Moving pictures

ArtForum, April, 1999 by Thomas Crow

WITH THE SECOND AND FINAL LEG OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART'S JACKSON POLLOCK RETROSPECTIVE UNDER WAY AT LONDON'S TATE GALLERY, ART-FORUM CONTRIBUTING EDITOR THOMAS CROW IS JOINED BY ART HISTORIAN MICHAEL FRIED IN ASSESSING THE NEW YORK INSTALLMENT OF THE SHOW AND THE CRITICAL RESPONSE THAT GREETED IT. THEIR PAIRED VIEWS CELEBRATE THE ARTIST'S ACHIEVEMENT, IN CROW'S WORDS ARGUABLY OUR CULTURE'S "MOST IMPORTANT ARTISTIC EVENT."

The Jackson Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was a triumph of arrangement, lighting, sight lines, and spatial design. It exerted a fierce grip on the visitor's subjective passage through the installation, each moment of relative calm and relaxation giving way to a rush of funneling acceleration toward some revelation of spectacular and overwhelming visual impact. And then the cycle would repeat itself, until the dampening close of the installation on the 1953 canvas The Deep, with its covering of smoothly congealed white matter parted, only barely, to allow a glimpse into some indecipherable beyond.

The punctuations in this passage were played for maximal visual drama. Never have the major paintings been so brilliantly lit: The two rarely seen behemoths, the 1943-44 Mural (on loan from the University of Iowa Museum of Art) and the 1952 Blue Poles (from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra), shone with an intensity I can find nowhere in my memory of pilgrimages to see them on their home turf. The sanctum sanctorum of this processional was of course given over to the three equally monumental works of 1950 that mark the commanding summit of Pollock's pouring, spattering, drizzling, trailing, splashing, stabbing, lashing (but almost never dripping) technique: Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950; One: Number 31, 1950; and the otherwise unnamed black skein of Number 32.

At that point, analogies to ancient sites of miracles gave way to an altogether different sense of presence, that of the luminous cinema screen, the three paintings adding up to a sensory spectacular in surround-vision. It is an old and facile observation to note the resemblance in scale and proportion between Pollock's large canvases and the movies. Against this notion, one can recall that in his day theater screens were actually much larger. Indeed, the shape and dimensions of the paintings far more closely match the long-standing tradition of heroic narrative work as sanctioned by artists from Rubens and Lebrun to David and Gericault, a handmade monumentality revived for Pollock's own generation by the muralism of Guernica and of the revolutionary Mexicans he so much admired. But that fortuitous resemblance to the screen (strengthened in our era of the multiplex) is now bound up with a deeper sense of the cinematic that has overtaken the Pollock story.

This is not a condition that any of us can escape. From the moment that Pollock presented himself to Namuth's lens and directorial eye, the acting out of a new artist's persona entered the experience of the paintings; once the famous sequential photographs and films came to light, no observer could un-know them. The Museum of Modern Art acknowledged this irrevocably hybrid condition by its choice of supporting exhibits and accessories. The continuous playing of Namuth's film record of the painter in action was only to be expected and was in this context unremarkable; but even closer to the movies was the exhibition's most startling concession to extra-aesthetic hero-worship, a full-scale mock-up of his rough, shedlike studio from the Springs at the east end of Long Island. This was a structure with only an inside, with nothing beyond its high windows, which only a camera could make look like the real thing.

That effect took on an uncanny resonance on the day I first saw the show, a normally closed Wednesday on which the museum was opened to a fairly large crowd of art professionals. The buzz among the visitors was that Ed Harris, slated both to direct and to play the leading role in a forthcoming film biography of the artist, had spent several hours there (with his family) absorbing the genius he intends to portray. I'm unable to confirm the truth of this - despite spending most of the afternoon there, I never noticed him - but just the idea, the unseen presence of the workaday celebrity whom many see as a Pollock lookalike, contributed to the eerie half-reality that the installation began to share with the staging of a film.

In many ways, Pollock had been the object of casting from the start of his mature career. Howard Putzel, a Hollywood native who had migrated east to serve as Peggy Guggenheim's scout and adviser, selected him as the unique American recipient for her sustained patronage. Putzel, dead by 1945 and still cruelly underestimated by history as a key artistic intelligence, was also behind the commission for Mural: Without him Pollock would never have had that crucial early experience of painting on a heroic scale. And with Mural began the persistent practice of posing the artist for photographs in front of his paintings, just as the dramatic dust jacket of the MOMA exhibition catalogue - a still from Namuth's film of Pollock painting on glass - gives us the artist as star in his own life story. As he lay beneath a glass plate, Namuth recorded Pollock leaning over this transparent ground against a cold clear sky of late autumn, depositing the skeins and spatters of his horizontal cam vases in a forced simulation of his typical procedure. With Pollock's fiat tones as voice-over commentary, the film has long been a staple of studio art instruction. The catalogue jacket's freeze-frame of the artist's expressively craggy torso, in silhouetted closeup against an azure field, excludes everything but an actor's stark presence and one looping trademark gesture (the lines of which seem to trace a fluid signature); the endpapers continue the sequence, an accumulating thicket of black marks melding with the presence of their maker.