Читать книгу Pollock - Donald Wigal - Страница 15

A 1927 photo of fifteen-year-old Jackson taken by Lee Ewing is the only one showing him posing in Western garb. It contributes significantly to the myth of Pollock as a cowboy. But there are also photos showing he would occasionally wear formal attire and pose like a young European royal, with a jaunty walking cane in hand. In fact, the translator of a German biography referred to these quaint photos, commenting on the young man at the time, “…cultivates dandyish attire.” (123)

After filming his movie Pollock, director Ed Harris regretted the famous ‘cowboy’ photo wasn’t shown more clearly in the film. (45) The photo is seen only briefly, and off to the side of an early scene showing Pollock’s Eighth Street apartment in Greenwich Village, Manhattan.

Easter and the Totem, 1953. Oil on canvas, 208.6 × 147.3 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Flame, 1934–1938. Oil on canvas, mounted on fibreboard, 51.1 × 76.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

“I’m just more at ease in a big area than I am on some thing 2 × 2; I feel more at home in a big area.”[15]

Age 38

Perhaps because of America’s admiration for the pioneers of the country’s West and the mythology of the American cowboy, Pollock often seemed to be forgiven for his crude behaviour. Some observers might even say this tolerance extended to his reckless drunken driving, if not also to its ultimate consequences. Minutes before his death while driving drunk, a policeman who knew Pollock would unfortunately overlook his drunken state.

Like some of the rough-edged characters of Western fiction, Pollock would live out a boisterous and often crude Wild West spirit, especially in the bars of lower Manhattan. Meanwhile his brilliant art would intoxicate sophisticated viewers in the world’s most civilised museums[16]. In fact, the art world would be influenced forever by Pollock’s unique, important and indelible contribution. Even during his lifetime, Pollock had become the new benchmark to which the art world would refer, as they began to consider modern art as ‘before,’ ‘contemporary with,’ or ‘after’ Pollock.

Pollock’s influence is still notable fifty years later. In a review of the first showing of the early efforts of Italian painter Carla Accardi, in Manhattan in 2005, Roberta Smith of The New York Times notes the paintings of Accardi include impressive works from the mid-1950s. Her fields of scattered and overlapping circles and signs, rendered in white or yellow and black, “…suggest a controlled response to the work of Jackson Pollock.”[17]

Not all references back to Pollock reflect an understanding of what his method was about. During the 2004 U. S. presidential election campaign, Daniel Okrent, the public editor of The New York Times spoke of what he saw as poor management of the paper’s coverage of the campaign. He compared its chaos to a “…pattern adapted from Jackson Pollock.” The title of his article was How would Jackson Pollock Cover this Campaign?[18].