Beyond the Pasteboard Mask

Anyone who is older than an Eagle Scout can remember the scandal. There was a grown man, a dreamer in denims named Jackson Pollock, tacking canvas to the floor and dribbling paint onto it. That was less than 20 years ago, but now Pollock has been dead nearly eight years, and the time has come for looking at Pollock in retrospect. This week Manhattan's Marlborough-Gerson Gallery provides the opportunity in a show of 150 Pollocks, drawn mainly from his widow's estate. That exhibition is backed by ten early works in the tiny Griffin Gallery.

The Marlborough exhibition (see color pages) shows that Pollock dripped most expressively, but he did much more than drip. The farmer's son from Cody, Wyo., was abstract expressionism's most inventive artist and its unquestioned pioneer of new forms.

Middens of Mythology. "He didn't have a logical mind," said Thomas Hart Benton, who was Pollock's teacher at Manhattan's Art Students League from 1929 to 1931, "but he was a very fine colorist." Perhaps he learned his color and texture from the land, when, he worked as a surveyor's helper; in any case, he learned drawing from anatomy up. He borrowed Benton's feel for the swirly sensuousness of oils, turned to the writhing images of the Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco, loved the sinuous drapery of baroque art. But his greatest influence came from childhood days in the Southwest: sand painting by the Navahos, who sifted colored earths through their fingers to form flat talismans on the ground.

What Pollock missed in logic, he made up in intuition. Surrealism excited him in its reliance on the unconscious, and he underwent Jungian analysis in 1939 to unearth the middens of mythology stored in his mind.

Neon Phalanx. Rejecting the scientific color of the French impressionists, even the acid color of the German expressionists, Pollock explored a clattering spectrum, an American neon intensity of pigments. He used fast-drying enamels, and aluminum paint to produce higher highlights than white could yield. He hit upon the idea that the paint could be the image, not just serve as its representative. He rejected the notion that paintings should have visual climaxes that smack the eye--such as a Mona Lisa in the midst of a landscape --and instead made every square inch of his big works bear up under an equal pressure of paint.

Pollock inverted traditional perspective. Instead of a vanishing point, his paintings advance like a phalanx, enmeshing and engulfing the eye beyond peripheral vision--like CinemaScope. But Pollock believed that art was more than communication--an idea that led him in conversation to emphasize the act of painting more than the outcome. This, in turn, led Critic Harold Rosenberg to dub his style "action painting" --and the phrase stuck.

Pollock strewed oils about, but nothing was an accident. If it was, he cleaned it up. He danced around, and even on top of, his work. In later years, he called his canvases "the arena," a flatland where he encountered himself in a battle between mind and hand, He improvised like a jazz musician, scattering paint off the tip of an overloaded brush in the whiplash rhythm of his choreography. Sometimes he added sand and broken glass for texture. "It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess," he said in 1947. "Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give-and-take."

In 1951, after eight years of one-man shows (and rising prices), Pollock abruptly banished color from his work. He also began weaving images again with his whiplash scatter stroke. There emerged an ascetic calligraphy that, in daring the absurdity of sheer scribble, produced a flowing script that entranced the eye with its imagism.

The Deep. It was never simple for Pollock. Friends saw him, a cigarette smoldering on his lip, emerge from his studio limp as a wet dishrag. In 1953 Pollock took up brushes again, using his drip technique less and less frequently, to produce his last spurt of genius. In Portrait and a Dream, he showed the dichotomy between the monochrome meandering of his somnolent mind and the colorful mask of his own waking self. In Easter and the Totem, he paired a budding lily with a brown bullet totem that juts into the canvas from the left. He painted The Deep, a blinding flutter of butterfly wings which gape apart to reveal a fissure roiling like some hellish furnace. It was a fiery glimmer into the end.

Tortured by self-doubt and the derision of the public press, Pollock gave up the brush for the bottle. His forays from his remote Long Island studio into New York frequently ended in barroom squabbles at the abstract expressionists' hangout, the old Cedar Bar. Painter Barnett Newman tried to keep him out of it. "The.y're laying for you," warned Newman. "You go in there a hero, and you come out a bum." One of Pollock's last major works was 1955's Search, an encyclopedia of his artistry in joyous Christmas colors. Its true thrill is seen best close up: an endless antipasto of textures, oils stained and then swirled into pastes, squiggles and scumbles, flecks and fissures that the viewer's eye wanders among, jerking with the appeal of each tiny element.

Drooling Imitators. On an August night in 1956, near East Hampton, L.I., while his wife, Painter Lee Krasner, was in Europe, Pollock drove off a high-crowned road at top speed, bounced off an embankment and smacked into trees. He and one of two young artist's models in the car were killed.

His widow had a huge boulder set near his grave. On it, a brass plaque is inscribed with the signature that finished his works. His top price while alive, $10,000, soared ten times higher. Imitators flooded the art market with works that drooled more like a hungry walrus than like Pollock's. Few ever managed like Pollock to puncture what his favorite author Herman Melville called the "pasteboard mask" of visible reality, to pierce beyond the surface into the reasoning soul of men's minds.

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