Jackson Pollock Small Poured Works 1943-50 (V2)

hi I'm Helen Harrison I'm the director of the Pollock Krasner house & Study Center and I'd like to take you on a tour of our current exhibition Jackson Pollock small pored works 1943 to 1950 this is Jackson Pollock's home he and Lee Krasner lived here from 1945 until his death on August 11th 1956 50 years ago but this is the first time that we have exhibited a group of his paintings when Lee Krasner died in 1984 she left the property to become a museum but not of their art this is a museum of their lives and of their working environment but we are now able to include this exhibition on our roster because of the commemoration of this anniversary so let me show you around and let me explain the exhibition to you we're starting over here with a very early poured work it's actually a screen print and it was made by Pollock in the winter of 1943 as a holiday card they used to send out the cards as sort of as a New Year gesture rather than a Christmas card because Lee was Jewish and Jackson was not religious so for them a holiday card commemorating the new year was more appropriate and as you can see in this image what he's done is pour and drizzle and drape the liquid material onto the screen and then printed it and this is probably his very first fully poured composition he was experimenting with the technique in the early 1940s under the influence of surrealism and in our exhibition catalog our guest curator Frances O'Connor has analyzed the purpose the impulse behind this technical development which Pollock was working on in perfecting throughout the early to mid 1940s and really reached its its apotheosis in around 1947 but in Pollock's case it was really a question of getting the kind of image he wanted using whatever technique came to hand what ever worked for him and he himself said it and I'm quoting him now it doesn't matter how the paint is put on as long as something is being said technique is just a means of arriving at a statement so it's the finished product itself rather than the means to arrive at it that's important and that was important to him but you'll see in the exhibition a variety of different techniques not only the pouring but combined with other methods of applying the paint that really gives you a well-rounded picture of the variety and the amazing inventiveness of his his imagery so let's go on into the main room this is the living dining area of the house and this is where Jackson and Lee entertained their guests this is where they had their artwork on exhibit of course now we have just Pollock's work nothing of Lee's in the house at the moment but we do have 13 of his paintings from this particular period 43 to 50 and one of the earliest ones is right in the center of that wall a beautiful blue and green painting that's called composition with pouring too now this picture shows you a combination of techniques where Pollock has evidently painted on a conventional canvas with a brush and he has brushed in a kind of flowing image underneath and almost a little I shaped down here with some eyelashes so there are intimations of figures or creatures of some kind and then on the top he has overlaid it with this rather beautiful filigree of poured paint you can see the black enamel and also some off-white some kind of cream color enamel that he's used to just enhance and enrich the image so that it looks like it's floating and here he is doing this kind of experimental work in 1943 very early on and it shows you a kind of transitional quality in his work that he was experimenting with at that time then we get a little bit later over here this mole by the way this beautiful blue and green painting was lent to us by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and they've lent two pictures to this show we have a combination of private and museum collections who have been very very generous with us just for this special occasion so let's go over and have a look at this one this is really an amazing painting because like the little screen print this is entirely poured there's no brushwork in this picture at all and you can see a beautiful layering here where he started out with a kind of Indian red color and then he has done a white layer and then a black layer over that and the three layers all kind of meld in together and the more you look at it the more it begins to get dimensional begins to look like a nest or a web it's actually called freeform and that's a very good description of it was painted in 1946 and this is also a fairly early example of a completely poured composition now maybe I should mention the fact that a lot of people call these drip paintings and there has been some controversy over whether drip is accurate whether poured is perhaps a better description and of course pouring implies a little more control drip sounds a little bit arbitrary like a dripping faucet you know something that you really can't control but pouring like you would pour maple syrup over a waffle you know you kind of make a design there and it's a continuous flow drip sounds like the paint is just plopping and of course that's not the case here at all as you can see this is a beautifully controlled pour and he has woven the different layers together and this is important to notice because it is by no means just a random blot and pollux development of this technique took several years he really worked very hard on this and ultimately of course he created his masterpieces using this technique the large pored paintings that you see at the Metropolitan Museum for example the Museum of Modern Art the Guggenheim all the major collections around the world but these paintings that we have here are all quite small I don't think we've got one that's bigger than 25 or 26 inches in any direction and the bulk of Pollock's work actually is quite small the large paintings account for only about 10% of his output in painting and the rest of them are small to medium sized canvases and of course it's perfect for this domestic environment where we have small rooms and small spaces and of course most of the paintings that we have in the show were