THE DANCING MASTER

JACKSON POLLOCK, LAVENDER MIST: NUMBER 1, 1950, 1950

(National Gallery of Art, Washington)

"Is this a painting?" Jackson Pollock asked his wife, artist Lee Krasner, as they stood in his small Long Island studio and looked at the work that now hangs in the Washington National Gallery under the title Lavender Mist. Decades later, recounting the moment to an interviewer, Krasner would say, "Can you imagine? Not ‘Is it a good painting,’ but ‘Is it a painting?’"¹ Pollock asked his question in the autumn of 1950, when the strain of performing for the camera of Hans Namuth, who was shooting a documentary about Pollock’s techniques, had aggravated the painter’s anxieties about his own ‘phoniness,’ his authenticity (or lack of said) as an artist. These insecurities eventually erupted into volcanic violence when Pollock overturned a fully-laden dinner table while childishly taunting Namuth with a chant of "I’m not a phony, you’re a phony...I’m not a phony...you’re a phony."² It was yet another in the long series of pathetic low points that would become the Pollock legend.

Is this a painting?

The question is interesting–and valid–because it reflects more than just the artist’s colossal insecurity. In Lavender Mist and some other works from the period 1948-50, Pollock travels farther into his own form of abstraction than any painter had gone before. Here there are no hard Cubist lines, no Mondrian-style geometries, no Hans Hofmann push-pull colors, no biomorphic figures à la Miro or Gorky. Pollock’s work is truly original, and the truly original is completely unknown. There are no roadmaps to unexplored territory, no well-traveled paths, just an open space as empty as unpainted canvas. Like a good Modernist, Pollock is ‘making it new’ and feeling the terror of newness. Where am I? What am I doing? Why am I doing this? What is this? Is this a painting? Even while Pollock was in the process of redefining the word ‘painting’ both as a verb and a noun, he was not immune to the blindness that afflicts most people when confronted with the new. The history of the last two hundred years of artistic innovation can be written as the story of this blindness, from the English critics who ridiculed Turner’s late light- and paint-drenched landscapes as "pictures of nothing, and very like" to the Salon-goers who mocked Manet’s Olympia and (a generation later) Cezanne’s groundbreaking late works. Genuine painterly innovation has always been difficult to see. How, after all, are we to recognize something we’ve never seen before? To understand Pollock’s question, we must put ourselves in his paint-splattered shoes. We must go back to 1950, before his paintings were canonized and commodified, before they became icons of twentieth-century art, as instantly recognizable as a Modigliani nude. We must see them as they were and try to recapture some of the shock of Pollock’s new.

First of all, don’t think about the title. It’s worse than meaningless–it’s horrid. ‘Lavender Mist’ sounds like a Madison Avenue ad man’s name for ‘a seductive new fragrance from Estée Lauder.’ There is certainly lavender in the painting, great broken swaths of it snaking across the canvas, but no mist. Even the fact that the title was suggested by powerful art critic and early Pollock supporter Clement Greenberg doesn’t make it important. The artist often allowed friends to name his abstractions, and for a while he avoided titles altogether by numbering his paintings like musical compositions. Both facts suggest how little the titles really mean. Nonetheless, people will continue to look at this painting and see misty lavender, and tour guides will continue to point out said lavender, just as tour guides before Pollock’s huge Autumn Rhythm at the Met say, "You can see the rhythm, can’t you?" while visitors nod obediently.

It’s better, in this and every case, simply to look at the painting and think about what we see. My first impression as I walk across the gallery to Lavender Mist is of overflowing energy. The dam has burst and the rivers are running wild. "Action painting," the term popularized by critic Harold Rosenberg (who was, incidentally, no fan of Pollock or his paintings), has no better exemplar. Here is a painting in constant motion, giving the eye no place to rest. Top to bottom, edge to edge, all 10 by 7 feet of the canvas are in play, filled with a nearly impenetrable web of poured, thrown and splattered paint. Everything is in flux, caught in the act of becoming. Even the thinly painted areas at the borders give no refuge to our gaze; the eye jumps from dot to dot of flicked black, blue and white paint, settles on a blob of black flattened against the canvas, and then follows the string of pigment that extends from it, taking us back into the web, back into the thick of the action.

