The Revolutionary Work of Painter Jackson Pollock

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: NOVEMBER 16, 1998
Time: 12:00
Tran: 111601np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Jackson Pollock Exhibit
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Jackson Pollock's dripped and poured paintings of the late 1940s and the '50s shook up the art world, changed the direction of modern art, and made him one of the most important and controversial artists of the century.

Now, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is showing the first major U.S. retrospective of his work in 31 years. My guest is the lead curator, Kirk Varnedoe, who organized retrospective with Pepe Karmel (ph). The show is described as a landmark, nearly perfect, by New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman (ph), who went on to say, "If you care about art, you live for exhibitions like this in which an artist against the heavy odds of his own skewed talent and unhinged personality pursued something so wild, untested, and mysterious that its full meaning was unclear even to him."

Kirk Varnedoe wrote a catalogue essay in which he gets beneath the mythology that grew around Pollock. I asked him to start with the mythology itself.

KIRK VARNEDOE, CHIEF CURATOR, JACKSON POLLOCK EXHIBIT, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK CITY: Jackson Pollock's life has a tremendous drama to it. He struggles very hard in lonely isolation; comes out of a poor itinerant family in the West; moves to New York; and after 10 years of very lonely misery and the Depression years breaks through in the early '40s and comes to very high degree of success in the late '40s. Has an article in Life magazine; becomes the king of the hill; from out of nowhere becomes the leading American painter of his generation; and then almost as precipitously falls off -- falls into alcoholism, depression in the '50s; and then is killed in a car crash driving drunk in 1956.

So, it's a great American story of humble beginnings, giant success, tragic flaw, and violent death. It has all of the accoutrements of a great sort of mythic drama in the American popular culture sense. The overtones in the image of Pollock that you see in those photographs in Life magazine in 1949 -- black denim, cigarette dangling off of his lips -- there's a lot of Brando, there's a lot of James Dean, there's the whole sense of the rebel bohemian who pays the high price for his transgressions.

All of this surrounds his artwork with an air of celebrity stardom, and makes him the first of his kind, really, in the American visual arts that later Warhol and others would become, and that is the kind of star artist. And I think the myths of him, the myths of Pollock have to do with the strongly tragic inflection one reads into that life.

GROSS: And part of that image, too, is that macho that he brought to his painting and to his public image.

VARNEDOE: When Pollock appeared in Life magazine in 1949 leaning against his own painting with his arms crossed, sort of sneering at the camera with a cigarette dangling off his lips, I think most Life readers would have thought that an abstract painter was some curiously effete European with a beret and strange esthetic theories.

And the idea of this sort of working-class tough guy, hard drinking, bar fighting image that Pollock projected was a complete revolution in consciousness about what modern art was for the American audience.

GROSS: Let's look at his paintings and his actual approach to doing them, and then we'll get back to the story of his life and the story of his image. Pollock is most famous for splattering and dripping paint; he didn't like to use brushes. Would you describe his approach to painting during the most celebrated period of his career?

VARNEDOE: Yeah, beginning in 1947 Pollock took something that had been a marginal part of his own procedure as a painter, and something that other painters has used in one form or another, and that is liquefied paint poured, dripped, splattered, drizzled -- there are a number of different words that you would use -- onto the canvas with the canvas laid out on the floor beneath him.

He did this sometimes by punching hole in a paint can and using that to draw with as the paint dripped down, by pouring paint down a stick, by using a dry brush that would throw out a fan of paint. In many different techniques with varying degrees of force and with varying degrees of subtlety and control, he built up these webs of liquefied line on the canvas.

And it wasn't as if he was pouring paint in order to draw a tree or draw a face; the whole composition of the canvas was a series of webs of movement and line of the splotches and splatters, the frittered away vectors of line as he moved across areas, the puddlings of paint as they marbled together.

The process of his art is apparent in the finished artwork and determines a lot of the shape, the actual materials he uses -- the way they fall, the way they react to each other -- determine the quality of the lines. So that instead of executing a pre-ordained schema or following a prepared drawing, he spun out, literally, in a spontaneous fashion like a jazz artist his composition as he worked.