created right here on this property in Pollock's studio either here in the house or out in the barn let's take a look at another one that's a very interesting one over here this is one of only two paintings but Pollock did using liquid wax or encaustic as it's called this material is it's almost what you call it like a Crayola colored wax a very liquid material when it's melted and what he's done is to melt it and use it as if it were paint first he has melted it very very thin so that it creates a kind of translucent background on the canvas and then he's overlaid that with the strokes of color similar to what he would have done using liquid enamel paint but this is liquid wax he we don't know how he came to experiment with it but there are only two of these paintings that he ever did one of them is in a private collection this one belongs to the Hirshhorn Museum and they've lent it to us but for some reason he decided not to pursue this material maybe it did not give him the result that he wanted but for whatever reason it's something that he just tried and and then abandoned but it is a fascinating example and it's beautifully layered it's got lots of different colors and very very interesting textures and this is one of the highlights of the exhibition our visitors have really enjoyed seeing this one and it's very very seldom seen a lot of people don't even know that these small works exist they think of his work as being predominantly very very large but in fact that's not the case and that's one of the things that this exhibition is illustrating also he mixed his media quite a bit we've got one over here that shows you his combination of oil paint and water-based paint what he's done is to create a several layers of enamel in typical colors that he used frequently the yellow the kind of blueish green here the bright red and then and and the white of course he has done his final layer in this very chalky looking paint this black paint here this is actually a water-based paint like a gouache perhaps or tempera paint and it has a totally different texture it reflects it doesn't reflect the light at all it absorbs it whereas the other areas are very shiny very reflective so it creates a kind of visual tension in the work that's kind of interesting rather unusual but we do see it again in another of the paintings that we have in the show as well so this is painted on paper so the paper has absorbed and held held the material but it doesn't give it any texture whereas the encaustic painting you could very strongly you can see the texture of the canvas and that adds another dimension to it oh and as long as we're in this area let me point out our architectural model this is a concept for an ideal museum in which to exhibit Pollock's work it was originally designed in 1949 by the architect Peter Blake and he made the model as a demonstration of how he felt Pollock's work would be best appreciated in a building that has no walls the artwork itself would act as the wall so the paintings would become murals and he proposed this to Jackson and Jackson Pollock said okay but he didn't really get involved in the design however after the design was done Peter Blake said to him you know I think we need something three-dimensional to punctuate the space how about doing some little sculptures for it and Jackson said okay and Peter thought that he was going to make clay models which he had been playing around with clay a bit and in fact he made these beautiful wire sculptures that are like three dimensional versions of his two-dimensional paintings and then Peter said that he felt that Jackson had approved of his design now the original model was shown at the Betty Parsons gallery in 1949 and it actually did get Pollock a commission to paint a mural for a private home but the building itself was never built it's completely impractical Peters idea was to have a 50-foot sheet of plate glass for the roof but obviously that was not going to be built so it came back to the studio the original model that is and it just sat there and Jackson would look at it all the time it was sitting on his work table and this little painting right here the reproduction was in the background when he was painting the really really large canvases that made him famous in 1950 autumn rhythm one number 31 lavender mist number 32 1950 these were the giant canvases that we think of as representing his work but in the background was this little painting which has the same strokes the same shapes the same forms as you find in the large ones and this is one of the points that our guest curator Frances O'Connor wanted to make that the scale of the work is what's important rather than its size the relative proportion of the format of the work to the shapes within it that this does not vary that the format for whatever the size of the format regardless of that the scale of the work is the same so you have a sense of monumentality even in the tiny pieces and of course this is only a reproduction but the actual painting isn't that much larger it's quite a small work so it was something that Pollock constantly referred to as he was developing his large-scale compositions so it's a kind of a fascinating phenomenon and we've got some other lovely pieces over here I'll show you my favorite can't come with me everyone has a favorite of course and it's hard for me to choose because I'm lucky enough to have 13 of them to look at but this one I I'm always drawn back to partly because of its colors this beautiful kind of pearly color and also because of its texture you have a wonderful contrast again between the matte finish of the background paint and the very shiny enamel paint that kind of jumps out at you particularly when the light is on it like this and it really gives you a nice sense of contrast and it makes it seem very lively but also because the shapes look a little bit like dancing figures a lot of Pollock's pour'd works although they seem at first to be completely abstract like not referring to anything in nature actually do have these nature references coded within them and when you look carefully at this you can see heads and arms and