Art: Dappled Glories

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But what of the work? Varnedoe's catalog essay bears the title "Comet: Jackson Pollock's Life and Work," which fits the eclat and brevity of Pollock's appearance. But comets eventually swing back on their orbit and return, whereas Pollock was a singular and not a cyclic event, more like a meteor that plows into the earth and wreaks havoc on its climate, filling art's air with fallout. Artists have been defining themselves and their work against Pollock ever since. Yet most of his influence was indirect. Pollock's mature style--based on dripping and flinging skeins of paint onto a canvas flat on the floor, building a web of interaction among line, surface and color from above--was so much his own that to imitate it was self-evidently absurd. Willem de Kooning had shoals of imitators, because his work was grounded in a long European tradition of figure painting. Not Pollock; his central insights were too decisively new.

Rather, Pollock became an exemplar of risk and openness. It wasn't just that, as de Kooning said, he "broke the ice" and forced American art onto an international stage, where it had never had a place before. It was that the freedom implied in his work challenged and provoked other artists to claim an equal freedom in theirs--not only in painting but also in sculpture, performance art, dance and music.

Pollock was born in Cody, Wyo., in 1912 but grew up in California. Much ink has been spilled on the question of how Western an artist he was, how affected by the vast and epic landscapes he may or may not have noticed when he was two years old, but the point seems necessarily moot. In any case, he was not, as Europeans like to imagine, at home on the range, especially since Cody in 1912 was a new tract-housing development, not an Old West town. His father was a dud and a drifter who had little to do with his son. His ineffectual mother spoiled him. Mainly he was raised by older brothers, the eldest of whom, Charles, was a painter. At 16, Pollock was studying art in Los Angeles; two years later, he followed Charles to New York, where he found a serious teacher in Thomas Hart Benton, choleric dean of the American Regionalist movement.

Benton became a surrogate big daddy to replace Pollock's own woundingly absent father. Thus the future avant-gardist had for a mentor a man who hated abstract art. But when Pollock came under Benton's tutelage, he wasn't aiming at abstraction. Benton's way of composing, with its heftily twisting figures and buckling, scoop-and-bump space, was based on 16th century Mannerism--Midwestern El Greco and Tintoretto; he even adapted the Mannerist device of reducing the figures to geometrical dolls, sometimes modeling them in clay. This vehemence, locked up as a system, appealed to Pollock as a container for his own emotional flailing. Though some painters show early signs of genius, or at least of facility, Pollock showed none. After you've seen his early drawings in this show, it seems barely credible that so ham-fisted a young draftsman could have become such an exponent of visual grace.