“Who Snubbed Pollock?” features a different artist biweekly, all chosen because casual museum goers, and occasionally critics, often dismiss their work. Does the artist deserve this? Elle shares her thoughts — most are loving.
Pollock is a hack, my dad used to say, before he saw one in person at The Art Institute of Chicago: “Greyed Rainbow,” 1953. It took him a while to make his way down there. Everyone else in the family had already gone to see the Edlis and Neeson donation, four hundred million dollar’s worth of notables; Warhol and Johns took the tagline in the Chicago Tribune article.
When the modern wing reshuffled itself for the donation’s debut, “Greyed Rainbow” received a place of slight prominence near the front of the exhibit. It was a Pollock, but it wasn’t new. The museum had just created an entire room of Warhols and another of Twombly sculptures. And yet, when my dad came home, Pollock was all he talked about.
Jackson Pollock’s “Greyed Rainbow,” The Art Institute of Chicago
“It moves,” my dad said, head raised towards the ceiling as he spoke to us, as if re-imagining it. “You look at it; it really moves – I thought he was a hack, just dripping that paint, but he knew what he was doing. You can sit on that bench and just watch it.”
I’d seen it too. Not every Pollock moved for me –New York was a bust. “Eyes in the Heat” swayed for me at the Guggenheim in Venice, but “Greyed Rainbow’s” movement was as obvious as an optical illusion and, unlike gimmicky books of optical illusions for children, it created this illusion without any predictable geometric patterns of cubes, circles or waved lines.
My dad is not usually opinionated about art. I suspect he was unimpressed with Pollock the way anyone used to construction sites might be unimpressed with Pollock. Every house painter’s drop cloth looks like a knock off Pollock, the same drips of house paint on canvas. And I don’t blame my dad, because photographs flatten “Greyed Rainbow” to nothing: no shimmer, no oscillation, just paste.
Most of us fall in love with artists through reproductions: prints of O’Keefe and Van Gogh in school halls, a Rembrandt in our grandmother’s coffee table book. What other way is there to discover our favorites, unless you live in Paris one season, Barcelona the next? We make pilgrimages to see paintings we already love. And there is a case for art that transcends canvas and keeps its dignity and beauty even on coffee mugs. But there is also a case for what paint does in person, the optical effects only between paint and eye.
Pollock dripped and splashed paint directly from the can, but museums don’t bother mentioning this on most plaques. Everyone already knows about it. Anyone standing in front of a drip painting sees how it was made. Lots of artists these days are talking about the ‘hows’ of making art, about the process. The line between process and context only seems thin because both appear on the walls of museums and student exhibitions.
Context says “‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ reflects Picasso’s fear of syphilis, a life threatening disease in 1907” or “the two battery operated clocks in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ ‘Untitled (Perfect Lovers)’ were set at the same time but will inevitably fall out of sync.” Process describes how a work was made, and mediocre artists use it as a crutch.
Walk into a senior show and you might see plaques attempting to boost paintings by explaining they were created by natural rainfall, or by leaving them face down to be trampled in public. But great artists don’t rely on people knowing their processes. If an artist announces their process only to make a previously unremarkable work seem remarkable, it’s a sham.
My dad called Pollock a hack because he thought his process was a hack. The work, not the process, changed his mind about both. Great processes are self evident, or create illusions impossible to achieve any other way–Pollock did both.
Written by Elle Friedle.
Elle Friedle is a writing major and sequential minor at SCAD. She denies ever crying in MoMA.
