Reprise

The American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock has been many things to many people, but let us consider his work in relation to the metaphors of modernism. Doing so, perhaps surprisingly, invites us to enjoy a reprise of the Gleichnisse we have explored—piano, water, glass, and home—at Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme.

In 1924, well before Jackson Pollock became “Jackson Pollock,” a German Jewish immigrant in San Francisco, Galka Scheyer, brought four artists together as the “Blue Four”: Lyonel Feininger, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee.1 All had exhibited at Der Sturm, and all exhibited with the Société Anonyme. In March 1926 Dreier forwarded a parcel of at least seven Kandinskys and twelve Klees from the Société Anonyme and her personal collection for a Blue Four show that Scheyer organized at the Oakland Art Gallery.2 A letter from Dreier to Klee reveals that Scheyer had requested all the works by these artists that she had in her possession, but Dreier agreed to just a dozen Klees, because she wanted to keep fourteen for other exhibiting opportunities.3 The Société Anonyme had this incredible inventory because of Kandinsky’s and Klee’s solo exhibits there in 1923 and 1924, respectively.

Among those inspired in California by the Blue Four was Howard Putzel, who later advised Peggy Guggenheim to consult Frederick Kiesler on designing the Art of This Century gallery.4 Although Putzel’s background remains obscure, he wrote art criticism for the Argus: A Journal of Art Criticism, published in San Francisco from 1927 to 1929.5 In “Thirty European Modernists,” a review in part of the Blue Four show in Oakland, Putzel declared, “Kandinsky expresses himself in beautiful color; design is achieved through the symbolical significance of the forms.” Putzel was not altogether convinced by Gleichnis, however: “His [Kandinsky’s] message is literary—scientific or philosophical—rather than aesthetic.”6 Still, the critic wanted to see more from these artists, writing: “Of the more advanced pictures in the exhibition, the water color heads by Jawlensky impressed us most: they have impeccable design and very beautiful color, and they express a mystic inwardness that inspires one with awe.” Although such “mystic inwardness” remains undefined, Putzel’s praise of another artist’s work in the show clarifies the critical standards he was developing: “Men on Horses, an etching by Picasso, is one of the finest expressions of his ‘blue period’; the sensitive variations of line accent and the exquisite figure grouping effect a Mozartian harmony.”7

Putzel’s eye for the musical sharpened. He devoted an essay to “Lyonel Feininger—an architectural expressionist” in February 1928: “Feininger was born in New York in the ’seventies. Both of his parents were musicians, and, even though he is best known as a painter, his natural heritage also expresses itself in musical composition[,] which is classical in structure. His fugues generally are played in programs that include Bach, Rameau, and Scarlatti.” Such a preface prepares us for his observation that Feininger’s architectural paintings are “organized with sensitivity and precision, like a fugue made visual.”8

Melvin Lader, the only scholar to have concentrated on tracing Putzel’s origins, found his 1929 essay in the American Magazine of Art to be especially revealing. Lader contends that the Ray Boynton suite of murals in the Mills College (Oakland) concert hall is relatively conservative and “reminiscent of late nineteenth-century Symbolist art. . . . However, it is not the subject of the murals that is important in shedding light on Putzel, but his analysis of these paintings.”9 In his little-known essay, Putzel further develops his emerging musical model:

In Ray Boynton’s mural paintings at Mills College a personal and vitalizing force proclaims itself in art on the Pacific Coast. Logically enough, the impulse appears in the form of mural decoration, which has been the first gesture of every awakening or reawakening civilization when it commences to seek spiritual and esthetic coordination. . . . Boynton has glimpsed . . . the most glorious aspiration of humanity: the search for a gigantic peace which is also active. In them [the murals] harmonies flow and sing to each other in sumptuous expanses of green, blue and ochre. . . . The forms mingle and flow in exquisite synchronization with the space surrounding them—with the proportions of the hall itself. . . . The landscape of the organ screen compels with bold simplifications and noble rhythms. The color . . . caresses instead of scorching. It is like a realization of some dream-place where melodies and fragrance become a visible part of nature. Melodies, did I say? A symphony rather, whose themes exist in monumental design—in the succession of colossal curves that flow through climax after climax of color—a symphony without beginning or end, cyclical, eternally beautiful and therefore eternally true. Vibrating and singing colors, flowing forms; their visible music fills the empty auditorium during the silent hours.10

