Pollock and Me

It took me a long time for me to finally "get" modern art, and an even longer time to relate to it and grow fond of it, but somehow I never had that problem with Jackson Pollock. Jackson Pollock was the creator of those daring action drip paintings that are the glory of abstract expressionism which helped make New York the art capital of the world back in the fifties. Various black and white photos show him at work crouched cat-like with arms extended, paint can in one hand, drip stick in the other, methodically laying siege to a canvas rolled out beneath his paint-spattered shoes, ever-present butt dangling from his mouth.

As to why I could relate, perhaps it was the unrecognized madness in me making an unconscious connection to the obvious madness of the artist. The paintings are like a reverse Rorschach test, where nothing bears the faintest semblance to anything we can see, yet each drip, each splatter, individually or as a grouping or as a whole, seems to act as the perfect register to how we think and feel. Moreover, there is an extra-dimensional quality to a Jackson Pollock opus. With all other paintings, your viewing stops at the flat surface of the canvas. Not so with Pollock. You are seemingly drawn into some kind of parallel universe on the other side. Tom Wolfe said you could literally fly a spaceship through the things.

So it was that I rented the video, "Pollock," a low budget movie directed by and starring Eddie Harris in the title role. The film begs an obvious comparison to "A Beautiful Mind", for both are based on true stories of genius and madness. (Both also share a common set of actors in Eddie Harris and Jennifer Connelly.) But whereas John Nash's struggle with schizophrenia is the main story line in "A Beautiful Mind", no mention at all is made of Jackson Pollock's bipolar other than a cryptic aside about his neuroticism. Any behavior that might be taken for bipolar takes place while he is drunk, which happens to be a good deal of the time.

"Fuck Picasso!" he shouts in a alcoholic stupor one minute into the film. Picasso to Jackson Pollock symbolizes everything that is wrong about art - it's not homegrown and it's devoid of any new ideas, with seemingly nowhere to go. Pollock sees himself as the rightful heir to the cubists and surrealists, but not even the bohemian art world of New York in the early forties knows who he is. Nevertheless, he finds a comrade in arms, Lee Krasner played by Marcia Gay Harden, an equally skilled artist who was to Pollock what George Sand was to Chopin - lover, mentor, promoter, keeper, and mother figure. They marry, and she succeeds in securing him a wealthy patron, then gets him out to a farm on Long Island where he can sober up and work in relative peace.

There, in a barn he has fixed up as a studio, he unrolls his canvases, only to paint the type of stuff his contemporaries are painting. The breakthrough he is so desperately seeking continues to elude him. When it finally comes, it is fittingly interspersed with scenes of him in the garden growing vegetables and communing with nature. It is the springtime of the creative soul. "You've cracked it wide open," Lee Krasner says approvingly.

One after another, those lustrous drips would emerge from his humble barn destined eventually for places like MOMA, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Yale University Art Gallery, where a naive youth, profoundly moved in ways he could not describe, would simply gawk in wonder, grateful for the miracle of yet another soul - another Michelangelo, another Beethoven, another Van Gogh, all mad - personally reaching out to him from beyond the grave.

Unfortunately there could be no feel-good ending for this film. One summer night in 1956, a drunken Pollock drove his car off the road, killing him and a woman passenger. He hadn't done a painting in two years. He was 44.

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Pollock: Lustrous drips.