollock Paints a Picture [May 1951]," ArtNews 76 (November 1977): 164.
74. Pollock, interview by Wright, 23.
75. Clyfford Still, quoted by Katherine Kuh, "Clyfford Still," in Clyfford Still, ed. John O'Neill (New York: Harry N. Abrams and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979), 10.
76. Mark Rothko, for instance, declared that his works functioned as a "pictorial equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self," letter to the editor, New York Times, July 8, 1945, sec. 2, 2.
77. In addition, Robert Motherwell stated, "The idea that appears in Baudelaire ... is the idea of nature being analogies - that nature is essentially a system of equivalences ... any given thing can be a corresponding metaphor for something else." Motherwell, quoted in Robert Mattison, Robert Motherwell: The Formative Years (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1987), 14.
78. Friedman, Jackson Pollock, 71.
79. Pollock, interview in Life Magazine, 591.
80. See Claude Cernuschi, Jackson Pollock: Meaning and Significance (New York: Harper/Collins, 1992), esp. chap. 3;
81. and Cernuschi and Herczynski, "Cutting Pollock Down to Size," 73-89.
82. See Claude Cernuschi, "Not an Illustration but the Equivalent": A Cognitive Approach to Abstract Expressionism (Madison, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997).
83. Eve Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 145;
84. see also Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987);
85. and George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
86. Pollock, "My Painting," 18.
87. Krasner, "Jackson Pollock at Work: An Interview with Lee Krasner," 42.
88. Pat Steir, "Interview with Pat Steir, San Francisco, November 1990," by Constance Lewallen, View 7 (Fall 1991): 5.
89. Richard Serra, "Rigging," interview by Gerard Hovagyman in Weyergraf, Richard Serra: Interviews, Etc., 128.
90. Robert Smithson, The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 89.
91. Friedman, "An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock," 37.
92. Robert Smithson, interview by Paul Cummings, in Smithson, The Writings of Robert Smithson, 146, 147.
93. Steir, "Interview with Pat Steir," 5.
94. Clement Greenberg, "Recentness of Sculpture," in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 182.
95. See Ulrich Neisser, Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1976), 108ff.
96. See Cernuschi, Jackson Pollock, 135ff.
97. See Julius S. Held, "Gravity and Art," in Art Studies for an Editor: 25 Studies in Memory of Milton S. Fox (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975), 117-28.
98. Mark Rothko, quoted in Marjorie Phillips, Duncan Phillips and His Collection (Boston: W. W. Norton, 1970), 288.
99. See Jeffrey Weiss, "Dis-Orientation: Rothko's Inverted Canvases," in Seeing Rothko, ed. Glenn Phillips and Thomas Crow (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005), 135-58.
100. Meyer Schapiro, "Recent Abstract Painting," reprinted as "The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art," in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 213-26.
101. Although Mark Rothko was a nonaligned Socialist, Barnett Newman an anarchist, and Ad Reinhardt a Soviet sympathizer, they painted in so careful a way as to run afoul of Schapiro's interpretation. Even the gestural works of Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Yves Klein were far more controlled and calculated than their appearance suggests. See Claude Cernuschi, "The Politics of Abstract Expressionism," review of Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period, by David Craven, Archives of American Art Journal 39, nos. 1-2 (2000): 30-42.
102. Michael Leja, for example, interprets Abstract Expressionism's tragic bend as disguising "the conditions of authoritarian domination," as "a tool of bourgeois ideology," and as "operating within the hegemonic process" of an oppressive capitalist society. Leja, Refraining Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940's (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 117, 118.
103. For other readings of Abstract Expressionism as reflective of, if not complicit with, the American power structure and imperialist foreign policy during the Cold War, see Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 125-34;
104. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, "Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting," in Pollock and After, 135-52;
105. and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
106. For an expansion of Schapiro's argument and a penetrating analysis of the political and ideological loyalties of New York school artists, including an analysis of the files the FBI compiled on members of the movement, see David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
107. Pollock, interview by Wright, 20.
108. Robert Motherwell, "A Personal Expression," reprinted in Stephanie Terenzio, ed., The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 61.
109. "Way I see it, we're part of the one, making it whole. That's enough, being part of something bigger. ... We're part of the great all, in our lives and work. Union, that's us." Jackson Pollock, "Jackson Pollock: Fragments of Conversations and Statements, Selected, Extracted & Categorized from His Own Notes by Jeffrey Potter, 1949-1956," in Harrison, Such Desperate Joy, 89.
110. The connection between Pollock's interest in nature and an evocation of freedom was made by Krasner: "after living in Springs for six years, I think he would have given just as much emphasis to this Eastern Long Island landscape - and seascape. They were part of his consciousness: the horizontality he speaks of, and the sense of endless space, and the freedom. ..." Friedman, "An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock," 37.
111. According to the artist Jane Freilicher, Pollock's work conveyed a sense of unlimited freedom; Pollock's achievement, she maintained, "brought a glamour and authority to American painting which inspired younger painters. ... If you could bring it off, 'make it work,' it might be possible to do anything." Freilicher, quoted in "Jackson Pollock: An Artist's Symposium, Part 2," Art News 66 (May 1967): 72.
112. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 390: "Our life is nothing but motion."