Why is that Important?: Looking at Jackson Pollock A conversation with Sal Khan, Steven Zucker and Beth Harris. Created by Beth Harris, Steven Zucker and Sal Khan.
Exactly. And most of the artists of modern era have been painting for themselves. That's why I can't understand those who say it is crap as well as those who relish collecting the paintings for immense amount of money and boasting in front of others how rich and sensitive they are even though they have no real sensual connection with the painting.
A piece like this goes. Art is supposed to be you. Whatever it is. So stop caring if others like it. Your all losing the purpose of art. Art is simply for art sake!!! That's why they do it. They represent art
Sure, one must understand a piece in context. But, every person has context of a life and society they lived in, and they have a response to history. Only difference is, my signature at the bottom of any expression of it won't be worth millions by default. Pollock's is - by default - because somebody decided it was so. This more than anything, is what I think bothers people. I know it bothers artists, too.
Really? You think you could create something similar? Have you ever seen one of his paintings in real life? His painting Mural was 20 feet wide and weighed 350lbs. If you could create something even remotely similar you should go to art school. You can't look at a Pollock in a photograph or on a video, you need to see it and experience it in real life to appreciate his genius.
If you look at a photograph of a Pollock, it looks like a mess. But if you actually bother to go to a museum to look at his work, it's mesmerizing. Like Van Gogh, the poster art of his portraits look "pretty." But if you actually view the actual painting, there's nothing "pretty" about them. You see a very angry man capable of violence.
The Van Gogh comparison is excellent. I was not a fan of "Sunflower" until I saw it (well, one of them) in person in Tokyo. Instant adoration. It is the brilliance of the color, depth, and sheer presence. Pollack has that same quality.
Pollock's work has to be seen directly as photographic duplication does not do his visual impact much justice. Especially the huge, atmospheric paintings. However, to "see the artist" in his or her work is an interpretive fail in that such is not readable in visual terms. Yet, one can perceive the artist's use of technique, judgments made by the artist in terms of form, genre and process and whether the image "works." To suggest that one can understand the deep roots of emotion, thought and personality of the artist in the object is quite a stretch.
Jackson is my favourite Artist, I have see his work close up just beautiful, decided to go to university to study art history, best move I ever made. 1A is my Favourite too, as well as 9A Summertime I remember being about 14 in Cornwall and seeing a post card of Summertime and wanted it and my mum said that's terrible " I said no mum that's art " still have it
Your mother was right. Jackson Pollock’s art is solely used for tax evasion purposes for the rich ( you can easily look this up). Abstract art is amazing but Jackson makes awful pieces that mean nothing
I can appreciate that some people enjoy this type of art, but does not in my opinion hold as much worth as 'real' art. Art forms that involve creativity with dedication and discipline. Not just creativity.
Thank you for your comment. Scholars and conservators who have studied the work of Jackson Pollock disagree with your assumption that his work lacks dedication and discipline. In fact, those who have studied Pollock's work have reached the conclusion, despite popular mythology, that he was extraordinarily dedicated, skilled, and disciplined. The fact that Pollock's work and modernism more broadly still creates such antipathy among so many people - and so many decades later - suggests that his art is very real and addresses significant cultural issues that are still at issue today.
Smarthistory. art, history, conversation. I very much appreciate a reply, but I have to disagree as I get the sense that Pollocks art is more within the 'hipster' area of art - that the only ones who can appreciate it are those whom are deeply embedded in the world of art. Anyone can appreciate and analyse and/or just soak in the majestic works that I would contrast with Pollocks work...
@@ordinarylestibourne2252 I completely agree. I have no faith whatsoever in the commentaries of the modern art establishment. The kind of art that survives and is cherished by a culture is that which speaks for itself and doesn't require verbose and obscure explanations for it. The fact that we still debate the worth of Pollock's work is a testament to societies inability to accept the standard of art that the museums who enshrine this kind of expression are trying to present to us, not because his work is intrinsically timeless.
If one cannot do a drip style painting just as well as Jackson's you had better become a computer programmer or something.....no, wait....They could do it also.
You can grab a pen and copy the words of Shakespeare, take some chalk and mimic the formula's of Einstein, or follow the recipe of a great chef but you would still be just an ordinary cook. The value of a poet is not located in their ability to draw letters, and the value of modern art is not located in the artist's craftsmanship alone.
Good point about that they should be presented on the floor. I'm sure Pollock would agree there is no "up"! I have always loved Number 8, 1949. At first I kept seeing an autumn forest (due in part to the colour palette), but I just love gazing into it, there is so much more to see.
