JACKSON POLLOCK AND THE MODERN TRADITION, PART II

III. IMPRESSIONISM AND THE CLASSIC POLLOCK¹

REVIVALS OF INTEREST IN STYLES which have gone out of fashion constitute a commentary on the history of art. And the transformation of American painting between the late forties and mid-fifties must be considered in the context of a concurrent re-evaluation of Impressionism, particularly of the virtually forgotten late. Monet, and a shift of interest on the part of painters—Pollock among them—from Picasso to Matisse.

Classical Impressionism had ceased to be an issue for advanced painters well before the First World War. American avant-garde painting in the interwar period was essentially a Cubist proposition (in a somewhat provincial form) which became increasingly inflected by the Expressionist Picasso and by Surrealism during the late thirties and early forties. The Monet revival was no accident, coming as it did in the wake of Pollock’s pioneering of the big scintillating picture. Though he was familiar with classical Impressionism, the big late Monets could have been known to him, if at all, only through reproductions. The emergence of Pollock’s work and the Monet revival suggest a convergence of responses to a spirit increasingly “in the air” toward 1950. While the late art of Monet is of interest in this context as offering a type of the large-size picture toward which Pollock was working quite independently, the classical Impressionism of the 1870s actually provided important points of departure for the tradition that culminated in his all-over style.

Impressionism had made many of the first great contributions to the constantly expanding definition of modern painting, establishing certain basic conditions which inform much—though by no means all—of the art of the last hundred years. And as one of the great climaxes in this continuing tradition, the all-over Pollocks not only assume (i.e., presuppose) the Impressionist contribution to this definition, but subsume some of the particulars of the Impressionist style. Let us consider the affinities.

Though many works by the Old Masters contained heavily impastoed passages, the disposition and articulation (brushwork) of such areas was invariably related to the presence of the objects which the pictures illusionistically described. The hierarchies of brushwork patterns and impasto densities in effect recapitulated the illustrated objects as textural relief on the picture surface. The development in Impressionism of increasingly flecked and autonomous brushwork in the later 1860s led, in the first half of the following decade,to what Meyer Schapiro—who has acutely characterized this transformation—calls “the autonomous, homogeneous crust of paint.”² In the most abstract of Impressionist pictures—those of the 1870s, like the Duck Ponds of Monet and Renoir—the patterns of brushwork are nearly totally disengaged from the contouring of objects (the painters consciously sought not to recognize the identity or contours of objects, but only isolated spots of color sensation). Despite its remove, this fracturing of line adumbrated Pollock’s liberation from contouring discussed in last month’s Artforum.

The homogeneous paint crust of which Schapiro speaks is not only a matter of disengagement from contouring but, above all, of the approximate evenness of density all over the surface. In painterly Old Masters like Rembrandt and Goya, the clusters of heavy impasto are located here and there over the surfaces in different image-determined quantities. Impressionist impasto is not so much thick as it is evenly dosed, and therefore free of the compositional hierarchies formed by its patterns in Old Master art. This is crucial to the formation of the all-over conception. But while its familiar brushwork patterns has led Pollock’s late Scent (1955) to be considered Impressionist-influenced, no one has yet observed the importance of the Impressionist innovations for his earlier, classic all-over pictures. The insistent materiality of Pollock’s surfaces which nevertheless end by scintillating in an essentially optic way (in this connection consider the implication of the title of the transitional Shimmering Substance), the molecularization of shapes into myriad small sensations (by criss-crossing the variously colored lines), and the approximately even distribution of these pigment-sensations over the whole surface of the canvas are all features common to the most advanced Impressionist paintings.

Moreover, like the Impressionists, Pollock did his best to fragment and widely distribute the color sensations so that they would not constitute a shape of color. When dealing with large shapes of a single local color (the roof of the house in Renoir’s Duck Pond, for example) the Impressionists atomized them by juxtaposing complementaries and picking up reflected lights from adjacent objects. (In this period and, indeed, in general, the Impressionists tended to avoid subjects and vistas that confronted them with dominant fields of a single color.) But the Impressionists—despite their considerable though little remarked editing back at the studio—were hampered by their primary commitment to the visual field before them. Pollock was able to bring some of their plastic ideas to a perfect and more natural fulfillment by rendering them wholly consistent from within.

The degree to which particular drip Pollocks relate to Impressionism—an art of color spots, not of line—is measured by the extent to which the density of the lines in them, hence the frequency of their intersection, isolates their segments as spots, and also by the extent to which their linearity is otherwise modified by patching and puddling (effects present in all classic Pollocks). Number I (1948), One and Lavender Mist (both 1950) strongly reflect these practices. Autumn Rhythm and Number 32 (also both 1950), owing to their greater openness, remain more linear. The former three, along with such pictures as Number 8, Number 27 and Three (all of 1950), show Pollock at his most “painterly” and thus at his closest to Impressionism.

Turning from the formal means of Impressionism to its expressive character, and its social and cultural implications, we find much in it that points directly to Pollock—much that Pollock, in effect, completes or even, since his art is essentially visionary, apotheosizes. What I mean here has to do with their common confrontation of the flux, rhythm, and complexities of modern life, especially in great urban centers. While the Impressionists and Pollock had great interest in landscape, the world of nature was shared by them with the artists of the past. Only modern painters can have confronted the metropolis; none have better understood it than the Impressionists and Pollock. By this I do not mean that Pollock was a painter of the city in the literal manner of Impressionism. Pollock specifically rejected such suggestions.³ Pollock was not the painter of anything in a literal sense. His content—which must ultimately relate to some form of experience outside the picture—has to be understood in a more intuitive way.

