The Fate Of A Gesture: Jackson Pollock And Postwar American Art

by Carter Ratcliff

Flipping his colors onto the canvas, pouring and dripping his paints in a quintessentially American gesture, Jackson Pollock redefined the art of painting. It was the fate of Pollock's gesture, which reflected America's largest, most optimistic ideas of itself, to be mimicked, modified, and denied by artists of immense stature, among them Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Robert Smithson.Drawing from twenty years of experience as an art critic in New York, Carter Ratcliff maps the Manhattan art world from Fifty-seventh Street to SoHo, revisiting the world of studios, galleries, and artists' bars where those personalities met and clashed. In addition to providing an intimate biography of Pollock and the history and development of his ideas, Ratcliff explores the lives and consciousness of the other major American artists of the day. He follows the story of postwar American art from the late 1940s through the triumph of Abstract Expressionism and the sudden explosion of Pop Art, all the way to the boom of the 1980s, which brought stardom to an array of young artists. Over it all looms the monumental and tragic figure of Jackson Pollock, the measure of all who have felt compelled to challenge him.

Genres: Art, Biography

372 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of the book is an analysis about the 'fate of a gesture' as developed in American art from the 1950s to the 1980s. Carter Ratcliff puts forward an interesting thesis about how Pollock's 'gesture,' in his case the 'drip,' changes through the works of a number of artists discussed in his book. The major problem, for this reader, is how Ratcliff discusses a number of artworks in his book, but he fails to include images to supplement his thesis. Those he did include were in black-and-white. This made the text somewhat disjointed. However, the premise is interesting, and well worth the read.