Volume 45, Number 19 · December 3, 1998
Jackson Whole
By John Updike
Jackson Pollock 1998-February 2, 1999; Tate Gallery, London, March 11-June 6, 1999.
an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 1,, Catalog of the exhibition by Kirk Varnedoe, with Pepe Karmel
Museum of Modern Art/Abrams, 336 pp., $35.00 (paper)
America loves an emblematic life, and the Pollock show at the Museum of Modern Art is arranged to tell a tale of long struggle, high triumph, and swift fall. The category of 'the heroic,' no longer applicable to political figures (mendacious bean-counters) and soldiers (dull tools of wicked warmongers) and athletes (at those salaries!), can still be applied to artists, especially Abstract Expressionists. They worked on a heroic scale, and made heroic breakthroughs into sublime simplifications-Rothko's hovering rectangles of color, Kline's sweeping bars of black, De Kooning's infernos of flickering, flashing strokes, and above all Pollock's epic drips.
Review, 3082 words
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