Jackson Pollock: Blue poles

mr. Pollock in your opinion what is the meaning of Modern Art mmm-hmm mother not to me there's nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims the thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves most modern painters work from a different source they work from within in other words expressing the energy the motion and other inner forces I suppose every time you're approached by a layman they ask you how they should look at a Pollock painting or what they look for how do they learn to appreciate Modern Art I think they should not look for butBut passivate and trying to receive what the painting has to offer I think it should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed afternoon wine you may like it or may not but I think it's nice to give it a chance Jackson died in 56 Lupo's is painted in 52 first time I sold out it there with the museum when it was on 54th Street I was kind of wowed the oranges yellows would terrific the white splendid there was an atmosphere gentle and delicate and tough and aggressive and somehow they're all that at the same time that's very unusual it was available for sale for $6,000 by the time I bought it 32,000 so it's a pretty good ride in a couple years according to Lee Pollock I was Jackson's closest friend but where the time he died I was very much projections work in importance I think the apartment it's impossible to have such glory in one place it's more than you can expect anything to be it was there for a while and then it broke up [Music] when you're actually commissioned to create a national art gallery where on earth you start it depends on your ambition it also depends on the sort of funding you had if funds are low and ambition is low then you might make yourself a gallery which is or the local community if you're called the National Gallery in a country such as this I think you really have to work a little bit harder than that and we are attempting to build up a large number of varied collections all on the grounds that there's a great deal of excellent material still available let's bring it into the country James Mollison the first director at the National Gallery in Australia and the then Prime Minister of Economy in 1973 decided to go for broke to make a purchase that was 2 million American dollars for one painting it's the most expensive American painting to that time it created so much controversy because Australian taxpayers thought it was a waste of money with few exceptions it was negative media coverage either against the painting or against the National Gallery or against the government of Gough Whitlam in those days 2 million American dollars was 1.3 million Australian and the Metropolitan Museum that year bought a Rembrandt for 2 million American dollars and we bought a very large very splashy very abstract painting for the same price everybody can see how valuable and important a Rembrandt painting is most people in Australia did not really approve of abstract painting because they thought it was a sort of con I thought we were being taken for a ride by these slick New York art dealers Robert Hughes was a great fan of Pollock he was an Australian artist or a known critic he'd gone to New York in the 1960s and he was strongly recommended that we buy it because of Pollock's importance in the 20th century your eye travels into that exquisite web of paint as though you were pushing your way through a forest discovering layer after layer of space and detail it's a strictly organized as a you cello the formal minuet of energy perhaps it's that play off between the huge size of the canvas and the care with which Pollock inflicted every inch of it that makes blue pole so absorbing there are critics quite eminent ones who dislike it because it's not flat not a continuous all-over pattern others disagree and I'm one of them in my opinion this is one of the two or three supreme works of Pollock's career a feat of lyric invention [Music] Pollock is sort of from nowhere he's from Cody Wyoming and in the 1920s and 30s in the New York art world people weren't from Cody Wyoming they were from Armenia Russia Holland France Germany all the expatriates that fled during the pogroms Stalin and of course World War two there was a sense of America as the great site for the future of art all the bad news in Europe transferred into good news for all of the expatriates and then all of the young artists in the US who felt like here was a torch that had been passed for them to be the next great Cultural Revolution after Paris American artists have to deal with the supernova named Picasso how do you get around something so epically huge that's happened just before you artists have had to face this before in the past think of Michelangelo how do you follow that act you ape it and then you have to change it Willem de Kooning famously said Pollock broke the ice [Music] what Pollock did was deploy something that had been there from the beginning from cave paintings the drip but no one thought to look at it use it or to even count it as art he's making paintings in a new way he's putting them on the floor the brush is never touched to the canvas instead there's a physical dance around the canvas there is no perspective in Pollock's painting there is no narrative and pollux painting it all happens at once this is a breakthrough of kind of epic proportions you may not like what you're seeing as Pollock but what Pollock did is actually jump categories he made something that was a painting that did not look like a painting at the time I want to remind you going back to the caves the first paintings ever made were often made with paint like this and you would move your hand away and that physical action that physical dance left the impression of where you were [Music] mr. parks the classical artists had a world to express and they did