HEART OF DARKNESS

A signature style creates a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can render an artistic reputation iconic – witness Piet Mondrian’s rectangles, Pablo Picasso’s twin-profile heads and Andy Warhol’s silkscreen Campbell’s Soup cans… the list could continue at random. On the other hand, any such distinctive idiom runs the risk that the artist will get stuck in a one-note rut. To be sure, formulas are fecund, yet they may also become formulaic. Jackson Pollock knew this danger full well. Arguably, Pollock’s “drip” or “poured” works, executed using highly fluent enamel paints during 1947-50, have resulted in the single most ultra-distinctive style of the Twentieth Century. Writing some three decades ago, I already had good reason to note a Volkswagen Beetle decorated in the Pollock style in Toledo, Spain, not Ohio.[1] Similarly, Mark Rothko switched in 1957 from his brighter palette to a darker register because he felt the former had become too popular and easy. To summon a phrase from Franz Kafka, sometimes the artist must take sides against himself in the battle for modernism. Always a chancer, Pollock did so in Number 17 and related compositions to striking effect.[2] Who dares, wins.

Indeed, if we understand Kafka’s advice as ultimately pointing beyond doctrinaire modernity, it succinctly anticipated Pollock’s maneuver in 1951 when he left behind the classic “pourings” for this nexus of new canvases. They proved rebellious enough to have given diehard modernists and camp followers a tonic challenge. Then again, it was the very dare that Pollock intended: “I’ve had a period of drawing on canvas in black – with some of my early images coming thru – think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing – and the kids who think it simple to splash a Pollock out.”[3] That Number 17 may still possess the force to disturb is all to the good. As Pollock implied, he had looked back to move forward. The French have a phrase for this trick: reculer pour sauter mieux (to draw back in order to make a better jump). His pictorial leap in both directions continues to rivet attention.

When Pollock showed Number 17 and other black pourings[4] – the usual term for them coined by the foremost Pollock expert and co-author of his landmark catalogue raisonné – at the Betty Parsons gallery toward the end of 1951, it elicited positive responses. Reading between the lines of the formalist critic Clement Greenberg’s review, one can sense that, predictably, his echt modernist mindset had a problem with the resurgent figuration, most evident at the gallery in Echo. Still, his conclusion was laudatory: “The more explicit structure of the work reveals much that was implicit in the preceding phase and should convince anyone that this artist is much, much more than a grandiose decorator.”[5] In retrospect, Pollock did not need to “convince” insofar as the proof exists in the 1951 paintings themselves. A less doctrinaire critic than Greenberg was the astute James Fitzsimmons. His verdict remains valid: “But now an intensely gripping game of hide and seek is played – instincts and emotions other than the aesthetic are engaged. By introducing associative elements into his work, Pollock has found his own way of dealing with human experience. In this sense, his new paintings possess an additional level of meaning and so transmit a more complex kind of experience than did his earlier work. It would seem that Pollock has confounded those who insisted that he was up a blind alley.”[6] Tweak Fitzsimmons’s turn of phrase to “a dark alley” and it catches the mood that emanates from the black pourings.[7]

Various pictures in this “black” series have motifs or iconography recognizable enough to identify them or make connections with Pollock’s visual syntax from the late 1930s through the mid-1940s. Thus, note the ear at upper left in Echo and suggestions of quasi-religious themes such as entombment (Number 14) and crucifixion (Black and White Painting III) or demonic upright figural configurations (Number 5) elsewhere in the group, especially as it continued into the following year. Number 17, though, is rather a special case.

Harder to “read” than many other companion pieces, Number 17 has closer affinities than most with the drawings done in colored inks on Japanese and other specialist papers. Blotches, dabs, spatters, swirls, curlicues, and so on – all the modes that dexterity at full throttle can conjure – unite the two trends. Any residual figuration in Number 17 relates to the centralized heads that had fascinated Pollock as early as his Untitled (Self-Portrait) done around 1930–33. On this score, the most apt comparison is perhaps with the bestial Head. This Picasso-influenced demon evinces a literal snarling stare; Number 14 does the same metaphorically with it violent vectors. By turns, they soak into the raw cotton duck like mordants and puddle on its surface into reflective passages (particularly predominant in the lower right quadrant). Francis V. O’Connor even proposed that “Pollock’s greatest triumphs of reflectivity” occurred at this time.[8] Gloom and glare.

