Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution: Museum of Modern Art
Publication: Vogue Features 1989 – 2006  
Subject:   

When Jackson Pollock posed in front of his ancient Model T Ford for photographer Hans Namuth in 1951 he was playing a part. He was acting out the role of the brusque bluecollar painter demanded by his legend (for Pollock was already by then, aged 39, one of the most celebrated painters in the world); and he was proving, in the eyes of many, that a no-nonsense American did not have to abandon his roots to succeed in the exotic occupation of Modern Artist.

The truth was more complicated than Namuth’s image suggested. For one thing, Pollock no longer drove the car pictured in the photograph, having earned more than enough from his paintings to buy himself a brand-new Cadillac convertible; for another, he had begun to doubt whether he was, after all, quite the unmitigated success his publicity told him that he was.

“Jackson Pollock” at the Tate Gallery (11 March-16 June), originally at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, documents what was simultaneously one of the most appallingly short-lived and most exhilaratingly productive careers of the twentieth century. At the heart of the show - the chief reason to see it - is a group of the famous poured and dripped paintings, huge in scale, which the artist created between 1947 and 1951. These gave rise to the term “Action Painting” and led to Pollock’s joky immortalisation, in the American newspapers of the 1950s, as “Jack the Dripper”. Extremely fragile and as a consequence rarely loaned abroad, they include some of the most beautiful, most evanescently delicate and most frequently bullshitted-about paintings of the twentieth century.

Formed from coils and loops and whorls of paint spun out across the canvas like the webs of an eccentric spider, the beauty of these works of art is inseparable from the simplicity of the idea that gave rise to them: the notion of making a painting out of gesture alone. The patterns which Pollock made are often suggestive, evoking blizzards, mists and galaxies (or, more prosaically, the oil spills on a garage floor). His titles, like Autumn Mist, are sometimes nudges towards figurative interpretation. But his paintings remain, essentially, records of his own body’s movements in space and time. If they have a single meaning, it is the banal or profound idea (take your pick) that man is, himself, a microcosm of the universe in which he lives. The artist’s most illuminating remark about his own work came when he was asked why he didn’t paint nature. “I am nature,” he replied.

But the very simplicity of Pollock’s art contained the seeds of his downfall. There was nothing more to elaborate on, after a few short years. What there was to say had been said. After 1951 his painting degenerated into murk and faux-naif symbolism and he took to the bottle. Then one night in 1956 he wrapped his car (not the Ford which Namuth photographed, the other one)  around a tree. Pollock’s life was over, and the elemental trails of paint on his canvases were suddenly to be sentimentalised as something else again: the traces left by a comet as it flashed brightly and briefly through the sky. At a stroke Pollock had become the James Dean of art - a tragic archetype. If the Tate’s retrospective helps to rescue his work from the melodramata of his posthumous reputation, it will have more than justified itself.