Young Pollock

A newly opened exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Jackson Pollock's earliest drawings, the first of its kind, reminds us once again that youthful ineptitude is no herald of what is to come.

"Seldom has so sumptuous a showcase been awarded to such tentative, graceless art," declares The New York Times's critic, Holland Cotter. The work in Pollock's two earliest sketchbooks, says Mr. Cotter, forms an "often mortifyingly awkward record of his effort to achieve even a minimal graphic proficiency."

The young artist apparently would have been the first to agree. In 1930, at the age of 18, Pollock thought his work "rotten." He wrote his brother that it seemed to "lack freedom and rhythm. It is cold and lifeless. It isn't worth the postage to send it."

Shades of Albert Einstein! Shades of Winston Churchill! At 4, according to legend, Einstein had hardly begun to talk; his parents feared he was slow or even feeble-minded. Churchill, so the story goes, had such trouble learning Greek and Latin that it was feared the future Prime Minister would not graduate from his public school.

As Mr. Cotter points out, any insight into the career of such a towering figure as Pollock, who did much of his postwar work in Springs, is valuable - the show at the Met particularly so since its "looping . . . doodles" and "lumpish, mollusklike bodies" are housed under the same roof as many of his great mature paintings.

Comparisons may be odious, but they can be instructive as well. Would-be artists, writers, scientists - students all - take heart.