No Limits, Just Edges:
Jackson Pollock at the
Deutsche Guggenheim
Starting on
January 29, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin will be dedicating a large
retrospective to the drawings of Jackson Pollock, titled "No Limits, Just
Edges."
Untitled,
1951
©Pollock-Krasner Foundation/
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
"The modern
artist… is working and expressing an inner world - in other words -
expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces." This quote of Jackson
Pollock's seems custom-tailored to the role he played in 20th-century
art. Pollock is considered to be the most important American Abstract
Expressionist and pioneer of "Action
Painting," an artist maudit and American Prometheus. When the
artist, who'd had relatively little success up until that point, was
discovered and promoted in 1943 by Peggy
Guggenheim, a spectacular career began that lasted a mere ten years.
On August 11 1956, Pollock drove into a tree, drunk, killing one of his
female passengers along with himself. The legend he left behind was
largely due to his "Drip
Paintings," in which he sprayed, poured, and spackled paint or
simply dripped it onto canvases spread out on the studio floor. More than
any other works by a contemporary artist, Pollock's abstract paintings
were celebrated in the nineteen-fifties as the quintessential expression
of an independent contemporary American art.
Die
Maske, ca. 1943
©Pollock-Krasner
Foundation/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
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"No Limits, Just Edges": the title of the first German
retrospective of Jackson Pollock's drawings plays on the artist's all-over
works, which transgressed every painting limitation known at the time.
Yet it only partially conveys what the visitor can expect to see. The
drawings span the period between 1940 and 1950 and do indeed form the
exhibition's main focus, referring as they do to the time of the "Drip
Paintings," when Pollock developed his inimitable style. Yet the
exhibition also provides an overview of the artist's early creative phase
and features numerous pages from early sketchbooks as well as studies done
from Old Master paintings and revolutionary
Mexican artists. A fascination for Native
American art also played an important role in Pollock's early
development, as did an involvement with psychoanalysis, European Surrealism,
and the work of Pablo
Picasso.
In 1928, Jackson Pollock entered the Manual
Arts High School in New York at the age of 16. Due to his difficult
family situation, depression and alcoholism marked his life from early on.
After being thrown out of school twice, he signed up at the Art
Students League in 1930, where he attended the painting class of Thomas
Hart Benton, whom Pollock's brother Charles had already studied with.
Benton, a representative of American
Regionalism, categorically dismissed European Modernism, instead
seeking stylistic orientation in the works of El
Greco, Tintoretto,
and Rubens.
Without falling prey to a chauvinist provincialism, he concentrated on a
painting that combined a powerful formulation of plastic criteria with
themes from the conquering of the West and the life of the Native
Americans. The "Imaginary West" that Pollock addressed in his early works
is indebted to Benton's principle of the classical American landscape as
an "extended horizontality." Two early graphic works in the exhibition, Harbor
and Lighthouse (ca. 1934-38) and Gay Head (ca. 1936), document this
influence. Thus, Pollock depicts motifs of the cultivated American East
Coast as though it were a wilderness newly discovered by pioneers.
Thomas
Hart Benton:
The Ballad of the
Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, 1934,
Courtesy
Collection of the Spencer Museum of Art
Pollock's
encounter with the Mexican muralists David
Alfaro Siqueiros and José
Clemente Orozco left a lasting impression. Siqueiros and Orozco were
among the most politically active artists of the time. Siqueiros, who had
moved from Mexico to Los Angeles in 1932 as a result of his Communist
principles, led a workshop that Pollock took part in in 1936. Siqueiros
deeply impressed the young Pollock, above all in a technical sense; he
encouraged his students to use industrial enamels and paints and to
incorporate sand and other materials to liven up their paintings.
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