The mind wants to see order in this chaos and searches for recognizable forms. There are several short white diagonals that look like arrows (although some critics think they resemble spermatozoa and refer to Pollock’s problematic potency). At many points, thin streams of paint intersect to form emphatic X’s, but this is almost certainly a side effect of the technique rather than an attempt to communicate. It would be difficult– probably impossible–to overlay this many lines of paint without often crossing those lines in an X form. There is certainly a black triangle at the lower right, and a large but vague diagonal axis crosses the left half of the painting from the upper left corner to the bottom center. Heavy black marks across the top and bottom of the canvas seem to anticipate the works of Cy Twombly by suggesting a kind of cursive script, words written in a language we cannot quite understand. Finally the eye does light on two perfectly recognizable shapes: the artist’s signature in the bottom left corner and his inverted handprint high up in the top right. But even here our gaze doesn’t rest for long before following the stream of white that curves out of the palm of Pollock’s handprint and carries us back into motion.

In a surprising way, this almost unconscious search for familiar forms is both completely beside the point and very much the point of Pollock’s painting. Our gaze jumps across the canvas, moving freely, treating no area as more or less important than any other. We look at one side, one corner, one half of the painting; we look at an angle; we look up from below. Standing very close, a few inches from the surface, we see thickly poured impasto crossing exposed canvas; from across the room we see a fascinating, mind-boggling tangle of lines. And every gaze, every attempt to go deeper into the painting, to see pattern and form in chaos, takes us back to the surface, back to the reality of a flat canvas loaded with paint. These two factors, this freedom and this reality, are the points of Pollock’s work, the things that make this painting so radically new.

But...Is this a painting?

* * *

For the sharpest possible contrast to Pollock’s work, one must follow Shelley’s advice in "Adonais": "Go thou to Rome." Walk east across the Piazza della Rotonda, where the ancient facade of the Pantheon faces a shiny new McDonald’s, and continue along a narrow Roman street until you find yourself on the steps of the church of Sant’ Ignazio di Loyola. Drop a coin in the cup of the beggar who opens the door and go inside. As you move along the nave, your eyes adjust to the light, and you note the familiar Baroque architecture–heavy piers, side chapels, rounded arches–that you’ve already seen in a dozen other Roman churches. Keeping your head down, look for a round metal plate about the size of a manhole cover set into the middle of the nave floor. Step onto this plate and then–and only then–look up.

In the late 1600's the Jesuits commissioned Andrea Pozzo, a master of perspective painting, to fresco the nave ceiling with an allegorical depiction of the Jesuit mission to bring the Word to the world. Pozzo complied by painting one of the two most magical and confounding illusionistic ceilings of the entire Baroque period (the other, also commissioned by Jesuits, was painted by Baciccio in the church of Il Gesu a couple of blocks away). In Pozzo’s vision, the architecture of the church appears to continue straight up into a wide open and beautifully painted sky. The ceiling has been painted away. The reality of the plaster vault above us has been completely subsumed by Pozzo’s illusionism, transformed into a structure of columns and arches populated by a multitude of allegorical figures and open to a sky where St. Ignatius rises in glory. The full effect of this piece of ecclesiastico-imperialist propaganda can only leave the viewer astonished, amazed. We know it’s impossible, but we see it with our own eyes. Pozzo has followed the eminently rational rules of perspective and created an absolutely impossible vision, a perfect counterpart to the church’s attempts to use reason to confound rationality, to place a frame of logical argument around such ultimate irrationalities as Heaven, Hell and God.

But if you step away from the metal plate, if you walk over to the wall and sit on one of the benches, something unexpected happens. Suddenly the ceiling looks skewed. The illusion is lost, and the painted architecture appears to fly off at an odd angle. The metal plate is placed in the exact center of the floor, directly beneath the vanishing point of Pozzo’s perspective scheme, and this is the only viewpoint from which the painting completely ‘works.’ Standing anywhere else in the church, we literally ‘lose perspective’ and can no longer see the illusion. Only when standing on the plate and looking up at the lower parts of the fresco do we catch ourselves wondering if this is paint or real architecture. Only then might we ask ourselves, "Is this a painting?"

