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The Figurative Pollock
This beautiful book focuses on the distinctive and expressive power of Jackson Pollock's figurative paintings, drawings, and prints; a rarely studied aspect of his artistic career. Jackson Pollock’s name has become synonymous with the abstract drip paintings that he famously created on the floor of his studio. Before these paintings, from the 1930s to the late 1940s, Pollock created figurative works, studying at one time under the painter Thomas Hart Benton and with the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Pollock took up figuration again after his famous drip paintings. This book starts with the early decades and also treats Pollock’s re-adoption of the figuration after his renowned abstract paintings. The Figurative Pollock features 100 paintings and works on paper. From rolling landscapes to experiments in non-Western totemic painting to sketches and drawings fueled by Jungian analysis, the enormous range of Pollock’s early and late work is presented here. Brimming with confidence and a sense of freedom, distinct yet so easily related to Pollock’s most famous oeuvre, these works contribute to an understanding of how the artist found his voice.
248 pages, Hardcover
Published November 21, 2016
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April 28, 2021
"When you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge." - Jackson Pollock
Crossing a boundary can be something one does deliberately in a state of heightened awareness, or it can happen almost by accident, through inattention or disregard. Which of these descriptions better suits Jackson Pollock's persistent crossing and recrossing of the border between abstraction and representation? This seemingly modest question encompasses several others.
For an earlier generation of modernist painters striving to invent abstraction, some kind of separation seemed essential. Abstraction promised purity and autonomy; it posited separation from a world in which depiction had become associated with commerce, political persuasion, deception and banality. Moreover, freedom from the obligation to reference appearances in the world expanded an artist's control over pectoral form.
Figuration and abstraction operated in Pollock's work in concert with a variety of other polarities, including order and disorder, unity and heterogeneity, disembodiment and materiality, allusion and literalism, containment and liberation, close-up and distant viewing. These conflicts and fraught metaphors were central to the pertinence that Pollock's art had for its first audiences. That art gave convincing form to new notions of the self as conflicted and of the human situation as tragic. Pollock's paintings are distinguished by their insistent demand that their contradictory aspects be grasped and held simultaneously. The best of them insist that the viewer vividly experience their conflicts and divisions as an enactment of the divided selfhood internalized by Pollock and staged in the production of his art.
Crossing a boundary can be something one does deliberately in a state of heightened awareness, or it can happen almost by accident, through inattention or disregard. Which of these descriptions better suits Jackson Pollock's persistent crossing and recrossing of the border between abstraction and representation? This seemingly modest question encompasses several others.
For an earlier generation of modernist painters striving to invent abstraction, some kind of separation seemed essential. Abstraction promised purity and autonomy; it posited separation from a world in which depiction had become associated with commerce, political persuasion, deception and banality. Moreover, freedom from the obligation to reference appearances in the world expanded an artist's control over pectoral form.
Figuration and abstraction operated in Pollock's work in concert with a variety of other polarities, including order and disorder, unity and heterogeneity, disembodiment and materiality, allusion and literalism, containment and liberation, close-up and distant viewing. These conflicts and fraught metaphors were central to the pertinence that Pollock's art had for its first audiences. That art gave convincing form to new notions of the self as conflicted and of the human situation as tragic. Pollock's paintings are distinguished by their insistent demand that their contradictory aspects be grasped and held simultaneously. The best of them insist that the viewer vividly experience their conflicts and divisions as an enactment of the divided selfhood internalized by Pollock and staged in the production of his art.
Displaying 1 of 1 review