Jackson Pollock & American painting's Whitmanesque episode - reinterpretation of Pollack's drip paintings

Art in America, Feb, 1994 by Carter Ratcliff

In 1950 the Museo Corer in Venice presented a Pollock exhibition. The Moon-Woman (1942), a quasi-figurative picture, was among the earliest works on view. Eyes in the Heat was included, as were Full Fathom Five, Alchemy and more recent drip paintings. The show charted the acceleration of Pollock's brush and its abandonment, as he began slinging his pigments through the air. A Venetian critic named Bruno Alfieri saw:.

 --chaos
 --absolute lack of harmony
 --complete lack of structural organization
 --total absence of technique, however rudimentary
 --once again, chaos.(4)

Alfieri was entirely in error only when he charged Pollock with having no technique. The most unsympathetic eye should be able to gather even from the frothiest of the drip paintings much evidence of this painter's command of paint. Obviously Pollock could get his material to loop and splash as he wished. However, Alfieri's eye was attuned to traditional composition, so it wouldn't be fair to expect him to have found in the large patterns of Pollock's works anything but chaos, disharmony and a hopeless lack of structure. These paintings are not, after all, traditionally composed. By Alfieri's standards, which are those of nearly all Westerners, European and American, he was right in coming to the conclusions that he did.

The sneering tone that makes his review so lively may not be justified, but it is excusable, for Alfleri's sneers signal dread sincerely felt. In a well-composed picture, where large things are happily subordinated to small, hierarchy is not merely stable. It is beautiful, and this beauty has important uses. For the gorgeous hierarchy established by traditional composition symbolizes far grander kinds of order: social, cultural, spiritual.(5) Traditional composition is a visual rhetoric designed to persuade us that hierarchy is good. Thus subordination, including our own, need not feel oppressive. It can seem graceful, bracing, utopian. To a sensibility persuaded by this rhetoric, pictures which employ none of it--pictures like Pollock's--look nightmarish. That is how they looked to Alfieri, who was not merely wrong to condemn Pollock's Venetian exhibition as he did. He was wrong in a way that shows us what is at stake.

Order without hierarchy may be a practical impossibility, yet it has an imaginary existence in America's egalitarian ideals. "All men are created equal," according to the Declaration of Independence. In 1848 the American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton amended the phrase to read: "all men and women are created equal." There are innumerable elaborations of this principle, though not much disagreement that the fullest is Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, who gave a tone of ecstatic fraternalism to a rhetoric of absolute equality. As in Pollock's paintings, so in the sprawl of Whitman's verse: there is energy, an implication of boundlessness, and an intricate weave of incident that never coalesces into a stable hierarchy. In the work of both painter and poet the lack of hierarchical structure is the prerequisite for what is positive about their work: its power to image forth a political premise still basic to America's idea of itself.