The Champ

Jackson Pollock, at 43 the bush-bearded heavyweight champion of abstract expressionism, shuffled into the ring at Manhattan's Sidney Janis Gallery, and flexed his muscles for the crowd with a retrospective show covering 15 years of his career. The exhibition stretched back to the time when Pollock was imitating imitations of Picasso, reached a climax with the year 1948, when Pollock first conceived the idea of dripping and sloshing paint from buckets onto vast canvases laid flat on the floor. Once the canvases were hung upright, what gravity had accomplished came to look like the outpouring of Herculean energy. Pollock had invented a new kind of decoration, astonishingly vehement.

That was Pollock's one big contribution to the slosh-and-spatter school of postwar art, and friend and foe alike crowded the exhibition in tribute to the champ's prowess. They found a sort of proof of his claims to fame in the exhibition catalogue, which lists no less than 16 U.S. and three European museums that own Pollock canvases. But when it came down to explaining just what Pollock was up to, the critics retreated into a prose that rivaled his own gaudy drippings. Items:

¶ The New York Times regretted that "until psychology digs deeper into the workings of the creative act, the spectator can only respond, in one way or another, to the gruff, turgid, sporadically vital reelings and writhings of Pollock's inner-directed art." ¶ The New York Herald Tribune stated firmly that "whether or not you like Pollock's painting, or think the results no better than color decorations, one must admit the potency of his process." ¶ Art News explained that Pollock's work "sustains the abstract-size scale toward which his vision has probably always been directed. It is a 'cosmic' scale because of the multiple overlay and continuous spiral movement in conjunction with the non-figurativeness." ¶ Arts summed up: "A Pollock painting, charged with his personal mythology, remains meaningless to him for whom Pollock himself is not a tangible reality. As Indian sculpture is related to Vedic and Upanishadic thought, exactly so are Pollock's canvases related to his self. Ignore that relation and they remain anonymous and insignificant." In other words you can't tell very much about the champ without a personal introduction.

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