Somewhere deep in every American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe.
—D. H. Lawrence, 1923.

Until well into the 1940s, Jackson Pollock’s painting remained locked in a struggle to master and overcome the influences of the European modernist painters he took as his models—primarily Picasso, Kandinsky, and Miró. That he was not himself an artist in their class was more or less taken for granted even by his most ardent admirers at the time. It is doubtful that Pollock himself believed he was an artist in their class. Yet what he brought to his encounter with these European masters was a fierce determination to produce an art that would somehow carry him beyond the styles and conventions he was wrestling with. Among much else, this meant that traditional easel painting had to be abandoned in favor of something the European masters of modernism had not yet attempted to place at the center of their art—a mode of mural-scale wall painting of a radically subjective character.

Pollock seems to have understood that as an easel painter he would never be able to trump his European masters. Not only did they bring to the tradition of the easel picture a richer and more complex command of experience than any that was within his own reach, but they had effectively transformed the content of the easel picture to conform to the imperatives of that experience. Mural-scale wall painting of a certain persuasion~dash\painting that would be tethered not to the service of some social cause but to the only subject that governed the artist’s will: his own troubled psyche offered a way to circumvent the tradition to which Pollock could not finally make a significant contribution.

It was in the interest of circumventing that tradition that the influence of the Mexican muralists, the public art of Thomas Hart Benton, and Pollock’s own response to Picasso’s Guernica all played a crucial role in determining his leap into mural-scale wall painting in the late 1940s. It was in the scale and ambition of such painting, not in its ethos or imagery, that Pollock saw the possibility of a radical artistic opportunity. For the social content of 1930s mural painting Pollock felt no affinity whatever. Indifferent to politics and fundamentally antisocial in his personal behavior, Pollock had only one subject that commanded his loyalty: his own appetites, ambitions, and compulsions, which years of Jungian psychoanalysis had elevated in his own mind to the status of a cosmological imperative. (Hence his megalomaniac assertion that “I am nature!”) It wasn’t until he was able to bring those appetites and ambitions into alignment with a pictorial technique allowing them unfettered expression—unfettered, that is, by the traditional tools and constraints of easel painting—that Pollock was able to achieve an art uniquely his own.

It is for this reason that the “drip” abstractions of the late 1940s and early 1950s are inevitably the central focus in any comprehensive account of Pollock’s oeuvre. It is one of the distinctions of the “Jackson Pollock” retrospective which Kirk Varnedoe has organized at the Museum of Modern Art that it assembles a larger number of these abstract paintings than has ever before been seen in a single exhibition.[1] This, in my view, is also one of the principal liabilities of the exhibition, for what has come to be regarded as “classic” Pollock is not, after all, an art of infinite variety. It is maddeningly repetitious in its formal rhythms. It is paltry in its command of color, for classic Pollock is largely based on light-dark contrasts rather than chromatic structure. Classic Pollock also lacks breadth, as even Clement Greenberg acknowledged, in its range of feeling and invention.

Given these limitations, such paintings are best seen in isolation from each other. They actually gain something from being viewed in the company of abstract paintings unlike themselves in method and imagery —which is generally how we do see these Pollocks in museum collections—for the contrasts to be observed in such contexts have the effect of underscoring the element of furious, headlong energy in Pollock. When a large number of Pollock’s abstract paintings are seen in close succession, however—as they are in the MOMA retrospective—their much-vaunted energy tends to deflate and flatten into decorative tedium. The more we look, the less we find. What may strike us initially as random and reckless in the labyrinthine traceries of dripped and poured pigment soon reveals itself to be involuntarily governed by an ineluctable and compulsive monotony. Pollock’s unconscious, to the extent that it was called upon by his automatist methods to supply him with images, forms, and ideas, turned out to be a very limited resource. But then, so too was the element of conscious control in Pollock. Which may be why classic Pollock turned out to have a lifespan of less than five years.

