The most celebrated artists are usually preceded by their auras. Before entering a room of Van Goghs, we anticipate the air of a soulful loner; with Picasso, we expect a nose-thumbing, adolescent genius. With Jackson Pollock, we expect an impression of fierce and fearless self-discovery—and more than for most artists, the evidence of global shifts: what more vivid example of ascendant America, and its forthright embrace of wide, wild spaces?
Is there still something to be learned about Pollock? By its nature, Washburn’s current selection of works on paper includes none of his iconic works—the large canvases which gave him elbow room to physically connect with his paint. Nevertheless, his temperament is much in evidence in the nearly 20 smaller works here, which concentrate on the 1940s and early ’50s, after the artist had shrugged off the influence of Thomas Hart Benton and began looking at Masson and Picasso.
Jackson Pollock
In person, Pollock was indeed something of a naïf, as prone to child-like affection for a puppy as to drunken fisticuffs with his peers. It’s the restless, brooding immediacy—not feats of craft or composition—that move us in his work. Lacking the purely physical drama of his large canvases, the smaller works here serve as psychic delvings, roiling with animal-like forms in scratchy marks and textures, often accompanied by undecipherable numbers and letters. I was struck by the knowingness of his borrowings, especially from Picasso, whose motifs of spike-tongued bulls and open-mouthed, distended heads appear again and again. To these, Pollock sometimes added his own abstracted designs inspired by American Indian and Inuit art. Filling up entire sheets, dozens of such descriptions in raw, impatient marks seem as much psychic working notes as independent works of art.
A few drawings have more climactic rhythms, as if intended from the start as self-contained images. Among these, an untitled drawing from c. 1946 on red paper muscularly pits a diagonal against ragged arcs and dotted waves; one senses the unfolding of an urgent, inchoate plan.
The more unusual works here include a tiny drawing from c. 1952-56 done on an unfolded matchbox, and what looks like a careful study, in rich, dark tones, of a stylized Inuit animal head (c. 1943). Particularly interesting is a small terracotta sculpture resembling a mass of grappling animals. Unclear in its specific forms, it contains a bristling, packed energy that seems pure Pollock: the eloquent description of the struggle to articulate.
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Through March 26, Washburn Gallery, 20 W. 57th St., 212-397-6780.
