253 - Jackson Pollock Retrospective

Jackson Pollock Retrospective
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd. Street, New York, N. Y.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York opened its Jackson Pollock Exhibition on April 5, 1967. The exhibit is superb and includes many interesting samples of Pollock's early work, including two early paintings reflecting the influence of Albert Ryder.

Professor William Rubin has noted that Pollock adhered "instinctively" to an all-over distribution of line and color "that prevented any climactic emphasis on one point . . . of his essentially light-dark structured canvas."¹ Pollock's development of an all-over style of painting,² derived from impressionism and cubism, is basic to an understanding of his modernity and spirituality. Every culture-classical, medieval, Oriental, primitive-has its particular "spirituality," by which I mean those forms of language, art, religion, government, and social life which express the imagination and world-view of its particular place and time. Modern man, too, has his spirituality, his ways of imagining the world. The artist gives us concrete images of this world-view, shaped both by the age and culture of which he is a part and through his own imagination. In this sense, every work of art is both an archetypal and autotypal image.

The development of all-over painting, with its implicit rejection of a hierarchical ordering of space, is the necessary prerequisite for Pollock's "art of the broken center." The "center" here refers to those archetypal and ordering images around which the life of a given culture is centered and which direct and give meaning to the human enterprise. The center establishes the "world." Thus, Goethe could write:

For what the center brings
Must obviously be
That which remains to the end
And was there from eternity.

¹ Artforum, Vol. V, No. 6, February, 1967, p. 19 (italics added).
² All-over painting treats every part of the canvas as if it were of equal value and rejects all notions of foreground and background, center and limits, perspective, etc.

254 - Jackson Pollock Retrospective

In our time, this center has become "broken." Its collapse is witnessed by philosophers, poets, novelists, psychologists, even theologians. Kafka described it in The Trial and The Castle, Beckett in Waiting for Godot, Yeats in The Second Coming, and Eliot in The Waste Land.

However unconscious and personal its origins, the "broken center" in Pollock's drip paintings must be seen as a visual dramatization of the crisis of meaning experienced by contemporary man. Whether consciously or instinctually, Pollock struggled heroically to retain the center, to keep it from vanishing altogether in the maze of his arabesque image. His employment of all-over painting and his linear arabesque militated against the retention of a clearly visible center. Yet Pollock's struggle with the center is clearly manifest in such paintings as Vortex, 1947; Arabesque, 1948; the Circular Painting on metal (with its hand-painted center!), 1952; and Blue Poles (with its black drip circle at visual center), 1953.³ In Number I, 1948, the movement of the lines in the arabesque itself permit a visual center to emerge, making it one of Pollock's most beautiful and visually successful paintings.

The problem of the center becomes increasingly evident if one compares Pollock's paintings with Celtic-Germanic art of the late seventh and early eighth centuries. In these Celtic-Germanic works, animal images and mythical sea dragons are abstracted and become little more than swirling, arabesque lines. A visual comparison of Pollock's Number 14, 1948, with a detail from the Cross Page of the Lindisfarne Gospels (c. 700 A.D., British Museum, London) shows how close his vision lies to the primitive spirituality of pre-Christian art. The controlling center and hierarchic ordering of the Cross Page is provided by the imposition of the cross upon this vital menagerie. Jansen says, "It is as if the world of paganism, embodied in these biting and clawing monsters, had suddenly been subdued by the superior authority of the Cross."⁴ The comparison is instructive because it allows us to see how the process is reversed in Pollock's art; here the controlling center "cannot hold"⁵ and, at times, vanishes altogether. The end result is a heightened sense of primitive energy whose only life is the life of its beautifully sensitive, swirling lines. The heightened sense of energy conveyed by the Pollock lines defines Pollock's particular spirituality.

Professor Rubin has noted in passing that many of Pollock's paintings exhibit a greater density of image near the bottom of the pictures. If

³ The pole or stake, as Eliade shows, is a prime symbol for the center. Pollock's poles are in various stages of disintegration. Their presence in the painting confirms again our thesis that Pollock's art is concerned primarily with this center.
⁴ H. W. Jansen, History of Art, Prentice-Hall, Inc., & Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1962, p. 197.
⁵ Cf. the lines by W. B. Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;. . .
Surely some revelation is at hand.

