MY MAGICAL ATTIC: JACKSON POLLOCK: BLIND SPOTS AT TATE LIVERPOOL

August 02, 2015

JACKSON POLLOCK: BLIND SPOTS AT TATE LIVERPOOL

June 30, 2015 – October 18, 2015

JACKSON POLLOCK: BLIND SPOTS AT TATE LIVERPOOL

June 30, 2015 – October 18, 2015

Supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), Terra Foundation for American Art, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Tate Liverpool Members

This summer Tate Liverpool presents the first exhibition in more than three decades to survey the late paintings of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), made between 1951 and 1953; a phase of work referred to as his black pourings and a highly influential part of his career.

Jackson Pollock is widely considered one of the most important and provocative American artists of the twentieth century, whose work has made an immense contribution to abstract art. Pollock famously pioneered ‘action painting’ - a process that saw him dripping paint on canvases laid flat on the studio floor. Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots focuses on the latter part of the artist’s career, shedding light on a less known but extremely significant part of his body of work.
Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots will introduce audiences to the artist’s practice via a selection of his important drip paintings made between 1947-50 including Summertime: Number 9A 1948 (Tate) and Number 3, 1949: Tiger 1949 (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden). Exhibiting works from the height of the artist’s fame set against his lesser known paintings will serve to demonstrate the radical departure represented by the black pourings. The exhibition offers the opportunity to appreciate Pollock’s broader ambitions as an artist and makes these fascinating later paintings readable as ‘blind spots’ in an otherwise intensely debated career.

The black pourings, a series of black enamel and oil paintings, will be presented alongside unique works on paper and prints from the same period, which are regarded as his most important and productive output as a draughtsman. Also on display will be a number of virtually unknown and rarely seen sculptures, giving viewers the opportunity to reconsider his intentions as an artist

In 1965 art historian Michael Fried remarked that Pollock’s black pourings saw him ‘on the verge of an entirely new and different kind of painting … of virtually limitless potential’. After nearly four years of colourful, decorative, non-figurative paintings, Pollock felt compelled to return to the origins of his art. He needed to reinvigorate his practice during a personally difficult period in his life and the representational style of his black pourings, including the emergence of human figures and faces, signalled a major change of direction in Pollock’s style. His shift in technique also anticipated the arrival of colour field painting that followed in the mid-1950s to early 1960s; characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour it was found in the work of artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Jules Olitski.

The black pourings were first exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York in 1951, with another collection shown at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York in 1952. Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots will be the largest gathering of these works in a public institution and the most significant showing since their 1980 presentation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

An accompanying catalogue will include scholarly texts on Pollock’s practice with new essays by Jo Applin, University of York, Gavin Delahunty, Dallas Museum of Art, Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA and Stephanie Straine, Tate Liverpool.

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots has been developed in collaboration with The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. The exhibition at Tate Liverpool is curated by Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, Gavin Delahunty (formerly Head of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Liverpool) with Stephanie Straine, Assistant Curator, Tate Liverpool. The exhibition has been organised in partnership with the Dallas Museum of Art where it will be shown from 15 November 2015 - 20 March 2016.

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots will be exhibited alongside Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions and both exhibitions have been part funded by the European Regional Development Fund. The two complementing exhibitions will share Tate Liverpool’s fourth floor special exhibition galleries.

http://www.tate.org.uk/about/press-office/press-releases/jackson-pollock-blind-spots

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PORTRAIT AND A DREAM 1953

Oil and Enamel on Canvas

Dimensions: 148.6 × 342.3 cm

Dallas Museum of Art

PORTRAIT AND A DREAM 1953 ( DETAIL )

YELLOW ISLAND 1952

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: Support: 1435 x 1854 mm
Presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery ( Purchased Out of Funds Provided by

Mr and Mrs H.J. Heinz II and H.J. Heinz Co. Ltd ) 1961
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2014

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots on display at Tate Liverpool from

June 30, 2015 - October 18, 2015

NUMBER 12, 1952

Mixed Media

Dimensions: 2578 x 2261 mm

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots on display at Tate Liverpool from

June 30, 2015 - October 18, 2015

NO. 8, C. 1952

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 109.5 × 145.7 cm

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY /

Pollock, Jackson (1912-1956) © ARS, NY

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots on display at Tate Liverpool from

June 30, 2015 - October 18, 2015

NUMBER 7 - 1952

Enamel and Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 1349 x 1016 mm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Purchase, Emilio Azcarraga Gift, in Honor of William S. Lieberman, 1987

Image Copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

NUMBER 7 - 1952 ( DETAIL )

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots on display at Tate Liverpool from

June 30, 2015 - October 18, 2015

NUMBER 14 - 1951

Oil Paint on Canvas

Dimensions: Support: 1465 x 2695 mm Frame: 1493 x 2721 x 63 mm

SUMMER TIME: NUMBER 9A - 1948
Oil, Enamel and House Paint on Canvas
Dimensions: Support: 848 x 5550 mm - Frame: 833 x 5809 x 72 mm
Purchased 1988 Pollock - Krasner Foundation, Inc.

