MoMA Takes Rare Pollocks Out of the Attic
Museum permanent collection shows can be confusing. Some are installed, well, permanently, and others are of the more ephemeral variety. The Museum of Modern Art’s “Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey, 1934-1954,” for example, has been up for a few months but will be a memory come May 1.
It would be a shame to let it pass by. With the no-stops, all-out retrospective in 1998 a distant memory, this show is a brief, lively, and remarkably complete survey of the best and most important breakthroughs and highlights of the artist’s career. The two decades covered might seem measly compared to other artistic surveys, until you remember that these years cover Pollock’s entire career until his death at 44 in 1956.
The exhibition brings together close to 50 works from the museum’s collection, including many drawings and prints that are rarely put on public display. These rare and little-known works were clearly the catalyst for the show, and are given quite a bit of attention in MoMA’s Prints and Illustrated Books galleries by Starr Figura, one of the drawing and print department’s curators.
The earliest work, dating from 1930 to 1933, is a precious Western scene in oil and crayon on a wooden cigar box, in a style that borrows from Thomas Hart Benton, an early mentor. It continues with lithographs and screenprints from a period when Pollock was absorbing influences from Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco.
In “Landscape With Steer,” a lithograph from around 1936 or 1937, the museum makes the most of the two examples in its collection, one in black and white and the other with airbrushed enamel in bold primary hues. The color heightens an angry sky full of roiling turmoil. The steer stands in the left foreground, stoic and almost comically oblivious to the rush of weather around it. If the work is about the steer, it is a steer in the midst of end times. Even without the color, there is a sense of the apocalyptic about the composition. With only two or three known to be in the edition, these could be the only two in existence. Their rareness makes them much more special than the average edition of 50 or so.
The same fiery scenes of war and destruction continue in an untitled screenprint with gouache and India ink additions, dated from the late 1930s. While mostly colored with yellow, the undercurrent of red keeps the emotion at a high pitch. The violence, perhaps inspired by the onset of the war in Europe, is abstract, but cannot be mistaken.
During the early 1940s, the influence of Picasso is evident in paintings like “Mask” and “Gothic,” and in a series of screenprints on colored paper. Sometimes Pollock included details similar to the work that was inspiration; in other cases, someone recorded him stating that a painting like “Gothic” was inspired by Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Small reproductions of the original images have been provided on the wall labels for reference.
Although Pollock took inspiration from others directly to painted form, he was just as likely to distill it and find his own interpretation, as he did with other artists in this period such as Miro. The organizers noted that his drawings were not considered preparatory studies but exercises in their own right, even when several sketches look like early renderings of motifs he explored in later paintings. There are also in his printmaking early examples of his all-over compositional approach and the curved lines that would come to dominate his drip paintings.
The museum lays claim to presenting the first drip painting by the artist. The 1946 “Free Form,” a small canvas about 19 by 14 inches, looks like a practice piece, but one the artist liked enough to sign and date. The red background is attention-getting, but it was not a regular motif in his subsequent larger paintings (although the color still made appearances in the mix).
An early follow-up painting, “Full Fathom Five,” incorporates not only the drip technique but the odds and ends of Pollock’s toolbox and so much more. The darkness of the canvas, its hints of the dappled sea, and its reference to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” point to watery depths. It is as if a giant wave of paint had washed over his studio and swept up in its path bits of detritus. Objects such as nails, tacks, a washer, coins, the eraser end of a pencil, and a key, among others, are immersed with a palette knife into a dense and gritty impasto. The tactile and brackish texture is overlaid with poured lines and drips of light blues, silvers, and teal. The combination makes for a rich and chewy composition, and one of sublimity.
There is so much black in Pollock’s oeuvre, and particularly in these works. In an early painting like “The Flame,” from the mid-1930s, he can’t have fire without the charcoal it creates dominating the composition. A painting such as “Shimmering Substance,” with its deep play of white curves and squiggles over mostly primary colors and just a hint of black, therefore comes as a relief. The museum notes that this 1946 canvas was one of his first fully non-representational works and part of a series known as “Sounds in the Grass,” seven paintings that use a much lighter palette. They are believed to be a response to his new environment in Springs, where he and his wife, Lee Krasner, moved in late 1945.
“White Light,” a painting from 1954, is the latest work in the show and also has a sunnier disposition. It and the nearby “Easter and the Totem,” from 1953, signal the artist’s movement back and forth between light and dark colors, non-objective painting and figuration, and brush and poured application in his late phase. It was a period of struggle that evolved into a long artist’s block, which ended only with his death in 1956.
Most of the people in the galleries on Saturday crowded around the handful of celebrated drip paintings. I was happy for them, tourists and casual observers having this opportunity to see the works in glorious context, even though they will no doubt return to their regular places in the painting and sculpture galleries once the show closes. I was even happier for myself, as the crowd’s enthusiasm allowed me more time and space to appreciate Pollock’s less heralded works before these Persephones disappear into the underworld of storage once again.