The Halfway State:
Curator Susan Davidson on the
Jackson Pollock exhibition "No Limits, Just Edges"
Portrait of the artist, 1951 Photo: Arnold Newman
©Arnold Newman/ Liaison Agency/ Getty Images
When asked what he’d save if his house caught on fire,
Jackson Pollock answered: "the fire". In No Limits, Just Edges
, an exhibition opening at the
Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin and the
Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Pollock’s work reveals the success
of what he called "a halfway state". So it follows that in 1947, when
Jackson Pollock applied for and received a
Guggenheim Fellowship, that the artist planned to create pictures that
"would constitute a halfway state, an attempt to point out the direction
of the future, without arriving there completely".
Pollock’s
work precariously, yet purposefully, hung in the balance between painting
and drawing; each contained a unique speed and depth often misinterpreted
as "chaos". Pollock, however, knew perfectly well what he was going for.
His wife, Lee Krasner
, saw it as "some new category". His drawings, though frequently referring to
Cezanne’s telltale lines, delivered new information. While the 1950
issue of TIME magazine saw this
advance as a state of chaos and confused Pollock’s emotional intensity for
emotional frenzy, the artist had quite another take on his work,
declaring: "No chaos, damn it."
|
Susan Davidson, Curator, Guggenheim
Museum
Courtesy: Cheryl
Kaplan 2004
©Cheryl Kaplan. All rights reserved.
|
Cheryl Kaplan met with Susan Davidson, art
curator at
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, to talk with her about No
Limits, Just Edges, the show she organized for Deutsche Guggenheim in
Berlin. The exhibition and its comprehensive catalogue constitute a
complete retrospective of Pollock’s drawings.
Cheryl
Kaplan: Jackson Pollock famously said: "I approach painting as one
approaches drawing: direct. I don’t work from drawings, I don’t make
sketches into a final painting." Why was eliminating drawing as a
preparatory step to painting so important to Pollock’s work? Was it
radical?
Susan Davidson: He eliminated drawing in the
traditional aspect of drawing being a preparatory mode for painting.
Pollock drew as he painted. That’s what was radical about it. No one had
actually fused those
19th-century ideals in the way Pollock had.
Though Cezanne had
actually begun to think about drawing in that way.
|
Jackson Pollock, Untiteld 1939-42
The Whitney Museum of American Art
©Pollock-Krasner Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
But the times didn’t allow him to do it.
Cezanne’s pictures have a level of drawing underneath which
Pollock’s don’t.
When does the show of drawings at
the Deutsche
Guggenheim start?
It’s a full retrospective, beginning with
a beautiful landscape drawing I’d call juvenilia from the early 30s, just
as he’s coming to New York and working with
Thomas Hart Benton. It has a dogmatic
regionalism and
realism embedded into him by Benton. Until then, his drawing wasn’t very
refined. It’s one of the more refined and realistic drawings.
Jackson Pollock, Harbor and Lighthouse, 1934-38
Collection Beatrice Cunmmings Mayer, Chicago
©Pollock-Krasner Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
Was it critical for Pollock to stop using drawing as a preparatory gesture?
I’m not sure it was a conscious effort. The work is so expressive and
immediate.
Was this decision an evolution?
Yes, in
the sense that he skipped a step.
Pollock is really framed
between Cezanne and Benton.
The
surrealist moment really contributed to Pollock’s work, training him to be
"automatic". Though I’m not sure Pollock wasn’t anymore steeped
in it than
Motherwell or others hanging around with him at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery.
Jackson Pollock , Untitled, c.1946
Peggy Guggenheim Collection , Venice
(Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, New York)
©Pollock-Krasner Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
[1]
[2]
[3]
|