Has any one done a study into the way alcohol effects the artist . Here in New Zealand all our best artists were alcoholic and or drug addicts. Not so much these days .. but then the art is not as profound these days. Our greatest artist Colin Mcahon’s late paintings are as beautiful as they are dark and depressing. He died of alcohol related disease. Pollock famously did his best work when he was on the wagon … as soon as he fell off his work went into decline and he ended up wrapped around a tree. Of course there are many great artists who are not addicts eg Gehard Richter … but I’m sure booze and drugs do make for some mad art eg Francis Bacon .6
Shoulda brought up Knudd Merril and Max Ernst use of drips before , late 30's , though Pollock was using overall compositions at times in the late 30's . Andre Masson and the automatic subconsciousness side of Surrealisim I'm sure was an influence ....Important is the use of scale , these are big paintings . Scale came from the Mexican muralists . He did study in Siquerios workshope where they used spray and let things drip too. . "! choose to veil the imagery" - Pollock
The speaker says Pollock unrolled the canvas, laid it on the floor and started.Did he apply gesso to his canvas first ? Perhaps some of the negative reactions to these pieces comes from the knowledge that they were created by dripping and flinging paint. Might people react differently if they were told that the artist applied these marks with a brush?
Many of Pollock's canvases were painted without any gesso. Just the paint applied directly on the raw cotton duck. In fact, the resulting staining of the fabric would prove important for later artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and others.
Seems like you clearly don't know very much about the painting process, art history, historical interpretation, and Pollock as a person. If all you see is paint splattered on a canvas, you might as well be blind.
i am trying to work with this exact piece of art as an inspiration to create fashion. This video very much helped me to understand the meaning and thought behind pollocks Number 1A.
The importance of art is one part innovation and three parts promotion. The Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum years back was made up of pieces from Saatchi (Owns large advertising agency). A big controversy was started over elephant dung and the Virgin Mary used in a piece. That created, well, a sensation and the value of all the paintings jumped. NO coincidence. Saatchi's collection became much more valuable. I think he knows a little about promotion.
I like looking at this beautiful work - the discussion, on the other hand, lacks depth. Common people might call it "a mess" but they aren't the sort who would go to a gallery to look at art anyway. This discussion from the "man in the street" point-of-view serves no important purpose.
The EMU at University of Oregon should have a Jackson Pollock hanging on a wall somewhere. I was on a jury committee that chose art for the 1970s addition. The piece we chose had a lot of green in it. If you wanted to, you could interpret it as looking through a forest of trees. Appropriate for Oregon.
Perhaps I'm biased here, (because I'm a 3d artist) I see a great DEPTH to his works like 1A. He did such an excellent job at layering that it weaves in and out of itself. The dance through space is also in the Z. Amazing.
It is absolutely true that professional recognition is often arbitrary. But it is also important to remember that Pollock and the rest of the Abstract Expressionists were not initially embraced by museums. They worked for many years with little recognition. Only later did they become well known, in part because of their impact on other artists and on visual culture more broadly.
Yes affecting culture more broadly I can understand that. But the fact that a person values these paintings at 100's of millions of dollars while many other interesting artists go unrecognized perhaps ones that were affected by this, no matter how much intent was behind a Jackson Pollock its just really hard to wrap your head around the fact that its art the same way as if a artist has a blank canvas and they have a name it gets considered as art and displayed in museums A BLANK CANVAS, or a canvas with one black line. I know even those "paintings" have certain purposeful proportions aesthetic techniques but still its just really hard to wrap my head around it.
Smarthistory. art, history, conversation. I hear you, Sir. I work security at the Anderson collection at Stanford University and they have "Lucifur" which is apparently a very famous Jackson Pollock. It seems to be the centerpiece of the whole exhibit. I know there's something special in it. I want so badly to understand it. Part of me feels it's an agreed-upon delusion like religion or a cult. It's not as great as they say. Another part of me feels I'm plainly ignorant. I identify with poetry as an artistic medium and I often see poetry in painters. I almost see poetry in Pollock's work, but it reminds me of the nonsense poetry of Lewis Carrol. It's cute and all, but has no real meaning. Some nonsense poets can be good, but nowhere near as good as more literal poets. I suppose Pollock started a conversation. That's cute and all, but art has to enlighten. Conversation alone isn't enlightenment, but maybe I just don't see what others see. I'll never forget the name Jackson Pollock, but help me realize why.
To me, Number 1A painting showed that, from chaos, you can pick out order. Although it seems chaotic and random, distinct patterns form. From something so "messy" looking, when viewed close, when you step back you can see an order to it. The paint is sprawled across the canvas, in what is seemingly a disorderly fashion, but it is very well composed in its placement, evenly stroked throughout the canvas in measured and careful spacing. These all have unique dualities within them, it is still, but it moves so quickly, dancing and darting, yet immobile. It is action frozen in time. It is harmonic entropy. Taking aesthetic enjoyment in Number 1A work is an indication of a personality disorder.
