Review: Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works,1978Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works by EugeneVictor Thaw; Francis Valentine O'ConnorReview by: Susi BlochArt Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 55-56Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776329 .

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Review: Jackson Pollock: A

Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, 1978.

SUSI BLOCH

Jackson Pollock has been dead for 23 years (he died August 11, 1956). His importance in the history of post-World War II modernism is established, although the nature of his achieve- ment has been long debated and continues to be debated. Here and there, something of significance in the way of critical analysis has been written-not very much and not recently. Critically, something of the nature and magnitude of Pollock's achievement emerges in the fact that always, in the more ambitious essays, there exists the attempt to identify in the mature Pollock the crisis of abstraction as experienced in the late '40s and early '50s and to see in Pollock, uniquely, the resolution of that crisis. Yet recourse, systematic or incidental, to Pollock's work itself, other than in reproduction, remains extremely limited. As Francis V. O'Connor pointed out in his brief essay accompanying the small Pollock exhibition that opened at the Yale University Art Gallery in conjunction with the publication of the Catalogue Raisonne, of the known Pollocks, only 12.5 percent are in public collections-and not always on view; 31.5 percent remain in the Estate in storage; 50 percent are in private collections. Thus the publication of a catalogue raisonne,1 especially one whose emphasis is on the functionalism and comprehensiveness, rather than tokenism, of its plates cannot but provide an important and timely re- source for Pollock studies. It should be noted immediately that these four large volumes depart appreciably from the format and endeavor of the traditional catalogue raisonne precisely through the editors' decision that every work should be pho- tographically documented (including sheets that simply retain, without further reworking, stains that had bled through from a work in progress), and that the plates should provide as fully as possible, in terms of scale and impression, an "instructive" sense of the original. Visually, then, the catalogue is meant analytically and dialectically to project the particularity of in- dividual works and the complex particularity of Pollock's de- velopment. On the whole, and in the face of some probable dispute over categorical (by medium) decisions and divisions, the catalogue is valuable in this respect, as well as, of course, in its chronology and documentation of the individual works.

Within the practice of art history it is unusual for a catalogue raisonne to be undertaken and published shortly after an artist's death. When taken, the advantages of such a precipitous de- cision are clear: closeness in point of time (and space) to when (and where) the works were made. There is the relatively

contained dispersement of the work itself and pertinent records and documents. There is the accessibility, always diminished even after a short time, of persons personally and/or profes- sionally related to the artist: here, most immediately, Pollock's widow, the painter Lee Krasner, who initiated the project of the catalogue raisonne and was in many respects instrumental in its realization. There are Pollock's three dealers, sequentially, Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons, and Sidney Janis; all are alive, and each one in a different fashion and with different

impact played a role, sometimes significant, in the advance- ment of a "theory" of painting, the polemic of modernism. Equally important, and again diminished in number, are family, friends, artists, and critics acquainted, circumstantially and/or consequentially, with the man and his work. Understanding of Pollock's development as a painter cannot proceed without taking into account the complex circumstance of persons and debate in New York during the '40s and '50s. Yet any descriptive acknowledgement of this circumstance is, seemingly system- atically and seemingly by editorial policy, omitted from the catalogue's documentation; only the impact of Benton, Siquei- ros, and Orozco are indicated. It is an omission which seriously diminishes the worth of Thaw's introductory essay to the colorplates, which stands as a summary discussion of Pollock's development and the pictorial issues that Pollock's work en- gaged. It is an omission of biographical and professional history that seriously compromises O'Connor's appendix, "The Life of Jackson Pollock 1912-1956: A Documentary Chronology." It is an omission that cannot be argued away on the grounds that O'Connor's monograph of 1967, an extensively annotated "Chronology" which served as the text of The Museum of Modern Art's Pollock retrospective, incorporates a great deal of critical literature and exhibition data that does contribute some sense, and some particulars, of historical moment.

O'Connor has been active in Pollock studies over a consid- erable period of time (since 1962), and his primary focus has always been the early Pollock, Pollock of the '30s. O'Connor's understanding and practice of scholarship has always been precisely defined and circumscribed; he categorically estab- lishes a difference between the purely "analytic" operation of securing and ordering the data that compose the record of an artist's oeuvre and the "critical" operation of interpreting that data. Thus in the general introduction, O'Connor and Thaw project this catalogue as a compendium of facts, "a clear,

