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Jackson Pollock
Part Of The Great American Artists Series Of Books.
- GenresArtNonfictionBiography
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1959
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188 people want to read
About the author
Frank O'Hara
122 books703 followersCollections of American poet Francis Russell O'Hara include
Meditations in an Emergency
(1957) and
Lunch Poems
(1964); playfulness, irony, sophistication, and a shared interest in the visual arts mark works of the New York School, an active group that included O'Hara during the 1950s and 1960s.
Parents reared O'Hara in Grafton, Massachusetts. O'Hara served in the south Pacific and Japan as a sonar man on the destroyer United States Ship Nicholas during World War II.
With the funding, made available to veterans, he attended Harvard University and roomed with artist-writer Edward Gorey. He majored in music and composed some works despite his irregular attendance was and his disparate interests. Visual art and contemporary music, his first love, heavily influenced O'Hara, a fine piano player all his life; he suddenly played swathes of Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff when visiting new partners, often to their shock.
At Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O'Hara changed his major and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.
He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At Michigan, he won a Hopwood award and received his Master of Arts in English literature 1951. In that autumn, O'Hara moved into an apartment in city of New York with Joe LeSueur, his roommate and sometimes his lover for the next 11 years. Known throughout his life for his extreme sociability, passion, and warmth, O'Hara had hundreds of friends and lovers throughout his life, many from the New York art and poetry worlds. Soon after he arrived in New York, the Museum of Modern Art employed him at the front desk, and he began to write seriously.
O'Hara, active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Art News, and in 1960 was made Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also friends with artists like Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers, and Joan Mitchell. O'Hara died in an accident on Fire Island in which he was struck and seriously injured by a man speeding in a beach vehicle during the early morning hours of July 24, 1966. He died the next day of a ruptured liver at the age of 40 and was buried in the Green River Cemetery on Long Island.
Parents reared O'Hara in Grafton, Massachusetts. O'Hara served in the south Pacific and Japan as a sonar man on the destroyer United States Ship Nicholas during World War II.
With the funding, made available to veterans, he attended Harvard University and roomed with artist-writer Edward Gorey. He majored in music and composed some works despite his irregular attendance was and his disparate interests. Visual art and contemporary music, his first love, heavily influenced O'Hara, a fine piano player all his life; he suddenly played swathes of Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff when visiting new partners, often to their shock.
At Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O'Hara changed his major and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.
He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At Michigan, he won a Hopwood award and received his Master of Arts in English literature 1951. In that autumn, O'Hara moved into an apartment in city of New York with Joe LeSueur, his roommate and sometimes his lover for the next 11 years. Known throughout his life for his extreme sociability, passion, and warmth, O'Hara had hundreds of friends and lovers throughout his life, many from the New York art and poetry worlds. Soon after he arrived in New York, the Museum of Modern Art employed him at the front desk, and he began to write seriously.
O'Hara, active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Art News, and in 1960 was made Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also friends with artists like Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers, and Joan Mitchell. O'Hara died in an accident on Fire Island in which he was struck and seriously injured by a man speeding in a beach vehicle during the early morning hours of July 24, 1966. He died the next day of a ruptured liver at the age of 40 and was buried in the Green River Cemetery on Long Island.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 31, 2016
کتابیه که می ارزه. چطور؟ خب معمولن وقتی یکی نگا میکنه کارای پولاک رو( اکثرن هم کارهای اواخر دوره کاریش ) که تابلو هایی با ابعاد بزرگ و به صورت قطره چکانی هست، با خودش میگه این مسخره بازیا چیه؟ با این کتاب میفهمه ادم که چه مسیری رو طی کرده و چه فکری پشت این انتزاع نابی که به وجود اورده پنهان شده.
پ.ن: انتزاع ناب؟ پنهان؟ خیلی احساسی شدم :))
پ.ن: انتزاع ناب؟ پنهان؟ خیلی احساسی شدم :))
September 23, 2018
I love the art of modern 1950s artist Jackson Pollack who proved that when you are pissed as fucking hell your art is ten times better than sober.
Look at Peter Cook when he was drunk he was very funny but when he was sober he stunk. Oliver Reed was another example.
I think that Pollack is the art for dreams you can look for hours & no two people will see same thing. This large format paper back book. I played £ 40 at book fair few years ago.