Pollack was probably the breast American calligraphers ever produced here. You really sea it in the canvases that came after the drip years. Black on raw canvass is a beautiful thing in the right hands. On a side note my other favorite "raw canvas" painters was Morris Lewis. His "Unfurled" series was really something. I have the book.
To me, this series of paintings always showed that, from chaos, you can pick out order. Although it seems chaotic and random, distinct patterns form. From something so "messy" looking, when viewed close up, when you step back you can see an order to it. The paint is sprawled across the canvas, in what is seemingly a disorderly fashion, but it is very well composed in its placement, evenly stroked throughout the canvas in measured and careful spacing. These all have unique dualities within them, it is still, but it moves so quickly, dancing and darting, yet immobile. It is action frozen in time. It is harmonic entropy.
I'm glad Pollock's work leads to these theoretical discussions. But my issue is the representational nature of his work. It's, I guess, strange to call abstract art representational, but, in my experience, his work is consistently interpreted in regards to his intentions. That is, they represent Pollock. This might sound harsh, but I usually couldn't care less about an artist's intentions. My lit professors sold me on formalism early in my academic studies, &, while I veer away from it sometimes, e.g. so as to explore the way race or gender is cultivated in art, I try to start with formalism & work outward. Again in my experience, most scholars don't employ this type of method with Pollock's work. It's instead all about his subconscious & his life & his process. It's like the work is secondary. His work & how it is interpreted would be a great topic for authorship discourse. Think of Bahktin's "Discourse in the Novel", Barthes' "The Death of the Author", or even Foucault's "What is an Author?" These essays explore the idea of the author, in my opinion, more deeply than Pollock's paintings & yield a more collaborative author, as opposed to a unique individual. I don't know. I could be wrong. But I feel like the evolution of art, especially painting & literature, often seems to be informed not as much by previous schools of art or literature but by previous schools of criticism. Or, the way we receive art distorts the way we create it. That rings v troubling to me.
You cannot read intention in any art work. That is an interpretive fallacy. Impact and process are more useful and telling issues to consider as they are readable. There is nothing representational in Pollock's drip paintings as they are evocative and suggestive. They are a conscious reaction to and departure from objective representation. His paintings have nothing to do with autobiography or positing the artist in the work. His presence in his work is figured in the conceptual, in his execution and artistic judgment/choices. The actual art objects he executed are not "secondary" in that they are the only evidence that art has been attempted or achieved. And, the postmodern concerns of race, sex, gender social class do not apply here as Pollock's drip paintings are about form, visual vocabulary, process, material, application, color theory, genre and tradition. Art that's about art. Truly art for art's sake. This is why formalism is the best hermeneutic means to use when encountering his work.
I was very skeptical of Pollock's paintings but I think I get it now, but correct me if I'm still mistaken. It's like Steve Jobs creating the first iPhone. It was revolutionary at the time. Today 20 companies have a smartphone that mimicked it or improved upon it. But he was the first, and there's a lot to be learned from his original idea. So it's not the mere "product" or final result but what led to the creation of it aka "context." Back in those days, this was as close to a "story in one picture" as you could get. Photographs weren't invented, paintings were not that complex or abstract/ambiguous, and books were monotone not only in terms of pure words but also having to interact. This was a "glance that you could continually keep learning from the more you looked at it." Like a puzzle of sorts I now have an appreciation for pollock's painting. The video felt like 2 minutes long, not 12 minutes. It was *that* engaging. Thanks!
So props on all accounts but photographs were invented! If you look at something like futurism, such as Dynamism of a Dog on a leash, you’ll see how artist experimented with capturing movement. The effects exposure had in photographs was explored in painting until then. Although besides all that, abstract expressionism came in sprinkles throughout other prominent artistic movements and so sometimes they’d be out of place for a while before people grasped the innovativeness of their work! Another example if you want someone goofy to research would be Marcel Duchamp
So glad you’ve a new appreciation for the work, that’s fantastic… Really disturbed that 1948 is soooooooooo far “back in the day” in your mind that there were no photographs 🤯 🤦🏻♀️ Photography began in 1800…
There's a difference between art and artefact. The iphone or any piece of useful technology is not art however aesthetically pleasing some such objects might be. Art opens up something within you if it's good art. If it's great art it opens up a whole world. An artefact is .... useful. Although an iphone may open up worlds (ie present art to you) it is the means or the tool (ie like the canvas, or the paint or brush) it isn't art itself. So if the iphone helps you understand revolutionary, that's fine but that's as far as any comparison should go.
I am a huge fan of SmartHistory, but I have to say, trying to get artistic meaning out of what could be a drop cloth for anybody painting their kitchen is just so Emperor's New Clothes. Sorry.