Art: Dappled Glories

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The ability to get the whole surface moving would have deep results for his later work, and afterimages of Mural would keep reappearing right up to the slanting "poles" in his last great canvas, Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952. The two pictures have something else in common: they remind you how Pollock, whom we tend to think of as a web-weaving, linear artist, was also a real colorist, idiosyncratic and original. There is something vulgar about the palette of Blue Poles, with its giddy dance of aluminum paint and hot orange, but it is the kind of vulgarity that fairly seethes with life.

It is an amazing experience to walk through the central galleries of this show where the masterpieces of his career are hung, the huge all-over paintings of 1948-50. How did an artist who looked so unpromising at first attain this clarity, strength and command of scale? Not easily, and it is very much to the show's credit that it includes failures and partial successes along with the works that incontestably come off. It makes you more alert to the risks Pollock took. There were no rules for what he was doing; the besetting danger was always overcongestion of the surface, so that no air was left between the marks and the energy he strove to transmit clogged up.

You do not need to be with these works very long before realizing how feeble a term "drip" is for the ways--the numberless, subtle and improvised ways--Pollock's paint got on the canvas. His public notoriety came in part from public resentment. Real artists lay watercolor washes or put glazes over body color, but this one just spilled liquids incontinently, as though painting were no more demanding than knocking over a cup of coffee or taking a pee. But when you look at these pictures, it isn't so. Pollock was a consummate aesthete. (The fact that he could also be a mean, drunken galoot doesn't gainsay that.)

He would walk around the canvas, throwing paint on it from the edges, and the loops and lashes that resulted have a grace and energy that his labored hand drawing never reached. Then there was the pouring, the overlay, one color bleeding into another, producing marbled effects, mists, separations, spots and speckles, each with its element of chance, but all controlled by the prepared mind that chance favors. And the retouching and linkages, done with a brush. "Glory be to God for dappled things!" the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once exclaimed, and that's what crosses one's mind in front of such works as One, 1950, or Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950.

Hopkins was apostrophizing nature in all its ceaseless variety, and that is what Pollock seems to have been doing too. "I want to be nature," he declared, and the paintings attest to that. These tiny incidents pullulating in a large field may evoke the experience of looking into a dense thicket close up, or the wider one of staring at the Milky Way, but in either case Pollock's imagination seems organically bound to the natural world without actually depicting it. The contrast between the great size of the canvases (One is more than 17 ft. across) and the intricacy of their microforms plays its part too. There is no ideal viewing distance; you must step back to grasp their size and overall energy, but you must also put your nose in them to appreciate their details. Just like the real world, one is tempted to say.