Stephanie Straine and Gavin Delahunty, Curators of Tate Liverpool's

Jackson Pollock Exhibition, With the Artist's 1948 Work Summertime

SUMMER TIME: NUMBER 9A - 1948 ( DETAIL )

THE TATE LIVERPOOL

JACKSON POLLOCK: 5 THINGS

A new exhibition at Tate Liverpool looks afresh at the pioneering and iconic American artist Jackson Pollock. Scrutinising some of the blind spots in a relatively neglected area of his work, here are five things you might not have known about Jackson Pollock

POLLOCK THE SCULPTOR

Acclaimed for the lyrical drip technique he pioneered, it might come as a surprise to learn that, at the beginning of his career, Jackson Pollock was set more on sculpture than painting. In a letter to family, dated 1933, Pollock said:

I am devoting all my time to sculpture now – cutting in stone during the day and modelling at night – it holds my interest deeply – I like it better than painting – drawing though [sic] is the essence of all.

Though a relatively slight aspect of his legacy, it was something Pollock would turn to in the hard times, when painting - or life - was proving difficult. A collaboration with his friend, the sculptor Tony Smith, would be the last creative endeavour he would undertake before his death in a car crash in 1956.

POLLOCK & PICASSO

Jackson Pollock didn’t just happen across the techniques that led Life magazine to ask in 1949 ‘s he the greatest living painter in the United States?’ His journey had taken in various influences; from Mexican muralists such as José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera during the 1930s to the likes of European masters Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró. But none of these looms quite so large as Picasso, whose impact can perhaps most strongly be seen in works such as Number 14 1951, in which monstrous reclining figures writhing in space seem to recall Picasso’s Guernica 1937; simultaneously, this is Pollock’s tribute and challenge to Picasso. Speaking to B. H. Friedman in 1969, his wife Lee Krasner Pollock had this to say about her husband’s relationship with the Spanish artist:

… there’s no question that he admired Picasso and at the same time competed with him, wanted to go past him… I remember one time I heard something fall and then Jackson yelling, “God damn it, that guy missed nothing!” I went to see what had happened. Jackson was sitting, staring; and on the floor, where he had thrown it, was a book of Picasso’s work…

ON ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

The artistic movement that Pollock was most associated with, indeed in the vanguard of, was abstract expressionism. Best characterized by gestural mark-making, it calls to mind an artist channelling their unconscious directly onto canvas, or, as Pollock said: ‘The modern artist … is working and expressing an inner world – in other words expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.’

However, Pollock’s sense of what his art represented was never as clear cut as the assumptions of critics and commentators who sought so eagerly to categorise him. In a 1956 interview with the art historian Selden Rodman, he had this to say:

I don’t care for “abstract expressionism” … and it’s certainly not “non-objective,” and not “nonrepresentational” either. I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time.

THE NAMUT EFFECT

Some of the most memorable images taken of Pollock, and perhaps of any artist at work, were those gleaned from photo shoots and filming sessions undertaken with the photographer Hans Namuth in 1950. Along with the Life magazine spread the previous year they were responsible in many ways for cementing Pollock’s reputation as a colossus of post-war American culture. But, it appears, as well as being iconic and career-defining, there would be other knock-on effects resulting from these sessions.

Pollock, who had had difficulties with alcohol from his mid-teens, had been undergoing regular therapy which saw him achieve two years of sobriety. Immediately following filming, he returned to drinking, leading some to suggest it was the exposure of performing on film that triggered this return to alcohol. Namuth, looking back on this time in 1979, wrote:

I have asked myself why Jackson chose this point in his life to resume drinking. In part, of course, it was the result of the circumstances of that last day of filming. There was a heavy air of crisis hanging about. […] One can, of course, speculate on the deeper reasons. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but in retrospect I think he had reached a transition point in his work […].

POLLOCK MYTHOLOGY

The wider narrative of Pollock, one of the twentieth century’s most compelling figures, arises from a mixture of mythologies, truths and half-truths. David Elliott, in his essay ‘Myths’, (Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting 1979), notes ‘Jackson Pollock’s mercurial career and early death in a car crash at the age of 44 are wholly in keeping with this pattern; his life and death as well as his work have both been absorbed into our cultural history.’

