Critique of Jackson Pollock’s One J A M E S W W A D D O M S

If it is true that the worshipful Gothic elevated the dowager Romanesque, both literally and artistically; if it can be said of the Florentine Renaissance that the patronage of an affluent merchant class made possible the stylistic experiments of Ghiberti, Angelico, and Botticelli; if it may be accepted of the High Renaissance that craftsmen achieved recognition as Artists whose new titular capitalization spoke to the shifting influence of the rendering of beauty from the qualities of the subject to the skills of its interpreter; and if it is permitted that the various ‘isms’ as definitions of Artists’ many perceptions of their world allowed for the penultimate achievement of Art as a distinct field of endeavor independent of the needs of its observers, then Jackson Pollock represents that sad, fatalistic and ultimate achievement of art at its historical impasse. Completing a full circle from the ancient Egyptian copyist, Pollock uses the perceived stalemate of 20th century art to honor himself, with devastating consequences. Instead of building upon

precedent, Pollock demonstrated that for him there was nothing left of Art but stalemate, and his compulsion to ‘create’ without regard to subject or style leaves the observer of One to wonder if the composition’s artful splatter and calculated dribbling is of any real significance. The pedantic sophistry of this work stands in sharp relief to the attempt at dialectic which the recent ‘isms’ had shared with the grand and evolving story of art, a tale described by some as a succession of attempts to solve artistic

problems. The Greeks inherited and solved the problem of foreshortening. The Romans completed the development of classical architecture. The impressionists, fauvists, cubists, dadaists and surrealists all continued the work of exploring the ways in which man could express his view of contemporary surroundings. Thus, the next step in the evolution of art, should Pollock have intended his work as such a next step, would necessarily involve the recognition that the voices which previously had been championing the story of art as the story of the human condition had quieted in a postwar world where things no longer made sense. Jackson Pollock, with the unease of an dinner guest who dreads a lull in conversation, thrust One upon the world with much more concern that he be heard than the substance and cacophony of his conversation. Pollock squanders the unique positioning of mid-20th century culture’s confluence in a public hungry for meaning. Pollock’s One is a celebration of the absence of meaning, instead embracing nihilism and dissonance. The post-World War II culture of Europe was certainly tired of the divisiveness which had plagued the continent for thousands of years and which had most recently incited the blind nationalism and despotic messiahs who sowed the seeds of conflict. But it also cherished its past, illustrated in the looting of paintings from conquered lands by Nazi Germany; the country of Holbein the younger and Durer had felt the pangs of secular oblation so strongly that it could only sate itself with the absorption of the great masters of Europe into the

German pantheon. It was in the wake of this atmosphere that Pollock tried to prove that Art meant nothing except a raw experience for which a subject was irrelevant. Pollock, who had proven himself in the 1940’s as an artist of considerable skill within the abstract expressionist movement, relinquishes his Art to the unpredictability of contrived wrist motions and sweeping drizzlings. The Artist, in the great irony of abstract expressionism, proved that Art cannot exist without a subject, whether physically extant on the canvas, or as an object of human controversy in the academic arena or the coffeehouses of 60’s counterculture. The subject of One is not the omission of form or the attempt for nothingness, but rather, it is the opposite, it is the unblinking dissection of the motives for its creation and success, the will of the Artist and the willingness of his public to share in his posterity.