The Crisis of Jackson Pollock’s Mural as a Painting

Abstract

Jackson Pollock’s express interest in securing his pictorial meaning (what he came to call his “statement”) against the contexts of exhibition and reception within which viewers encountered his work corresponded to deep concern with the autonomy of painting. I suggest that the twinned issues of art’s autonomy and the artist’s meaning bear not only on how we interpret Mural, but also on current debates regarding the status of readers or viewers in interpretation in general. My central historical claim is that Pollock attempted to establish the identity and independence of Mural as a work of art in the face of a perceived breakdown of the conventions of easel painting. The argument proceeds in three parts. First, I explain what is at stake in maintaining a theoretical distinction between the artist’s meaning and a viewer’s actual experience. Second, I consider Clement Greenberg’s view that the possibilities of expression in contemporary art were under threat from the collapse of the conventions of easel painting that had traditionally secured the genre’s identity. I then show how Pollock thematized the issue of autonomy in Stenographic Figure (ca. 1942), and conclude by explaining how he responded formally to the challenge of establishing the pictorial identity of Mural.