Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock's Black Paintings
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Differentiation, not reduction, is the aim of these articles. It was my hope to propose internal differences and distinctions within the general grouping of artists called Abstract Expressionist. In one case the use of biomorphic form is taken as the stylistic common denominator of a subgroup of Abstract Expressionists at a certain moment of history. In the case of Gottlieb my intention was to isolate one period of his work that I both admire on its own merits and consider representative of much New York art of the forties in its evocation of myth. In "The American Sublime" I have taken another subgroup within Abstract Expressionism, one I feel to be of singular importance, and have attempted to define a connection between its intentions and the traditional aesthetic of the sublime. An extension of this line of thought, of course, runs through the piece on Newman's Stations of the Cross.
Jackson Pollock's Black Paintings
Jackson Pollock's first black painting seems to be 32, 1950. It is one of a group of classical paintings done that year. The others are 1 (known as Lavender Mist), 28, 30 (known as Autumn Rhythm), 31 (known as One), and a mural in William Rubin's collection. In these works the turbulence of the first drip-paintings is subdued to a coiling equilibrium and the long, narrow formats of the brighter early drips is solidified into large but proportionately traditional rectangles. The disciplined but infinitely varied morphology of 32 established an all-over suspended surface of flowing and branching forms. During the next two years Pollock pursued the use of black with, it seems to me, both a sense of being carried along by the momentum of inventiveness and, at the same time, by an emerging critical spirit which entirely changed the meaning of the later works.
These paintings are frequently described as black and white but this is wrong. In the 1940s there were several artists of Pollock's generation who used black and white, notably de Kooning with his paintings in enamel of 1946-48, Motherwell with his At Five in the Afternoon, 1949, the sketch which got escalated into the Elegies for the Spanish Republic, and Franz Kline who by 1949 was doing the drawings on which his 1950 black-and-white paintings are based. De Kooning was first, but his works were fairly small; Kline and Motherwell were later, but their paintings were larger. Common to all of them, however, is the fact that they used black and white (or, maybe, black and ochre), but never black singly in paintings. Pollock at the time was alone in making one- color black paintings; this is a crucial difference and one that is lost when his work is called "black and white." Only Barnett Newman, in paintings of 1958 and later, seems to have understood the difference between black-and-white paintings and black paintings on raw canvas.
The importance of this distinction can be seen by considering the way in which the black paintings of Pollock were executed. Pollock poured black Duco, thinned with turpentine, onto raw canvas, not onto a dead- white canvas. The tools were either sticks or old brushes hardened solid or, according to Lee Krasner Pollock, basting syringes. The paint, though subject to exceptional control, was not applied by touch; the paint impressions that we see were formed by the fall and flow of liquid, in the grip of gravity, onto a surface that was not hard and firm, like a primed canvas, but soft and receptive as sized but unprimed duck. Thus the black, even when applied in a continuous stream, does not produce a strongly directional visual reading. It burrs at the edges as it leaks out into the canvas. The effect is somewhat like photographic enlargements of an etched line, in which the irregularities of the edges turn the contours into sensually fraying thresholds. The black line tends to dilate as a mark rather than to converge upon enclosed areas. Thus what looks like drawing is, in fact, a restrained but pervasive way of painting; the black paintings are concerned with the fusion of color and surface, of paint and field.
This effect has been noticed in the more abstract black paintings, such as 26, 1951, where the painting is clearly seen to expand laterally into the untouched field of the canvas. It has been harder to recognize this property in many of the other paintings of 1951 owing to the presence of figurative elements. Indeed the iconography of heads, lovers, warriors, has a neoclassic abundance, but, also, a neoclassic inconsequentialness which dissolves the reality of rape or combat. According to Michael Fried, "by 1951 Pollock returned to traditional drawing with a vengeance." 1. He allows that Pollock even here, is less "tactile" than de Kooning, but concludes that Pollock is dealing himself out of the mainstream of (Greenbergian) "modernism." Fried's point is that in the preceding drip paintings, line "is no longer contour, no longer the edge of anything." However, a close look at the black paintings shows why Fried is wrong: as a rule, Pollock's iconography is not conveyed by volume-inducing lines. The lines not only have a non-directional property, as they stain out onto the canvas, but the sign-system in use is not one based on the perception of solids and their translation into a two- dimensional system.