Even so, the paintings produced in the early stages of this short-lived period are more interesting than those that came at the end. If we take Cathedral (1947) as marking its beginning, then it was pretty much over by 1950, the year in which Pollock produced Lavender Mist, Autumn Rhythm, and a number of similar paintings in which he seems to have been able to effect a more workable equation between uncertainty and control than either before or after. That there remained a large element of uncertainty in Pollock’s own view of what he was doing in the drip abstractions even in his best years is evident in his introduction of Miróesque cut-out figures in 1948–49. In the eight-foot-wide Out of the Web (1949), for example, the figures actually dominate the web-like traceries of pigment. By the time we get to Blue Poles (1952), uncertainty has been supplanted by predictability. Blue Poles is the Abstract Expressionist version of Salon painting. Classic Pollock had become its own cliché. And in the few years that remained, Pollock is seen to be attempting something like a return to easel painting.

No one has given us a better account of the artistic implications of the shift from easel painting to wall painting in Pollock than the late William C. Seitz in his early study of Abstract Expressionist Painting in America.

Until 1946 [wrote Seitz] Pollock’s paint surfaces were passionately molded with brush and knife in what Thomas Hess characterized as a “heavy, dark Expressionist idiom.” The irreducible unit of his style, despite rectilinear structure, was the individual stroke, though its identity was apt to be lost in the total textural maelstrom and the optical pulsation effected by variegated color.

Out of this “total textural maelstrom,” according to Seitz, came “Pollock’s identification of passion with nonobjective brush tracks,” and this in turn led him to a pictorial method in which “tools seldom touched the painting surface”—the method Seitz described as “the flow or drip of enamel from brush, stick, or can.”

Seitz then addressed the crucial question of “the degree and nature of the control that the artist intentionally or unconsciously exerts over his medium.” While reminding us that “The idea of accident is deeply entrenched in modern tradition,” Seitz went on to observe that Pollock had

demonstrated that direction can be given to even so fluid and willful a medium as poured enamel. Control here applies not to the exact track and shape of each brushstroke [sic] to be sure, but to the types of relationship inherent in the process. Individual passages … at no point evidence the direct touch of the painter. Rather, it is his entire bodily activity that from a distance influences, but by no means determines, his configuration. Accident, gravity, and the fluid response of the paint combine with human gesture to form a structure that is the result of their interaction.

About the pictorial structure that results from this interaction, Seitz also offered some cogent observations.

It is easy to see three-dimensional structure in Pollock’s pictures; and as one’s consciousness moves, in exploring his endless space of cellular division, time is involved as well. Finally, following the perceptual jolt by which one’s impression of a visual field shifts, hollow space becomes flat surface. What was open structure is seen as a network of lines that weave above and below each other across the canvas, and the spectator is excluded. The picture, still vital, becomes a wall decoration.

Now the possibility that it might be the fate of mural-scale abstract painting to be experienced as wall decoration—“wallpaper,” as Harold Rosenberg derisively characterized it in “The American Action Painters”— was an issue that was deeply troubling to virtually all of the painters of the New York School. That is why there was so much heated discussion lavished on the importance of the “subject” from the earliest days of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1940s. It was believed—some of the time, anyway, by some of the artists— that a compelling subject would forestall abstraction’s descent into wall decoration. There were New York School painters— Mark Rothko prominently among them— who insisted that the only legitimate subject for abstract painting was some mythic or mystical vision of human tragedy, yet few observers of his art could find any hint or suggestion of such a subject in the paintings he actually created. Willem de Kooning, on the other hand, downgraded the very notion that “content” might play an important role in painting—“It’s very tiny—very tiny, content,” he said—but his own argument was undermined by the series of Women paintings that placed him in a direct line of descent from Picasso, for whom a subject had always been crucial. There was never any consensus on the subject of a “subject” in the New York School, nor could there be —for it was in the very nature of Abstract Expressionist painting for each of its practitioners to conduct a radically subjective dialogue with the art of the European modernists they aspired to supplant.

In this respect, certainly, Robert Motherwell was far more candid than most of his colleagues in the New York School when he observed that

Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which anything he paints is both a homage and a critique, and everything he says a gloss.