limbs and again very abstracted but it's suggestive and for each person each person takes from it whatever they want you know there's a lot of leeway and and Pollak himself encouraged that when people asked him how to interpret his work he said why don't you just take what it has to give look at it passively and enjoy it the way you would enjoy looking at the landscape or looking at a flower just get what it what you can from it so for hit from his point of view it really wasn't important if you if you understood it you know if you if you've got it but if there was something there for you you would get it it's just a question of looking and enjoying so for me this is the one of course I sit right across the room from it all day long and I get to look at it all day so I can study it and and really contemplate and that's of course the beauty of having these works here that you really don't appreciate them in reproduction they don't reproduce well because you lose the texture and you lose the contrast that you get with these different varieties of technical paint manipulation here you've got conventional painting he's painted in a background he's actually worked into it with the end of his brush or some other hard implement and then over the top he's created this beautiful filigree of semi figurative imagery so it's it's just a stunning picture and it's got an awful lot going on in it so I enjoy looking at it all day long let's go over here and take a look at a couple of others oh here's here's an interesting one this could really be called a flow painting because you can see how the paint has been applied while it's still liquid the two different colors the the predominant silver and black have kind of melted together and that's done by pouring wet on wet so that you get this interaction of the material and then at a certain point he's worked into some of the color with like extra paint so he's made a kind of impasto effect that really gives you added texture added dimension and to me it has almost a flower garden look to it and I would say very strongly influenced by surrealism this is a 1949 painting and early in Pollock's career he was very interested in the effects that the Surrealists were getting by using chance and trying to delve into their unconscious for inspiration so it was really a question of no preconceptions no preliminary sketches or any kind of pre-planning you kind of had to start off and do something and then see where it took you let your unconscious just kind of lead you in whatever direction it did now sometimes it would leave you up a blind alley but sometimes it would lead you to places that you would never expected to go if you'd thought about it ahead of time but that doesn't mean that there wasn't any thought involved because once you've made your first mark then you've got to make a decision about what's the next mark to make but it's a little bit like jazz you get you start off with your tune and then you improvise based on that tune and you could go off into the stratosphere but you'll always come back again you'll always come around and kind of finish it off and that's what Pollock did he would start and go to wherever it led him and then he would wrap it all up and this one I think really does have that to that that feeling to it and one of the surrealist whose work he admired was a man named Andre masong who did very much this type of technique using the impasto using this flowing imagery and I think that this is a Jackson must have had a little bit of Nassau in the back of his mind when he was working on this remember this was someone who was not out in left-field his work was very much part of the tradition of Western painting and he was well aware of his predecessors and he also was very interested in Native American art he really felt that that type of symbolism was very meaningful and almost Universal in its appeal and he was also very strongly influenced by Picasso whose work he admired very much and the Mexican muralists whose work he also admired so you can see quite a lot of synthesizing going on in his early work and eventually when he came into his own he just had absorbed it all and put it all together in a very original and novel way let's go have a look at a couple of others we've got in here this is their parlor this is the room where they kept their book collection and their record collection Pollock was a jazz fan and so was Lee as a matter of fact they both loved jazz his taste was a little bit more New Orleans ragtime Dixieland the early jazz she liked the more font guard bebop and progressive jazz Miles Davis the modern jazz quartet those are her records but we have records that belong to both of them right here and the record player on which they played them which is vintage about 1954 and it still works it's really quite a remarkable instrument of course it's fun for the kids to see because they don't understand you know what this thing is their parents have to explain it to them but we also have their 33 and a third records that belong to Lee and some early seventy-eights that belong to Jackson and on the wall in this room we have a very nice painting that was lent to us by the Everson's ium which is a combination again of water-based and oil-based paint painted on masonite which is a hard kind of composition board with a red background and you may have noticed we've got a couple of paintings here with red backgrounds that was one of Pollock's favorite colors he liked working on red which is quite unusual because it's such a bright insistent color that sometimes it can seem a little overwhelming but he knew how to tame it he knew how to get it to lie down and behave or how to come forward and really jazz up a picture and this one I think is a particularly jazzy one it's nice that it's near the record collection because it's got that kind of feeling about it you can see he's used some yellow paint to punctuate it and some beautiful black and blue strokes to just kind of give it a rhythmic feeling I think it's really a stunning painting over here is another layered picture again a red background but this time very pale very stained and