Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION
on canvas. The works in what became his “signature” style of poured and
dripped as well as brushed paint were not made on the easel, however, but on
the floor. Neither strictly mural nor easel paintings, Pollock’s work of 1941–50
can indeed be said to lie between these in function; I will return shortly to the
question of function.
His “drip” technique established the canvas as the ground of the picture: the
physical ground is the visual ground. On this lie various sorts of line, which once
again define neither planes nor figures. Along with the abandonment of earlier
normal functions of line pictorial space tends to vaporize. Differences in value,
color, and thickness of line or paint area (as well as other objects that may be
embedded in the picture surface) typically generate a hazy, pulsating spatiality in
these pictures, like a thinned-out and flowing version of cubist space.
Perhaps it was no accident that it was Piet Mondrian—important influence
on the geometric abstractionists in the AAA, a friend of AAA member Lee Krasner—who
gave Pollock a big break by urging Peggy Guggenheim to take his
work seriously. In Mondrian’s “Neo-Plasticist” pictures, too, line neither outlines
forms nor defines planes. While planes, rendered as flat areas of solid color, are
present, they are not grounds on which figures can appear, and are no more—
and no less—than equals of the lines. (In some works the distinction between a
thick line and a narrow plane is arbitrary.) One consequence of this pictorial
method is that Mondrian’s pictures completely fill the picture space, as opposed
to the centrality of image typical of Cubism. This edge-to-edge character of
Mondrian’s paintings combines the exquisite balancing of elements that makes
each a totality with the suggestion that what we are seeing stands in for a greater
totality that continues beyond the framing edge.
A related idea emerged in the form of a negative judgment on Pollock’s pictures
when in 1948 Life magazine convened a panel of experts to consider the
question, “Is modern art, considered as a whole, a good or bad development?
That is to say, is it something that responsible people can support, or may they
neglect it as a minor and impermanent phase of culture?” 11 This question about
modern art had to do particularly with abstraction, which foregrounded the picture
as an object of interest in its own right by abandoning the modes of
representation and narrative central to the meaning of earlier art. The absence
of figurative content seemed to rob Pollock’s pictures, in particular, of the formal
identity that made serious significance possible. Speaking of the 1947 painting
Cathedral, panel member Aldous Huxley said, “It raises a question of why it stops
when it does . . . It seems to me like a panel for a wallpaper which is repeated
indefinitely around the wall.” 12
11 Russell W. Davenport and Winthrop Sargeant, “A Life Round Table on modern art,” Life 25
(October 11, 1948), p. 56.
12 Ibid., p. 62. Interestingly, people had already spoken about Mural in these terms; according to
Clement Greenberg, “People were saying it goes on and on, repeating itself, but I told Jackson,
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