Yet the idea that “the whole culture of modern painting” might in fact be the unacknowledged subject of Abstract Expressionist painting—which I firmly believe to be the case—was deeply distasteful to many painters in the movement, who regarded it as an affront to their high-risk, existential ambitions as members of an embattled avant-garde. It was an idea that for many people in the art world conjured up discredited notions of art-for-art’s-sake and “significant form”—theories that were believed to give priority to art over life, and thus inevitably put in question the ambition of the New York School painting to produce an art so radical that it would at some level challenge the life of the time.

It was for this reason that Harold Rosenberg’s theory of “action painting” scored such an immense success when it was first promulgated in 1952. In a single bold stroke, Rosenberg’s essay “The American Action Painters” appeared to remove the entire Abstract Expressionist movement from both the history of modern painting and the pettifogging distinctions of aesthetic discourse by situating it instead in some exalted realm of existential “action,” where, as the author claimed, “what matters always is the revelation contained in the act,” and such mundane matters as “Form, color, composition, drawing … can be dispensed with.” This was the key passage in what amounted to a declaration of independence from what D. H. Lawrence had called “the old parenthood of Europe”:

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

It was further claimed by Rosenberg that “The new American painting is not ‘pure’ art, since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the aesthetic.” On the contrary, Rosenberg wrote, “The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.” From this perspective, then,

The critic who goes on judging in terms of schools, styles, form—as if the painter were still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (the work of art), instead of living on the canvas—is bound to seem a stranger.

If “every distinction between art and life” had been eliminated in this painting, what it called for wasn’t art criticism or aesthetic judgment but some existentialist version of psychoanalysis.

Since the painter has become an actor, the spectator has to think in a vocabulary of action: its inception, duration, direction— psychic state, concentration and relaxation of the will, passivity, alert waiting. He must become a connoisseur of the gradations between the automatic, the spontaneous, the evoked.

The notion that “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event” was the sheerest nonsense, of course. But it proved to be very seductive nonsense. For its effect was to provide the Abstract Expressionist movement with an exciting new dramaturgy in which the artist now emerged as an existential hero and his painting was to be seen not as an aesthetic endeavor but as the cynosure of a heroic private action that was not to be judged by aesthetic standards. It was, alas, a very “European” theory, which derived from ideas to be found in Breton’s surrealism, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and Sartre’s existentialism, yet it proved to be so appealing that it was somehow exempted from any negative association with “the old parenthood of Europe.”

There was, however, a dirty little secret involved in the promulgation of Rosenberg’s theory. For it was well known at the time that Jackson Pollock was the artist upon whose recent work—the mural-scale “drip” abstractions of the late 1940s and early 1950s—Rosenberg had based his theory of “action painting.” And it was also well known in New York art circles that Rosenberg actually despised Pollock’s paintings and had a very low opinion of the man himself. Yet because Pollock was the only painter then at work whose pictorial practice—especially as it was recorded in the photographs by Hans Namuth—seemed to lend itself to Rosenberg’s existential “action” scenario, he shamelessly exploited Pollock’s notoriety without according him appropriate recognition or even mentioning his name. There was thus at the very core of this famous essay on “The American Action Painters” an act—one might even call it an existential act—of unconscionable bad faith. Yet because Rosenberg was so enamored of his own theory and saw that its publication would bring him a celebrity he had never before enjoyed—which, of course, it promptly did—he turned his private mockery of Pollock’s painting into a bogus manifesto for the entire Abstract Expressionist movement.

The unhappy history of this episode in critical legerdemain is now worth recalling not only because it became so inextricably involved in public perceptions of the art of the New York School for so many years but also because something akin to Harold Rosenberg’s bad faith in promoting his “action” theory seems to have governed the very conception of the “Jackson Pollock” retrospective at MOMA. Unlike Rosenberg, Mr. Varnedoe cannot be accused of despising Pollock’s painting, yet implicit in the atrocious way he has presented the artist’s drip abstractions to the public—and without the drip paintings there would be no Pollock retrospective—is an assumption that these are not works of art that can be expected to sustain our attention without recourse to the mythology surrounding their creation.