Music provides the primary metaphor, which Putzel deploys to represent a three-dimensional, multisensory, simultaneously active and passive experience set in motion by these glowing murals that both “compel” and “caress” the viewer. This rhetoric corresponds with the experience of Gleichnisse with which we have become familiar in Four Metaphors of Modernism. Putzel’s emphasis on murals, though, as the “first gesture of every awakening or reawakening civilization” appears initially discordant in this context. Indeed, already in 1904, the German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe had associated the development of modern art precisely with the demise of ancient mural and mosaic traditions.11

We need to switch contexts and place ourselves in California, where a vibrant mural culture was emerging. Diego Rivera’s fame for his murals in Mexico City brought him his first American commission in 1929. He painted his great murals at the Luncheon Club of the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco (1930–31); more commissions followed.12 Radical local painters welcomed Rivera’s radical politics. After Rivera left town, their efforts coalesced in collaborative projects such as the murals in the interior of San Francisco’s Coit Tower in 1934 (a project to which Boynton also contributed). The typically figurative representations of these artists can be extremely moving. However, such socialist realism does not seem to have caught Putzel’s fancy as much as the idea of the mural with symphonic potential.

Fast forward to New York, 1943. Putzel was advising Guggenheim on all things related to her gallery. She wanted to commission a mural for the foyer of her duplex at 155 East Sixty-First Street. She was not sure whom to engage for such a large project: the entrance hall measured thirty-five by thirteen and a half feet, and the wall in question was twenty feet long.13 She had taken a chance on Putzel’s recommendation of Kiesler the previous year with great success; why not take his advice with a relatively unknown artist, Pollock, for a mural?

Pollock’s extraordinary Mural (1943, Figure R.1) has been the subject of many conflicting analyses.14 Yet consider the neglected words of Lader, who observes: “Putzel’s emphasis [regarding Boynton’s murals] upon the fluid lines, the seemingly endless, cyclical entanglement of colors, the expansiveness of the color field, the rhythm and harmony of the murals, and the monumental proportions suggests several reasons why Putzel was later drawn to the art of Jackson Pollock.”15 I go further and hazard that Putzel’s description of Boynton’s paintings, especially of “the succession of colossal curves that flow through climax after climax of color—a symphony without beginning or end, cyclical,” may describe Pollock’s Mural better than its ostensible subject in Oakland. Putzel, who often attended concerts with both Guggenheim (in Paris and New York) and later with Pollock and Lee Krasner in New York, intuited the powerful, rhythmic music that Pollock could bring to the canvas.16 Although I have been unable to determine whether the piano, in particular, played a role in the musical lives of this particular set, I hope readers will indulge this musical interlude as a variation on the Gleichnis of piano.

Water came next in our Sturm–Société Anonyme narrative, and a provocative essay by Anna Chave suggests that it did for Pollock, too. Chave submits that the rhetoric surrounding Pollock’s “drip” paintings, initiated in 1947, consistently invokes ejaculation and (male) urination, that is, specifically masculine flows.17 Perceived (feminine) flows, in contrast, can be threatening. However, as Chave contends, “Critics typically associate Pollock’s flows not with engulfing floods of the female body but with masculine streams of urine and semen.” At the same time, however, Pollock “had some dephallicizing impulses,” as Chave acknowledges.18 First, she notes that the painter talked of “experiencing a kind of ecstasy or loss of self when he worked: ‘I can . . . literally be in the painting. . . . When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I am doing.’”19 Pollock did not cling to the mast like Adorno’s Odysseus. Second, as Chave observes about the paintings themselves: “What distinguishes Pollock’s work from almost all other art before it is not that he poured paint on canvas but that he kept those streams of paint from forming pools or bodying shapes or objects, and so configuring a composition.”20 Although Pollock’s paint had to dry, he managed to maintain the appearance of never-ending flow. Chave concludes that “Pollock’s painting, in its attempt to describe ‘unframed space’ (as Krasner phrased it), and in its act of destructuring and decentering, may in a sense be seen as an attempt to visualize the void, the hole, the Mother.”21