Let us begin with the particular modernity of Impressionism as an image of life, a conception expounded with great beauty by Meyer Schapiro.⁴ The Impressionists not only gave up those subjects—historical, mythological, religious, etc.—which were the staples of Old Master painting but chose from among the possibilities of contemporary life, the uncharged, commonplace activities (as opposed to events) of the pleasurable life around them (instead of those climactic and dramatic incidents selected by the Romantic Painters). To the extent that their images of crowds on the boulevards, in the cafes and at picnics belong to the world of relaxation and enjoyment, they have a far narrower expressive range than Pollock’s alternately ecstatic and tragic art. Nevertheless, they constitute the first confrontation of the pace and molecularity of modern urban life, a confrontation which took place not only on the image level, but was supported, as we have seen, by a new, looser articulation of the surface composition that atomized the forms in an analogous way.

Pollock’s reflections of the rhythms of modern experience have occasionally been discussed in apocalyptic and pseudo-Einsteinian terms (“an effort to get out into the time flux and to embrace the cosmos”; “his equation of time with space”).⁵ But the alternative to this discredited rhetoric (Einstein called the classic text relating Cubism to relativity theory “sheissig”)⁶ need not be a retreat into purely formalist criticism. Pollock’s expression of these specifically modern experiences, and the relationship of this expression to Impressionism, revolves largely around the question of accidentality.

In an essay which I believe to have been the result of a fatal misunderstanding of Pollock’s art, Rudolph Arnheim, a leading Gestalt psychologist and author of numerous texts on art, distinguished between accident as image-content and as esthetic content.⁷ Realism, he observed, is bound to mean confrontation with accidental life situations that one would not see in stylized arts, the Byzantine, for example. If the relative realism of Old Master art meant some confrontation with this, then the Realism of the mid-19th century meant (at least theoretically) an almost total acceptance of it as an image of the world. Such images of accidentality are thus common, Arnheim correctly observes, in the work of the Impressionists who are still rooted in naturalism in that sense:

It also becomes evident, however, that while accidental relationships crept into the subject matter, the artistic representation of their effects was not based at all on chance selection or grouping. In order to have necessity . . . these pictorial compositions . . . must actually convey these ideas by compelling, neatly defined visual patterns. [The example given is Degas’ Cotton Exchange in New Orleans.]

Such well organized images are then insightfully contrasted with:

dismal examples that accumulated in the western art of the last centuries when the compositional patterns of realism became so complex that the average painter’s eyes could no longer organize them. Here accidental patterns were produced not by intent but by the degeneration of the sense of form. The desire for the faithful imitation of nature finally conquered man’s natural and traditional sense of form. . . .

Unfortunately the next step in the argument is the discussion of recent modern paintings as actual agglomerations of accidents as opposed to images of them (Pollock’s Greyed Rainbow of 1953 is the example given). Presented in the bald manner common to much hostile Pollock criticism, such a contention would be beneath discussion. But Professor Arnheim’s dialectic is rather subtle and constitutes the only serious presentation I know of this point of view.

Arnheim observes that if painters like Pollock were involved simply in laissez-faire paint-slinging “the monotonous rhythms” we supposedly see “would be disrupted by impulses, reminiscences, associations from other areas of mental functioning. . . . Only by careful supervision throughout the work will the artist obtain the perfect homogeneity of the texture, and such control must be guided by a definite image of what the artist is trying to accomplish.” This is supposedly achieved by quantification—the multiplying of accidents which as Arnheim rightly demonstrates statistically, cancel each other out in time, the point-to-point interrelationships receding, and the common properties coming to the fore to produce “texture.” Such a painting as Greyed Rainbow, Arnheim claims, can be perceived only as texture—not because the number or size of the units of which it is made up go beyond the range of the human eye’s capacity but because the units do not fit into more comprehensive shapes.

Finally Arnheim adds that in such an image—the “visual embodiment of a maximum of accident”—we “recognize the portrait of a life situation in which social, economical, political and psychological forces have become so complex that . . . nothing predictable seems to remain but the meaningless routine of daily activities, the undirected milling of anonymous crowds.”

Here we have it—the order of imagery toward which all but the most rigorously formalist criticism must tend. Those crowds are there somewhere in the poetic allusiveness of Pollock’s drip pictures. But like the real crowd, whose collective image is the sum total of purposeful movements, they are not milling undirectedly. Pollock’s image is not, of course, a picture of a crowd, or anything else, but it is no less engaged with the feeling and pulse of such contemporary experiences. Like the pictures of life in older art (except at its most corrupt, as in Victorian realism) which were not images of the way life really was but the way it might ideally exist, Pollock accepts the challenges of the molecularity and prima facie confusion of modern life and transcends them, endowing them with a comprehensive order. His image is an equilibrated and ordered structure of modern experiences which as art provides symbolically precisely the unity, equilibrium and absolute completeness which life lacks.

As a closed and fixed system, a picture is able to show life whole—from the outside—in a way that man, “inside” life, can never experience directly. If we see only a piece of Pollock—in effect, the way we experience life—no matter how much richness is involved, we miss its essential structure, its monistic simultaneity. A good deal of talk about “environmental painting” misses this point (see below).

