Читать книгу Pollock - Donald Wigal - Страница 37

Once Krasner settled the initial problems with Pollock’s estate, she eagerly returned to her own career. She prepared the barn-studio to be her own studio. At that point in his oral chronology, Potter adds the rather unexpected sentence: “She had the artist Athos Zacharias scrape down and paint the floor of Jackson’s studio.”[81] Zacharias was Krasner’s assistant at the time.

The statement is surprising because all who visit or even know about the studio recall the reverence given to the paint-splattered floor, considered to be just as Pollock left it. It is even said to show footprints associated with the painter(s) who created Blue Poles.

Zacharias recalls,

When I became L.K’s assistant, at a meeting that Alfonso Ossorio arranged, the studio floor was covered with 23 square pieces of hard one quarter inch thick material… On the surface of this material there were leavings of Jackson’s paintings that were very striking. After perhaps a few months, Lee asked me to ‘roll out’ (paint over) the floor with grey flooring paint. My heart sank because of the symbolic significance of her request. At the time I was not aware that on the underside of (each of) the panels there was silk screened (the image of) a baseball diamond. These were board-games that Jackson had obtained from one of his brothers, who was in the board-game business. After Lee died, the boards were pulled up and leavings of Jackson’s paintings appeared again on the original floor board[82].

An expert on baseball board-games, Dr. Mark Cooper, has identified the squares as not wood, but a firm kind of pressboard. They were excess inventory from the 1948 game called Autograph Baseball Game, made by the F. J. Raff Company. Zacharias remembers Pollock painted on some of these floorboards from the original barn. He remembers one such work was hung in the kitchen dining area where he and Krasner would eat.

A footprint on the floorboard in the studio today is said to have been made by Pollock after he, and apparently others, walked across his famous 1952 painting Blue Poles (13).

Today those who visit Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center can see supplies once used by Pollock and/or Krasner[83]. They can also see very little splattering of paint on the immaculate shelves. The neat display includes “powdered pigments from the WPA paint workshop, strips of broken colored glass used by Pollock in collage pieces and by Krasner in glass Mosaics, and a skull stolen by Pollock from a prop cabinet at the Art Students League.” (13) The orderly display is similar to that of other memorialised studios of artists, including those of Benton and de Kooning. However, the spotless coffee cans and tubes of paint are in contrast to the hallowed studio floor, where visitors can see multi-coloured paints splattered by Pollock himself. The hallowed area is venerated; visitors wear slippers to protect the area if they want to walk on it.

Untitled, 1946. Gouache on paper, 56.5 × 82.6 cm,Thyssen – Bornemisza Collection, Lugano.

Circumcision, 1946. Oil on canvas, 142.3 × 168 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York).