Also common to the early painting and the late one is a tightly enfolded quality, as though the thoughts driving Pollock’s hand were circling back upon themselves. In the process, they create nodes, collisions where energy, as it were, coagulates. Rawness, vital and tough, is the overriding impression. Nor should the allusion to the early self-portrait be taken lightly. In two letters Pollock made confessions that echo, via the latter. The first: “People have always frightened and bored me, consequently I have been within my own shell…” The next year (1930), he added: “this so-called happy part of one’s life is a bit of damnable hell… the more I think I am thinking the darker things become.”^[9] Shells turn in upon themselves. In these terms, the simile chimes with Number 17’s compactness, as if it were an inscape, a painterly map of introversion. Secondly, as the young Pollock brooded darkly, so did his later self in 1951. Few impulses are more dynamic than this return of the repressed. Here, though, dynamism counters a film noirish, shadow-laden phantasmagoria. Imagine Rorschach blots with a keen life of their own. As such, Number 17 fuses the inchoate or formlessness with purpose. It is both wild and controlled. Pollock’s lineation manages to intermingle inside with outside, positive and negative space. Truth to tell, his idiosyncratic prowess as a draftsman always did. Drawing became inseparable from painting in the classic pourings and, to a still blunter degree, in the black-and-white tumult that ensued. To quote Pollock, “Yes, I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing; that is, it’s direct.”[10]

Understood as a whole, this dramatic interlude in Pollock’s brief, meteoric trajectory (to borrow Kirk Varnedoe’s description)[11] resembles a katábasis. Be not puzzled by the ancient Greek word: it simply means a descent into the underworld – in this case the restive darkness in the depths of Pollock’s psyche. As he put it, “when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.”[12] In Number 17 these shades recede into the webs – to reverse the title of Pollock’s Out of the Web: Number 7, 1949 – now returned, akin to ominous revenants, from the 1947-50 period. Intriguingly, Lee Krasner, who better than anyone else knew Jackson, deemed his “black” moment in 1951-52 important enough to evoke it in her own descent into a nocturnal place, her “Umber” series.[13] So did Pollock himself. On the rightward side of Portrait and a Dream, a visionary, transfigured self-portrait counterpoises the somber “dream” in the left half. Dream or nightmare, this monochrome thicket threshes and twists with the same kind of dark energies that galvanize Number 17.[14] Could Pollock have paid a better tribute to himself? I think not.

[1] David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism (London & New York: Thames & Hudson, 1990; second edition 2015), p. 7.

[2] A cautionary note. Pollock’s titular numbering has little significance. For example, One: Number 31, 1950 happened after Number 32, 1950 and before Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950.

[3] Pollock, letter to Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon (June 1951).

[4] Francis V. O’Connor, Jackson Pollock: The Black Pourings (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1980).

[5] Greenberg, “Jackson Pollock’s New Style” (February 1952), in Pepe Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 80.

[6] Fitzsimmons, “Fifty-Seventh Street in Review: Jackson Pollock” (December 1951), in Karmel 1999, p. 79.

[7] Gavin Delahunty, ed., Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots (London: Tate Publishing, 2015) unpacks the term “black pourings” and its thematics. Personally, I would prefer the term “dark pourings”, not least since Pollock handled black quite differently to other Abstract Expressionists such as Clyfford Still and Ad Reinhardt.

[8] O’Connor, “Forensic Connoisseurship, Jackson Pollock, and the Authentic Eye”, unpublished manuscript (2012).

[9] Pollock, letter to Charles and Frank Pollock (October 22, 1929) and to Charles (January 31, 1930.

[10] Pollock, “Interview with William Wright” (1950), in Karmel 1999, p. 20.

[11] Kirk Varnedoe, “Meteor”, in Jackson Pollock (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998), pp. 15–85.

[12] Pollock (no date, but surely late in his life), in Francis V. O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, eds,. Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), vol. 4, p. 241

[13] David Anfam, Lee Krasner: The Umber Paintings 1959–1962 (New York: Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2018).

[14] See Lee Krasner quoted in B. H. Friedman, “An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock” (1960), in Karmel 1999, p. 35: “Jackson talked for a long time about the left section [of Portrait and a Dream]. He spoke freely and brilliantly. I wish I had had a tape recorder. The only thing I remember is that he described the upper right-hand corner of the left panel as ‘the dark side of the moon’.” Significantly, darkness is the keynote.