Where Pozzo’s ceiling limits the viewer’s freedom and anchors us to a single spot, Pollock’s Lavender Mist, with its total denial of illusion and perspective, sets us radically free. There is no privileged viewpoint; we can enter Pollock’s painting from anywhere and follow his lines as far as we want to go. The painter’s freedom becomes the viewer’s freedom; and just as Pozzo’s carefully calculated and controlled illusionism reflected his own authoritarian era, Pollock’s best canvases of the late Forties and early Fifties reflect a contemporary global concern with individual freedom and personal expression. With the end of the century’s most horrific war and the beginning of a long, atomic Cold War, with McCarthyite repression in the United States and Stalinist and imperialist terror around the globe, artists and writers countered with paeans to radical individualism, defiant songs of the self. While Pollock was in his barn on Long Island creating paintings unlike any seen before, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis were reinventing jazz as a forum for long, risky, exploratory improvisations. Not far away in Manhattan, Ralph Ellison was writing his own brilliant improvisation on American themes, Invisible Man. In a different neighborhood, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs were taking their first steps toward a more liberated kind of American writing. The first volume of the Kinsey Report shocked Americans with the truth about their own sexual behavior, and in Paris Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, the foundational text of modern feminism.

But it was Beauvoir’s companion Jean-Paul Sartre who was responsible for the farthest-reaching intellectual development of these years, his formulation of Existentialism. As presented in its earliest and most influential form, Sartre’s philosophy stated that for human beings, existence precedes essence. That is, in a world without gods we exist before we become anything, and it is only through our freely chosen actions that we can authentically define ourselves. Since we exist in a solely human world, with no recourse to a higher power, we must assume full responsibility for our actions and consider each act carefully, because with every choice we define who we are. An ideal Existentialist life can thus be seen as a steady forward progress along a constantly forking road; at every turn, with every choice, our lives are altered and we are changed.

Jackson Pollock was no intellectual, and he almost certainly understood little or nothing of Sartre’s philosophy, but somehow the painter plugged himself into this late Forties liberationist zeitgeist. For him, painting was an Existential act. Every line, every curve, every blot, every tiny dab on Lavender Mist is the result of a freely chosen action. Through the accumulation of these hundreds of free choices, a painting was created. As Pollock moved around the edges of his canvas, dribbling black paint from an old hardened brush or pouring it straight from the can, his every action was calculated to achieve a given effect–a certain thickness of line, a certain shape of curve. He switched colors and poured on some lavender, then a lot of aluminum (this has now faded to gray), and over it all he laid a mass of strong, arrow-like white lines. His progress was steady, his actions were deliberate, and his work sets us free.

I think of Pollock as the dancing master of American art. In the famous photographs of Pollock painting (pictures that the media have made better-known than any of his individual works), the artist is captured in a vigorous dance of creation. He glides along the floor, lunges forward, steps onto the canvas, drops a line of paint, steps back and moves on. As a vision of artistic creation, this is as attractive as it is misleading. Pollock’s actions in these photographs seem to be determined more by the scale of the canvas than any inner aesthetic motivation. When working on large canvases, he could only paint in his style by moving his entire body forward and back. He lunges forward to throw lines across the wide canvas and leans sideways to make them curve. When working on smaller paintings, though, the artist would kneel on the floor and paint by moving only his hands and arms. (In a little-known, rarely reproduced photo, we see him doing exactly this.) So Pollock’s ‘dance’ is a functional thing, not an aesthetic necessity; if he could create the same effect while standing in a single position, he would. He is not the dancer but the dancing master. We, the viewers, are the dancers, dancing to his music. He creates a field of possibilities for our wandering eyes.

To experience Lavender Mist we must dance with it. While Andrea Pozzo and his fellow perspectivists require us to stand still and look, Pollock encourages us to move. Walk up to the canvas, pick a spot, any spot, and follow one of the lines that radiate out from it on a journey across the painting. I’m reminded of those old Flemish landscapes by Patinir and Brueghel in which the eye is led along a curving road into the world of the painting, a vicarious visual pilgrimage. This is a pilgrimage into Pollock, a journey into pure painting. Begin at the line of white that curls out of the handprint at the top corner. Follow it down across thick webs of paint to a small puddle of blue, and then switch to a thin black strand that drops you down at autobahn speed to a thick, curving black at the bottom of the painting. Pass through a pool of congealed white, then shoot back up along another vertical black. Jump to a different black strand that takes you farther, and so on, across the painting. This is the pleasure of Pollock, this cool, sinuous journey along the canvas, as freely improvised as a bebop saxophone solo. We skim along the surface in a Pollock dance with different moves for every mind. The possibilities are endless and the painting hypnotic. We make the journey up as we go along, wandering through this landscape without a map; we constantly make decisions, just as the artist did in the Existential act of painting. And thus even this purely hedonistic, ‘traveling’ approach to Pollock brings us back to the deeper meaning of the work: the necessity of freely choosing every step in our journey and our lives. Therein lies authenticity and the key to all originality. We dance with Pollock’s painting, but the steps are our own.

