Jackson Pollock, his paintings are famous and so is he, a seminal figure to be sure. Besides being famous, his paintings are unbelievably expensive, and just in case you wanted to buy one, here’s what you get. Jackson couldn’t do representation, so you’d acquire a revolutionary form of painting, one that profoundly embodies despair, frustration, and futility. Some said at the time that Jackson’s work wasn’t art, but you wouldn’t hear that from me. I see the spontaneous, totally authentic expression of monumental social unease and self-doubt turned aggressive and belligerent through the medium of alcohol. Beyond rendering his inner existential tantrum, the work, itself, has also been gloriously self-destructive, commercial paint solvents eating away at raw canvas, and museums keep his paintings on constant life-support. Pure genius, that.
The question is, if you’re not a terminal alcoholic verging toward suicide, why would you want to own one of Jackson’s paintings, or even spend much time in front of one at a museum? The awful truth about art is, it’s really true – art reveals the artist at whatever level you care to look, and sometimes you find yourself in there, too.
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Last week Diane and I took a walk to the Mexican Museum of Art here in Chicago. It's a great museum, we're members in fact, the art is world class. We got lucky this day to find a show of work by the famed Mexican muralists and the U.S. artists that went Mexico to study with them from the 30's to the 50's. There was work by Reviera, Orozco, and Seguieros (sp?), and many others, as well as work by many Norte Americanos, including a young Jackson Pollock. Is this common knowledge? After viewing his representative pieces, I was guessing that he left Mexico with his tail tucked between his legs, gave up representational work, started drinking, became self-destructive, and began dripping paint - oh, an interesting tid-bit: The painter (the name eludes me)that Pollock studied with laid his canvasses on the floor
and used a dripping technique - the one thing Pollock is remembered for.
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