Text: Donald Wigal. Layout: Baseline Co Ltd A Nguyen Hue Fiditourist 3 rd Floor, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City - Vietnam

Transcription

1 POLLOCK

2 Text: Donald Wigal Layout: Baseline Co Ltd A Nguyen Hue Fiditourist 3 rd Floor, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City - Vietnam Sirrocco, London, UK (English version) Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA Pollock Estate/ Artists Rights Society, New York, USA ISBN: All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

3 Jackson Pollock

4 4

5 Fifty years ago the artist Jackson Pollock died, but he lives on in his biographies and especially in his work. However, much of his genius was expressed by how he veiled the visible while he unveiled the invisible. It may be that by veiling himself and his art as he so uniquely did, Pollock paradoxically revealed much of his interior life, thereby making it possible to see and better understand therein something of his spiritual journey if not also something of the universal human journey. Many of the events in Pollock s life and much of his radically new art proved to be mystically profane and ugly, yet awesome. At times the artist, like his art, appears to be innocent, graceful and sensitive. At the same time, his life and art might seem to be crude, macho and abrasive. The biographer Andrea Gabor considers him to be brilliant and naïve, gentle and aggressive, vulnerable and destructive. She observes, Few artists... seemed to personify the masculine excesses of the era more completely than Jackson Pollock, who came to represent an archetype of unbridled artistic vitality. The cycles of Pollock s life and art overlap at times, sometimes appearing to have the ambivalent traits of a child-man, angel-beast, and creator-destroyer. Many observers of his work are both kept at a distance by what is ugly and yet pulled into what is beautiful in the realities of the artist s rugged presence and his brilliant achievements. At the same time, his private, self-destructive compulsions and isolation ironically drove him to his highly public end fifty years ago. The myth of the artist cowboy On 28 January, 1912, Paul Jackson Pollock was born on Watkins Ranch in Cody, Wyoming. In a unique way Pollock would carry on the spirit of some of Cody s most exciting pioneering, rebellious and wild images, as well as myths about legendary American cowboys. Although Pollock spent only his first few months as an infant in Cody, he didn t correct people who presumed he lived in that truly Western town until he arrived in New York City. Willem de Kooning s biographers state, Pollock s self-destruction had a kind of grandeur that many in the art world respected. Pollock seemed a purely American figure, an authentic visionary, cowboy, and maverick. McCoy was the birth name of Jackson s father, LeRoy. After the death of LeRoy s parents in 1897, he was taken care of by a family named Pollock. Ten days before his twentyfirst birthday, LeRoy was adopted by the Pollocks. He then took on the name Pollock. Later he asked a lawyer to have his name changed back to McCoy, but doing so was too expensive. Jackson was the youngest of five boys in the family of LeRoy McClure Pollock ( ) and Stella May ( ). His brothers were Charles Cecil ( ), Marvin Jay ( ), Frank Leslie ( ), and Sanford Sande LeRoy ( ). 1. Untitled (Self-portrait), Oil on gesso on canvas mounted on fibreboard, 18.4 x 13.3 cm, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York. 5

6 6 2. T.P. s Boat in Menemsha Pond, c Oil on metal, 11.7 x 16.2 cm, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain.

7 3. Going West, Oil on gesso on fibreboard, 38.3 x 52.7 cm, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. 7

8 8

9 4. Untitled (Woman), c Oil on fibreboard, 35.8 x 26.6 cm, Nagashima Museum, Kagoshima City, Japan. 5. Untitled (Naked Man with a Knife), c Oil on canvas, 127 x 91.4 cm, Tate Gallery, London. 9