Painting on Paper:
Jackson Pollock in Berlin
The exhibition No Limits, Just Edges, featuring approximately fifty
drawings by Jackson Pollock, American painter and co-inventor of the
Abstract Expressionism movement, has met with largely positive response in
the press and on the radio. Carsten Probst’s report for the
Culture Today broadcast of
Deutschlandfunk in Cologne stated, for instance, that "Jackson Pollock
chiefly became known as one of the most important champions of action
painting. Now, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin has dedicated a show to
one of the artist’s lesser known sides." In order to illustrate the value
of Pollock’s drawings, Probst first of all quotes the artist himself: "The
drawings I make are connected to my painting, but they do not serve it."
Probst interprets the artist’s statement thus: "In other words, he needed
no preliminary sketches for his paintings, and this was what constituted
his radical break with painting tradition, among other things. Pollock saw
his works on paper as a completely autonomous medium, even if he sometimes
practiced methods we’re familiar with from his paintings."
The emphasis here, however, is on "sometimes," Probst hastens to add. "Among
the approximately fifty works spanning three decades, one naturally
encounters things that even viewers less familiar with art like to see as
being ‘typically Pollock;’ after all, the American artist, who was born in
1912 in Wyoming, is the famous inventor of Drip Painting." Yet "the really
surprising discoveries" are the lesser-known works, according to the
author. "An ink drawing from a later phase, for instance, where thinly
diluted patches of ink dance like fine clouds of smoke dissolving in the
summer air. Or a work in an extreme horizontal format, over five feet
long, in which only three large black forms somewhat reminiscent of Arabic
letters can be seen on a white background." All in all, according to
Probst, "the exhibition carves an aspect of Pollock’s work out with the
greatest precision, making an old classic seem completely contemporary
again."
In the
Berliner Morgenpost, Christiane Meixner considers the Pollock show
to be "exemplary in a dual sense: on the one hand, it traces how Jackson
Pollock gradually developed from representational, figurative painting to
his style of dripping, of making pure marks with paint." On the other
hand, Meixner goes on to say, the "comprehensive catalogue accompanying
the exhibition also tells some of the story of how the artist’s career
began in the nineteen fifties, backed by a powerful American dealer, Peggy
Guggenheim," and praises the exhibition as a veritable "event."
For Bernhard Schulz from the Tagesspiegel
, as well, this opportunity to experience Pollock’s drawings is a "stroke of
luck." Schulz is also pleased with the show’s subtitle "Painting
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on Paper," because the artist "almost completely does away
with the boundaries between drawing and painting … The culmination point of
the exhibition turns out to be a series of works that should really be
considered paintings and are merely termed graphic works by virtue of the
fact of their having been made on paper." Schulz goes on to describe the
artist’s artistic development: "It was indeed a long and winding path that
Pollock embarked on, beginning with the figurative works that still
heavily bear traces of the Depression Era of the thirties, when Pollock
was studying with the staunchly conservative Regionalist Thomas Hart
Benton." Back then, however, Pollock was not "particularly capable of
gaining much from visible reality." It was only after he "brought out his
innermost being and addressed it in a manner that was only barely veiled …
that he succeeded in creating authentic and immediate works."
Die Welt am Sonntag writes: "Jackson Pollock will remain famous for
all time for his Drip Paintings – the works he created by pouring paint
directly onto the canvas. Yet the artist’s early works – from harbor scene
kitsch plus lighthouse to the late abstractions par excellence – are far
less known, and have been pretty much forgotten in Europe."
In
their article on the exhibition, the
Frankfurter Rundschau reminds readers just how astonishingly short
Pollock’s best creative period really was: “only five years, no more than
that.” Yet, in the opinion of the Rundschau critic, these
five years sufficed to secure the artist world fame: "a biography like a
novel," heavily influenced by his older brother and simultaneously riddled
with torturous self-doubt. For the Rundschau, Pollock already died
long before his fatal car accident: "he hardly produced a single painting
throughout the last years."
Under the title "Every Squirt of
Paint a Stroke of Genius," the
Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung reports: "As the small, but
carefully selected show in Berlin demonstrates, the stylistic development
of Pollock’s drawings basically corresponds to his paintings. Four phases
in the artist’s comparatively short creative period from 1935 to 1956 can
be defined: as in his painting, Pollock increasingly progressed through
various Surrealist influences towards pure abstraction." For the critic of
the NOZ, it’s surprising "how finely balanced the delicate lines,
fat drops, and broad marks are applied to the smaller paper formats."
According to the NOZ, Pollock’s expressive treatment of materials
also works well on "paper, which is more porous," whereas the "drippings
on paper" are obviously characterized by a "great joy in experimentation."
The Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung speculates that "in the
miniatures, Jackson Pollock sought to express his temperament in narrower
confines, perhaps even to tame it."
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