Arnheim notwithstanding, the expressions of chance and accident in Pollock’s painting are ultimately no less controlled, no less determined than in Impressionism, even though they are confronted in a more direct and hazardous way. The artist himself has said, “I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.”⁸ Yet even a cursory glance at a drip Pollock shows that on a purely operational level this was not entirely true despite the remarkable virtuosity he developed in his technique. There are numerous small spots and puddlings which were manifestly not one hundred percent controlled as they happened. But they are accidental only then; in the final work they have been transmuted into esthetic decision.

Once the picture is under way (its “automatic” beginnings I shall discuss in connection with Surrealism) Pollock comes to it with a clear intent based upon the “stored decisions” of which I spoke.⁹ Immediately he begins to work, drawing rapidly with the paint entirely in accordance with his will, he confronts the fact that his method entails a margin of accident: an unexpected mark or puddling (the latter is especially uncontrollable when—as happens only occasionally—two different wet colors fuse). In reacting to this the artist has essentially three possibilities open to him. If the accident is unfortunate, it can simply be painted out (too many of these produce “a mess,” as Pollock called canvases with which he had “lost contact”).¹⁰ But the accident might also contain the germ of an idea that had not previously occurred to Pollock, in which case he could build upon it improvisationally (“I have no fears of making changes, destroying the image, etc.” because organically “the painting has a life of its own”).¹¹ The picture might change character as a result, and the accident disappear as such through its organic assimilation into the fabric of decisions. Finally Pollock might have just let the accidental mark stand. The choice of this alternative was, however, very much an esthetic decision and so here, too, the accident has been transmuted into art. To whatever extent it was anything other than the results of the initial impulses of the will, the finished picture was not made up of accidents but of responses to them.

This confrontation and transcendence of accidentality, rather than being a sign of resignation before the complexities of life, is precisely the guarantor of Pollock’s relevance. Given the immense role which unpredictable events—unexpected convergences and collisions—play in the denouements of modern existences, no art that did not on some level confront the accidental and improvisational could satisfy us as a structure for our own experience. The successful life—like the successful Pollock—is one in which we hold it together and give it meaning by maximizing the favorable possibilities and minimizing the unfavorable effects of the myriad accidental situations with which we are bombarded.

The character and viability of Pollock’s image reflects its recapitulation, in symbolic terms, of this life process. This is not Action Painting where a gestural act in the artist’s space leaves a supposedly intrinsically meaningful imprint on the canvas. In Pollock, as in older art, everything significant happens on the canvas; the method is not mimetic. And it is only a method. The finished picture as a statement of content—and as a success or failure—like all finished pictures, is entirely independent of whatever means has been used to achieve it, however much that means may have given character to the work.

The antithesis established by Arnheim between Impressionism as simply the image of accident and Pollock as the actuality of it holds no more for the former than for the latter. For concomitantly with their imaging of the accidental situations that articulate modern life the Impressionists incorporated, in their revolutionary painting technique, a prophetic margin of accident. If we look closely at the pictures, especially those of the early 1870s where the flecking is maximally disengaged from shaping, we find that the rapidly executed brushwork is full of irregular edges, extensions and “tails” (as the brush is lifted) which were certainly not predetermined and whose final presence in the picture depended upon the same order of decision (leave it, develop it, paint it out) which confronted Pollock. Not that we cannot find some of this among the more painterly Old Masters, but it was confined by the degree to which their brushwork was committed to contouring, to building up the illusion of objects. If we have any doubts about the marginal accidentality in the facture of Impressionist paintings we need only consider the public response to them in their day. Cham’s cartoon “Impressionist” (see cut) was creating a paint fabric that because of its supposedly uncontrolled, ragged and atomized texture shocked a public used to Salon painting as much as Pollock’s methodology did in the context of the late 1940s. In fact the commentaries in the popular press during the two periods bear a remarkable resemblance.

In their improvisational rapidity, the Impressionists initiated a freedom of facture and loosening of the paint fabric which, enlarged upon by many subsequent artists, culminated in Pollock, who in this respect, is unlikely to be matched. Impressionism thus stands midway between the Old Masters and Pollock. The Old Masters knew what they were going to do to the canvas before they did it. The Impressionist assumed a posture of naivete in regard to the given of the visual field, trying to isolate simply its sensations, and to build the work up improvisationally in response to those. To the extent, however, that his image was controlled by the field of sensations without (and it was to a considerable extent), his improvisation was illusory. Abstract and non-figurative painting had to be invented for this sort of improvisation to attain the autonomy it had in arts like music.

Nevertheless, despite the rapid improvisation in certain Old Master paintings (Rubens, Hals and Magnasco for example), the speed with which the Impressionists painted was a radical innovation; it responded in part to a desire to capture the sense of the moment in time thus “freezing” the quality of movement peculiar to modern life in the metropolis. Like everything else in Impressionism it would not have developed similarly in the Florence or Odessa of that time or, for that matter, even in the Paris of fifty years earlier. The notion of the rapidly executed improvisational picture, which is not common to most modern styles, was especially advanced in the 20th century by Picasso (in his more spontaneous works), by Klee (not so much by Kandinsky, I believe) and above all by the automatism of the “abstract“ Surrealists who—in this regard—lead directly to Pollock.

In Impressionism the molecularization of the paint surface went hand in hand with the breakdown of Old Master compositional geometries; this two-fold process constituted the first step in the direction of the all-over style. Just as the atomized paint fabric achieved a certain all-overness in forming a homogeneous, autonomous crust, so the motifs themselves tended to be fragmented and more loosely distributed in the composition (too loosely, Cézanne thought). Old Master composition had usually depended for its coherence on a single large geometry which incorporated all the crucial motifs of the image and locked them in proper climactic order both optically (to the extent that the geometry functioned abstractly) and hierarchically (in terms of the intrinsic importance of the subject matter’s components). These static, deceptively simple structures were no more apt for expressing life in Paris in 1870 than Cubism’s structures would have been to express it in the New York of 1950.

