jackson pollock’s renaissance connection

Jackson Pollock: The Figure of the Fury

Palazzo Vecchio

Florence, Italy

15 April – 27 July 2014

by

Joseph Nechvatal

Published at Hyperallergic.com asJackson Pollock’s Renaissance Connection

http://hyperallergic.com/136418/jackson-pollocks-renaissance-connection/

The city of Florence is paying homage to Jackson Pollock, well-known for his all-over

syncretistic paintings, by connecting his work to that of Michelangelo’s. This unusual

connection was conceived and curated by Sergio Risaliti and Francesca Campana

Comparini under the organization of the Opera Laboratori Fiorentini – Civita Group.

The site chosen to exhibit sixteen small to medium-sized works by Pollock (the best

being “Earth Worms” (1946) and “Square Composition with Horse” (1937 – 1938) -

albeit it has more to do with Picasso than Michelangelo) is the top floor of the majestic

Palazzo Vecchio. Therein lays the curiosity.

Jackson Pollock, “Earth Worms” (1946)

The title, The Figure of the Fury, refers to Pollock in the act of painting as he moved

around his canvases, while simultaneously alluding to the expression, “fury of the figure”

by the 16th-century art theorist and painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1584). Lomazzo

pointed out that what bestowed furious qualities to a figure is a sensed motion similar to

that of a flame; the same swirling motion that Michelangelo gave to his figures that is

here assigned to Pollock (even though Pollock only become acquainted with

Michelangelo through book reproductions during his studies under Thomas Hart Benton).

Wilfred Zogbaum, “Jackson Pollock portrait” (1947) from Wilfred Zogbaum in the

atelier of Fireplace road.

Jackson Pollock, “Untitled” (1937-1939), Colored pencil and graphite on paper. TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Jackson Pollock, by SIAE 2014

Jackson Pollock, “Untitled” (1937-1939), Colored pencil and graphite on paper. TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Jackson Pollock, by SIAE 2014

Usually when we encounter large classic Pollock drip paintings of some figural-depth,

we are pummelled and overwhelmed by their connectively immersive suggestivity - and

by the extent to which the immediacy of the field is forgrounded. The resulting

radicalization, as regards their distribution of visual incident into the optical field,

manifests an omni-perspectivalism that is exemplary of omni-directionality.

As evidence of this ambient trend's beginnings, Pollock famously painted the engulfing

“Mural” (1943) for Peggy Guggenheim where he transformed the canvas into a whole

wall instead of a small object of contemplation which is visually and physically

dominated by the viewer. “Mural” set the precedent for the scale of Pollock's celebrated

all-over drip-paintings (with their even distribution of compositional interest across an

entire large surface) largely inspired by Clement Greenberg's review in the Nation's art

column of February 1, 1947 of Pollock's previous show at Art of This Century in which

Greenberg wrote: "Pollock points a way beyond the easel, beyond the mobile, framed

picture, to the mural."

Pollock's ensuing appeal for mural commissions increased and in a 1949 letter to his

dealer, Betty Parsons, he wrote, "I want to mention that I am going to try to get some

mural commissions through an agent. I feel it is important for me to broaden my

possibilities in this line of development." The same year Pollock told an interviewer,

"The direction that painting seems to be taking is away from the easel, into some sort of

wall painting. Some of my canvases are an impractical size ... 9 by 18 feet! But I enjoy

working big and whenever I have a chance I do it whether it's practical or not."

Pollock sought to create a spatial continuousness that no longer distinguished between the

pictorial space and the area in which the viewer stood. As such, Pollock's imposing

paintings demand that the observer relinquish intellectual control (as the beholder is now

torn free of unyielding renaissance perspective) and dive into the energetic

color/movement (through the eye being drawn into the excessive aspect of the painting)

and therein dissolve into the dazzling chaos of the individual lines which are also, at the

same time, creating a uniformly structured whole-field.

In contrast with the devises of European renaissance perspective, Pollock sought to draw

the viewer into the canvas, not by establishing a distant vanishing-point, but by

conceptually eliminating the frame so as to permit the eye to follow the curvilinear

patterns beyond the canvas and into the implied surrounding space without being stopped

by the edges.

Relevant to these concerns are the semi-pejorative statements made by Aldous Huxley

concerning Pollock's painting Cathedral from a 1948 Parsons exhibition. Huxley made

these remarks as a participant in the Roundtable on Modern Art, a panel discussion held

at the Museum of Modern Art from which excerpts were reproduced in Life magazine's

issue of October 11, 1948. In it, Huxley points out Cathedral's lack of focus due to its all-

over compositional approach, saying "It raises the question of why it stops when it does.

The artist could go on forever. (Laughter) I don't know. It seems like a panel for a

wallpaper which is repeated indefinitely around the wall."

Taking this "wallpaper (...) repeated indefinitely around the wall" aspect seriously, the

architect Peter Blake, in planning the architectural strategy for what was proposed to be

the Jackson Pollock Museum, had the idea (with Pollock) to extend the paintings

indefinitely around the space. In an article concerned with the project named "Unframed

Space: A Museum for Jackson Pollock's Paintings" in Interiors magazine, Arthur Drexler

wrote that Pollock's paintings "seem as though they might very well be extended

indefinitely, and it is precisely this quality that has been emphasized in the central unit of

the plan." About the continuous rhythms of Pollock's paintings Drexler goes on to

describe how, in the model of the museum, "a painting 17 feet long constitutes an entire

wall. It is terminated on both ends not by a frame or a solid partition, but by mirrors. The

painting is thus extended into miles of reflected space, and leaves no doubt in the

observer's mind as to this particular aspect of Pollock's work."

This immersive Pollock effect is here radically reversed - as we encounter his modest-in-

scaled work after a lengthy, massively engulfing, walk through the Palazzo Vecchio

itself, with its extravagant connected rooms after rooms of Mannerist Grotesque murals,

ceiling paintings and stucco. Most notably here was the Room of Lorenzo the

Magnificent, covered, as it is, in immersive stucco murals (1556-1558) by Leonardo

Ricciarelli, Giovanni Boscoli and Mariotto di Francesco based, supposedly, on drawings

by the architect Bartolomeo Ammannati.

Bartolomeo Ammannati (drawing), Leonardo Ricciarelli, Giovanni Boscoli & Mariotto di

Francesco (stucco) (1556-1558)



Even after consuming only one glass of wine and a plate of spaghetti, this room made my

head spin softly - the way a great Pollock does with its all-over connectivity, full of

dynamism.

These great immersive stucco rooms are deliberately anti-actual, often including

elaborate depictions of multiple figures bound together in tendrils.

This Grotesque (in Italian Grottosesco) became an arabesque style of all-over decoration

based on a linked mêlée of fantastic, diminutive figures deriving from Roman mural and

vault decoration which had been unearthed during the Renaissance (such as at the Golden

House of Nero); mural decorations which themselves suggested ancient expressions of

religio-sexual inter-penetrability - fanciful imagery mixing animal, human, and plant

forms together. First revived in the Renaissance by the school of Raphael, the Grotesque

came into fashion in 16th-century Italy and subsequently became popular throughout

Europe.

Hence, while I found this modest show fairly uninteresting in terms of the Pollock-

Michelangelo connection, I was flattened by the reversal of all-overness connectivity that

we associate with Pollock, and for that alone, I found this exhibition to be absolutely

fascinating.

jackson pollock’s renaissance connection

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