FALL 1979 55

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objective, and documented description of each work made by the artist." The editors' intention here is to "inform theory, not to promulgate theory." This position on face value is perfectly reasonable and acceptable. Yet such a position would not have been violated by an attempt in the general introduction or in an appendix analytically to summarize the arguments of Pollock literature, in some way to suggest the state and problems of Pollock studies. For it can and should be argued that the history and vagaries of Pollock writing (the "text" that a work or body of work accrues) becomes a very real extension of the work, a manifestation of the work that is difficult, perhaps impossible, to separate from the "primary" fact of the object itself. Certainly this catalogue does not stand outside of that "text" (that history of discussion and perception), for the recognition of its neces- sity (usefulness) and further, its "analytic" decisions (its order- ing and unfolding of the work), the way in which it, unavoid- ably, reflects back against and onto the work itself, and the way in which it projects itself forward in terms of furthering and clarifying that understanding, situates the catalogue, despite its claim of being merely a record, as part of an ongoing discourse. As discourse, then, this catalogue would have been importantly served by an attempt to summarize the course of Pollock studies and literature. Instead we do have the implication, stated, of the inadvertent wrongheadedness and misguidedness of much Pollock writing because of the unavailability of com- plete and accurate evidence. Be that as it may, on the basis of this record alone, without the interjection of any suggestion of what the amplification and correction of data might provide in relation to the existing discussion and interpretation of Pollock, it is difficult to project from any particular point of new evi- dence supplied, the catalyst for a significant revision or re- evaluation of interpretation. It is not that the catalogue is able totally to avoid the rhetoric or interpretations of Pollock writing. For instance, O'Connor does, in the introduction to Volume 2, propose that a better understanding of Pollock's mature tech- nique is facilitated by a simple and effective decision of ter- minology: the substitution of the term "pour" for "drip." And basically the catalogue's introductions, headnotes, and chron-

ological and categorical divisions seem to adjust to and rein- force existing critical distinctions. The run of 45 colorplates at the beginning of Volume 1, a selection of chronologically arranged works not previously known or reproduced in color, meant to indicate the course of Pollock's development, maps out an already established (interpreted) progression without, however, supplying (repetitiously or not) a few of those well- known works which more fully project Pollock's accomplish- ment.

Ultimately none of the preceding qualifications diminish the intelligence or strength of the visual document that the cata- logue provides. There is also the efficiency of its organization. All information pertaining to each work is appended directly to the photographic record (O'Connor has adjusted some of the documentation of his 1967 monograph). The division of the catalogue into four large volumes does facilitate necessary cross-referencing of the material, arranged chronologically ac- cording to medium. Of the categorical divisions the separation of "collage" works seems to me almost the only really ques- tionable decision, especially since these are included, without adequate discussion, in a volume whose introduction describes its content as consisting of essentially "minor works." Also

open to serious question is the editors' decision to institute titles for untitled paintings, especially since the catalogue num- ber (all works are numbered consecutively from Volume 1 through Volume 4 without interruption) would provide an adequate means of future identification and standardization of reference. The use of the word "Composition" in a majority of these instituted titles, for early as well as later works, is partic- ularly problematical, especially in conjunction with the later paintings, since the term is in many ways at odds with the process and ambition of those works.

In a will dating from 1951 Pollock requested of his executor that the body of work remaining in hand at the time of his death be kept intact as far as possible. There is nothing unique-usually only something uniquely unrealizable-about such a request. After all, the value-critical, dialectical, and visual-of an intact body of work was something appreciated even by Duchamp, who carefully contrived, despite the myth of his indifference, just such a comprehensiveness of holdings through the Arensbergs (Arensberg Collection, the Philadelphia Museum), and was possibly experienced by Pollock himself in the Kandinsky collection (over 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors) amassed by the Museum of Non-Objective Paint- ing (now The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). However, in 1951, two months before drawing up his will, Pollock saw a large Gorky exhibition and noted in a letter to Alfonso Ossorio how "impressive and wonderful to see an artist's development in one big show" and that he had not known 90 percent of this work. It was probably, then, simply the Gorky exhibition that motivated the request for keeping the work intact. For Krasner, Pollock's sole executrix, a catalogue raisonne was the most practical and thorough way of honoring Pollock's request. For O'Connor and Thaw it was a way of establishing and preserving the integrity of the work in the interest of scholarship and providing the market with a reliable reference. Given Pollock's request and the catalogue as practical response to that request, it is to be hoped that in the future a policy of informed, intelligent acquisition might be promoted, especially on the institutional level. The catalogue provenance entries give the impression that, except for the already seriously diminished coherence of the Estate holdings, no such policy, no ambition to achieve coherence, seems to exist. One may suggest, in fact, that a peculiar inversion increasingly takes place: museums, especially museums of modern art, have taken on all the worst characteristics of the "museum without walls" (the arbitrarily, willfully illustrated book, the survey text), while the monograph is left to put together, economically and resourcefully; a collec- tion. The small traveling exhibition of Pollocks that opened in New Haven in conjunction with the catalogue publication, including mostly works not previously or only rarely seen and largely taken from the Pollock Estate, brilliantly demonstrated in the intelligence of its selection (without, interestingly enough, recourse to large-scale works) the unique testimony that only the works themselves, as a coherent group, can provide. U

1. Francis Valentine O'Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw (eds.), Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonnd of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1978. 1075 pages, 4 vols., 1240 black-and- white ills., 45 colorplates. $250.00.

Susi Bloch is Assistant Professor of Art History at Empire State College (SUNY).

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