Words

A Jackson Pollock painting is apt to resemble a child's contour map of the Battle of Gettysburg (see cut). Nevertheless, he is the darling of a highbrow cult which considers him "the most powerful painter in America" (TIME, Dec. 1, 1947). So what was the cautious critic to write about Pollock's latest show in a Manhattan gallery last week? The New York Times's Sam Hunter covered it this way:

"[The] show . . . certainly reflects an advanced stage of the disintegration of modern painting. But it is disintegration with a possibly liberating and cathartic effect and informed by a highly individual rhythm . . . At every point of concentration of these high-tension moments of bravura phrasing . . . there is a disappointing absence of resolution in an image or pictorial incident, for all their magical diffusion of power . . . Certainly Pollock has carried the irrational quality of picture making to one extremity . . . And the danger for imitators in such a directly physical expression of states of being rather than of thinking or knowing is obvious . . . What does emerge is the large scale of Pollock's operations . . ."

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