Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [123]
Pollock, “No. 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist),” NG, Washington, DC.
PAINT HARD, LIVE HARD
Jackson Pollock attacking the keys of a grand piano with an ice pick. Pollock shattering a table full of glasses, then fingering the shards to drip blood in designs on the tabletop. Pollock pounding a table so ferociously that a box of matches burst into flames. Burning with intensity, Pollock convinced a generation of artists that art comes from within rather than without. His loutish behavior is legendary. He brawled in bars, urinated in potted plants, ripped doors off their hinges, and died drunk in a car crash at the age of 44.
Regardless of how turbulent his personal life or how unstructured his canvases, Pollock’s art was anything but mindless. “NO CHAOS DAMN IT,” he once wired a critic who failed to see how a canvas squirted with ink-filled basting syringes could be art.
When Hans Hofmann first visited Pollock’s studio he was startled by the absence of any models or sketches. “Do you work from nature?” he asked. Pollock replied, “I am nature.”
WILLEM DE KOONING (b. 1904), the Old Master of Abstract Expressionism, came to the U.S. from Holland as a stowaway. With his solid background in academic painting and an ability to draw like Ingres, he worked in a realistic style until 1948, when he developed his mature style of slashing brushstrokes. Unlike his colleagues, de Kooning kept his interest in the human figure and is known for a series of “Woman” paintings (which he compared to the Venus of Willendorf). These frontal images appear to both dissolve into and emerge out of fiercely brushed paint. His canvases look raw and unfinished, but de Kooning constantly reworked them in his trademark yellow, pink, and buff colors.
de Kooning, “Woman I,” 1950-52, MoMA, NY.
FRANZ KLINE (1910-62) was converted to abstraction after viewing his normal-sized sketches blown up on a wall with a slide projector. He was overwhelmed by the power of these giant black brushstrokes against a stark white background, and began to paint black enamel bars using a housepainter’s brush on huge, white canvases. Kline derived his massive linear forms from industrial shapes like trains and girders. “The final test of a painting,” he said, “is: does the painter’s emotion come across?”
Kline, “Mahoning,” 1956, Whitney, NY.
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE
The hands-down winner among all-star art schools was the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina during its brief heyday of 1933-57. Its staff and alumni were like a Who’s Who of the American avant-garde, including painters Albers, Shahn, de Kooning, Kline, Motherwell, composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham, architect Buckminster Fuller, and poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. It was at Black Mountain that Rauschenberg first conceived his object-plus-convas composites. One morning Rauschenberg was stunned by a canvas he had been working on the night before. He called fellow student Cy Twombly to see what had happened. Trapped in the thick black paint was a white butterfly. The “combine” was born.
HANS HOFMANN (1880-1966) was an early advocate of freely splashed pigment. A highly influential teacher, he influenced a generation of disciples with his “push-pull” (repulsion/attraction