Art: Beyond the Pasteboard Mask

Anyone who is older than an Eagle Scout can remember the scandal. There was a grown man, a dreamer in denims named Jackson Pollock, tacking canvas to the floor and dribbling paint onto it. That was less than 20 years ago, but now Pollock has been dead nearly eight years, and the time has come for looking at Pollock in retrospect. This week Manhattan's Marlborough-Gerson Gallery provides the opportunity in a show of 150 Pollocks, drawn mainly from his widow's estate. That exhibition is backed by ten early works in the tiny Griffin Gallery.

The Marlborough exhibition (see color pages) shows that Pollock dripped most expressively, but he did much more than drip. The farmer's son from Cody, Wyo., was abstract expressionism's most inventive artist and its unquestioned pioneer of new forms.

Middens of Mythology. "He didn't have a logical mind," said Thomas Hart Benton, who was Pollock's teacher at Manhattan's Art Students League from 1929 to 1931, "but he was a very fine colorist." Perhaps he learned his color and texture from the land, when, he worked as a surveyor's helper; in any case, he learned drawing from anatomy up. He borrowed Benton's feel for the swirly sensuousness of oils, turned to the writhing images of the Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco, loved the sinuous drapery of baroque art. But his greatest influence came from childhood days in the Southwest: sand painting by the Navahos, who sifted colored earths through their fingers to form flat talismans on the ground.

What Pollock missed in logic, he made up in intuition. Surrealism excited him in its reliance on the unconscious, and he underwent Jungian analysis in 1939 to unearth the middens of mythology stored in his mind.

Neon Phalanx. Rejecting the scientific color of the French impressionists, even the acid color of the German expressionists, Pollock explored a clattering spectrum, an American neon intensity of pigments. He used fast-drying enamels, and aluminum paint to produce higher highlights than white could yield. He hit upon the idea that the paint could be the image, not just serve as its representative. He rejected the notion that paintings should have visual climaxes that smack the eye—such as a Mona Lisa in the midst of a landscape —and instead made every square inch of his big works bear up under an equal pressure of paint.

Pollock inverted traditional perspective. Instead of a vanishing point, his paintings advance like a phalanx, enmeshing and engulfing the eye beyond peripheral vision—like CinemaScope. But Pollock believed that art was more than communication—an idea that led him in conversation to emphasize the act of painting more than the outcome. This, in turn, led Critic Harold Rosenberg to dub his style "action painting" —and the phrase stuck.