Absolute Drama
In "The Writings of Robert Motherwell" (2007) is a transcript of a symposium in which the artist participated in 1967, sponsored by Art News, with other contemporary artists on the subject of Jackson Pollock. Following are comments copied from Robert Motherwell's recollections of Pollock at that event, relevant to Pollock-the-man, the person, while omitting his thoughts about Pollock's art (with which, it is assumed, most are familiar). Taking into account what we know about Pollock's art (and if Motherwell's analysis is true), then Abstract Expressionism must be defined as motivated by emotion-not theory-and, at the same time, we gain a better understanding of the phenomenon that is Jackson Pollock.
“I first knew Pollock at the beginning of the 1940s. As the result of a bitter quarrel between our wives, Lee and Maria, in East Hampton, in the mid-1940s, we were forced to break off relations. Then in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Pollock and I met in New York several times by chance amicably. Sometime before his death, he came uninvited to my house to a big party I was giving for Philip Guston and behaved cordially, though fiercely baited by Kline and de Kooning (I suppose because of some past history, perhaps the episodes at the Cedar Bar). I marveled at Pollock's restraint, because I had often seen him violent, and at Kline's brutality, because I had never seen him anything but gentle (as he always was again when I saw him). I was glad that Pollock left as cordially and quietly as he had come. I never saw him again, I think. I did meet him at the Schrafft's men's bar the Friday of the weekend before Tomlin died; I remember this distinctly because Pollock was to meet Tomlin later that afternoon at the train for East Hampton. Pollock that day talked angrily of how in America one never permanently "makes it," that each new show is a new absolute test, despite whatever one has done in the past. But whether this was before or after my Guston party, I do not remember-I think before.
“Anyhow, in the early 1940s I knew Pollock professionally, we even collaborated together on several projects, which I regard as something of a miracle, when I think of what a loner he was.
“I should mention perhaps that we all were in our twenties, then, and poor.
“Pollock then was a deeply depressed man, as well a man with his aesthetic aspirations might be in those days—of the Depression, World War II, the WPA, the prevalence of Marxist intellectuals and painters, and so on—and like most depressed men, rather reticent. His wife often spoke up for him, in a protective but not always feeling way: one sometimes wondered if Pollock himself would have replied in the same words; and beneath his depression you could often sense his potential rage.
“Breton used to say that the art of the future would be convulsive; but certainly it never occurred to him that one of the makers of that convulsive future art was Jackson Pollock. Pollock loved then the violent Picassos of the 1930s, such as the drawings for Guernica and the Woman with Knife and Cock, owned by Mary Callery (which was well known to us). Indeed, I think then his deepest aspiration was to make a parallel and personal version of such imagery, but he could not. It came out too Picassoid. With convulsive violence, Pollock then splashed out, or struck out his human image. Then I think a time came when he abandoned the original human image, realizing that his negative striking-out was image enough. It is true that, in one of his last shows, Pollock tried the human image again. But that was not where his power lay. It lay in a force of negation that was part of his character. What Pollock stands for, perhaps most of all, is that in the end there are no art rules, or that the rules are no good, that only when a man really asserts his identity, even if to the point of convulsion, does his medium rise to the character of style. That Pollock meant most of all to me; that is, the creative power of anger and negation. The destructive side of these we know too well, Abstract Expressionists perhaps most of all, with many of us prematurely in the grave.
“Perhaps Pollock at last learned the lesson of most modern artists, that what one is most gifted at is not necessarily how one most wanted to paint, that one's mature style is as unexpected to oneself as to everyone else.
“Whatever his profound inner conflict was, I think personally that it was never wholly resolved, despite the great lyrical works that are the by-product of that conflict. Pollock makes me think of Picasso's remark about Cézanne, that what is great Cézanne is not the beauty of the painting, that academic painters' painting is often as beautiful, but that it is Cézanne's anxiety that counts. I think that in the end the human price of Pollock's inner conflict became too great for him, a common artistic phenomenon that people on the outside seem to find difficult to grasp. It is a hard thing to say, but it is probably true that Pollock ultimately destroyed himself. Perhaps here is where he is closest to the American myth. (I remember Hans Hofmann reported as saying, when he first heard of David Smith's violent death, "how American.")
All this, and certain infantile acts, have led to the public image of Pollock as a very active man, as an "Action Painter," in the current jargon. But I would suspect the opposite, that Pollock was an essentially passive man, who occasionally, at an emotional price that it frightens me to contemplate, overcame his passivity through a convulsion of activity that became transcendent when coupled with his sensitivity to painting as a medium. No artist can do more. Artists who do do it are heroic, and Pollock was a hero. Not an essentially American one, like Gary Cooper, but a modern and international one, as it turned out. Which, given the place and time, is even more heroic.
“Therefore I hope that the Pollock exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art will not be taken by the cool younger generation as just a moment in American art history, but as a celebration of the force of man's spirit. All the rest is politics, of various painters trying to force themselves onto history's stage.