And the end result has no horizon, no up, no down, no center or side in those terms of standard compositions. It's instead a kind of cloud or pulsing web or a series of dendrites or synapses of linear energy. And that's -- all of these things were shocking, but I think the poured or dripped aspect suggested to many people a lack of control that lacked the kind of touch or personality of a artist's brush work. And it suggested and infatuation with chaos or accident.

GROSS: Well, do you see Jackson Pollock's paintings as being involved with chance processes or do you think that finally there is a sense of order that he as the painter brings to the canvas?

VARNEDOE: The more I look at Pollock's canvases, the more I'm impressed with the sense of control that he had over what he did. He did like the sense of dynamism and spontaneity; he liked to see the effect of paint as it fell. And every time he would make a mark he would then respond to that mark so that if there was an accident or an occurrence that he didn't like on the canvas he would tend to paint over it. These pictures are generally done in layers, and each layer would respond to, adjust, correct, cover over the previous layer in selective fashion.

He had the kind of control which is not planned, it's not like he's a strategic artist, but like a great athlete or like a ballet dancer he had an amazing feel for the movement on his body in the air, for the medium that he was using, in which, though he was engaged in the act of painting and not reflecting on it, he still had a fine degree of control between the thick and the thin, the speed, the puddle, the splatter, of the line that he was using.

And if you look at the paintings you'll see that the so-called drip method or pouring method is not one style, that he had to reinvent it on widely differing scales so that the same gestures he made in the compass of a wrist had to be reinvented to hold the sweep of an arm across a canvas 10 feet high. And lines that were three inches thick at some point had to be recalibrated in smaller works to be as fine as a hair.

There's this constant sense of reinvention and an enormous variety of expression in the work so that he was able to control not only the palette and the color, but the feeling that the work was aggressive or joyous, light and dancing or nebular and lush. There's a broad range of effect in this word that suggests that he knew very strongly the character of each picture as he worked on it and pulled that character out.

GROSS: My guest is Kirk Varnedoe and he is the curator of the Jackson Pollock show now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Pollock liked to paint with the canvas on the floor, which is different from the perspective painters usually used 'til that point, which is on an easel or on the wall. What did it give him to be able to work on the floor?

VARNEDOE: Now, the first statement that he made about working on the floor when he talked about the way he liked work, he talked about the resistance of pushing against a hard material. Instead of stretching a canvas taut on a standard stretcher the way a lot of artists do, he first worked with it nailed to the wall; he liked resistance, he liked to push.

And then when he got out on the floor, he not only got to push against something hard as he put the paint down on the canvas, he also got to work on it from all sides; that he could walk around it -- work the top, work the bottom, work the sides -- and somehow feel that he was inside the canvas.

Inevitably when you set something up on the wall the connotation is like a window, it's something you're looking into in a frame. But when the work is down on the floor it's a receiving ground, you have a different relationship with your body to the work that you're making. And I think that his sense of liking to be in the picture or over the picture, to feel the work, falling down on it, the floor boards pushing back up, was something that got him into working on the floor.

The remarkable thing is that during the great period of the poured and dripped paintings it was precisely that sense of resistance or friction that he seemed to like so much when he started working on hard surfaces that he gave up and internalized or sublimated into this choreography in the air just above the canvas that let the material fall.

So, there's a kind of muscular attention built into the way that he works which is like a residue or a memory of his push against the hard surfaces of the floor and the wall in his early work.

GROSS: So, Pollock really works with gravity in some respects.

VARNEDOE: Very much so. And, you know, I think when Pollock works were shown in 1967 they had the greatest impact on young sculptors precisely because of the sense of gravity in his work. There were many people who felt that Pollock had, in a certain sense, pulled all the air out of the room for painters; that his statement was so extreme that there was no way to follow them without being merely an imitator.

