Desire to Create New Techniques

In interpretations, an artist’s painting technique is correlated and analyzed with a finished artwork. A technique is an activity per-formed step by step, and it helps to understand the subject matter of the unconscious in the process of art making. Pollock’s technique is called action painting because of the way the artist’s brushstrokes and other paint marks seemed to be a record of his activity on the canvas.

The painting conveys the energy of how it was done, and the natural property of lines will express the overall meaning. Pollock opens up a universe of ideas to be explored, offering viewers the possibility of drawing their own conclusions (Yenawine 1991, 113).

Pollock wanted to reach a deeper level of consciousness in his painting process. In 1951, in an interview with William Wright (1999, 21), Pollock said, “The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world—in other words—expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.” Furthermore, Pollock (1999, 16) stated, “I am particularly impressed with their [modern artists] con-cept of the source of art being unconscious.” Aesthetic and artistic challenges were an important part of Pollock’s career. He created his own drip technique. His strong opinion was that the “new needs new techniques. . . . Each age finds its own technique” (Wright 1999, 20).

Additionally, William Rubin (1999, 228, 245) made the point that Pollock’s personal history was only a little related to the Jungians’ anal-ysis. Moreover, Jungian critics have developed a very unreal model of

Pollock’s procedures. And furthermore, the basic artistic problems with which the artist is struggling are part of the normal process of self-ex-amination and self-discovery and should not be seen as part of a thera-peutic process. Pollock was a painter who responded to aesthetic needs.

Deborah Solomon (1987, 239) wrote, “The Deep, which shows a huge floe of ice split down the middle by a crack, seems oddly contrived;

unable to recapture the meaning that had unfolded almost magically in his earlier work, Pollock turned to heavy-handed symbolism.”

Friedman (1972, 206) believed that The Deep was a more difficult and a more completely abstract resolution than any of Pollock’s pre-vious works. Furthermore, immediately after the 1954 exhibition at the Sydney Janis Gallery, poet Frank O’Hara (1959, 31) commended this painting in the following terms: “The Deep is the coda to this triumph. It is a scornful, technical masterpiece, like the Olympia of Manet. And it is one of the most provocative images of our time, an abyss of glamour encroached upon by a flood of innocence. In this innocence, which ambiguously dominates the last works. . . .” Later, in 1959, O’Hara called The Deep “a work which contemporary aesthetic conjecture had cried out for” (Friedman 1972, 202).

Another critique observed that the paintings in the show were sur-prisingly different one from the other and together were seen as a new trend. They were painted with brushes, not dripped. Friedman explained that Pollock was under pressure to paint masterpieces as he had for his first solo exhibition at the Janis Gallery in 1952. Also, Pollock was too honest to repeat himself (Friedman 1972, 205–7).

Pollock spend a lot of time at the general store near his house. Dan Miller, the owner, said that Pollock’s problem was his frustration that

“there was something inside him that he was not able to put down on canvas” (Friedman 1972, 218). There are only two paintings that suggest a possible way forward in Pollock’s final years: The Deep and Easter and the Totem. Jeremy Lewison (1999, 78) described this situa-tion as follows:

In The Deep, where paint is applied predominantly by brush, Pollock evokes a deep space, often referred to poetically or speculatively as vaginal. He appears here to renounce the shallow space of the dripped works and the flatness that Greenberg insisted upon as a prerequisite of modernist painting. In striving for a painterly effect, however, Pol-lock labors the brushwork, and the white surface, so inflected by brush marks and so thinly painted, remains unintentionally flat. Neverthe-less, in this painting Pollock appears to have been looking for a new image, one which allowed him to escape the enveloping web and pass through the picture plane to a state of transcendence.

As a critic, Clement Greenberg supported Pollock’s work through the 1940s. However, by 1952, Greenberg was no longer writing about Pol-lock’s work in superlative terms (Valliere 2000, 253). Greenberg gave two reasons to James T. Valliere that he didn’t write about Pollock anymore: “Jackson lost his stuff around ’52, in my opinion he lost his inspiration. The other thing was that he had become, if not famous, at least notorious and I suppose the battle had been won” (Valliere 2000, 249). B. H. Friedman (1972, 207) wrote that in 1952 Green-berg had privately told Pollock that he was disappointed in his recent work. After that, there were additional negative critiques in publica-tions such as the art pages of Time magazine. Friedman (1972, 212) believed that Pollock must have been hurt and angry.

There was also a painful professional rift that occurred between Pollock and the artist Clyfford Still. In early 1956, after the “Fif-teen Years of Jackson Pollock” his 1955 retrospective exhibition at the Sydney Janis Gallery in New York, Clyfford Still wrote Pollock and asked him if he was ashamed of his work or fearful that people would insult him as an artist, since Still was not invited to the open-ing reception. This letter devastated Pollock, he was seen cryopen-ing, and it was said that he was in a terrible state (Friedman 1972, 223–24;

Steinberg 1999, 81).

Hans Namuth’s film, Jackson Pollock Motion Picture, of Pollock’s painting process shows clearly that the artist is drawing in the air.

Elkins described that Pollock exhibited a series of habitual hand ges-tures: a violent flick of the brush at the canvas, beginning with the hand held in toward his chest and turned down. Sometimes, the hand is curled down and it turns quickly up and out. These movements create explosive spatters. In a third gesture, the hand sweeps slowly back and forth—once right and then left—and then he steps to the side, collects more paint, and sweeps again. The movement, quick and repetitive, generates U-shaped marks (Elkins 1999, 89–91).

I believe that Greenberg’s critique can provide an insight into Pol-lock’s technical development; in 1943, in his search for style, and in 1945, Greenberg said that Pollock was not afraid to look ugly, and that all profoundly original art looks ugly at first (Greenberg 1999, 51–53). In 1947, Pollock’s work was more “American”—rougher and more brutal—but it was also more complete. In 1948, his new work presented a conundrum: wallpaper patterns, raw, uncultivated emo-tion—and yet it was more cheerful. In 1949, Pollock developed an astonishingly original process and emerged as one of the most import-ant painters of our time (Greenberg 1999, 56–62). Greenberg asserted that Pollock’s gift lay in his temperament and intelligence, and above all, in his authenticity to be honest. Like Mondrian, Pollock demon-strated that not skill but inspiration, vision, and intuitive capacity are what count in creation (Greenberg 1999, 110–12).