2021-01-18
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Jackson Pollock: inside the painting
'I'm an artist, I see it that way! Jackson Pollock, a young American avant-garde artist, exclaimed and began to spray paint in large quantities on the canvas lying on the floor. He jumped, crawled, and hopped around his creation, delighting in the game (was it random?) colors, shapes and lines, a combination of incongruous. For Pollock, the process of creating the canvas itself was important, the very fact of liberation from conventional cliches and from mind control...
This is how the famous American abstract artist was seen and captured by photographer and journalist Hans Namuth, who came to him for an interview. The leader of abstract expressionism, who was gaining popularity among the intelligentsia of the United States in the 40s of the last century, spoke about his work specifically and directly.
Easel and palette used by the artists of the classical school was not for him. He preferred to be INSIDE the painting, helping the painting to come out. Pollock often used paint mixed with sand or broken glass (a technique of sand painting - ika-borrowed from the Navajo Indians), which was poured and sprayed on the canvas in large quantities...
It is in this technique (dripping or drip painting), the authorship of which is attributed to Pollock himself, that his most famous and most expensive paintings are made. And the most unique in this respect is the canvas with the 'original' simple name - 'No. 17A'.
It is one of the most expensive paintings in the world. Still, because in 2016, its value went through the roof to $ 200 million! And this astronomical sum was laid out by the American billionaire Kenneth Griffin, whose private collection can not be called modest.
For those whose artistic taste is brought up on the canons of classical painting, it is difficult to accept and call a 'picture' a work that is a sheet of fiberboard, on which some absurd blots are covered with oil paints. This is not Rembrandt and not da Vinci, who for weeks prescribed a single fragment, following the laws of perspective and catching all the fluctuations of chiaroscuro.
'Rrrraz-and you're done!'- this is the motto of most of Pollock's works, written by him in some unthinkable impulses. He himself said that he felt the picture before starting work on it. And that his every movement and every spray was devoted to a single purpose-to create on the canvas what Pollock saw inside himself. He used everything from the strength of his own muscles to Earth's gravity to do it.
The basis for the formation of their own style was the already existing experience of muralist and surrealist artists who depict abstract reality with their own vision of reality. Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera (husband of the famous Mexican artist Frida Kahlo), and, of course, Pablo Picasso-it was they who led the novice abstract artist from the still traceable figurativeness in the works (for example, 'The Wolf', where you can really guess the outlines of a certain mammal)
until there is no such thing. Like, for example, his 'Gothic', written in 1943. This is one of the first paintings by Pollock, which was noticed and bought by the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
As Pollock improves his method, he becomes bolder and more confident with his materials. He was also emboldened by a passing fascination with theosophy, shamanic practices and psychoanalysis, as well as an addiction to alcohol. The latter played a fatal joke with the artist - in a state of strong alcoholic intoxication, Jackson Pollock got behind the wheel on August 11, 1956 and crashed, taking with him the life of a young passenger...
His works are shocking, exciting, or deeply repulsive. But no one is left indifferent. America saw and appreciated in Pollock's work its main value-freedom.
Therefore, in the Cold War, he became one of the symbols of the American way of life, loudly and vividly representing the United States abroad.
Therefore, the sponsor of his posthumous exhibition was not anyone, but the CIA itself.
Therefore, in the countries of the socialist camp in the works of Pollock did not see any artistic value, calling them 'jokes'.
Art is a deeply subjective thing. Someone, having got acquainted with his flowing technique, will laugh for a long time, seeing how zalikhvatsky, with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and 'slightly tipsy' Pollock splashes paint on the canvas. And someone will pay $ 200 million for such a picture... Isn't that the secret of genius?
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