Jackson Pollock by O’Hara Frank;

Author:O’Hara, Frank;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Golden Springs Publishing
Published: 2015-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

Scale, Size And Violence

Pollock has done paintings of enormous size, as have most of the recent abstract painters in America. In Europe there seems to be a general belief that if a painting is 7x10’ or over, it naturally must have been painted by an American. And the size of the painterly projection is a significant characteristic of Action Painting or Abstract Expressionism.

As the critic Clement Greenberg pointed out almost a decade ago, the New York School was early involved in the conception of the “wall” as opposed to that of the “easel.” This may have come from the participation of so many of these artists in the Federal Arts Project which, in basic accord with the aims, if not the ideology, expressed in Rivera’s previously quoted remark, had undertaken a large program of murals for public buildings. The theory behind this was, I imagine, less spiritual than that of Rivera: if the taxpayer is paying for the art it should be available to the taxpayer, physically at the very least. Clement Greenberg has noted that Pollock worked as an easel painter on the Federal Arts Project, but many other painters, among them Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, worked on the mural projects, and undoubtedly this experience had an effect on the pictorial ambitions of the New York School. Certainly the great 9x17’ paintings of Pollock done in 1950 have the effect of murals, whether installed in a private or public collection.

Scale, that mysterious and ambiguous quality in art which elsewhere is a simple designation, has a particular significance in Pollock’s work, but it has nothing to do with perspectival relationships in the traditional sense or with the relationship of the size of the object painted to the size of the object in reality. It has to do, rather, with the emotional effect of the painting upon the spectator. His explorations of this quality lead to the strange grandeur of that modestly sized, 2½ x 2’ painting, Shimmering Substance, whose dispersed strokes of impasto create a majestic, passionate celebration of matter, purely by their relation to the plane and format of the picture’s surface. Another use of scale is seen in Easter and the Totem (plate 82), whose seven feet of thinly-painted, large-scale arabesques have the intimacy and lyricism of a watercolor. When we approach the all-over, “drip” paintings of 1948-50, however, a different aspect of scale is apparent.

It is, of course, Pollock’s passion as an artist that kept his works from ever being decorative, but this passion was expressed through scale as one of his important means. In the past, an artist by means of scale could create a vast panorama on a few feet of canvas or wall, relating this scale both to the visual reality of known images (the size of a man’s body) and to the setting (the building it would enhance). Pollock, choosing to use no images with real visual equivalents and having no building in mind, struck upon a use of scale which was to have a revolutionary effect on contemporary painting and sculpture.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.