Big and Bold as It Should Be

Ground zero at the Museum of Modern Art’s must-see retrospective of paintings by Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), which opened Sunday, comes two-thirds of the way through the show. There’s a place to stand that you wish could be frozen in time, kept intact forever.

At this remarkable spot, scanning from the left far across the room, you see the great expanse of elbowing forms in black paint on bare canvas, “Number 32, 1950.” Next, on a free-standing wall perpendicular to it, comes the commanding lyrical majesty of “Autumn Rhythm,” all 17 feet of its visually encompassing width engaged in an energetic tug-of-war with its looping, mostly vertical calligraphy. Behind and to the right, the perfectly named “Lavender Mist” opens into an impossibly deep fog of space, its gentle halations of pale color seeming to tremble at the perpetual brink of dispersal. Finally, rounding out the sequence at the far right is MOMA’s own magnificent web of thrashing paint, “One: Number 31, 1950.”

All four of these monumental paintings date from 1950, Pollock’s crowning year. In 1947 he’d begun in earnest to employ the radically new drip method he and other artists had toyed with for many years that would forever distinguish his art, but by 1950 he’d cranked up both the scale and--just as important--a sense of galvanic ambition. The result was the first epic Modern art made by an American painter.

Key to the achievement was Pollock’s precedent-busting decision to break direct contact with the canvas. Rather than applying a brush loaded with paint to a prepared and waiting surface, as artists had done for centuries, he instead drew in the air above a canvas laid out on the floor. The black, white, silver, yellow or other colored enamel streaming from his brush fell to earth in a tangled skein of flowing pigment.

The paintings, subsequently stretched and hung vertically on the wall, pull you in close to marvel at (and puzzle over) how they were made, and then push you away with a false promise of satisfying your desire to take it all in. They feel both carefully choreographed and haphazard, muscular and lyrical, redundant and imaginative, forceful yet impossibly delicate.

What they do not feel is transcendent. Pollock’s drip paintings were saddled from the start with competing claims of absolutist authority--of “the triumph of American painting” as a fated event embodied in his intuitive quest for spiritual truths. Those triumphalist fantasies were eventually swept away for good by the gruesome betrayals of the Vietnam era, only to be replaced with similarly vulgar theories of State Department manipulation of the artist’s reputation calculated to match America’s global dominance after World War II.

If Pollock’s greatest paintings, circa 1948 to 1950, do not feel transcendent, they resonate nonetheless with the conflict between an aching desire to transcend and the literalized, bluntly material failure to accomplish it. A monumental poignancy radiates from these big, exciting pictures, which show us an artist insistently demanding that painting make good on its modern promise of secular redemption--a promise it finally could not keep.

This is why Pollock, despite the shocking brevity of his career, remains an artist central to the developing maturity of American painting after World War II. And his kick-out-the-jams inventiveness did in fact, as Willem de Kooning claimed, “break the ice” for American art.

Everyone who cares about Modern art knows at least the bare bones of Pollock’s story--or even the detailed one, as told with the compelling sweep of a Great American Novel in a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1989 biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Remarkably, though, there hasn’t been a substantive opportunity in the United States to review his crucial career in more than 30 years (the last American retrospective, also at MOMA, was in 1967; an incomplete 1982 survey in Paris did not travel here)--a period in which painting itself came under considerable challenge in the art world.

From Wyoming to Mt. Washington

Born in the hardscrabble town of Cody, Wyo., the youngest of five brothers, Pollock ended up at Manual Arts High School in L.A., later spending time among the Native American artifacts at the venerable Southwest Museum on Mt. Washington. Moving to New York at 18, he studied painting with America’s favorite artist-jingoist, Thomas Hart Benton; came increasingly under the avant-garde sway of European Surrealism, with its universalizing dream of uncovering a visual Esperanto of primal mythology; grew further attached, as the Great Depression segued into global war, to the heroic aspirations of the Mexican muralists (especially Siqueiros) he’d known since his Southern California youth; began to wrestle in his art with the gigantic precedent of Picasso; and, finally, took solace in the unwavering support of the gifted painter Lee Krasner, whom he married in 1945.

He also drank. A lot.

Pollock has a reputation as a legendary alcoholic--famously urinating in the Park Avenue fireplace of his patron, Peggy Guggenheim, during a cocktail party, and drunk behind the wheel of his convertible on the night of Aug. 11, 1956, when he smashed into a tree and was instantly killed. But looking at the show suggests that he’d be better remembered for a stretch of legendary sobriety.

Pollock stopped drinking in 1948, only picking up the bottle again just three days before his triumphant show opened at Betty Parsons Gallery in late November 1950. (All the pictures visible from the MOMA retrospective’s ground zero were in Parsons’ show.) Prior to that two-year period of intensely inventive productivity, Pollock had been a skillful painter of fairly standard Surrealist cliches, sometimes given a distinctive twist of American iconography; after, his art skidded rapidly into the dumper.

This large (106 paintings, 49 works on paper) and definitive retrospective, which will not travel, was astutely organized by MOMA curator Kirk Varnedoe with Pepe Karmel. They’ve installed the work spaciously and at a leisurely pace on the museum’s third floor, no doubt with the likelihood of vast crowds in mind. One result is a heightened sense of expansive yet bodily scaled rooms, which is just right for the radical new space found in Pollock’s all-over canvases. Think of them as domestic murals, with all the inherent contradictions such a term might imply.

Vast Survey, Small Studio

The show is divided into three sections. Spanning barely 20 years, it reveals an artist covering vast territory between small, anecdotal pictures that describe American history and big, immersive abstractions that succeeded in making it.

First comes the darkly tentative, soon voracious early work, which skitters about gobbling up Benton, tribal art, Siqueiros, Surrealism and the rest. There’s a blunt crudeness to pictures like “Guardians of the Secret” and “She-Wolf” (both 1943), in which the glancing sparks set off by more effete automatic drawing found in French Surrealism are swamped by conflagrations of color, booming line and dramatic, fragmentary figures.

Next are the full-fledged experiments with the drip technique, culminating in the crescendo of 1950. At the end of this section is a helpful reconstruction of the surprisingly small studio on Long Island where Pollock painted. Two films and 23 of the famous photographs by Hans Namuth of Pollock at work or posing with his work are shown here.

Finally, in three quick rooms comes the decline and fall. The last six years are represented by just 11 works, including the black paintings made with a squirting turkey baster and the clotted “Blue Poles” (1952), his final drip painting.

This nearly flawless show brings back Pollock with a vengeance. Notably, he has arrived just as a large and ambitious younger generation of artists has returned to painting with alacrity. Timing isn’t everything, but here it may turn out to be a lot.

* “Jackson Pollock, a Retrospective,” Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., New York, (212) 708-9750, through Feb. 2.