The Impressionist world (except in the minds of the most proper Victorians) no longer contained the clearly stratified social hierarchy of the centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution and the rigorously hierarchical political structures of the monarchy were long since gone. The old life hung on in the provinces but the new life in Paris called forth an art in which the design hierarchies of Old Master painting—always the underpinning of those inherent in their frequently formal subjects—would be fragmented into smaller more equal units and looser, more casual relationships. If the anticipatory all-over formulations of Impressionism—the dissolution of hierarchies and the evening-out of the size, intensity and character of the compositional constituents—reflected the new relationships of Parisian life a century ago, the much more advanced and intense form of it in Pollock emerged in part from the world of the New York melting pot which has provided the possibility of cultural, and hence esthetic, syntheses and syncretisms of an unparalleled order.

The Impressionists were very good at eliminating the vestigial pictorial geometries which had persisted intact—as viable orderings—through Ingres and Delacroix (though subsequently undermined by Courbet). They were not always successful in implementing their replacement. In their loosely articulated compositions they substituted textural homogeneity and an all-over evenness in the flickering light for the earlier geometrical unity. This was achieved by an averaging out of values made possible in turn by the dissolution of heretofore “solid” modeled forms into individual color flecks or “sensations.” The resultant luminous and textural evenness were also to be essential to Pollock’s all-over esthetic. But for density of pictorial “architecture” within a shallow space, Pollock found inspiration rather in Cézanne, via the Cubism which preserved and distilled Cézanne’s “restructuring” of Impressionism.

The compositional fragmentation of Impressionism was accepted by Cézanne as a starting point, as was its insistence upon sensations. But he locked these fragments into overall unities by analogies of shape, color, number, etc., with such subtlety that the “random” forms (e.g., the fruit on the tablecloth) seem fatally rooted in place. Cézanne fixed the Impressionist sensations with clear coordinates in shallow spatial structures, allowing them to model forms in low relief. Analytic Cubism dissected this pictorial architecture and Mondrian, as we shall see later, culminated in his works of 1913–14 this process of dissection, which Picasso and Braque had left incomplete a year earlier. The planar clarity with which the “sensations” that make up Pollock’s layered webs relate to one another in their shallow frontal space¹² depended upon Pollock’s grasp of this Cézannesque-Cubist tradition.

However, before proceeding to Cubism’s particular contribution to the all-over configuration and to the articulation of shallow space, I should like to discuss some affinities of the classic Pollocks with the later Monets.

IV. COLOR AND SCALE; AFFINITIES WITH THE LATE MONET

THUS FAR I HAVE DISCUSSED the Impressionist style as it was held more or less in common with Monet, Renoir, Sisley and (to a much lesser extent) Pissarro during the 1870s and 1880s. My characterization was based upon its most abstract moments, which were not typical of its whole history, and was certainly meant to exclude such phases as Renoir’s academizing “classical” period in the 1880s.

The term Impressionist continues to be used in connection with the late Monets and, obviously, their style developed out of his earlier work. But these pictures, with which the classic Pollocks have such striking affinities, need to be characterized in a different way. Their mood (so analogous to that of Debussy, who is usually mislabeled an “Impressionist”)¹³ is essentially Symbolist and, indeed, they emerge coincidentally with the flourishing of Symbolist poetry. Unlike the Impressionism of the period 1865–85 these Mallarméan Monets are veiled, introspective, poetic pictures in which lonely contemplation—close in mood and even esthetic to the “musical“ Whistlers of the ’70s and ’80s—has replaced the gay, molecular world of Parisian sociability.

Classical pleine-air Impressionism reflects continuous retinal confrontation of the external motif. The large later pictures—despite some confrontation of the motif—ended as a more removed, internalized and at times even hermetic experience. They are therefore closer to Pollock in the poetic and visionary character that such “distance” from the motif made possible. Like Pollock, the late Monet digests nature but recasts it poetically. But Pollock opened up the distance between nature and the retina even further, which allowed his exquisite allusions to it—as in Lavender Mist, One and Autumn Rhythm—to simultaneously comprehend other metaphoric levels. The Impressionists—given their naturalistic commitment to the external visual world—had to choose between the landscape and cityscape; Pollock was able to fuse them—with other allusions—in a single image.

The spirit of landscape in Pollock is carried primarily by the atmospheric tonalities and large size of the pictures (since they are not illusions of nature they are free to communicate its qualities in this more direct way). And it is to these properties especially we must turn in discussing his affinities with the late Monet. We must keep in mind throughout this discussion, however, that while some smaller late Monets were visible in New York in the years of Pollock’s formation, the largest were unknown to him (except perhaps, through reproductions).

Classical Impressionist pictures were structured primarily by juxtapositions of pure color. The most advanced examples reveal a tendency to keep the flickering, light averaged out at an approximately even value over the whole surface (the earliest Impressionist pictures have larger contrasts, but the painters worked away from this) and to articulate its forms by changes in hue. The tonal late Monets, beginning with the smaller pictures of the 1890s; tend to reverse this proposition. They frequently have only one hue (usually one rare in nature and hence poetically evocative, like purple or rose) and the picture is chromatically articulated by a point-to-point inflection from light to dark and warm to cool within that hue. In those that introduce a second hue, the light-dark nuancing is reinforced by an enhancement of the secondary continuum of warm to cool.