There is also the idea that Pollock had been a naïve ‘man-child’ of an artist, haphazardly hurling paint at a canvas. But, as Helen A. Harrison, Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center has noted (biography.com 2015):

This is [a] misconception enshrined in the Pollock movie. For dramatic purposes, Pollock’s years of experimentation with liquid paint were condensed into a single “eureka moment”. He first tried it in 1936 … By 1947 he had perfected the technique of pouring, flinging and spattering liquid paint, and could control its flow to achieve the effects he was after.’ Pollock modestly put the painstakingly accomplished method down to ‘… a natural growth out of a need’, explaining that: ‘I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/jackson-pollock-five-things

MURAL 1943 ( DETAIL )

MURAL 1943

Oil and Casein on Canvas

Dimensions: 242.9 x 603.9 cm

University of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim, 1959.6

MURAL 1943 ( DETAIL )

NUMBER 3, 1949: TIGER, 1949

Oil, Enamel, Metallic Enamel, and Cigarette

Fragment on Canvas Mounted on Fiberboard

Dimensions: 157.5 x 94.6 cm

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,

Washington, DC, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots on display at Tate Liverpool from

June 30, 2015 - October 18, 2015

PAINTING 1953 - 1954 ( DETAIL )

PAINTING 1953 - 1954

Black and Colored Ink on Paper B. Oil and Gouache on Paper

PAINTING 1953 - 1954 ( DETAIL )

STONE HEAD C.1930-1933

Stone

Dimensions: 108 x 76 x 70 mm

Courtesy of Jason McCoy, New York

NUMBER 34 - 1949

Oil and Enamel on White Paperboard Mounted on Masonite

Dimensions: 559 x 775 mm

Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence

UNTITLED FROM AN UNTITLED PORTFOLIO 1951

Screenprint

Dimensions: Composition: 55.1 x 42.5 cm; Sheet: 73 x 58.5 cm

Credit: Gift of Lee Krasner Pollock

Museum of Modern Art Collection

LUCIFER 1947

Oil, Enamel, and Aluminum Paint on Canvas

Dimensions: 104.1 x 267.9 cm

Collection Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson

LUCIFER 1947 ( DETAIL )

CR 1096 (P32) [AFTER NUMBER 27, 1951], 1951

( PRINTED POSTHUMOUSLY 1964 )

Silkscreen

Dimensions: 58.4 × 73.7 cm

Edition 35/50

LUCIFER 1947 ( DETAIL )

ONE: NUMBER 31, 1950

Oil and Enamel Paint on Canvas

Dimensions: 269.5 x 530.8 cm

Credit: Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund (by exchange)

ECHO: NUMBER 25 - 1951

Enamel Paint on Canvas

Dimensions: 233.4 x 218.4 cm

NUMBER 7 - 1950

Oil, Enamel, and Aluminum Paint on Canvas

Dimensions: 58.5 x 268.6 cm

Exhibition Announcement, Betty Parsons Gallery, Nov. 26-Dec. 15, 1951

NUMBER 13A: ARABESQUE 1948

Oil and Enamel on Canvas

Dimensions: 94 × 297 1/5 cm

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

UNTITLED 1951

Black and Sepia Ink on Mulberry Paper

Dimensions: 63.5 x 98.4 cm

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots on display at Tate Liverpool from

June 30, 2015 - October 18, 2015

NUMBER 5 1952

Painting

Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth

Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum

Purchase Made Possible by a Grant From The Burnett Foundation

NUMBER 23 - 1948

Enamel on Gesso on Paper

Dimensions: 575 x 784 mm

NUMBER 12, 1949
Oil on Paper Laid Down on Masonite
Dimensions: 78.8 x 57.1 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York ( Gift From the Above, 1952)

NUMBER 14: GRAY 1948

Enamel Over Gesso on Paper -

Dimensions: 57 × 78 1/2 cm

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots on display at Tate Liverpool from

June 30, 2015 - October 18, 2015

NUMBER 28 – 1950

Enamel on Canvas

Dimensions: 173 x 266.7 cm

Credit Line: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection, Gift of

Muriel Kallis Newman, in Honor of Her Grandchildren, Ellen Steinberg Coven and

Dr. Peter Steinberg, 2006

UNTITLED: CA. 1948 - 49

Medium: Dripped ink and enamel on paper

Dimensions: 56.8 x 76.2 cm

Credit Line: Gift of Lee Krasner Pollock, 1982

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

UNTITLED CA. 1952 - 56

Medium: Dripped ink on Howell Paper

Dimensions: 46 x 55.6cm

Credit Line: Gift of Lee Krasner Pollock, 1982

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

JACKSON POLLOCK: SEPARATING MAN FROM MYTH

By Mike Pinnington

July 22, 2015

Jackson Pollock’s reputation often precedes him. With an exhibition at Tate Liverpool exploring the blind spots in Pollock’s practice, Mike Pinnington thought it was a good time to address and dispel some of the folklore that has grown up around this ground-breaking artist’s life and times.