As such, Pollock’s fluidity may evoke not only the Gleichnis of water but also that of home, which Freud and others have linked with the maternal body. Here, as elsewhere, we must tread cautiously. Just as Butler warns against a feminist embrace of the womb (for its potential essentialism and ahistoricism), Chave reminds us, as Felski has before, that a masculine lauding of the maternal may not be a celebration of the feminine so much as an appropriation thereof for masculinist ends.22 Indeed, in this context Chave recalls that there had been a woman who had poured paint and articulated something like a fluid, feminine space prior to Pollock: Janet Sobel, who received a solo show at Art of This Century in 1946, and whose own drip paintings might be exemplified by this Untitled painting (ca. 1946, Figure R.2).23 Pollock had seen her work already in 1944; he and Clement Greenberg attended the opening together in 1946.24 As Chave points out, Greenberg both credits and minimizes Sobel in this context, writing: “The effect—and it was the first really ‘all-over’ one that I had ever seen . . .—was strangely pleasing. Later on, Pollock admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him. But he had really anticipated his own ‘all-overness’ in a mural he did for Peggy Guggenheim at the beginning of 1944 [sic].”25

Lamentably, Greenberg’s emphasis on Pollock’s self-generation has largely elided this potentially feminine and actually female source in most of the literature, but the example of Sobel gives us the opportunity to reflect on the large number of women actually exhibited by and promoted by Der Sturm, the Société Anonyme, and Art of This Century. It is entirely possible that, in addition to Sobel’s painting, the maternal spaces in Guggenheim’s gallery encouraged Pollock to explore the same in his free flow of paint. Finally, whether one accepts the attribution of femininity to Pollock’s painting or not, one cannot ignore the allusions to water.

Full Fathom Five (1947, Figure R.3), one of Pollock’s first two drip paintings, maintains the illusion of ever-flowing paint and offers us a Gleichnis of the deep sea. This is no pure sea, though, but one that has swallowed all of the waste of life: “nails, tacks, buttons, [a] key, coins, cigarettes, matches, etc.” are wrapped within the skeins of paint.26 The text from which the title comes is “Ariel’s Song” in Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

In the play, a sea spirit, Ariel, sings these words to guide the shipwrecked character, Ferdinand, through the water. It is his father, drowned, who lies at such a depth below. But just as Alfred Döblin’s “Conversations with Calypso” embraces death and life in the sea, so does Shakespeare offer the possibility of endless transformation in this song. The English expression “sea-change,” meaning a dramatic shift of course and perspective, derives from this passage. Guggenheim admired this painting and bought it before giving it to the Museum of Modern Art. The Gleichnis of water retains its oceanic power of movement and change in this and other free-flowing paintings by Pollock.