255 - Jackson Pollock Retrospective

one tries to "read" a Pollock painting upside down-e.g., Number I, 1948; Autumn Rhythm, 1950; or One, 1950-it becomes unbearably top-heavy. "The difference of 'weight' between the top and the bottom of a visual object tends to push the perceptual center upward," says Rudolf Arnheim. Pollock's all-over painting is thus qualified by a decreasing density, a movement from weight to lightness, from bottom to top. The Pollock arabesque usually stops short of the limits of the canvas on three sides (top and sides), thus allowing the canvas itself to function as a spatial backdrop upon which the paintings seem to float freely. The arabseque image, the vitality of these fluid lines, the elevation of the eye from greater to lesser density, the sense of floating free-all contribute directly to the sense of spirituality in Pollock's art.

One final observation has to do with the frequent appearance of eyes in Pollock's work-e.g., in Eyes in the Heat, 1946, and the post-classical Number 18, 1951, which consists of numerous variations upon the eye. One dare not speculate unduly upon this phenomenon in Pollock's art, but it must be said that the eye is always in some sense a symbol of consciousness. In an art which has its roots deep in the unconscious, the appearance of eyes sets up a kind of dialectic. It is as if what is revealed in the heat of passion must not go unseen, as if the unconscious were demanding to be made conscious-and visible. Contrary to popular opinion, Pollock often took months to create a painting, studying for many hours what was done in a burst of energy.

What, finally, is the meaning of Pollock's art? Writing about the visual arts today is a dangerous undertaking. So entrenched is the positivism of American critics that anyone, including the artist, who dares to suggest that the meaning of a work of art transcends the order of "pure visibility" is in for a fight. Why is this so? The tradition of pragmatism and positivism in American thought is certainly one factor. Another is the justifiable reaction to psychoanalytical. studies of art which reduce it to a symptom of the artist's psychic state. The absence of any coherent, underlying esthetic from which to judge the work of art is perhaps the prime factor. Indeed, says Venturi, if "we wish to inform ourselves of the directive ideas of the existing history of art, of the spiritual values which it represents, of the relations which it institutes with philosophy, history and literature, we are immediately aware that unity is lacking and anarchy reigns."⁶ In our time how can any one man be expected to display the knowledge of art and its intuitions, of psychology, philosophy, literature, history, science, and all the rest which is required to shape a viable esthetic from which to judge today's

⁶ Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism. E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1964, pp. 16, 17 (tr. by Charles Marriott).

256 - Jackson Pollock Retrospective

art? I suspect, then, that the positivism of American art critics is, in part, a "pragmatic" solution to the problems posed by the complexities of the modern intellectual task. But the life of the spirit to which art belongs does not lend itself to pragmatic solutions.

Positivism-or, to quote Venturi once more-"detachment, natural to the scientist, is not suitable to the art critic since he moves within the human world of man's passions and fantasies. . . . He is partial to the everlasting creativity that is reborn every day and at every instant within the work of art. If he has acquired that force that makes a work art, he will be able to recognize it in any work, irrespective of the taste in which it was executed."⁷

Pollock's art is, first of all, an art of crisis-the crisis of the broken center, of the breakdown of cultural values. Pollock's paintings engulf us in their sense of vertigo. But we are saved from the void by the vital energy which we see here. "Vitalism in art," says Sir Herbert Read, "is a challenge to nihilism in art." In returning to Primitive sources in the psyche, Pollock has also tapped the sources of our life-energies. His vision is not unlike that of D. H. Lawrence who found the source of renewal in the biological forces themselves.

Pollock's art also reverses the movement of western history from primitive to sophisticated order; we have already noted its similarities to the pre-Christian art of Europe. Pollock's art protests against the tragedy of over-reason in our scientific culture.

Lastly, Pollock's painting may be said to represent the dismemberment stage in the myth of death and transformation. Apropos of this "art of the broken center" is Neumann's statement that "castration symbolism often occurs in those who are overpowered by the spirit." Yet dismemberment is for all mythologies and theologies the first and necessary stage in the process of renewal. Pollock's arabesque-with-eyes is, then, a confirmation of D. H. Lawrence's view that "the human soul must suffer its own disintegration, consciously, if ever it is to survive."

Finley Eversole
Foundation for the Arts, Religion and Culture
New York, N. Y.

⁷ Ibid., P. 349.