Review:Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, 1978

Abstract

Jackson Pollock has been dead for 23 years (he died August 11, 1956). His importance in the history of post-World War II modernism is established, although the nature of his achievement has been long debated and continues to be debated. Here and there, something of significance in the way of critical analysis has been written-not very much and not recently. Critically, something of the nature and magnitude of Pollock's achievement emerges in the fact that always, in the more ambitious essays, there exists the attempt to identify in the mature Pollock the crisis of abstraction as experienced in the late '40s and early '50s and to see in Pollock, uniquely, the resolution of that crisis. Yet recourse, systematic or incidental, to Pollock's work itself, other than in reproduction, remains extremely limited. As Francis V. O'Connor pointed out in his brief essay accompanying the small Pollock exhibition that opened at the Yale University Art Gallery in conjunction with the publication of the Catalogue Raisonne, of the known Pollocks, only 12.5 percent are in public collections-and not always on view; 31.5 percent remain in the Estate in storage; 50 percent are in private collections. Thus the publication of a catalogue raisonne,1 especially one whose emphasis is on the functionalism and comprehensiveness, rather than tokenism, of its plates cannot but provide an important and timely resource for Pollock studies. It should be noted immediately that these four large volumes depart appreciably from the format and endeavor of the traditional catalogue raisonne precisely through the editors' decision that every work should be photographically documented (including sheets that simply retain, without further reworking, stains that had bled through from a work in progress), and that the plates should provide as fully as possible, in terms of scale and impression, an instructive sense of the original. Visually, then, the catalogue is meant analytically and dialectically to project the particularity of individual works and the complex particularity of Pollock's development. On the whole, and in the face of some probable dispute over categorical (by medium) decisions and divisions, the catalogue is valuable in this respect, as well as, of course, in its chronology and documentation of the individual works. Within the practice of art history it is unusual for a catalogue raisonne to be undertaken and published shortly after an artist's death. When taken, the advantages of such a precipitous decision are clear: closeness in point of time (and space) to when (and where) the works were made. There is the relatively contained dispersement of the work itself and pertinent records an documents. There is the accessibility, always diminished even aft r a short time, of persons personally and/or professionally related to the artist: here, most immediately, Pollock's widow, he painter Lee Krasner, who initiated the project of the ca alogue raisonne and was in many respects instrumental in its realization. There are Pollock's three dealers, sequentially, Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons, and Sidney Janis; all are alive, and each one in a different fashion and with different impact play d a role, sometimes significant, in the advancement of a theory of painting, the polemic of modernism. Equally important, and again diminished in number, are family, friends, artists, and critics acquainted, circumstantially and/or consequentially, with the man and his work. Understanding of Pollock's development as a painter cannot proceed without taking into account the complex circumstance of persons and debate in New York during the '40s and '50s. Yet any descriptive acknowledgement of this circumstance is, seemingly systematically and seemingly by editorial policy, omitted from the catalogue's documentation; only the impact of Benton, Siqueiros, and Orozco are indicated. It is an omission which seriously diminishes the worth of Thaw's introductory essay to the colorplates, which stands as a summary discussion of Pollock's development and the pictorial issues that Pollock's work engaged. It is an omission of biographical and professional history that seriously compromises O'Connor's appendix, Life of Jackson Pollock 1912-1956: A Documentary Chronology. It is an omission that cannot be argued away on the grounds that O'Connor's monograph of 1967, an extensively annotated Chronology which served as the text of The Museum of Modern Art's Pollock retrospective, incorporates a great deal of critical literature and exhibition data that does contribute some