Abstract Expressionism
December 14, 1998
I think I finished this “tour” of Abstract Expressionist painting Friday, when I got around to see the Jackson Pollack retrospective at the MoMA. Much hubbub about this exhibit: a booming big front page E-section in the New York Times, lengthy reviews in the New Yorker, smaller reviews in any number of on-line magazines I read, an essay in the New Republic, and not least, MoMA carving out most of its third floor for it, moving any number of other paintings into storage. Much of this buzz was about how there was some sort of 50th year reunion for the Abstract Expressionists in New York museums this year, with Rothko up in the Whitney, Pollack at MoMA and some others in smaller galleries elsewhere.
While not exactly bouncing around excitedly like the proverbial kid in the candy store, I did see this as a neat-o opportunity to fill gaps in my education. Stuff that I didn’t fully appreciate in school: I reread Iliad and Odyssey in the past year or so, and toyed with the idea of picking up Dante again, maybe after I finish playing Tomb Raider 3 (current stuck on London: Alwych, which is modelled on the London Underground). I’m trying to get to Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall a bit more often. Given that it’s down the street from me, I have no excuse. And there’s this whole Abstract Expressionist movement thing, which was covered in Art Hum with a perfunctory “Picasso blah blah blah then there were the Abstract Expressionists, and the final will be next week…”, much like World War Two is covered in high school American History classes.
Anyway, I saw the Rothko on the day it closed a couple of weeks ago. It was perhaps the first time I saw a line snake out of a museum, onto the sidewalk and around the corner. And it wasn’t even a free admissions evening. Weird. Rothko’s signature style consists of massive canvases with two or three large, solid rectangles on them, and helpful titles like “White Center”. The NGA apparently housed this exhibit before the Whitney, and they haven’t gotten around to taking down the pages.
This exhibit nicely works through his early paintings, when he drew, well, things. From there, he started experimenting with basic forms and colors. You can see some of this, as pictures of people became somewhat more boxy. As the exhibit progresses, the experimenting with simple shapes and colors becomes the main thing, and we have the large paintings with a couple of rectangles, done in a few main colors. These colors apparently varied depending on Rothko’s mood: during his perky years, they were predominantly orange, yellow and red. In the next room, for his depressed years, we get lots of black, purple and blue. The ones from his perky years were better in some way.
Big rectangles on fields of color isn’t an adequate description, and the above URL won’t present this work sufficiently. Low-res jpegs on web pages don’t really capture how luminious the colors look, as your eye moves from the big orange box to the big red box, across the yellow background. Rothko was actually able to make the colors jump out in some way in these transitions. And these paintings are huge, easily filling your field of vision. You see color, and that’s basically it.
MoMA’s web site has the following bit, which I haven’t looked at.
This is a larger exhibit than Rothko’s. Perhaps it’s because Pollack’s name is a bit bigger, or perhaps he simply had more work under his belt before dying in the 1950s. In any case, this exhibit follow the usual format for retrospectives, starting with his early, student work (apparently spent at the Art Student’s League on 57th Street, right near Planet Hollywood), when things looked like things, and progressed through the years as he developed his signature style, where paint is dripped and splattered and sprayed onto the canvas with a variety of tools, none of them brushes.
At the heart of the exibit are three “monumental” drip paintings, really huge works that would cover the floor of my living room. Here’s “Autumn Rhythms”, the one I liked the most.
It’s hard to see in the jpeg, but the small splotches of light blue work very well, adding a sort of — that word again — luminosity to the piece. The splatters of black paint glow a little, and so on. And standing in front of the really large drip paintings, you usually can feel some sort of pulse or rhythm — pattern is too strong a word — despite the apparent anarchy of random sprays of paint. Something progresses across the canvas, though it’s hard to see.
Criticism that my pet monkey Stan can chug out Pollacks for a few bananas a day are somewhat unfounded. Stan would have had a hard time replicating the technique, actually, since Pollack apparently spent a fair amount of time figuring out and planning how splatters of paint would appear on canvas. Treating the canvas with glue, for example, keeps paint from soaking in and makes the edges more distinct. The MoMA exhibit has a section devoted to this, where curators apparently spent time figuring out how Pollack got things to look the way they do.
Despite its niceties, I found the Pollack a little disappointing compared to the Rothko, probably because I had a harder time figuring out what Pollack was trying to do. This may have been the lack of gradual progression from student work to mature work, or that this was a different sort of abstraction. I’m not sure. The best exhibit I’ve seen which showed what someone was trying to accomplish was the one MoMA had on Piet Mondrian a few years ago, where paintings of, say, cows became rectangular abstractions of cow shapes, which became simply rectangles, and so on. There was a strong sense that you could see into Mondrian’s thought process. Less so with Rothko, and even less so with Pollack. From that point of view, all this is a little disappointing: I may be looking at it the wrong way, but getting into the thought process seems to be the main trick for modern art, and in that sense I haven’t figured out what the Abstract Expressionists are trying to do.
Anyway, MoMA’s basically free on Friday from about 4:30 to closing. It’s worth a walk through, and if nothing else, there are the other parts of MoMA that haven’t been taken down for this exhibit. Oh, on the 2nd floor, they apparently have a few rooms of other Abstract Expressionist work. I think this room should be called “the Pollack and Rothko and others that’s too crappy to be sucked into the other exhibits around town” retrospective. One nice section is something on the design of light fixtures, which actually is very cool. The coolest one, which I may have come close to buying if they had it on sale at the gift shop, was a hanging lamp, with the lightsource a foot or two above this wide plastic ring. The ring apparently has a hologram of an old-fashioned light bulb, so it looks like, well, a light bulb floating inside the ring. Much cooler than lava lamps.
Of course, there’s also the obligatory end-of-exhibit gift shop, selling the usual coffee table book and prints, as well as “Jackson Pollack Jazz”. I’m vaguely surprised there’s no “Jackson Pollack Jigsaw Puzzles”, which would probably give anyone coniptions.