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New Interest in Jackson Pollock

© Gretchen Wms. Jurek

In looking around on the Internet for the artist and art movement I decided to write on this month, I came across all kinds of recently updated information. I hadn't heard of the movie 'Pollock' until it was brought up recently on a news program I watch. Most interesting to me was not the subject matter, nor the film clips they showed, but, rather, the way the movie came about. The main actor, Ed Harris, determined that the story should be filmed, and that he would be the main actor. This was apparently due to the fact that his father-in-law had given him the biography on Jackson Pollock, primarily, he said, because Harris looks quite a bit like the picture of Pollock on the cover. When Harris read the book, he became more and more interested, even haunted, by Pollock's interesting and miserable life story. He was also the film's director, and cast his wife as Peggy Guggenheim, a major monetary influence in Pollock's career.

http://filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/...

http://www.gvny.com/movies/pollock/

I was in high school during the few years that remained in Pollock's life, and had no use for him or his artwork. I read about him in the national media and felt really sorry for his wife, Lee Krasner. Like most women of that time, she had basically quit her own career as an artist to live her life at Pollock's whim, and his alcoholic behavior was well-known, even in those secretive times. To me, it sounded wretched. The relationship between them helped me to come to the conscious decision I made in college not to get involved romantically with an artist. Additionally, it helped me to determine that I did not want to go to a university where the mainstay in the art department was abstractionism or abstract-expressionism. Other than these reactions, I had little interest in the man. Even as the minor-league beatnik I became.

Until now.

Now, I can look back over that explosive movement in the US art scene, and see how important it was, and how important Pollock was in it. It was East Coast, I was West Coast, but the effects were like a slow-moving tsunami. It overwhelmed the West Coast too. When I discovered, only in the past couple of weeks, why I always felt a sense of rhythmic beats in Pollock's work, I was amazed to find out that he had studied very seriously with Thomas Hart Benton. Benton's visual signature is a rhythmic swirling of the main elements in his paintings. An open examination of Pollock's later paintings, even the so-called "Jack the Dripper" work done when all semblance of figurative imagery was gone shows this incessant beat, beat, beat. I wondered why I could almost always tell a painting as a Pollock, and that is why. His work was interesting, but I was too busy to take on a dissection of that particular art movement while I was in school. Now I am interested. Now I want to find out more.

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