Pollock (2000) film review John A. Walker (copyright 2009)
Jackson Pollock in his studio. Photo copyright Arnold Newman 1949. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------JACKSON POLLOCK After World War II, New York replaced Paris as the Western world’s art capital and paintings by the American abstract expressionists received national and international acclaim. Pollock (1912-56) was the first of that generation to ‘break the ice’, that is, to achieve commercial success and to make a splash in the mass media. (Americans were looking for a native art star to rival Europe’s Picasso.) In August 1949, Pollock was profiled in a Life magazine article that began with the question ‘Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?’ and was illustrated with photographs by Arnold Newman of Pollock standing in front of his drip paintings. Pollock’s unconventional method of painting by pouring and dripping fluid paint on to canvases laid out on the floor aroused curiosity and became a talking point. The artist was photographed several times posing moodily with a
cigarette in his mouth while wearing a paint-splattered denim outfit and white Tshirt or dressed in dark clothes like a beatnik poet. His once handsome face was weathered and had a furrowed brow. Such portraits suggested a rugged but emotional artisan, an outsider-rebel in the James Dean mould. (Earlier, Pollock had had a cowboy image because he was a man from Cody in the West and one photo showed him in cowboy gear with rifle and pistol.) Of course, at other times, such as when he gave interviews to the media, Pollock dressed more formally in a jacket, dark trousers, white shirt and tie. Hans Namuth also photographed and filmed him during the early 1950s while making his action paintings in and around the wooden barn that served as his studio in The Springs, near East Hampton, Long Island. (Pollock and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner [1902-84], bought a house and barn there in 1945.) Namuth’s dramatic photos and films accompanied by Pollock’s voice-over commentary were highly influential in terms of increasing Pollock’s fame and revealing his unusual creative process and techniques. In March 1951, the British photographer Cecil Beaton was commissioned by Vogue magazine to shoot fashion models with Pollock paintings as a backdrop. This was an early indication that Pollock’s work might eventually lose its apocalyptic charge and end up as mere wall decoration. Within the New York art world, Pollock’s personal problems were well known: depression and mental instability (he was prescribed tranquillisers and attended psychotherapy sessions), drinking binges, aggressive anti-social behaviour, assaults on women and adulteries, bar room brawls and urinating in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace. (Mike Bidlo, the American appropriation artist, recreated Pollock’s
infamous urination event in a performance and photograph in the early 1980s.) Pollock might have looked macho and acted tough but he was not considered fit enough to serve in the military during World War II. His premature death in 1956 aged 44 in a self-inflicted car crash terminated his career in a dramatic, violent fashion – again like James Dean. However, any sorrow at Pollock’s fate should be tempered by the knowledge that he had been drinking, was in a foul mood and the crash was the result of speeding and reckless driving. He had two women passengers with him one of whom – Ruth Kligman, his lover - was injured and the other – Edith Metzger - was killed. If he had survived, Pollock deserved to be tried and found guilty of manslaughter. Pollock and the other abstract expressionists achieved renown and affluence after decades of poverty, struggle and public indifference, and some of them were ill equipped to cope with sudden success. Pollock’s death was virtual suicide and Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko did commit suicide. While Pollock wanted attention and approval for his art, he was also tormented by self-doubt. Publicity was not positive in all respects because it also prompted jokes, ridicule and insults from conservative critics and outraged members of the public. The media’s attention made him feel like a freak show, as if ‘his skin had been taken off’ and he feared the envy and resentment of his fellow artists: ‘They only want me on top of the heap, so they can push me off.’ One biography claims that, towards the end of his life, Pollock boasted drunkenly in the Cedar Bar that he was ‘the greatest painter in the world’, that he parodied himself and became ‘trapped by his own celebrity … playing a role; feeling week by week, more like a fraud, more like the
phoney that his brothers had always accused him of being’. (1) The painter Mercedes Matter observed sorrowfully: ‘The minute success entered into the art world and it became a business, everything changed. It was all ruined.’ (2) Subsequent generations, particularly the pop artists, were much more at ease with living in the spotlight, with art as a business, and they developed strategies for coping with media pressure. In the decades since his death, Pollock’s artistic reputation has grown because of biographies, monographs and retrospective travelling exhibitions and the huge prices fetched by major paintings in salerooms. In 1989, a blockbuster biography (934 pages long) written by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith was published and later awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Pollock’s studio was preserved and turned into a national historic landmark and research library: the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center (see website http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/CAS/pkhouse.nsf). It is administered by the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Visitors are required to wear padded slippers to protect the studio’s paint-splattered floor. A replica of the studio appeared in the Pollock retrospective held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1998. MoMA’s shop also sold Pollock-related merchandise such as a jazz compact disc, a silk scarf and a poster. The complexities of Pollock’s drip paintings lent themselves to jigsaw puzzles: in 1965, Springbok Editions issued a 360-piece puzzle of the 1952 canvas Convergence.
Puzzle and lithograph. Photo Amazon.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------THE POLLOCK FILM
Somewhat belatedly, the established American actor Ed Harris (b. 1950) made a biopic – Pollock (Brant-Allen and three other production companies) - in 1999-2000. (The delay may well have because Pollock was primarily regarded as an abstract painter.) Harris directed and played the part of Pollock while Val Kilmer played his main rival Willem de Kooning. The screenplay, written by Barbar Turner and Susan Emshwiller, was based on the Naifef and White biography. Harris physically
resembled Pollock and had learned all about his painting techniques. Harris spent some years in the 1990s learning to draw and paint in preparation for the film. Some scenes were shot on location on Long Island. Naturally, in this film – which received mostly favourable reviews - Pollock’s private life and personal problems figured as much as his paintings.