No matter how outlandish the truth, human nature dictates that people invariably want to embellish the known facts, to the extent that reality is at times overshadowed by the resultant fictions. A case in point is Jackson Pollock, a figure whose biography quickly became laced with legend; the mythologies conjured up over time rivalling – and often overshadowing – his artistic legacy. Of course, however, some of the best fictions have a grain of truth to them…

POLLOCK WAS LIMITED TO ABSTRACT ART

Although identified as the pioneer and leading light of the abstract expressionist movement (a term coined to describe new forms of abstract art, often characterized by gestural mark-making and the impression of spontaneity), Pollock was by no means confined to this style alone. For a good deal of his career he worked figuratively, and even commented on this himself. In one of his few written statements, dated 1951, Pollock declared:

I don’t care for ‘abstract expressionism’ … and it’s certainly not ‘non-objective’, and not ‘nonrepresentational’ either. I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge… painting is a state of being… Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

POLLOCK DEVELOPED IN A BUBBLE

While it is correct to say that Pollock dismantled and redefined modernist painting, it is wrong to suggest that he arrived upon his signature style in a vacuum. Although never travelling outside of the United States, and once declaring that ‘I don’t see why the problems of modern painting can’t be solved as well here [America] as elsewhere,’ Pollock was highly conversant in European modernism; in particular with reference to the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso. Indeed, Pollock filled pages of a sketchbook with his thoughts and interpretations on the latter – his admiration for Picasso’s Guernica and the studies for it are well documented.

POLLOCK COULD ONLY PAINT TO JAZZ

Pollock thought that jazz was ‘the only interesting thing to happen in this country [America]’ and after his death he left behind him a large collection of records by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. In his work you can draw comparisons with the music he clearly loved: you see rhythm, variation in tempo and movement, and his drip style is regularly referred to as lyrical. It is understandable then that this led to the misconception that he could only have worked to the strains of the genre he adored. Much of his output, however, was produced in a converted barn with no power source. Unless he had a few musicians on call to play while he painted, the romantic claim that he could only do so while listening to jazz is unfounded.

POLLOCK WAS AT HIS MOST PROLIFIC UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF ALCOHOL

Probably the most absurd and easily refutable fantasy about Pollock was that he was at his most prolific and created his best works while drinking. Even the smallest grasp of what his technique entailed and required of him rules out that idea. Requiring of him great skill, concentration and patience, when asked about his approach to painting, Pollock asserted: ‘I can control the flow of the paint; there is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.’ The most productive phase of his career actually came when he had been sober for a period of two years. In contrast, his output slowed dramatically to a crawl when drinking, and during the final years of his life, as he began to lose his battle with alcohol, Pollock painted only a handful of works.

POLLOCK WAS OUT OF IDEAS POST ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

It’s tempting to draw the conclusion that, once he had conquered the art world, graced magazines, been caught up in fashion shoots and declared the greatest American artist of his generation that, after the iconic period spanning 1947–1950 (and years before his death), Pollock was washed up. The exhibition Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots explores the subsequent years in which he reconfigured the language and techniques of abstract expressionism to produce a more explicitly figurative, starkly monochromatic practice. Leading critic and art historian Michael Fried would later remark that during this time, Pollock had been ‘on the verge of an entirely new and different kind of painting,’ one which was ‘of virtually limitless potential’. Another critic, Clement Greenberg no less, was quick to acknowledge that, far from out of ideas, the artist was in fact articulating ‘something different from what he had to say before’.

POLLOCK DISCOVERED HIS DRIP TECHNIQUE BY CHANCE

As has been touched upon elsewhere, the sense that the development of his famed drip technique was some kind of fortunate accident is highly reductive, one given undue weight by its depiction in the 2000 biopic Pollock, starring and directed by Ed Harris. This couldn’t be further from the truth; it was something that took him years to perfect, from experimentation in the late 1930s to his mastery of it toward the end of the following decade. His pioneering work though, proved shocking to many and he was regularly asked about his approach, fielding rather blunt questions like this one from a 1950 radio interview: ‘Mr. Pollock, there’s been a good deal of controversy and a great many comments have been made regarding your method of painting. Is there something you’d like to tell us about that?’ Remarkably, such enquiries were usually greeted with modesty, eliciting humble responses about finding new techniques for new times, or expressing feelings rather than merely illustrating them. Privately however, such scrutiny made Pollock extremely self-aware of public opinion of him, his work and his abilities.

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/jackson-pollock-man-myth

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August 02, 2015

JACKSON POLLOCK: BLIND SPOTS AT TATE LIVERPOOL