But for young sculptures in the late '60s seeing the Pollock retrospective in the context of an era then dominated by hard edged geometry and minimalism or the very sharp, bright colors of pop, young artists like Richard Sera (ph) or Eva Hess (ph) or Robert Smithson (ph) felt that Pollock's work with gravity and his willingness to let materials have their own form, to respond to the dynamics of the tariness and liquidity of black paint, to use silver paint, to let things fall, opened up a whole body of installation sculpture, people who worked with detritus flung down on the ground, Richard Sera's thrown lid pieces, Robert Smithson's poured asphalt pieces, the dialogue with the concrete materiality of property.

For a lot of Pollock's contemporaries, it was the subjective spirit that seemed to be important. It was the psychological trauma that seemed to be inherent in his work. But for latest of the late '60s it was the concrete materiality and specifically the relationship to gravity and weight that was so impressive.

GROSS: What do you think Pollock's drip paintings represented in terms of a conceptual breakthrough in art?

VARNEDOE: Well, like many moments in modern art, Pollock's breakthrough in 1947-48 had a tremendous destructive force. It seemed to eliminate many things on which painting had traditionally depended. No standard composition, even cubism depended not -- though it obviously rejected the idea of imitation in the natural world, it still depended on a compositional relationship of opposing masses. There was something in the picture about balance and construction and structure.

Pollock seemed to void all of that, to get that out there. He seemed to make the process almost take dominance over the product, and he seemed to give up on any notion of art fulfilling a plan. In fact, art seemed to be the result of a form of behavior in a way that opened up into happenings, into performance art.

One of the things that's astonishing about Pollock and his legacy is that the breakthrough he made and the kind of art he made seemed to feed or nurture artists who produced work radically different in appearance from his own work. So, Pollock's breakthrough was to give a new sense of permission to a lot of different artists.

GROSS: You know, you write in your catalog essay that Pollock not only, you know, Pollock's paint were not only free from representation, but from symbolism as well. Was that an important breakthrough, to free painting from symbolism?

VARNEDOE: Well, I think especially given the immediate context of the work that Pollock and many of his contemporaries were producing around the time of World War II, in 1943, '44, '45, extremely dark period for the world, there was a heavy emphasis on works that seemed to have a kind of primordial, totemic, mystical symbolism.

He painted a lot of pictures which seem like puzzles with portentous titles like "Guardians of the Secret" and titles that referred to the unconscious. There's been a great deal of Jungian interpretation of the symbolic language of Pollock's work. It's something that he inherited as well from the surrealists in Europe and from Picasso. And it was this huge freight of unknown secrets and mysterious imaginings of the deep unconscious of the race, etc., etc.

And then went Pollock broke through and produced this new kind of painting without imagery, where the paint was flung down on the canvas, suddenly you had pictures which had no agenda.

In fact, he even began to title them with numbers. Instead of using poetic board evocative titles, in 1948 he just titled the pictures "Number 1, 1948," or "Number 2, 1948" in order to distance them from this kind of literary reading in and to make people focus on the present tense aspect of their abstract properties as works of art.

And that was a very radical snuffing out of something that had been the mark of seriousness for art only a couple of years earlier.

GROSS: My guest is Kirk Varnedoe and he curated the Jackson Pollock show which is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he wrote the main catalog essay for the accompanying book.

Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: My guest is Kirk Varnedoe. He is the lead curator of the Jackson Pollock show now on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also wrote the main catalogue essay.

I found it very interesting in reading the essay that, you know, until Pollock started experimenting with the techniques that he originated he thought of his art as kind of derivative and unremarkable and other people thought of it is that way as well.

VARNEDOE: Yeah, Pollock was no Mozart. I mean, it's really unusual, he had a fixation from very early on, as a teenager, that he wanted to be an artist. I think his older brother, Charles, who was about eight years older, had pursued a career in art, and I think that Pollock watching him leave home and establishing himself outside got the idea that this was a way to get out of his circumstances, and this was something he could be that would be different from what he had been as a child.

