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Being poor in the fifties was not the ordeal it had been during the Depression. Artists scrambled from week to week, month to month, without deep fears of complete ruin, and now they can't recall precisely how they managed. Even memories of first sales are dim. Most of the hard facts about artists' incomes in the fifties float on the currents of Jackson Pollock's legend. According to Tony Smith, Pollock's art earned him about $ 2, 600 in 1950. One sold for $ 6, 000 in 1954; soon afterward, Blue Poles (1952) fetched $ 8, 000.
In the last year of his life, 1956, Pollock's work sold steadily. Within a season, de Kooning began to do nearly as well in the marketplace. In a painting such as Number One (1948) by Pollock there is only a pictorial field so homogeneous, overall and devoid both of recognizable objects and of abstract shapes that I want to call it optical, to distinguish it from the structured, essentially tactile pictorial field of previous modernist painting from Cubism to de Kooning and even Hans Hofmann. Pollock's field is optical because it addresses itself to eyesight alone. The materiality of his pigment is rendered sheerly visual, and the result is a new kind of space if it still makes sense to call it space in which conditions of seeing prevail rather than one in which objects exist, flat shapes are juxtaposed or physical events transpire. The outlined figure on the left of Number One, or the series of Pollock's hand prints which appear top right of the painting.
Pollock One, a drip painting more than seventeen feet wide, is a monumental feature of an itinerary that begins in a gallery devoted to Change. Next come leading figures of the School of Paris: Monet, Van Gogh and Gauguin, the Neo-Impressionists, Matisse and the Fauvists, Picasso and the Cubists, Mondrian, Mir. Byways lead to minor episodes and back to the high road, the great boulevard of Parisian modernism. One appears as the boulevard veers toward New York. At this turning, we are to understand Pollock's greatness as an adhesive joining Old World and New. This is an impressive claim.
Ever since America's discovery, its relations with Europe have generated friction, and it would be gratifying to believe that Pollock overcame the conflict -- in the realm of painting, anyway. If he did, his accomplishment is major, though there is something small about it, too. An elaboration of Cubist flatness is, after all, just a formal exercise, even if it does join the avant-garde painters of Paris and New York. The passion, the strange glory, of Pollock's best art must have some greater significance than that. Yet authoritative voices have been saying for nearly half a century that it doesn't -- rather, Greenberg and Barr and William Rubin, Barr's successor at the Modern, have argued that, in painting, there is no greater significance, no greater glory, than a major innovation in form.
Pollock's art worked on newcomers like a daydream of the abyss. After sinking into it for a while, they'd pull away and return to the solid realm of well-built compositions. Only the veteran Willem de Kooning made a thoroughly conscious effort to redesign Pollock's intimations of infinity. The result was a canvas called Excavation (1950).
The structure of Excavation looks elastic. Angles are springy; lines stretch and become curves that feel to the eye like muscles flexed or voluptuously relaxing. Certain slits in the painting's fleshy surface are evidently mouths; others may be female genitalia. This is a big painting, over eight feet wide. Across its surface, allusions to the body proliferate and turn topographical; supple flesh becomes fluid, like watery clay, and spreads in currents churned by remnants of anatomy. De Kooning's challenge to Pollock was unmistakable.
He, too, could make a field painting. Unlike Pollock, he felt no need to abandon traditional technique. Excavation flaunts the virtuosity of the maker's hand; and never, not even in this hectic, slippery image, did de Kooning entirely dismantle the scaffolding of composition. With little complaint, the roiling forms of Excavation allow themselves to be contained by the edges of the canvas.
You could say that Excavation is nothing like a drip painting and therefore no challenge to Pollock. That is not what the downtown painters concluded in the fifties. They saw in this canvas proof that aesthetic options need not exclude one another; in art, you can have it both ways. You can undermine pictorial architecture and persuade it to stand.
You can evoke the infinite without abandoning proper composition. You can make a painting that looks, in its moment, as audaciously new as Excavation and give it roots deep in European tradition.
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Research essay sample on Feet Wide Number One
