Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

Such a view is more plausible in relation to Cathedral than to most of Pollock’s
drip paintings. Even in a relatively edge-to-edge work like Full Fathom Five (also
from 1947) his looping marks draw his images away from the edges; the resulting
centeredness is one of the things that links them, in contrast to Mondrian’s
work, to earlier painting and limits what Greenberg called their “allover” character.
But the problem of decorativeness, seen as a fault, had long been raised
for abstract painting generally. Clement Greenberg himself—a member of the
Life panel and by that time Pollock’s champion—had written of the very danger
evoked by Huxley’s criticism in a 1941 review of works by Miró, Kandinsky, and
Léger, which showed, he felt, “how easy it is for the abstract painter to degenerate
into a decorator.” This is “the besetting danger of abstract art” (although,
Greenberg also insisted, to be an interior decorator “is still . . . to be more creative
than an academic painter”).
The rejection of depiction of natural and social phenomena in favor of concentration
on the artist’s picture-making material and procedures was a major
reason, Greenberg thought, why modern painters could not “cover large spaces
successfully,” as recent mural painting demonstrated:
We, with our tradition of easel painting, are not satisfied to have our
pictorial art in the form of decoration. We demand of a picture what
we demand of literature and music: dramatic interest, interior movement
. . . It is the task of the abstract artist to satisfy this requirement
with the limited means at his disposal. He cannot resort to the means of
the past, for they have been made stale by overuse, and to take them up
again would be to rob his art of its originality and real excitement. 13
In 1943 Greenberg described Guardians of the Secret as zigzagging “between the
intensity of the easel picture and the blandness of the mural.” 14 One thing
Greenberg found in Pollock’s later work, then, was successful large-scale painting,
fulfilling the “function” of the easel painting—visual drama—in wall-sized
works.
‘That is great art’” (Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985), p. 76).
13 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1931–1944,
ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 61–5. Greenberg’s nextwritten
review essay, on Paul Klee, continued this theme:
The difficulty which besets the abstract painter in so far as he wants to create more
than decoration is that of overcoming the inertia into which his picture always risks
falling because of its flatness. The easel-painting . . . relies upon the illusion of depth,
of composition in depth and upon dramatic interest for the intensity of the effect it
must have to overcome its smallness and its isolation.
Ibid., p. 69
14 Ibid., p. 165.
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