The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe

Author:Tom Wolfe [Wolfe, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-312-42758-0
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1975-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

Barnett Newman

In any event, if Greenberg was right about Pollock’s status in the world of art—and Pollock wasn’t arguing—then he must also be right about the theories. So Pollock started pushing his work in the direction the theories went. Onward! Flatter! More fuliginous! More “over-all evenness”! But fewer gaping holes! (Greenberg thought Pollock sometimes left “gaping holes” in the otherwise “integrated plane.”) Greenberg took to going by Pollock’s studio and giving on-the-spot critiques.

Soon Pollock was having a generally hard time figuring out where the boundary was between Himself—old Jack—and his Reputation or whether there was any. Pollock was the classic case of the artist hopelessly stuck between the Boho Dance and the Consummation. Pollock had internalized the usual antibourgeois bohemian values in huge gulps during the days of the Depression, when he was a boho on the dole and doing odd jobs such as hand-painting neckties (during that short-lived men’s fashion). The Consummation came so fast—in that one year, 1943—Pollock never could manage the double-tracking. He got forever stuck halfway. Here was the archetypical Pollock gesture: one night he arrives drunk at Peggy Guggenheim’s house during a party for a lot of swell people. So he takes off his clothes in another room and comes walking into the living room stark naked and urinates in the fireplace. On the other hand, neither that night nor thereafter did he give up coming to Peggy Guggenheim’s house, where all those swell people were. He would insist on going to the old Stork Club or to 21 without a necktie to prove he could get in anyway thanks to “my reputation”—and if he did, he would make sure he got drunk enough and rude enough to get thrown out. They had to accept him Uptown, but he couldn’t stand liking it.

Despite his huge reputation, his work did not sell well, and he barely scraped by financially—which satisfied his boho soul on the one hand but also made him scream (stuck, as he was, in the doorway): If I’m so terrific, why ain’t I rich? And this gets down to the problems that COLLECTORS were beginning to have with Abstract Expressionism and the abstract styles that followed, such as the Washington School. Most of early Modernism, and particularly Cubism, was only partly abstract. The creatures in Matisse’s Joie de Vivre, which seemed so outrageously abstract in 1905, may not have been nice concupiscent little lamb chops such as were available in Max Klinger’s The Judgment of Paris, but they were nude women all the same. For many COLLECTORS it was enough to know the general theory and the fact that here were nudes done in “the new [Fauvist, Cubist, Expressionist, Surrealist, or whatever] way.” But with Abstract Expressionism and what came after it, they had to have … the Word. There were no two ways about it. There was no use whatsoever in looking at a picture without knowing about Flatness and associated theorems.

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