Jackson Pollack

Source: NY Times 5/26 Weekend Arts p. B.25 "Pollack on Paper: A Magician Flinging Swirls and Pixie Dust" by Holland Cotter

Jackson Pollock must have done something remarkable. Everyone says so . Some say he was a genius. Holland Cotter uses four words to describe his reaction to an exhibit of works on paper now at the Guggenheim Museum: "ordinary, puzzling, extraordinary, gone." He writes that before Pollack modern American art did not exist internationally. He states that Pollack wasn't a tragic hero. His story is "B-movie, boozy, embarrassing, pathetic." "He transformed picture-making into dancing, the picture into a magic place, over which he distributed pigment like pixie dust." "...this is the artist I want to spend time with who, for a sort short time, got beyond himself, and did work that was like nothing else in modern art up to that time." Pollack's work seems to be experienced as "presences, surfaces reflecting whatever ideas and desires are projected on them." I guess that's ok. Sort of Zen. No quarrel. So Pollack broke new ground. Artists do that. His paintings are quite busy. I guess being the first to do something in art is a distinction. Pollack seems to have had a brief time where his work was "untranscendentally gorgeous" and then "In the fall of 1950 he went back to drinking and turned ordinary again." Untranscendentally gorgeous? Turned ordinary? I guess modern art pulled itself together and managed to contunue without him.