Dappled Glories

By ROBERT HUGHES

The most eagerly awaited show of the U.S. art season opens this week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: the retrospective of Jackson Pollock's work, organized by MOMA's senior curator of painting and sculpture, Kirk Varnedoe, in tandem with co-curator Pepe Carmel. The two have done a brilliant job, producing, along the way, one of the very few museum catalogs that can be read for pleasure as well as instruction. Amazingly enough, the American audience hasn't had a chance to see Pollock's work whole in more than 30 years. The last comprehensive show in a U.S. museum was in 1967, also at MOMA. (A limited retrospective was mounted in Paris in 1982.) How will a new generation of museumgoers take to his work?

With delight and gratitude, one hopes. Pollock was a great painter; at least he painted some great pictures, which changed the face of American art, and look as fresh and strong today as they must have 50 years ago, when they emerged from his shack of a studio on New York's Long Island. But how great is "great"? Meaning has drained out of the idea of greatness because today it is so inextricably confused with fame, and fame with celebrity, all on the dumb level of publicity--and Pollock is the most publicized and celebrated artist in American history.

A Goya he wasn't, nor a Velazquez, nor a Titian. An American Picasso, maybe? No: the oeuvre lacks that vast span. For someone who had the impact on international art that he did, Pollock had a bafflingly short career. He didn't attain any degree of originality until after his 30th birthday. The arc of the career rises from 1943, when the collector and gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim commissioned him to paint a mural for her Manhattan apartment, to the early '50s--no more than 10 years. The final four years of his life brought a string of pictorial failures and, at best, semi-successes: no talent could survive the alcoholic battering Pollock gave his. And then at age 44, a fatal car crash, after which the rest is the kind of pop hagiology that America reserves for its culture heroes.

American actors and baseball players had been this famous before and would be more so; Ernest Hemingway was, but no painter was or would be again--not even Andy Warhol. Eager to curate his own reputation, Pollock let photographers in and performed for them. Hans Namuth, Rudy Burckhardt and Arnold Newman saw a drama in Pollock's mating dance around the canvas on the floor that normally isn't present in a painter's address to his work. It was solipsistic and histrionic at the same time--broody like Brando, vulnerable like James Dean. Pollock's fate was pure stardom, granted by the media and then riveted in place by early violent death and by the posthumous market for his work.

But what of the work? Varnedoe's catalog essay bears the title "Comet: Jackson Pollock's Life and Work," which fits the eclat and brevity of Pollock's appearance. But comets eventually swing back on their orbit and return, whereas Pollock was a singular and not a cyclic event, more like a meteor that plows into the earth and wreaks havoc on its climate, filling art's air with fallout. Artists have been defining themselves and their work against Pollock ever since. Yet most of his influence was indirect. Pollock's mature style--based on dripping and flinging skeins of paint onto a canvas flat on the floor, building a web of interaction among line, surface and color from above--was so much his own that to imitate it was self-evidently absurd. Willem de Kooning had shoals of imitators, because his work was grounded in a long European tradition of figure painting. Not Pollock; his central insights were too decisively new.

Rather, Pollock became an exemplar of risk and openness. It wasn't just that, as de Kooning said, he "broke the ice" and forced American art onto an international stage, where it had never had a place before. It was that the freedom implied in his work challenged and provoked other artists to claim an equal freedom in theirs--not only in painting but also in sculpture, performance art, dance and music.

Pollock was born in Cody, Wyo., in 1912 but grew up in California. Much ink has been spilled on the question of how Western an artist he was, how affected by the vast and epic landscapes he may or may not have noticed when he was two years old, but the point seems necessarily moot. In any case, he was not, as Europeans like to imagine, at home on the range, especially since Cody in 1912 was a new tract-housing development, not an Old West town. His father was a dud and a drifter who had little to do with his son. His ineffectual mother spoiled him. Mainly he was raised by older brothers, the eldest of whom, Charles, was a painter. At 16, Pollock was studying art in Los Angeles; two years later, he followed Charles to New York, where he found a serious teacher in Thomas Hart Benton, choleric dean of the American Regionalist movement.

Benton became a surrogate big daddy to replace Pollock's own woundingly absent father. Thus the future avant-gardist had for a mentor a man who hated abstract art. But when Pollock came under Benton's tutelage, he wasn't aiming at abstraction. Benton's way of composing, with its heftily twisting figures and buckling, scoop-and-bump space, was based on 16th century Mannerism--Midwestern El Greco and Tintoretto; he even adapted the Mannerist device of reducing the figures to geometrical dolls, sometimes modeling them in clay. This vehemence, locked up as a system, appealed to Pollock as a container for his own emotional flailing. Though some painters show early signs of genius, or at least of facility, Pollock showed none. After you've seen his early drawings in this show, it seems barely credible that so ham-fisted a young draftsman could have become such an exponent of visual grace.