It has all his great works which you can unfold out into long page. You have load of facts about each piece, along with photos & historical facts about his death. Like most great piss artist his end was no surprise. James Dean was speeding car, Edgar Allan Poe was drugs, Christopher Marlow was murder even Shakespeare died young.
Aesthetic creation of numbers into art while dripping the same colours of greatness into everlasting memory of mind
Look at Peter Cook when he was drunk he was very funny but when he was sober he stunk. Oliver Reed was another example.
I think that Pollack is the art for dreams you can look for hours & no two people will see same thing. This large format paper back book. I played £ 40 at book fair few years ago.
It has all his great works which you can unfold out into long page. You have load of facts about each piece, along with photos & historical facts about his death. Like most great piss artist his end was no surprise. James Dean was speeding car, Edgar Allan Poe was drugs, Christopher Marlow was murder even Shakespeare died young.
Aesthetic creation of numbers into art while dripping the same colours of greatness into everlasting memory of mind
December 16, 2019
Another book in the series by MOMA. Tells briefly of Pollack's life tragically cut short by an alcohol induced car wreck, his development as an artist and analyzes eleven of his works that are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Only about 46 pages long, the prints of his art are on quality paper and in color,
Only about 46 pages long, the prints of his art are on quality paper and in color,
April 18, 2015
O'Hara was probably still raw from his friend Pollock's death in 1956 when he wrote this meditation in 1959. It's personal, but also speaks to and of the world.
He gives a good sense of how Pollock got from the WPA to his famous drip paintings. There is lot of cross-fertilization with de Kooning in his works from the 40s combined with hints of Miro and Klee and Picasso. O'Hara also talks about the relationship of Pollock's ideas to both myth and traditional art. In addition, surrealism and the scale of mural painting influence Pollock's direction.
Because of that scale, and the texture of the paint, no reproduction of Pollock can match the experience of standing in front of the actual art. But O'Hara's commentary illuminates the illustrations well.
His quote from Walt Whitman is appropriate to both the life and what Pollock left behind.
"Here is the efflux of the soul,
The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower’d gates, ever provoking questions,
These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are they?"
He gives a good sense of how Pollock got from the WPA to his famous drip paintings. There is lot of cross-fertilization with de Kooning in his works from the 40s combined with hints of Miro and Klee and Picasso. O'Hara also talks about the relationship of Pollock's ideas to both myth and traditional art. In addition, surrealism and the scale of mural painting influence Pollock's direction.
Because of that scale, and the texture of the paint, no reproduction of Pollock can match the experience of standing in front of the actual art. But O'Hara's commentary illuminates the illustrations well.
His quote from Walt Whitman is appropriate to both the life and what Pollock left behind.
"Here is the efflux of the soul,
The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower’d gates, ever provoking questions,
These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are they?"
September 12, 2023
if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com
230812: extensive coffee book from MoMA exhibition. large colour reproductions suggest why I really really like his work- I have not seen him in person. for me, it is the years 1947 (Cathedral, Full Fathom Five, Alchemy, Autumn Rhythm, Lavender Mist, Phosphorescence) to 1952 ('numbers'. also nicknamed 'Blue Poles') that are greatest, once he began his famous 'drip' technique. ended career sad way, alcohol, driving. for five years though, the greatest modern american painter. wish I could be as fluid, passionate, expressive, in any of my arts...
230812: extensive coffee book from MoMA exhibition. large colour reproductions suggest why I really really like his work- I have not seen him in person. for me, it is the years 1947 (Cathedral, Full Fathom Five, Alchemy, Autumn Rhythm, Lavender Mist, Phosphorescence) to 1952 ('numbers'. also nicknamed 'Blue Poles') that are greatest, once he began his famous 'drip' technique. ended career sad way, alcohol, driving. for five years though, the greatest modern american painter. wish I could be as fluid, passionate, expressive, in any of my arts...
June 9, 2010
This little volume contains a discussion of 11 paintings of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) held by the Museum of Modern Art. While the brief essays accompanying these pictures are filled with plenty of 'curatorese', and betray an insecure attitude towards modern intellectual fashions, the book also contains some interesting material. In discussing "Bird", for instance -- we are told how Pollock had visited MoMA's 1941 Indian Art exhibit several times, and attended a demonstration of Native Americans "painting" an image on the ground with colored sand dropped from their fist (note that the painting is made of oil and sand).