Hence the unforgivable decision to install a life-size replica of the interior of the Long Island barn that served as Pollock’s studio in the exhibition itself. That studio interior is, of course, the mise en scène of the media-generated legend of “Jack the Dripper” and all the other nonsense written about Pollock’s antics as an artist. Owing to the photographs of Hans Namuth that documented Pollock’s “performance” in that studio, it has become a space almost as famous as the paintings that were created in it. At MOMA, moreover, the replica of this studio space is adorned with a copious selections of the Namuth photographs of Pollock at work, and on a video monitor at the entrance there is a film version of the same subject. This replica of the Pollock studio turns out to provide the climactic moment in what is a large and at times a very wearying exhibition, and its function in the retrospective is clearly to give the public something other than Pollock’s paintings to look at. To an understanding of Pollock’s painting this replica of his studio space contributes nothing. Its purpose is purely dramaturgical. By evoking the legend of the painter performing in the studio, it succeeds in shifting attention from the paintings to the artist himself as he has passed into the mythology of modern cultural life. It certainly succeeds as show biz, but is finally very damaging to the public’s understanding of the art.

What the conception of the Pollock retrospective owes to Rosenberg’s “action” theory, and what both owe to the folklore generated by Namuth’s studio photographs and films, is made explicit by Pepe Karmel, Mr. Varnedoe’s collaborater on this exhibition, in his essay for the catalogue accompanying the retrospective. This essay on “Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” which runs to some forty-five large pages plus 102 footnotes—roughly two-thirds as long as Mr. Varnedoe’s own essay on the life and work of the artist—is something of a museological phenomenon in itself. I, at least, cannot recall another museum text of this length in which the most mind-numbing pedantry is so seamlessly combined with such shameless legend-mongering to produce such a negligible critical result. For what momentous discovery does Mr. Karmel come up with after his protracted study of Namuth’s negatives and the outtakes from the Pollock film project? “Pollock’s achievement, in his pictures of 1947–50,” writes Mr. Karmel in conclusion, “was to transform graphic flatness into optical flatness—to show that by piling layer upon layer, sign upon sign, you could generate a pictorial sensation equivalent to that of the primordial vision field.” He acknowledges that “The impact of this discovery is evident in Pollock’s painting,” and then adds: “But only through the films and photographs of Hans Namuth can we understand the technique that made it possible.”

Yet in this pedantic endeavor Mr. Karmel is guilty of engaging in the very same critical strategy he takes Harold Rosenberg’s “action” theory to task for. “Rosenberg’s rhetoric encouraged artists and critics to focus on Pollock’s actions rather than on the images resulting from them,” Karmel correctly observes, and then at much greater length than Rosenberg attempted does exactly the same thing. But since the whole conception of this retrospective is to exploit the Pollock myth rather than to give the public a disinterested account of the artist’s accomplishment—which really doesn’t require an exhibition on this scale—it was essential for MOMA, too, to concentrate on “Pollock’s actions” rather than his art. So the paint-splattered floor of the artist’s studio is given a full-color reproduction in the catalogue, and the studio itself has been replicated as a shrine where not the paintings of Jackson Pollock but the photographs of Hans Namuth documenting their production may be pondered as the sacred relics of the artist’s legend. All of which has less to do with the life of art than with the current business practices of the art-museum industry. The first part of “Jackson Pollock and the New York School” appeared in the January issue of The New Criterion.

Notes
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1. “Jackson Pollock” opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on November 1, 1998, and remains on view until February 2, 1999. Go back to the text.
2. Originally written as a doctoral dissertation at Princeton University in 1955, Seitz’s Abstract Expressionist Painting in American was not published as a book until 1983, when Harvard University Press brought it out with a forward by Robert Motherwell and an introduction by Dore Ashton. Go back to the text.