"Jackson Pollock: early sketchbooks and drawings."

ArtForum, Feb, 1998 by Yve-Alain Bois

To this, Greenberg responded: "I agree the drawing contains distortions. But it is quite obvious that these are not of a kind due to ineptitude. Notice that there are no errors of proportion or positioning. The distortions are matters of emphasis. I do not see anything grossly inaccurate in the rendering of the torso, and the calf 'jumps' only when you focus on it to the exclusion of everything else; otherwise, it seems a necessary accent." Greenberg's answer is disingenuous, and he knew it (which is why he made no attempt to explain in what sense the excrescent calf was a necessity). But the exchange takes us to the heart of the matter: What does it mean to say, as his beloved teacher Thomas Hart Benton and many after him had done, that Pollock could not draw? And does it make any sense to say that Pollock "drew well" in mature works like Autumn Rhythm? It certainly does, but only once it has been recognized that most traditional rules governing the practice of drawing have been overturned - with Pollock's major achievement on that score, as proposed by Michael Fried long ago, being that his drip method liberated the line from its function of defining contour. But then should this later accomplishment not lead us to be more circumspect regarding Pollock's "incapacity to draw" in his youth?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York obviously agrees that we should: not only did the institution acquire three early Pollock sketchbooks, it has recently published them in a splendid facsimile edition, the best of its kind I have ever seen. Furthermore, the publication of this luxurious volume, which comprises essays by Nan Rosenthal, Katharine Baetjer, and Lisa Mintz Messinger (the box is in itself a work of high craft), is marked by an elegant exhibition that gives everyone the opportunity to discover this little-known corpus. Along with the sketches themselves, which are shown unmounted and individually framed, are displayed some twenty-seven drawings dating from ca. 1934-37 and ca. 1939-42, among the forty bequested to the museum by Lee Krasner in 1982. The drawing after Michelangelo accompanying Greenberg's article was taken from Sketchbook II (p. 25) and is one of seven sheets devoted to the Sistine Chapel.

The first two sketchbooks are large, roughly of the same size (18 by 12 inches and 13 7/8 by 16 7/8 inches), and mainly (though not exclusively) devoted to the works of old masters (the sources are identified and elucidated by Baetjer). There has long been speculation about their date, but Rosenthal convincingly argues that the drawings were executed no earlier than late 1937 and no later than 1939. The third sketchbook is smaller than the others (14 by 10 inches), and the drawings it contains are similar in kind to those made by Pollock for his therapist in 1939-40. They draw heavily from the art of the Mexican muralists (Orozco in particular), the Surrealists, and Picasso, as Messinger discusses in her essay.

The sketches after the old masters are of two kinds. We could characterize the first as "studies in modeling" (the drawings after Michelangelo are of this sort, but we can also find studies after Giotto, Rubens, El Greco, or Signorelli), with which we might include, on the basis of common stylistic characteristics, a series of anatomic nude drawings from either life models or photographs (male or female), and three portraits: a self-portrait (the only one Pollock made as an adult, according to Rosenthal), a female face drawn after a cover of Life magazine, and one whose source has not been identified. Besides the not-so-surprising mixing of high and low, what is perhaps most striking in these drawings is the use of color - especially since most were based on black-and-white photographs (as Baetjer notes, even though the Met owned several El Grecos, for example, Pollock never bothered to draw them in situ: he relied on his small store of art books). Very few sheets are monochromatic, even though the colors of the pencils Pollock used are almost always close in hue (different browns, yellow, red, and black). This translation of sheer differences in value (or light contrast) into color unsettles the seamless continuity of a volume's surface that traditional modeling is made to emphasize, and engenders a layering of distinct coloristic units that do not quite mesh, giving the drawings a strangely acid quality (despite the soft grain of the paper that is revealed by the rubbing of the pencils) that save them from being merely academic. It also tells us something, I think, about Pollock's unique handling of color to come later in his career.

The second type of sketch after the old masters, by far the most numerous, is the Benton-like "analysis," whereby the figures of a Rubens or a Greco are progressively geometricized, first transformed into cubic men (one thinks of the little schematic mannequins in Durer's studies of proportion), then into abstract, regular volumes (the cones, spheres, and cylinders of nineteenth-century academic teaching), then into a forest of arcs. The contrast between the cartoonish shapes of cubic men and the pathos of their gestures is striking, and there is something rather comic in seeing the saints kneeling beneath a crucified Christ by El Greco transformed into crystal-like solids drawn in turquoise and adorned with brown arrows (Sketchbook II, p. 7), or a multifigure history or religious painting by any of the above (add Tintoretto) transformed into a Boccioni (or, to stay in America, a Stanton Macdonald-Wright) composition. What is perhaps most surprising is that Pollock engaged in this little game long after Benton, who left the Art Students League in 1932, had ceased to be his teacher. Why? It is my contention that Pollock, like Picasso and Braque in 1911 or Mondrian shortly after, was in search of a unitary mode of notation that would be able to transcode anything. Baetjer remarks that the diagrammatic simplification of the figures accentuates the similarity of their poses (they are the same in drawings after two paintings by Rubens, for example, and in one after Signorelli). But one should also note Pollock's fascination with drapery - those leftovers through which painters from the Renaissance up to Manet have traditionally been prone to show off their skill - and with interstitial spaces. Once it has been demonstrated that everything can be reduced to a similar diagram, the challenge will then be to take similarity (or unity) as a starting point, and get rid of the diagram - which is exactly what Pollock will later do with his allover compositions.