Bird, 1938-1941. Oil and sand on canvas. MoMA
On the other hand, the author wastes valuable sentence-space trying to connect the painting to a Prussian coat-of-arms, and then to some sort of Jungian "hovering", before finally admitting that Lee Krasner (Pollock's wife) was probably right in claiming that the painting is sexual. That the painting is sexual and totemic is obvious.
The paintings covered are: The Flame; Bird; Stenographic Figure; The She-Wolf; Gothic; Shimmering Substance; Full Fathom Five; Number 1A, 1948; One: Number 31, 1950; Echo: Number 25, 1951; Easter and the Totem.
The volume, a product of the Museum, is a bit self-serving, as it points repeatedly to its own role in Pollock's career -- as in the example above, and by noting several times how it was an early buyer of Pollock (She-Wolf, 1944). This is a bit disturbing since Cal Tomkins writes that Pollock never earned more than $5600 for any of his paintings -- and that, only in the year of his death.
Anyway - here's my favorite picture in the volume.
Echo: Number 25, 1951. 1951. Enamal on unprimed canvas. MoMA
Juan Miró. Collage, Head of Georges Auric. Tarboard, chalk, and pencil on paper. 1929. Kunsthaus Zürich.
September 3, 2017
More an esay than a book, I enjoyed this small tome. It gives equal weight to early works and paintings, his classis drip period ,and the final, unfinished era that may have ended more figurative--filled with more color than anything he had done before. For the price this slight critical look is worth the read.
December 4, 2017
A number of pieces by a famous artist are discussed in this book.
Many of the images / pictures in this book were stunning, but the comments on each one left me a bit cold. I would have liked the short biography of the artist (at the end of the book) to have been longer.
Many of the images / pictures in this book were stunning, but the comments on each one left me a bit cold. I would have liked the short biography of the artist (at the end of the book) to have been longer.
January 24, 2022
Libro molto interessante ed illuminante su una figura dell'arte moderna più citata che studiata scritto da uno dei poeti meno conosciuti e sottovalutati della Beat Generation che lo conobbe personalmente. Non sapevo di tutte queste influenze nell'arte di Pollock, da dove nascesse la sua volontà di realizzare opere attraverso quella tecnica che verrà chiamata Action Painting e del fatto che passò numerose fasi prima di arrivarvi nonché di una profonda influenza letteraria e in particolare dalla mitologia greca. L'unico difetto non riguarda il libro in sé che è ottimo, ma questa edizione che misteriosamente ha rimosso tutte le illustrazioni presenti nell'edizione originaria per cui il voto complessivo sarebbe stato decisamente più basso, un danno non da poco in particolare contando che si sta parlando di un libro di arte visuale in cui l'autore fa numerosi riferimenti diretti ai particolari delle opere e che quest'ultime non siano particolarmente famose, penalizzando chi vorrebbe approfondire o scoprire questo grande artista del Novecento.
March 1, 2010
This collection is worth its price for Rosalind Krauss's fantastic essay "The Crisis of the Easel Picture" alone. Other essays (Clark's "Pollock's Smallness" and Coddington's "No Chaos Damn It," in particular) are good, but Krauss's is truly great. Also, in the concluding essay, Kirk Varnedoe gives a much-needed argument against the ridiculous, oversimplifying (yet popular) reading that Pollock's work is essentially an Expressionistic communication of his tumultuous, unstable emotional-self. No angst damn it!
October 17, 2016
This is one of the best books on art that I've seen and read. I say seen because it has most of his works pictured. Many of them also have a close up of one part of the canvas so you can see the strokes and drops of paint of all types that he used. It's like standing and looking at it in person. I've long been a fan of his late 1940s and early 50s work. If you saw the film Pollock, not much of the biography will be new; but if you are a true art aficionado, you will be interested in the extensive background on the art business around Pollock's works.
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June 22, 2011the power of sobriety....
April 13, 2012
Its a good un ...... a sumpuous book from MOMA. I bought this eleven years ago and it gave me the breadth and depth that i wanted.
July 17, 2020
I keep staring at Male and Female, thinking it'll explain my relationships. No luck thus far.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews