Читать книгу Pollock - Donald Wigal - Страница 9

On 28 January, 1912, Paul Jackson Pollock was born on Watkins Ranch in Cody, Wyoming. The town is in the northwest area of the state, about fifty miles East of Yellowstone National Park. The state is widely known as ‘the cowboy state’ and was part of the legendary Wild West. When Jackson’s parents moved there, the town had about 500 residents[7].

Pollock’s earliest experiences were in the atmosphere of myths and romanticising of the Old West. The town of Jackson’s birth was founded only six years before the Pollock family moved there by Colonel William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody (1846–1917). He was, and probably still is, the state’s most famous historical figure. Dozens of places in the area bear his name. He was an internationally-known buffalo hunter and showman, a promoter – and even creator – of some of the most legendary images of the ‘Wild West’ culture of the United States. Cody needlessly slaughtered 6,570 buffalo. It was a time when sensitivity to animal rights and macro-views of ecology were generally not yet cultivated.

At the time of Jackson’s birth, Buffalo Bill was nearing the end of his life. In a unique way Pollock would carry on the spirit of some of Cody’s most exciting pioneering, rebellious and wild images, as well as myths about legendary American cowboys. Although Pollock spent only his first few months as an infant in Cody, he didn’t correct people who presumed he had lived in that truly Western town until he arrived in New York City. The Pollock-like character in Updike’s Pollock-inspired novel Seek my Face (2002) was, “…always telling people he had been a cowboy and it was a lie but his body looked it.”[8]

Willem de Kooning’s biographers state, “Pollock’s self-destruction had a kind of grandeur that many in the art world respected. Pollock seemed a purely American figure, an authentic visionary, cowboy, and maverick.”[9]