There is something about an artist that is undeniably intriguing. The public expects their daily lives to be somehow different, filled with the dreamy eccentricities of Dali or the tormented thoughts of Munch. We want their life stories to play out in dramatic form so we see the bridge between the creator and the creation. Because this summer's
Guggenheim exhibit focuses on one of the Greatest American Painters of the 20th Century,
The New Yorker has taken a look into the life of Jacson Pollock. He is the lead of his own bildungsroman:
"Tragedy enhanced Pollock's status as the first American painter, after the corn-belt realist Grant Wood, to acheive general popular renown, as a shining native son. Born in Wyoming, Pollock came to New York, from California, in 1930. He was mentored at the Art Students League by Wood's American Scene colleague Thomas Hart Benton. He soon found the Expressionist and Surrealist tendencies of the downtown avant-garde more congenial than Benton's mannered figuration, partly because he was tormented by a belief that he could never draw properly. But a sense of nationalist mandate stayed with him."
He is a controversial desirable:
"The glowering Westerner who became known as Jack the Dripper seemed to speak not just for the country but
as it, in person: the Great American Painter, at a moment that was hot for Great American thises and thats. His helplessly photogenic, clenched features, broadcast by
Life in 1949, made him a pinup of seething manhood akin to Marlon Brando... Abstraction may have scandalized most Americans, but suddenly it was a homegrown scandal, with nothing sissified about it. The macho pose, an obligatory overcompensation for aestheticism in the nineteen-fifties, ill suited a man whose ruling emotion was fear... But it sold magazines."
And finally, he is a groundbreaking artist:
"... You feel the force, however baffled and flailing, of an ambition to recocile boundless pictorial space... with raw, emotionally driven physicality... Pollock at his peak burned his past conditioning and present turmoil, his very identity and character as a man, and he burned them clean. There's nobody to recognize... He prepared us to believe that absolutely anything was possible for him."
# posted by Megan Bright @ 7/25/2006 01:01:00 PM
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