The functions of drawing are not restricted to Renaissance-type iconicity of flat signs and volumetric originals. Calligraphy is also a form of drawing, a sign-system with non-solid but referential elements. It should be remembered that the iconography of figures that Pollock used is not an invention of his own, though it seems to have a great source of release and entertainment to him, but consists of clichés. It is an amalgam of Freud and Jung, mythology and Surrealism. He is painting, therefore, absolutely conventional figures, erotic or aggressive or apparitional, so that their delineation could be calligraphic without any sense of losing their spatial existence. Their spatial existence is ideographic not volumetric, so that Fried's notion of a return to contour and edge (implying sculptural solidity) is irrelevant. As signs, as clichés, and as marks, Pollock's black paintings oppose their three-dimensional potential as images.
To see the character of the 1951 period more clearly we might compare two paintings of heads, one from this year and one from 1952 when Pollock's way of using black had changed substantially. The early painting, 10, has a folkloric reputation as a "self-portrait by Jackson," but there seems to be no more reason to think so than in the case of Portrait and a Dream, 1953, the head in which has been described by the artist's widow as "probably a self-portrait." What is noticeable about this image is precisely its lack of subjective echoes; it is clearly a head, but the head seems to arrive without especial drama through the accretion of paint marks. That is to say, the cluster of marks produces an image, not so much as a gesture of self-expression but as a proof of the naturalness of image-making. We project configurations into random objects without difficulty and Pollock seems to be producing his image in a visualisation of this projective process. A head can be made out of anything and here the means is an island of paint marks. Any oval, with some internal emphasis, will turn into a head; this is a kind of primal image-making that Dubuffet, for example, was also interested in. The island-form, however, is not one that we read in terms of solids and voids, projections and recessions, but in terms of flow and of puddling, that is to say, non-volumetrically.
This holds true, too, for most of the paintings of 1951. Consider the four paintings visible in an installation shot of the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951 when the black paintings were shown. One of the paintings, is open and fluent, but the other three are dense and impacted with neoclassic (and Mexican mural) iconographic devices. However, even when the forms overlap, as in 22, the fact that a single matt black is the only substance used reasserts the basically flat structure of the painting. The semi-symmetrical form of 18 is also a part of that search for a primal iconography, a condensed sign-language. The brute fact of symmetry evoked by flowering forms such as these inevitably evokes organism recognition patterns in the viewer. That Pollock was concerned with art as potent signs is proved by earlier drawings in which he quoted rudimentary human figures from rock and cave paintings. Here in the black paintings this interest culminates in a deeply human play with conventions. It is important not to treat the black paintings as if they were really abstract, but at the same time we must try and define the particular use of signs and conventions which underlies his iconography. Its overtly Renaissance look is a screen. It is true, as everybody has pointed out, that the figures are revivals of his earlier pre-drip paintings, but given, now, a far more complex significative function.
If we compare 10 with 7, 1952, various differences become immediately apparent. For one thing the sustained fusion of black with the canvas is constantly disturbed. Areas of the painting have been done by hand, thus interrupting the disembodied effect of thin poured paint with physical pressure points, where the brush hit the canvas (which is spattered with studio debris). Also the canvas has been painted on at least two ways up, and the phases of work are left visible as a dichotomy rather than as options. All this introduces, in a way that is unknown in heads of the preceding years (24, 1951, is another example), planes that have the abrupt effect of ridges within the head. There is no question here of basic head-or-body schemata emerging from clusters of marks; this head is being painted as a solid body in space. There is no intrinsic objection to this kind of drawing, obviously, but it is true that the kind of drawing Fried located in the work of 1951 can be found in some works of 1952. It matters where the division is made: I see the originality of the drip paintings, 1947-50, as extended unexpectedly, brilliantly, and successfully by Pollock through the first year of the black paintings, whereas Fried makes a 1950 cut-off point which I regard as brutally premature.
There is no doubt that the later work of Pollock does not support the long runs of sustained energy and internal development that characterize his mature work. The later work is strained and discontinuous by comparison, which is not to write it off. 7 is typical, in its mingling, not to say grinding together, of pouring and pressure methods of applying paint, of various other later black paintings. Some of the results have high intensity, as in this image, with its sense of expressionist anguish, like a battered hellenistic head. To look back from this tattered image to 10 of the previous year is to move back into a totally coherent style of painting which is fully compatible with the drip paintings of the four preceding years.
There is some reason to indicate the exhibiting history of Pollock's black paintings. They were unveiled at Betty Parsons in 1951 and in the following year some black paintings of 1952 were shown at Janis. In 1955 Janis showed Echo, 1951, and in 1958 four 1950-52 paintings belonging to the Pollock Estate. The estate went to Marlborough Fine Art (via David Gibbs) and, between 1961-64, Marlborough toured the estate, including several important black paintings, in Europe and New York. In 1963 Ben Heller could write: "As yet the world has not fully appreciated these canvases," 2. although by then the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, had acquired the biggest of all the black pictures, 32, 1950.
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