Art: Dappled Glories

The most eagerly awaited show of the U.S. art season opens this week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: the retrospective of Jackson Pollock's work, organized by MOMA's senior curator of painting and sculpture, Kirk Varnedoe, in tandem with co-curator Pepe Carmel. The two have done a brilliant job, producing, along the way, one of the very few museum catalogs that can be read for pleasure as well as instruction. Amazingly enough, the American audience hasn't had a chance to see Pollock's work whole in more than 30 years. The last comprehensive show in a U.S. museum was in 1967, also at MOMA. (A limited retrospective was mounted in Paris in 1982.) How will a new generation of museumgoers take to his work?

With delight and gratitude, one hopes. Pollock was a great painter; at least he painted some great pictures, which changed the face of American art, and look as fresh and strong today as they must have 50 years ago, when they emerged from his shack of a studio on New York's Long Island. But how great is "great"? Meaning has drained out of the idea of greatness because today it is so inextricably confused with fame, and fame with celebrity, all on the dumb level of publicity--and Pollock is the most publicized and celebrated artist in American history.

A Goya he wasn't, nor a Velazquez, nor a Titian. An American Picasso, maybe? No: the oeuvre lacks that vast span. For someone who had the impact on international art that he did, Pollock had a bafflingly short career. He didn't attain any degree of originality until after his 30th birthday. The arc of the career rises from 1943, when the collector and gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim commissioned him to paint a mural for her Manhattan apartment, to the early '50s--no more than 10 years. The final four years of his life brought a string of pictorial failures and, at best, semi-successes: no talent could survive the alcoholic battering Pollock gave his. And then at age 44, a fatal car crash, after which the rest is the kind of pop hagiology that America reserves for its culture heroes.

American actors and baseball players had been this famous before and would be more so; Ernest Hemingway was, but no painter was or would be again--not even Andy Warhol. Eager to curate his own reputation, Pollock let photographers in and performed for them. Hans Namuth, Rudy Burckhardt and Arnold Newman saw a drama in Pollock's mating dance around the canvas on the floor that normally isn't present in a painter's address to his work. It was solipsistic and histrionic at the same time--broody like Brando, vulnerable like James Dean. Pollock's fate was pure stardom, granted by the media and then riveted in place by early violent death and by the posthumous market for his work.