I have already touched on home as a possible attribute of feminized water or the maternal. We should remember, too, that Pollock’s Mural was actually designed for a domestic space (Guggenheim’s foyer, Figure R.4). It was Marcel Duchamp who offered Guggenheim a wise suggestion before Pollock began work: to have the work painted on canvas, rather than the wall, so that Guggenheim could roll it up and take it along, should she decide to move again (as she did). One could consider this advice to be characteristic of the homelessness of the avant-garde, but I believe that it speaks more eloquently of a deeply felt need and ambition to make home here and now.28

Let us return, then, finally, to glass. The title of Pollock’s other “first” drip painting, Cathedral (1947, Dallas Museum of Art), may evoke the early twentieth-century rhetoric of medieval, communal renewal through architecture—specifically, translucent, colorful glass architecture, like Bruno Taut’s Glashaus (Figure 3.3). Yet the painting’s mesmerizing swirls may more likely be, as Caroline Jones suggests (compounding metaphors), “to absorb and surround the viewer. . . . The indefinite depth of this space, and its seemingly infinite extendibility, contribute to the sense of an oceanic or unbounded state.”29 As such, the glass reference virtually disappears, although the near opacity of Pollock’s webs confirms that oceanic bliss has little, if anything, to do with transparency.

Glass transparency does appear at a critical juncture in Pollock’s career: in Hans Namuth’s film Jackson Pollock, 51, for which the photographer staged Pollock’s painting in the yard of his and Krasner’s home on Long Island in late 1950.30 In closing, this film allows us to read glass and Pollock as ambivalent signs of modernism and modernity. It was not enough to film the artist painting on canvas spread out on the grass; Namuth wanted to capture the artist’s process more intimately, so he asked Pollock to paint on a pane of large (forty-eight by seventy-two feet), horizontal, transparent glass (seen here in stills from the film, Plate 12). Jones sets the scene: “The camera is positioned underneath, thus effacing both camera and cameraman, so that the painting itself seems to be the only witness to its creation. Watching the sequence, we become the imagined canvas, sole witness to Pollock’s creative dance.”31 If we are the imagined canvas, then Pollock is dripping his paint on us; the immediacy of modern art has never felt so direct, so intimately bodily. The description also recalls Kandinsky, years before, writing in Der Sturm about the artist’s playing the piano to touch the viewer’s soul. Pollock plays us as we are positioned under the glass. The reader will notice that metaphor returns as soon as we imagine complete immediacy: glass becomes canvas becomes body becomes piano.

Yet the myth of complete immediacy, often figured by transparency, remains, despite the multiplicity of metaphors. Jones continues: “The transparency of the finished work on glass [Pollock’s Number 29, 1950, Figure R.5] allows the viewer to approximate Pollock’s goal to ‘literally be in the painting.’ By seeing the world through it, one can be imaginatively surrounded by Pollock’s skeins of paint.”32 She is right, of course, that the glass remains partially transparent, but it is fantasy that one would be “surrounded by Pollock’s skeins of paint” only. This museum-approved photograph contributes to that purist dream. But if we were to see the painting in Ottawa at the National Gallery of Canada ourselves, we would experience it in real space, with all that involves: other objects and people appearing in the interstices of the paint and dispersed screens and such that Pollock also attached to the glass. We might also catch sight of some dust or a streak of window cleaner on the pane. That is the world we would see through it—and the world within which we live.

Namuth’s film has been interpreted as emasculating for Pollock; he had to do whatever he was directed to do, and he apparently felt that this compromised his authenticity.33 In this sense, complete transparency was his undoing, as he returned to drink after the film experience, with devastating, well-rehearsed consequences. I see it differently, though, apart from Pollock’s biography and especially in the context of Four Metaphors of Modernism. Pollock actually relinquished control in the film, trying something for the first time. As he says in voice-over: “This is the first time I am using glass as a medium.” Hearing that, we are not the imaginary canvas-glass-piano keys; rather, we empathize with his attempt to try something new, in the present tense. Then, it does not work. He says: “I lost contact with my first painting on glass, and I started another one.”34 His use of the past tense manages the failure as finished, although we know there had to be disappointment or frustration. What I love the most is that we see Pollock wash the “dirty” glass before he starts again. Nothing in the film stills above (the “dirty” glass) survives into Number 29, 1950. The film sequence is an acknowledgment of work, mistakes, and the repetition of daily life as well as art. The transitory is Gleichnis. Pollock brings art home.