Jackson Pollock
This work needs one more edit/pass at least
Pollock in his studio
There is value in articulating what you think is working in a piece of art and what is not. No artwork has ever existed that is beyond critique.
Arguments like these are not things you “win.” They are matters of opinion. The process of engaging with the work and explaining your reaction to it is what matters. Explaining why it resonates with you, what it makes you feel or think. That process is what forms personal taste.
Knowledge also gives you context. It allows you to say: “This feels derivative because the artist is closely imitating someone else’s work without adding anything new.”
Or: “This work is interesting because the artist is responding to earlier ideas and transforming them into something distinct.”
As a group, we humans can let our check books back our opinions. In the art world, dollar amounts often become shorthand for an enthusiastic approval by at least one person. A single painting by an artist starts selling for $20 million, then $50 million, then $100 million, and the price begins to behave like a verdict. The market tells us that a work matters, but not why. It confers importance while relieving everyone of the burden of explanation.
This has become a problem. When people who don’t know anything about art history look at a Pollock painting, they are going to ask “Why is that painting made by a man drizzling paint onto unstretched canvas selling for $100 million?”
Honestly… I have NEVER heard anyone give a good answer to this question. I have read and listened to a lot of art criticism over the years and when ever I hear someone talk about a Pollock painting, they start to describe how much control he had over the dripping paint and how only someone with a skilled eye could drip paint like Pollock.
Bollocks. Let me try to answer this question below.
17A 1948 - $200 million private sale
How to Think About a Pollock Painting
Pollock is an important historical figure. There are a handful of moments in Western art when the conversation changes. In the twentieth century, three of these moments come to mind for me: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, Duchamp’s Fountain in 1917, and Pollock’s drip paintings from the late 1940s.
Each of these works helped rupture an idea of what art was supposed to be. Picasso started down the path of Cubism. Duchamp added a dimension to all artwork by welcoming Conceptual thought. Pollock turned painting into an arena of action and gesture with Abstract Expressionism.
With Greenberg, an important art critic from the day, and the mythos created around a rag tag group of NYC painters, Pollock’s work became attached to larger questions about freedom, American cultural power, and the role of the artist after World War II. Modernism increasingly treated mastery with suspicion, as though the skill to paint a recognizable subject somehow contaminated authenticity.
The cultural influence of Pollock is undeniable. By the 1950s and 60s, art schools were producing wave after wave of abstract expressionist painters working in a visual language that often felt interchangeable. Looking through art magazines from the period, you encounter endless variations of work following the same strict Clement Greenberg guidelines.
To me, this American ‘freedom’ that Pollock represented created a self governing movement that was incredibly rigid, stifling, and long-lasting. It reached a point where artists such as Richard Diebenkorn and Philip Guston visibly wrestled with the dominance of Abstract Expressionism. Both moved in and out of figuration at different points in their careers, and Guston in particular faced intense criticism when he returned to cartoonish figurative imagery in the late 1960s. Within parts of the contemporary art world, figuration had become so unfashionable that people questioned whether this kind of painting could still be considered serious art.
That is the influence these Pollock paintings.
What Pollocks Paintings Represent:
What still fascinates me about Pollock is not the paintings, but the photographs and films documenting him at work. Pollock circling the canvas with a cigarette hanging from his mouth became one of the defining visual myths of twentieth-century art. That may be Pollock’s real achievement, he helped create a new image of the artist: the painter as existential performer, the canvas as receipt.
You also have to consider what Duchamp did with Conceptual art. He brought a urinal as his submission to an art show and because people took him seriously, an entire new way of thinking about art was created. We can’t fully understand the impact of that moment in time because we have all lived our entire lives in a post-Duchamp world. Essentially he was saying that ideas could be art and that something like a mass produced urinal could represent that idea.
What Pollock did was create a series of drip paintings that all signified a new painterly movement with rigid standards. These ‘standards’, these ideas influenced the entire western art world for almost a century.
Cliff’s Verdict on Pollock:
(Pollock is a hack and my opinion wont change)
Pollock matters. That is not really in dispute. His drip paintings helped alter the course of twentieth-century art, and the major canvases deserve to be treated as historically significant objects.
What I struggle with is the insistence that these paintings necessarily reward prolonged aesthetic contemplation independent of the mythology surrounding them. Outside of what they represent conceptually, I find the paintings themselves to be far less compelling than the cultural transformation they helped authorize.
I also struggle with the idea that purchasing one Pollock drip painting means purchasing that single transformative moment in art history. There is one Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. There is one original urinal represented by Duchamp’s Fountain. But there are roughly 160 Pollock poured or drip works from the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the market seems willing to treat each as though it represents the whole historical event.
If I walked into someone’s house and saw a $100,000,000 bill framed on the wall, I would stop and contemplate the implications of that for a minute. But I would not be contemplating the beauty of the bill. I would be contemplating the fact that someone had enough money to turn money itself into décor.
That is how these Pollock sales feel to me. The painting is still there. The history is still there. But at a certain price, the object starts to function less like an artwork and more like a framed certificate of wealth. The drip painting becomes a receipt for cultural significance.