Though it is not essentially monochromatic like that of the late Monet or the Analytic Cubists, the Pollockian structure is fundamentally a light-dark one, as is perfectly natural for an art that grows out of drawing. Individual colors fuse in an allover tonality; the color is applied, as Robert Goodnough observed, “so that one is not concerned with separate areas: the browns, blacks, silver and white (his example was Autumn Rhythm) move within one another to achieve an integrated whole in which one is aware of color rather than colors.”¹⁴

Two practices were necessary for Pollock to absorb the various colors into a tonal, chiaroscuro framework. First, in keeping with the all-over principle, the color would have to be distributed with approximate evenness, each quadrant of the canvas (and sometimes even the smaller subdivisions) having at least some of every color used. Second, the hues would have to be submerged in the non-hues. Almost every classic drip picture is liberally dosed with black, white and aluminum paint. The aluminum, since it reflects differently at different angles, covers a considerable range of the middle values, and its elusive light helps dissolve the skeins of color with which it interweaves into an all-over tonality. (It consequently has a special role in the structuring of Pollock’s space, which will be discussed later.)

To enhance this tonal unity, Pollock usually kept away from strong, saturated colors. The greatest of the drip pictures introduce mostly pale colors, or those remote from the primaries, which he handled with exquisite nuancing. Colors like red and green were either used very sparingly, or made into the unifying tonality, either as a ground (e.g., Number Twenty-Four 1948)—though this was not common—or by dominating the picture’s skeining, as in Full Fathom Five where the minuscule doses of other colors merely “season” the green. Hues like red, blue or yellow would not be allowed in such pictures in quantities that might challenge the hegemony of the dominant. Even in the perhaps most colorful of the classic paintings, Mural on Indian Red Ground (colorful in the sense of its juxtaposition of more saturated yellows, greens, and reds) the quantities of color are kept low in relation to the black, white and aluminum and its units are widely dispersed.

After his black, stained pictures of 1951 Pollock began using larger areas of bright color. This worked out most felicitously in Number 12 1952 (since severely damaged by fire). But when he tried to work these more intense hues into the all-over webs of the drip pictures which he resumed in 1952, the outcome was less happy. The reds of Convergence (1952) for example, have an unfortunate tendency to “pop” optically out of pictorial fabric. In the non-drip Easter and the Totem (1953) on the other hand, as in Number 12 he was able to juxtapose large panels of color with beautiful results.

It has been said that Pollock created “a new color,”¹⁵ and his use of certain Duco and Devolac colors after 1951 was indeed new to serious painting (enamel house paints, however, had been used by Pollock’s coevals, the Mexican painters, and by pre-World War II European painters). But we want here to watch the use of superlatives in the description of Pollock’s accomplishments lest they end by canceling each other out. Pollock did employ some new paint colors; this is a technical innovation. But except for the aluminum paint, he did not use them in a new way. Far too much emphasis tends to be placed upon the historical precedence in the invention of new techniques (the fuss about who invented dripping is a case in point) as opposed to what is done with them. Pollock did create a new conception of line; but his color is in no wise as revolutionary nor as crucial to his esthetic, however beautiful it frequently was.

The large late Monets constitute the sole genuine precedent in the modern tradition for the wall-size picture pioneered by Pollock, Rothko, Newman and Still beginning in 1950.¹⁶ These panoramic pictures, frequently exceeding twenty and sometimes reaching forty feet in width, were conceived by Monet as constituting a world in themselves (as experienced at the Orangerie) rather than as a “window” on a world, as is the traditional easel picture. Though they are the largest pictures in the modern tradition (excluding, of course, some institutional murals), they were painted independently of architecture which, like the largest canvases of the new American painters, they ideally displace rather than decorate.

Simply as large paintings, the Monets are not unique in modern art, architectural mural decoration like that of the Mexicans apart. There were some very large Matisses, the Bathers by a River (8′ 7” x 12” 10”) especially,¹⁷ and then of course Picasso’s Guernica (11” 6” x 25” 8”). In fact, the Chilean Surrealist Matta had shown a number of extremely large canvases in his New York exhibitions of the mid and late forties, some years before pictures of anything like comparable size [Science, Conscience and Patience of the “Vitreur” (1945) was 6′ 6” x 15′, Being With (1946) 7′ 4” x 15′] were made by Americans. But in one way or another—either because of their figuration, illusionistic structure, or particularized content—all but the Monets were fundamentally different in conception from what the American painters were to develop.

The Guernica, though not really a mural in the sense of being designed to relate to (and not merely to fit into) a specific architecture, was nevertheless made to be shown in a public building, addressed to a collectivity, and dealt with a public subject. The compositional forms of modern painting do not lend themselves to a climactic statement of this order and Picasso fell back on some techniques of Old Master painting, superimposing on his composition a big pedimental device. Though a surface-embracing geometry, this was, nevertheless, unlike those of the Old Masters since it did not coalesce with its subject but cut through it. For Picasso, the Guernica represented a considerable break with both the nature and structure of his other pictures; it was something of a sport in his oeuvre. Pollock’s largest pictures are an entirely consistent outgrowth of his smaller ones.

Though the Symbolist character of Monet’s Nympheas is anticipated by the Verlainesque but small late “Houses of Parliament” and “Views of Venice” that date from before and just after the turn of the century, their size is entirely a 20th-century contribution. (Those at the Orangerie date from about 1914.) Monet was carrying on this revolution quietly while attention was focused on Fauvism and Cubism as the embodiments of vanguard art.

