Though everyone knew, in the light of reason, that the man was very ill (and his death was perhaps a respite from almost certain future suffering), and that, in point of fact, he did not die as Stravinsky’s fertility maidens did, in the very moment of creation/annihilation - we still could not escape the disturbing itch (metaphysical in nature) that this death was in some direct way connected with art. One could not avoid the fact that during the last five years of his life his strength had weakened and during the last three, he hardly worked at all. Pollock’s tragedy was more subtle than his death for he did not die at the top. It was probably this latter side of Pollock that lay at the root of our depression. This ultimate, sacrificial aspect of being an artist, while not a new idea, seemed, the way Pollock did it, terribly modern, and in him the statement and the ritual were so grand, so authoritative and all-encompassing in its scale and daring, that whatever our private convictions, we could not fail to be affected by its spirit. But here it was in our time, in a man some of us knew. It was this bizarre consequence that was so moving. To “die at the top” for being his kind of modern artist was, to many, I think, implicit in the work before he died. We saw in his example the possibility of an astounding freshness, a sort of ecstatic blindness.īut, in addition, there was a morbid side to his meaningfulness. We were a piece of him he was, perhaps, the embodiment of our ambition for absolutely liberation and a secretly cherished wish to overturn old tables of crockery and flat champagne. We felt not only a sadness over the death of a great figure, but in some deeper way that something of ourselves had died too. The tragic news of Pollock’s death two summers ago was profoundly depressing to many of us. Here a young vanguard painter attempts to separate the man from the myth, and also to suggest what Pollock will mean to artists in 1960. The examples of his life and revolutionary style are increasingly, and not always benignly, influential, for his career has encouraged some artists in the perilous belief that self-destruction is necessary to the integrity of a work of art. ![]() ![]() The problem of Jackson Pollock, two years after his death is of paramount importance. ![]() On the occasion of a Kaprow exhibition at Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York, the artist’s essay follows in full below.-Alex Greenberger ![]() Yet Kaprow’s essay also takes Pollock to task for the cult of personality he had developed-perhaps he was not quite the genius that he seemed to be. This was something that Kaprow himself would come to rely on in his so-called “happenings,” in which paintings became props in larger, temporary events that cast viewers participants. In his essay, Kaprow writes about what he calls “the Act of Painting”-the way in which Pollock turned painting into a ritualistic performance of sorts, rethinking the art-making process as an activity that took place in time and made use of the body. But what, exactly, was the impact of his work at the time? This was the artist Allan Kaprow’s question when he wrote the essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” originally published in the October 1958 issue of ARTnews. When the Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock died in 1956, the New York art world knew, almost immediately, that it had lost one of the 20th century’s most important artists. ©ALLAN KAPROW ESTATE/COURTESY THE ALLAN KAPROW ESTATE AND HAUSER & WIRTH/ALEXANDRE CAREL, LONDON
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