Читать книгу Pollock - Donald Wigal - Страница 29

“I’ve got a long way to go yet toward my development – much that needs working on – doing everything with a definite purpose. Without purpose with each move then chaos.”[43]

Age 20

To help readers picture the young, rebellious Jackson, biographers have suggested thinking of characters played in movies starring James Dean, or characters played by Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Steve McQueen, or Martin Sheen when they were young. Many soap operas, for example, include a character that is an angry young man archetype. The myth of the cowboy-artist Pollock probably satisfied a similar popular need in his day.

Of course, those actors were generations after Pollock. Moreover, the actors were fortunately less rebellious in their real lives than in the troubled lives of the characters they played. Pollock was, in reality, truly at least as moody and non-conformist as those fictional characters. However, comparisons at the time, especially to James Dean, who also died in a fatal car crash, are inevitable. Dean’s last movie was Giant, the giant of motion pictures released in 1956, the year of Pollock’s fatal crash. Film critic Leslie Halliwell said Dean’s death set off “astonishing world-wide outbursts of emotional necrophilia.”[44] A retrospective bio-pic, The James Dean Story, was compiled in 1957, the same year as Pollock’s retrospective at MoMA.

That atmosphere and those comparisons, along with the unique but widely-circulated photo of Pollock in Western gear, help to keep the myth alive to this day. Jackson’s brother, Charles, had a very similar photo in the Western work gear, but he didn’t perpetuate into adulthood a corresponding cocky attitude, as did Jackson. It might be that Pollock’s inner child was always that of a rebellious and independent cowboy.