The large picture involved Monet in a fundamental reversal of those implications which had previously made small formats virtually standard for Impressionism. The small size of the classical Impressionist picture was in part a moral assertion. It proclaimed the painters’ modesty of intent in the face of the presumptuousness and windy rhetoric of the immense academic “machines” that filled the Salon. And it sorted well with the “candid,” unposed and fragmentary treatment accorded the subject matter. But it also had another purpose, that of facilitating the fragmentation of shape, color and texture into the homogeneous, autonomous surface crust described earlier.

The most abstract Impressionist pictures of the 1870s involved such a thoroughgoing pulverization of the surface, and required such fine visual discriminations, that the pictures could not be sustained over a large surface. Or so the painters thought at any rate. For when the format was on occasion enlarged (compare Renoir’s Duck Pond, 1873, 20 x 24 1/2”, with his Sunday Afternoon Boating Party, 1881, 51 3/8 x 69 1/4”) they markedly diminished the atomization of the surface, let the brushwork create some big contours and, as Meyer Schapiro observes, introduced into the design of the work large if discontinuous accents of compositional geometry. All this was done to sustain and cohere the activity of the eye over the larger surface by alluding to visual hierarchies of a type that they had originally worked away from.

In his large late pictures Monet developed another solution which involved a return to all overness in the brushwork, but with a stroke now much broader than had originally prevailed and which to some extent was necessitated by his failing eyesight. The compositional unity of these pictures usually depended on a mirror image symmetry of the top and bottom of the picture (the optical equation of the sensations of the landscape forms and their reflection in the water) and in cases where the pictures became very wide, on a placement of trees or drooping boughs at the lateral limits as bracketing devices (as in the largest pictures at the Orangerie). These compositional parentheses, absent from the best of the Nympheas, reflected Monet’s fear that an exceedingly wide (in relation to its height) picture might otherwise lose cohesiveness. In his “friezes” of the late forties Pollock succeeded with such elongated formats without falling back on the support of bracketing devices.

The late Monet’s success with the large picture seems to have depended on his shift from the earlier hue-juxtaposing structure to a chromatic light-dark variation within a dominantly tonal color. And though Pollock introduced differing hues into his light-dark pictorial armatures, they still functioned structurally, as I have suggested, in terms of their value definition. An immense picture, dissected into a molecular mass of color spots of roughly even value but markedly differing in hue (comparable in that sense to the classical Impressionist structure of Renoir’s Duck Pond, for example) has yet to be painted.

The large size of the Monets announced a wholly new conception of scale (as the Matisses, Picassos, and above all, the Mattas did not, owing to their figurative and/or illusionistic aspects). But the announcement fell on deaf ears in a European art world where the avant-garde had long since ceased to look to Impressionism for its cues. Pollock’s, Rothko’s, Newman’s and Still’s wall-size pictures of 1950 were arrived at independently. In fact, the revival of the late Monet which began at the end of the forties represented—as I have observed—a convergence of tastes has been altered recently.) in which the big Pollocks unquestionably played a role.¹⁸

The new large scale art was of a private order and was neither a mural nor an easel picture. The monumental art of the past was a public mural art, set within an architectural situation and in dialogue with the architecture whether tectonically reinforcing its accents or anti-tectonically opposing them. Even when devised for private Palazzos such murals—or their concomitant giant panel or easel pictures—constituted a public art insofar as the owners of the buildings were public figures and the uses of the large rooms in which they were situated were usually public too. Moreover, the subject matter of such art was almost invariably of a collective order—political, mythological, religious, historical, etc.—such as dominated Old Master art as a whole. (Genre subjects were reserved for easel paintings of cabinet size.)

The natural position of the spectator in regarding such pictures was one of sufficient distance for its illusion to hold and its narrative therefore to be comprehensible. Given the fact that they contained human figures and other motifs which functioned as modulars, the illusion of size remained the same whatever the actual size of the mural was. The realization of the new large-scale modern picture demanded consequently the elimination of illusions of—or schematic references to—recognizable images which are potential modulars. E. C. Goossen, in The Big Canvas, noted the importance, in this regard, of the elimination of human figures in the late Monets. (The latter was also, certainly, a poetic question.)

But insofar as Monet retained recognizable motifs from nature, the absolute scale of the immense American pictures was still closed to him. In the larger Nympheas I believe Monet frequently tried to negate the relativistic scale inherent in figurative painting by imaging the objects—trees, lily pads and the rest—in their actual size thus making them function in terms of the proximity of the spectator just as they do in life. This simultaneity of illusion and actuality proved a dead end, however, and in terms of rendering scale autonomous the American painters owed more to Mondrian and other pioneers of nonfigurative art than to Monet.

The peculiar experience of the large American pictures depends upon their actual size in relation to their intended private setting. Goossen observes that their:

footage in both directions is larger than the comprehensive image the eye is capable of taking in from the customary distance. The customary distance is that normally and previously satisfactory of a complete view of the average easel painting, prior to the increase of this average in the past ten years (written in 1958, ed.]. . . . Such canvases have forced their way into rooms where they consume the entire wall space, and in turn affect the quality of life in the room pressing an emotional experience upon those who used to have to stand and peer.¹⁹

The experience which Goossen describes here in most discreet terms has given rise to considerable loose talk and writing about “environmental painting” (as opposed to “environmental sculpture” or just plain Environments, both of which are literally three-dimensional). Excepting certain types of mural decoration (and unusual instances such as the oval room in the Orangerie in which the immense late Monets are installed), paintings—or at least, a painting—cannot literally encompass the spectator. Nevertheless, in apartments where we are bound to move frequently in close proximity to the wall, the Big Canvas brings us into very close contact with its parts in such a way that we see the whole only with difficulty. To do that we must step back, which exactly reverses the procedure with the easel painting where the “customary distance” allows seeing the whole and we step forward to study its parts.

