Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

a mess. Otherwise, there is pure harmony, an easy give-and-take, and thepainting comes out well.”For the observer, too, Pollock’s large-scale paintings tend to beexperienced more as environment than isolated object. The viewer is lessdetached from such a painting than from a more traditional artwork. Viewersrelate their impressions of his paintings to a wide range of phenomena:the American landscape, New York City, the night sky, atomic energy, jazzmusic, American transcendentalist ideas, existentialist ideas of risk andchance. Freed from the traditional functions of drawing, Pollock’s line trajectsfreely as an autonomous element, building an expansive web of forcessuspended in front of the canvas, seeming to project a sense of space outfrom the picture surface. Throughout each picture, there is a continual tensionbetween picture surface and the dissolving marks, between the frontalplane and receding space, between wall and veil. Greenburg comments thatthe picture surface of Pollock’s paintings seems to open up from the rear.Actually, it is the quality of flatness of the picture surface, not that materialsurface itself, that becomes dissolved by an element of pictorial illusion—avery subtle experience where the difference was indistinguishable betweenthe literalness of surface and the illusionistic “spatial” presence of the paintingconveyed through how the paint was applied.The most emulated and influential painter during the 1950s, Willemde Kooning (1904–1997), had studied art for eight years in his nativeHolland before moving to New York City in 1926. His later reputation waslargely based on his masterful syntheses of intense personal expressionwith a certain pictorial finesse and virtuoso handling of paint, or, in termsof formal innovation, on his combination of traditional figural subjects withan energetically structural but flat surface. De Kooning later admitted thathe was often jealous of Pollock, who told him, “You know more, but I feelmore.” His painting was strongly influenced by Pollock’s allover, drippedpaintstyle, but de Kooning also felt himself linked to the Western artistictradition.In the early 1940s de Kooning began to “draw” directly with hispaint-loaded brush, applying an often vehemently expressive brush stroketo increasingly complex compositions that seemed to reflect the dynamic,anxious, and restless qualities of modern urban living. He allowed his raw,gestural brush strokes themselves (“color drawing”) to carry the burden ofhis meaning. For many critics and fellow artists, his dynamic, open-endedcanvases seemed to convey an honesty of expression and risk-taking thatgave new meaning to the creative process.127