* * * *

Is this a painting?

This is painting.

A photograph taken in Pollock’s studio in the fall of 1950, about the time he asked his question, shows the completed Lavender Mist leaning against the far wall. In the foreground his materials are bunched together on the floor: big cans of commercial housepaint from Pittsburgh Paints and other manufacturers. Long-handled brushes stick out of the cans and paint drips down the sides, partly obscuring the labels. ("Best Paint Sold" promises one can; another offers extensive directions for use.) The floor itself is covered with random spills and drops of dried paint. Here is a genuinely chaotic, truly accidental paint surface created by Pollock; it is completely undisciplined, unthinking, and it points out by contrast the deliberate thought and effort involved in the construction of the beautifully controlled painting against the wall.

Lavender Mist is painting. It is a revelation of materials and processes: paint, canvas, the painter’s actions–and nothing else. No perspective scheme fooling the eye into depth; no figures (as in earlier and later works by Pollock) tempting us toward psychological or biographical interpretations; nothing but paint and motion. The work is a transcription, a (relatively) permanent record of the artist’s ephemeral actions. Pollock dips his brush in a can of black paint, pulls it out loaded and dripping, and leans forward to throw a line of black across the canvas. Paint collides with surface, and the artist moves on. The final painting is a complete record of all such actions. The canvas displays neither a struggle with the motif (as in Cézanne) nor a desperate attempt to ‘veil’ a psychologically dangerous image. Rather, it is an image of its own creation. The veil is ripped away and we gaze upon painting’s primal scene. Here is reality. This is the essence; this is what all painting is. Entirely self-referential, the work is its own interpretation, its own justification. Here it is, in all its difficult beauty. Take it or leave it.

****

In his maddeningly good book on Rembrandt, Simon Schama warns us, "Never confuse a genius with a saint."³ It’s a caution worth remembering whenever a writer or critic suggests that some painter of genius–Van Gogh, Cezanne, Braque–lived the life of a saint or a martyr to art. No one will ever accuse Jackson Pollock of saintliness, but his genius is undeniable. It exploded onto the art scene with his 1943 Mural (now at the University of Iowa) and continued to produce stunning, original works of art until he drowned it in alcohol in the early 1950's. In one of the notoriously inarticulate artist’s rare statements, he spoke of losing "contact" with a work during the process of creation and making an undisciplined "mess"⁴ instead of a successful painting. It seems that after 1950–shortly after he looked at Lavender Mist and asked, "Is this a painting?"–Pollock lost contact with his genius. Self-doubt and insecurity blocked all attempts at originality, and for the last five years of his life the artist descended into rage, violence, drunken self-parody and general swinishness. In other words, he gave his biographers plenty to write about.

Pollock’s death in a drunken car crash (in which a passenger also died) may be the most predictable denouement in all of art history. The man hailed only a few years earlier as the greatest painter of his generation had transformed himself into the biggest asshole of the New York School. When I think of the Pollock of these last years–bloated, drunk, dangerous and ultimately deadly–I am reminded that he thought of himself as a Westerner, an all-American painting cowboy, Gary Cooper with a brush. But in his steep downward trajectory, Pollock shot past the Hollywood John Wayne myth of the Western hero and broke through into something deeper and darker. He touched the nightmarish, psychopathic side of the Western myth that is evoked unforgettably in Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian. There is something in Pollock of McCarthy’s Judge Holden, a huge, fat, bald, brilliant, amoral, probably immortal avatar of American violence. After years of ultraviolent mayhem in Mexico and the American West, the Judge murders the novel’s central character in an outhouse and then proceeds to a saloon, where he dances the book to its frightening conclusion:

He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.⁵

NOTES

1. Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock, 649.

2. Ibid., 652-3.

3. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 542.

4. Chipp, Theories, 548.

5. McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 335.

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