Some confusion in the discussion of “environmental painting” has resulted from misconstruction of Pollock’s oft-quoted statement that his painting “does not come from the easel.”

I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or floor . . . On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. . . .²⁰

To be literally in the painting, i.e., walking on the surface, was a possibility while the canvas was on the floor. In fact, it was a necessity in painting the largest pictures, where Pollock could not have reached the entire surface from the outside edges. Once the work of art was hung vertically, however, the order of its experience changed. Neither Pollock nor the spectator could then be literally in the picture (any more than with any older art). Though from the customary distance one would be too close to see its entirety, one savored from there the richness of its local parts and the patterns of decision that articulated them. But just as Pollock could not comprehend the entirety of what he was about while literally in the picture—he had to climb a ladder or tack the picture to the wall for that—so the spectator cannot understand the work as the total, closed symbolic system it is except when he sees it whole. Any conception of environmental painting that precludes this possibility—that does not define painting as having simultaneously perceivable regular boundaries—deals with the art in less than its highest and most independent form (as it exists sometimes, for example, when serving as the handmaiden of architecture).

Since architecture is inherently more in the order of the collective than painting, a real mural art—as opposed to the autonomous wall-size pictures of the new American painters—is alien to the modern tradition which has resolutely stressed the autonomy and personal, private character of painting. It is not surprising that only those exceptional modern painters interested in collective experience, like Leger (in his case the collectivity was political, i.e., Communist) have ever considered subordinating their painting to architecture. The wall-size picture of the Americans, as adumbrated by Monet, forms a new category in which the intimacy and environment of the cabinet-size easel painting is preserved while the picture—drained of illusion—achieves the size of a mural painting independently of that genre’s social and esthetic implications. The “window” which was the traditional easel conception, has become the “wall.”

The process by which the American painters replaced the mural conception of the painted wall with that of the wall of paint constitutes an interesting extension of what seems to me a fascinating and as yet unclarified development within Impressionism. The discussion of this, however, needs some preparation, and will depart from, but attempt to go one step beyond, the familiar “window” principle used to characterize western illusionism by Ortega y Gasset, Coomaraswamy and others.

Most historians are agreed that through undermining conventional modeling (by eliminating the middle values) and suppressing most vestiges of perspective space (sometimes even its minimal cue, the horizon line), Manet had effected—in such pictures as The Woman with a Parrot and The Fifer—a flattening of space which represented one of the first major breaks with the constants of Old Master illusionism, i.e., the common denominators of virtually all styles from around 1425 to 1850. What appeared at the time to be the almost playing-card flatness of Manet’s most abstract pictures was certainly the first step in the direction of Mondrian and the late Matisse.

But Manet’s space, while squeezed in toward the picture plane, was still patently illusionistic, and located “behind” the picture frame. The latter was still a “window,” though the world it looked out on no longer receded to infinity. What of the advanced Monets and Renoirs of the early 1870s which succeeded these Manets? Their position in relation to the development of the modern “flat” picture—to the tendency to treat the picture as a painted object rather than as an illusion—has never been adequately defined, perhaps due to their ambivalent spatial qualities.

When we compare pictures like Monet’s and Renoir’s “Duck Ponds” to the flattened illusionism of the Manets we have mentioned, our first reaction is to imagine that the Impressionists had reinstated deep space, And, indeed, on the level of the illusion, this is perfectly true. But that illusion depends upon the spectators being what was, in the days of the salon, the “customary distance” from the picture. From there, the individual touches of paint coalesce as colored light into discrete, recognizable, three dimensional images. If, on the other hand, one gets close to the canvas, as the Impressionist picture invites, the atomization of modeling and consequent dissolution of illusionistic forms into the flecked and autonomous brushwork patterns discussed earlier results in a view of the picture not as three dimensional illusion but as a painted plane. The slightly relieved tangible surface crust is now seen no longer as disembodied light sensations but as “concrete” impasto texture.

In this sense then, the esthetic posture of Impressionist art was ambivalent, and the public, which had great difficulty at first reading it as illusion (after all, their eyes were used to Meissonier and the salon), naturally saw it as a disordered chaos of color spots. In time the public became able to read it as illusion, but still did not see it as painting (in the radical sense in which subsequent modern painters understood it, consciously or not).

Seen illusionistically, the Impressionist picture restored the deep vista that Manet had eliminated; seen close up, it eliminated the shallow illusionistic space Manet had retained. Pursuing Ortega’s image we can say that the “window” was now not transparent, but covered with a crust of paint which materially affirmed the two-dimensional surface of the window pane (picture plane) in a manner new to painting and fundamentally opposed to the shallow, “accordionized” space of the early Manet. It was as if, instead of seeing the duck pond through the window, one became aware that somebody had put blue paint on the glass where spots of sky had previously been visible. The “window” ceased therefore being a “window” and became analogous to an en-framed patch of painted “wall.”