There are now sufficient semi-fictional biopics of fine artists to constitute a genre. Such movies are generally acted and filmed in a naturalistic manner with a conventional narrative structure, that is, beginning, middle and end. The favourite subject of such films is a man of extremes, a famous genius, a tormented soul, burdened with disabilities such as alcoholism, depression and self doubt who struggles for recognition and commercial success, and the love of a good woman, and who triumphs in his art but dies prematurely, or violently and tragically.
In addition, the subject tends to be a romantic rather than a classical artist – one cannot imagine a biopic of the abstract painter Piet Mondrian for instance and a Andy Warhol biopic would be problematic because he was cool rather than hot, and devised a mask to protect himself from all the media attention. (Although there are several feature films in which Warhol appears as a character.) Pollock conforms to the rules of the genre but it is a sincere, well-crafted film, which provides more coverage of his paintings and painting techniques, and the art world, than is often the case. Also, it recognises the tremendous contribution to his career of his wife and fellow painter Lee Krasner (played by Marcia Gay Harden.)
. All fictional films involve impersonation and simulation. A common problem with films about artists is how to simulate the works and art and the creative act. Often the estates of artists will not allow actual works to be filmed or copied – as in the case of a recent film about Francis Bacon (see my review of Love is the Devil) . Ed Harris did gain permission from the Pollock estate to copy paintings and he went to great lengths to imitate Pollock’s painting methods; however, viewers should realise that the artist Lisa Lawley was employed to make the pre-drip paintings and Krasner’s early work was produced by Margaret von Biesen. They are plausible simulations. Francis V. O’Connor, a Pollock scholar, acted as the film’s art history consultant.
Ed Harris as Pollock in action. Image may be subject to copyright. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------In Pollock, there is a film within a film, namely the documentary that Namuth made
in 1951 of Pollock drip painting. As Harris’s film shows, Pollock himself wanted the publicity but he realised the creative act was being staged for the camera, that he was impersonating himself and this caused a feeling of inauthenticity. So, Ed Harris impersonates Pollock who was impersonating himself. There are layers of simulation.
Since every biopic involves reduction and simplification, there may seem little point in arguing about what has been put in and left out but one does note that Pollock’s radical past was omitted (the narrative goes back as far as 1941) – there is no indication that he was once a critic of American society and that in the 1930s he worked with communist artists such as the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siquerios. So, Harris’s Pollock is depoliticised. (3) Some of the people around him are also reduced to caricatures – the critic Clement Greenberg’s views on art, for instance are so simplified as to be absurd (see my article on Greenberg and the British). There are also unresolved contradictions such as Pollock saying that his art came from within, from the unconscious, but also that his abstraction and new painting methods were a response to what was without - the age of radio and the atom bomb.
Arguably, Pollock was the first American artist-celebrity or art star. Harris’s film does show how the mass media, specifically the Life magazine article of 1949, and photographs and films by Newman and Namuth, helped to make Pollock famous and how he found it hard to cope with success after decades of struggle and poverty.
Why are Hollywood directors and film stars drawn to films about fine artists? Many of them collect art, appreciate art and some even paint in their spare time. Art still has a cachet of being high culture - above the mass culture and commerce associated with Hollywood movies. Perhaps the main reason is that filmmaking is a effort involving many compromises, and directors and movie stars pine for the total artistic control a painter or sculptor in a studio seems to have.
I do wonder about the audience for such a film, which was a decade-long personal project for Harris. I suspect that most of those who will see it will belong to the intelligentsia – who already know about Pollock and have seen his paintings. Harris’s film will tell them little they did not already know – so what was the point? I doubt that it will attract members of the general public and make them want to see his actual works of art – the film also lacks pace and drama in its middle section.
Naturally, the film concludes with the fatal car crash in which Pollock dies. A mythic, James Dean type end to a major artist who in many ways was a deeply unattractive individual. We should not feel too sorry for Pollock because if he had survived the crash, he could have tried for dangerous driving and manslaughter for killing his passenger Edith Metzger. It seems to me that society is too willing to forgive artists’ anti-social behaviour because of the merit of their art.
A basic objection to biopics – voiced by John Berger in the 1950s regarding the film
Lust for Life (about van Gogh) - is that an artist becomes known because of his or her art but the biopic reverses this priority by focusing on the life rather than the art. (However, in this case, there is quite a lot about the art.) Of course, the art and the life of the artist are interrelated but it is by no means a simple matter to explain that relationship. Some art is clearly autobiographical - think of David Hockney or Tracey Emin - but other art is not - constructivist art, for instance.
Another objection can be made: the Pollock film shows how the art being produced in the 1940s was for a small circle of other artists and critics, and a few rich patrons such as Peggy Guggenheim. There is no indication why anyone outside these elite circles should be interested in Pollock’s work except repeated assertions ‘Jackson you are the greatest artist in America’. Whereas, in the 1930s, when many American artists – Pollock included - were figurative painters supported by the public programme, the WPA (Works Progress administration), there was an attempt to take art to the people by producing public murals and also easel paintings that addressed social and political issues. The transformation of this social realist art with a social purpose into abstract expressionism may well have been a source of anxiety to the artists concerned. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(1) Steven Naifeh & Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: an American Saga, (NY; C.N. Potter, 1989), p. 759.
(2) Matter quoted in Naifeh & Smith, p. 763.
(3) For a political analysis of the film from a socialist perspective, see the article by David Walsh: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/mar2001/poll-m31.shtml ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of Art and Artists on Screen and Art and Celebrity (some of the above appeared in the latter book).