then he's covered it with some very thin colors like a wash of yellow and a little bit of a brownish black it's it's very subdued and then as like as the coup de Gras he's put on this incredible layer of silver paint it's actually aluminum radiator paint and it just jumps right out at you it's it's really got a lot of punch this painting was part of a series that he did on one long strip of canvas and he did little vignettes one after another and then he cut it up and he mounted them separately so this is one of them and it's just just really a knockout little picture I think now this was painted in 1950 so this kind of brings us to the end of the show chronologically here we have another early work this is a work on paper and in this case instead of putting silver on top of the image as he did in the 1950 picture he has put it underneath he has painted the paper with a kind of silver ink wash and then put different colors of ink and watercolor over it so that it shimmers underneath and here's another example of his work that's influenced by surrealism you can see these kind of eyes shapes which are very Universal symbolism and a dog or a hyena or some kind of creature down at the bottom that seems to be emerging from this miasmic dark cloud that's surrounding it this is related to a painting that he did in 1943 called the she-wolf which is in the Museum of Modern Art's collection and it was the first purchase of his work by an institution and it really helped his career a lot so at this time he was clearly thinking of these creatures these animal forms in a very symbolic context and this although it's very much smaller than the she-wolf which is though I don't know about five or six feet wide this has the same kind of force the same power as that much larger painting the property is owned and administered by the Stony Brook foundation of Stony Brook University as a historic site and a research center and part of the research center is their book collection we have all of the catalogues and all of the reading matter that Lee and Jackson collected during their lives together and here it is this material is what they read for pleasure also their reference material things that interested them submissions that they've been to and collected the catalogs from and up on the top shelf it's a series of green books they're kind of ragged a little bit dog-eared but this is published by the Smithsonian a collection of work about Native American art it's a very comprehensive collection and many many illustrations and as I mentioned earlier Pollock was very interested in Native American art and some of the motifs from those books found their way into his paintings in the 1940s before he really started getting involved with the poring technique so the symbol paintings the things that he did the pictographic works from the early and mid 40s contain a lot of Native American references and I think that that was a very very important influence on him after Jackson and Lee moved out here was when he was really able to let his imagination run wild something about the the natural environment here the sounds in the grass the leaves the rhythms and energy of nature found its way into his work in a way that it had not done when he was working in the city and I think that the isolation out here was helpful to him as well because he was able to put aside some of the influences that he'd felt so strongly in New York the New York art world of course was at that time a hotbed of discussion and experimentation but in his case I think he had to break away from it before he could really find himself as an artist and certainly as you look out to our beautiful surroundings here we've got the salt marsh the water of a cabana Creek flowing gently behind the house the beautiful grasses and the trees and the bushes and everything that you see really has that rhythm that energy that is also reflected in his work in a very abstract way I certainly am NOT trying to make Jackson Pollock out to be a landscape painter but many of the titles of his pieces refer to natural phenomena such as sounds in the grass eyes in the heat earthworms croaking movement comet vortex phosphorescence these are things that you would see in this environment and that you will also see reflected in his work people sometimes ask me why we don't have that an exhibition of Pollock's work all the time and the reason is because Lee Krasner left what remained of his work and her work to a foundation that gives grants to artists the Pollock Krasner foundation they also give us a grant and they are the very generous sponsors of this exhibition together with the Stony Brook University Research Foundation so they're really the ones who've made this possible but of course it wouldn't be possible at all without the generous lenders the Museum of Modern Art the Hirshhorn Museum Wellesley College University of Rochester ete verson museum and a number of private collectors who've just really gone out of their way to make it a wonderful commemoration of Pollock's life and work this exhibition is unique to the house it's here for six weeks it opened on August 3rd and it will be on view through September 17th and for this special occasion we're going to be open an extra day each week during the run of the show we normally open on Thursdays Fridays and Saturdays but for this occasion will be open Thursdays through Sundays we have tours by appointment in the morning and you need to book that ahead of time and pay for it ahead of time so you call our telephone number six three one three two four four nine to nine to do that or if you come in the afternoons between 1:00 and 5:00 its general admission there's no appointment required and you can take a self-guided tour but either way you will see everything you'll see this show and you'll also see the studio in which most of the artwork was created

Channel: VVHTV Hamptons TV

Views: 34,234

Keywords: Jackson, Pollock, Poured, Drip, Abstract, Painting, SUNY, Stony, Brook, University, VVH-TV, Schimizzi, Hamptons, Genius, Krasner

Id: l_jgKkP96LI

Length: 29min 28sec (1768 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 28 2008