Viewed abstractly, the large late Monets may be said to have expanded the patch of “wall” of the classic Impressionist pictures to become identical with the whole wall; conversely, read as illusions, they must be thought of as glass “walls” rather than “windows.“ The Impressionists had always loved the notion of dissolving the distinction between the inside of a building and the natural world; Schapiro has noted that their friend Raffaelli predicted houses with three glass walls. The late Monets in effect do this for the spectator. But the late Monets contain the same ambivalence of possible readings evident in earlier Impressionism. Pollock was able to confirm the picture as painted “wall” by eliminating any possibility of its being read illusionistically or figuratively.

The big Pollocks are related to the late Monets not only in aspects of their plasticity but in their intimacy, a quality they share with the wall-size pictures of Rothko, Newman and Still. Unlike the Guernica and the monumental art of the past, they are meant, as we have seen, for private apartments and they address the spectator on an individual basis. The monumental Old Master picture expressed collective values and was set in an architecture that also embodied the order and hierarchy of these values (e.g., architectural progression leading to the basilican altar re-enacting the iconographic drama). In true mural situations, whatever more personal, private qualities the art of painting, as against architecture, inherently possessed were subverted by its “servitude.”

When Mark Rothko said he painted large to be intimate, he was expressing his interest in a kind of contact with a human being which the large American picture brings about forcibly in the apartment whose walls it displaces and where it operates in the spirit of Rimbaud’s injunction to “change life.” Many people assume that such large pictures were intended for museums. This is wrong; their presence there is a necessary cultural compromise. Apart from the fact that the vast spaces of the museum discourage the intimacy and closeness to the surface that the apartment fosters, the experience of the picture there is not private and contemplative (except perhaps for the curators before and after hours). And in the end the audience of the museum is but another collectivity (though in a world in which religious and political institutions have lost their power to inspire, one of the few viable ones).

—William Rubin

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NOTES

1. The texts contained in the present issue of Artforum are the third and fourth of six excerpts from my Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition being published by the magazine. “The Myths and the Paintings” and “The All-Over Compositions and the Drip Technique” appeared in the February issue; “Cubism and the Later Evolution of the All-Over Style” and “Surrealism: Automatism and the Early Iconography” (excerpts) will appear in April.

Due to an inadvertency on my part, two passages that were to have completed the discussions in footnotes nos. 8 and 11 of the texts excerpted in the February issue arrived at the magazine after the layouts had been frozen and could therefore not be added. Please consider the following addenda to footnote 8:

That Pollock played some role in the implementation of his own mythology is certain; the importance of his direct participation upon those who took up the myths, especially in Europe, and the relation of these myths to the content of his painting is more doubtful. And though the self-image projected by an artist comes from the same psyche as his painting, it does not necessarily follow that such a self-image, insofar as it crystallizes in a mythology, is contained in the painting. Thomas Hess (“Pollock: The Art of a Myth,” Art News, v. 62 no. 9, January, 1964) asserts that Pollock “chose his own self-image, gave it disciplined shape, intermingled it with his painting. He did not debunk the rumors about himself . . . Always attracted to mythologies, Pollock willed himself into a myth.” Hess considers that the Pollock myth is, in most of its ramifications, “a piece of his art; it reflects an aspect of the content of his painting.” But to assume that this mythological content is there (and it is unclear whether for Hess it is an assumption, a judgment, or both) too much equates a painter’s relation to the exigencies of his world with the nature of his artistic message. It risks bringing to the pictures a priori expectations leading to misreading. Yet even Hess foresees a time when “Pollock’s art will change again, finally, into cool objects . . . that can speak only about what they seem to be.”

Add to footnote 11: In the same magazine Thomas Hess (op. cit.) affirmed the fact that Pollock “deliberately chose to work in the great tradition of Western art. He believed in history, in the continuity of the avant-garde . . . As strong a case can he made for Pollock as a conservative painter as can be made for Cézanne.”

2. Meyer Schapiro, Lectures at Columbia University, 1950–51.

3. c.f., Seldon Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York, 1957, p. 84.

4. Schapiro, Lectures.

5. Bryan Robertson, Jackson Pollock, 1960, pps. 51 & 53.

6. Schapiro, Lectures.

7. Rudolf Arnheim, “Accident and the Necessity of Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, v. 16, no. 1, Sept. 1957.

8. Jackson Pollock, from the sound track of a film on the artist made in 1951 by Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenherg.

9. See the previous (February) issue of Artforum p. 15.

10. Pollock, “My Painting,” Possibilities I, New York, Winter 1947–8.

11. Ibid.

12. An extended discussion of this and other possible readings of Pollock’s space is contained in my chapter on “Cubism and the Later Evolution of the All-Over Style” appearing in the April Artforum.

13. c.f., Rollo Myers, Claude Debussy, New York, 1949, for the only satisfactory discussion of that composer’s relation to Symbolism as over and against Impressionism.

14. Robert Goodnough, “Pollock Paints a Picture,” Art News, v. 50, no. 3, May 1951.

15. Robertson, op.cit., p. 30.

16. See the previous (February) issue of Artforum, p. 14.

17. Clement Greenberg considers that this picture was especially influential (see “The Late Thirties in New York,” reprinted with changes in Art and Culture, Boston, 1961).

18. Newman was the first of the New York painters to speak of rejecting Cezanne as “my father,” insisting on Monet and Pissarro as “the true revolutionaries” in whom he had more interest. While not arguing his own direct descent from Impressionism (or that of any of his contemporaries), Newman’s emphasis on Monet was important in generating the Monet revival.

19. E. C. Goossen, “The Big Canvas,” Art International, v. 2, no. 8, 1958.

20. Pollock, “My Painting,” op.cit.