so by representing the objects in that world why doesn't the modern artists do the same thing mmm the modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera in the photograph it seems to me that the modern painter can i express this age the airplane the atom bomb the radio the old forms of the renaissance or of any other past culture each age finds its own technique I happen to find ways that are different from the usual techniques of painting I'm able to be me to be more free to move about the canvas with greater ease [Music] there is this desire on his part to just be utterly blunt almost as if painting were an animal act like breathing or moving then some kind of intellectual labor this is where the idea of him as a West Coast cowboy figure comes in the cliche about Pollock is that he's more than brawn than the brain but that's a myth in its own way and certainly he was very well-read psychoanalysis whether you're talking Freud what they're talking Union ideas all of this was so current in New York at that time theories of the unconscious this was all thinking and writing that he would have been exposed to around of downtown New York so he was very well aware but like any great figure he translated it into his own form of art he didn't illustrate these ideas in a way that you could then explain his work through this breakthrough is huge when you think about everything that follows Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists space is now pretty much gone you have Andy Warhol just telling people to make silk screens you have Jasper Johns repainting targets and numbers you have Robert Rauschenberg painting on beds think about that the famous abstract expressionist Barnett Newman said of their time we are making it out of ourselves that meant they wanted nothing of European painting they wanted to leave it behind and start anew [Music] tell me what was it about it that you liked so much that you lack sufficiently to want to buy it or the fact that it's absolutely central to the abstract expressionist movement and also that of Pollock's paintings it's one that is absolutely totally resolved every part of it is painted and the alterations to the surface of the painting I've never been commented on by anybody to the present time many of those apparently irrational loops in the picture are in fact altered in color from the color that was originally trickled onto the surface of the paint now it's a contrived picture in every way it is certainly the most important American picture perhaps in all time [Music] it's one of the few paintings in the history of the world that nearly brought down a government Whitlam was a reforming prime minister a progressive person the Labour government was very important after 23 years of Conservative government and in a way the people who objected to abstract art were tended to be traditionalists and the people who championed it tended to be progressive the split down the middle was that the progressive people who wanted an Australian only culture not realizing how regressive this is you've got to have both and Pollock provided something new and different and exciting it was first seen as an anti Australian purchase a cultural cringe that we didn't value Australian art enough but in effect what it's done is brought Australian art into the same range as international art so that when you come to the National Gallery when you go to any of the museums in Australia you see the world through Australian eyes and that's what blue poles did was to make Australia and representative of international and American and modern culture [Music] it shows the extraordinary power of art to educate an entire nation to change the visual literacy of a country that of course would have to hate it when they first saw it nearly a week for each layer to dry it put Australia on the map not for artistic or cultural reasons which it should have but because it was so expensive at the time now of course you wouldn't get two centimeters of blue poles for two million dollars would have to say this has been one of the most embarrassing moments of my life because politicians and even statesmen constantly call to account to explain themselves and to express regret that's difficult for some or even to apologize but I can't remember any occasion when a politician or even a statesman has been asked to say I'm right [Music] one thing that was said to me by Jim Allison I found very persuasive that Australia did not want to see itself as a white Bastion in a yellow world but wanted to be part of it the Pacific community and I thought of how Jackson had left New York I'm going out to live on his own how the kind of painting he did was totally going out on his own how he did a shows he he did a shows regularly he hung his stuff up took whatever beating or approval occasionally that he would take and I thought that he would like that did he have any concept at all of the value of his paintings not in terms of like what been paid for blue pearls today no I don't think even he could have conceived that you must remember that blue poles in his lifetime was sold for $6,000 and that was a high at the time for a Pollock what my Jackson Pollock have said to the thought of two million dollars for I think he did quite a jig to that one hey I could see I have I don't you know it's it's you know it's something I can't quite answer I think it would amuse him no and I mean if you think of what Jackson did he's made this museum in this case a nation's life the financial is a record in a way of the world opinion Canberra bought the painting and I was two million one hundred thousand and now priceless is the word [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: National Gallery of Australia

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Id: GMgz-p0jjBI

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 19 2020