Other influences besides Benton converged on him as well: the Mexican muralists of the '30s, especially Siquieros and Orozco; Picasso; Surrealism; Kandinsky; tribal art. As Varnedoe points out in his admirable catalog essay, if the notion that Pollock was some sort of cowboy isn't true, neither was he any kind of Indian. He'd seen Native American ceremonies and pictographs as a kid in Arizona, but his attachment to Indian art as a source of "primitive" authenticity came from museums and exhibitions in New York and was confirmed by other mentors he was acquiring, such as the painter John Graham. Even the sight of Hopi painters running colored sand through their hands to create a pattern on the ground below, so often proposed as the starting point of Pollock's drip painting, came to him not on a Southwestern mountaintop but inside MOMA, which had brought some Hopis to perform in Manhattan.

In art, hyperconsciousness of the tribal is one of the functions of city life. Certainly it was for Pollock, and from it stemmed his abiding interest in the "totemic"--in mythic images that were either lost to modern, Euro-American culture or buried so far back in its origins that they seemed mysterious and exotic. Pollock in the late 1930s was a boy in deep emotional trouble, drinking like a fish and undergoing Jungian analysis. Like other Abstract Expressionists-to-be (Mark Rothko, for instance), he was on the lookout for archetypes and dark, unconsulted levels of feeling, in the hope that art could release his inner shaman, antlers, rattle and all. Hence the portentous "mythic" subjects of his pictures (The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, Pasiphae and so on) and their general ooga-wooga atmosphere. As Varnedoe writes, "The godsend, liberating idea for him was the one he got simultaneously from looking at modern art and listening to his therapists: the principle that art could ultimately depend not on acquired talents but on inner resources, no matter how disturbed that inner life was." But could you make major art based largely on pent-up mythic fictions from outside your own cultural frame?

Such was Pollock's problem. The picture in which he broke free from it--and, it now seems, took American art into a larger freedom with him--was the 20-ft.-wide mural he did for Peggy Guggenheim. He painted it in one outpouring rush, in a day and a night. Mural isn't by any means an abstract painting. It retains the essence of subject matter shared by most "classical" murals, from Giotto to Matisse--the projection of human figures on a large plane surface. But the movement isn't suave. The figures are arabesques, coiling, jammed together, recognizable as figures because of their verticality but lacking most identifiable signs of the human body. They seem to repeat one another, but in fact they don't. The painting is a frieze of Dionysiac energy in which Pollock was at last able to get movement into his figures instead of confining it to the blurts and squiggles of paint around them.

The ability to get the whole surface moving would have deep results for his later work, and afterimages of Mural would keep reappearing right up to the slanting "poles" in his last great canvas, Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952. The two pictures have something else in common: they remind you how Pollock, whom we tend to think of as a web-weaving, linear artist, was also a real colorist, idiosyncratic and original. There is something vulgar about the palette of Blue Poles, with its giddy dance of aluminum paint and hot orange, but it is the kind of vulgarity that fairly seethes with life.

It is an amazing experience to walk through the central galleries of this show where the masterpieces of his career are hung, the huge all-over paintings of 1948-50. How did an artist who looked so unpromising at first attain this clarity, strength and command of scale? Not easily, and it is very much to the show's credit that it includes failures and partial successes along with the works that incontestably come off. It makes you more alert to the risks Pollock took. There were no rules for what he was doing; the besetting danger was always overcongestion of the surface, so that no air was left between the marks and the energy he strove to transmit clogged up.

You do not need to be with these works very long before realizing how feeble a term "drip" is for the ways--the numberless, subtle and improvised ways--Pollock's paint got on the canvas. His public notoriety came in part from public resentment. Real artists lay watercolor washes or put glazes over body color, but this one just spilled liquids incontinently, as though painting were no more demanding than knocking over a cup of coffee or taking a pee. But when you look at these pictures, it isn't so. Pollock was a consummate aesthete. (The fact that he could also be a mean, drunken galoot doesn't gainsay that.)

He would walk around the canvas, throwing paint on it from the edges, and the loops and lashes that resulted have a grace and energy that his labored hand drawing never reached. Then there was the pouring, the overlay, one color bleeding into another, producing marbled effects, mists, separations, spots and speckles, each with its element of chance, but all controlled by the prepared mind that chance favors. And the retouching and linkages, done with a brush. "Glory be to God for dappled things!" the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once exclaimed, and that's what crosses one's mind in front of such works as One, 1950, or Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950.

Hopkins was apostrophizing nature in all its ceaseless variety, and that is what Pollock seems to have been doing too. "I want to be nature," he declared, and the paintings attest to that. These tiny incidents pullulating in a large field may evoke the experience of looking into a dense thicket close up, or the wider one of staring at the Milky Way, but in either case Pollock's imagination seems organically bound to the natural world without actually depicting it. The contrast between the great size of the canvases (One is more than 17 ft. across) and the intricacy of their microforms plays its part too. There is no ideal viewing distance; you must step back to grasp their size and overall energy, but you must also put your nose in them to appreciate their details. Just like the real world, one is tempted to say.