But he had no talent for it whatsoever. Charles had a certain amount of talent. The brother closest to Jackson in age, Sandy, also pursued a career in art; he was recognized as having a certain kind of talent. Everybody looked at Pollock, and in his brother's description: if you had seen those drawings you would have advised him to become a tennis player or a plumber.

He just really was struggling. And when he went to New York to study with Thomas Hart Benton he was one of the least -- one of the least facile of the draftsmen in Benton's classes, the most struggling, the toughest in drawing. And he worked very, very hard, labored at it.

But somewhere this driving ambition to become an artist in the late '30s forced Pollock face-to-face with Picasso. He just was determined that he was going to beat the greatest artist in the world at his own game, and in order to do that he had to kind of swallow Picasso whole. So that when he saw Picasso's "Guernica" in New York, and when he saw the great Picasso retrospective at the Modern in 1939, he completely absorbed, plunged himself into Picasso's symbolism. And picking up pieces from other artists as well, he began to hammer together the style.

And when he first started showing in 1942-43, the critics who walked into the show said: oh, yeah, I see, there's this much Picasso, there's this much Beckman (ph), there's a little Kandinsky, there's this much Miro, all the sources were evident -- and yet -- and yet they all looked at the painting and said: ou, but yes, but this guy is original. Because there was a force.

And I think you feel it when you get those pictures grouped together again that the way he put the paint on canvas, and in fact, the very force of the struggle with the masters he was trying to come to terms with, is evident in the pictures and gives them a kind of special authenticity.

GROSS: His breakthrough painting, I think, was the 1943 mural that he did for Peggy Guggenheim, the art collector and gallery owner and heiress, I suppose. What was the commission that she presented to him?

VARNEDOE: Well, Peggy Guggenheim had just opened a new gallery called Art of This Century. She had moved to the U.S. from Europe in light of the war, and she brought with her a great collection of avant-garde art. And she had the idea that she was going to mix her collection of European modernists with showing younger American artists.

And so, she had advisers among curators in New York, and they spotted Pollock as a talent; she signed Pollock to a contract; and she scheduled him for a first monographic show in 1943. And in that summer, in preparation for the show, she commissioned Pollock to paint a big mural for the foyer of her apartment on the Upper East Side.

And Marcel Duchamp was very canny, he said: don't let him do it on the wall because you may move, have him paint it on canvas. So, she commissioned an 18-foot-long canvas for -- about nine or 10 feet high -- for the foyer of her apartment, in principle to be finished in time for the show in November.

And Pollock didn't even have a room big enough to paint an 18-foot-long canvas. So, he and his wife, Lee, surreptitiously tore down a wall in their apartment and took the drywall out in buckets at night so the landlord wouldn't know what they were doing, so they could open up a wall between two rooms large enough to stretch this canvas.

And the accounts that we have suggest that the canvas stayed there bare all during the summer. Pollock was working like a demon in August producing many of this more moderate sized pictures that went into the show in '43. But apparently by the time of November and the time of the exhibition the big mural was still unfinished.

And there are even witness accounts of people who went to dinner with Pollock just before Christmas who claim that there was absolutely nothing on the canvas. And the story goes that Peggy Guggenheim was having a party somewhere in mid-January and said: OK, either that mural is on my wall or you are history, get that thing done.

And according to Lee Krasner, Pollock then sort of locks himself in the room and in one night and day, in about a 15-hour session, rips this thing off. It's a real sort of Paul Bunyan exploit story, and it sparks a certain amount of cynicism; and yet when you look at the picture there's clearly nothing labored or premeditated about the picture.

It has an enormous surge. It's basically kind of frieze of turbulent stick figure- type vectors that stampede across these 18 feet of the canvas, and it's done with tremendous brio. There's very little second thinking about it, there's no composition under it.

And it seems to have been done, if not exactly in those circumstances, certainly in an all-out blitz of work of a tremendous spontaneity that seems untie every knot that's constricted together in all the rest of Pollock's work at the time.

It makes the rest of Pollock's work at the time look comparatively stiff and packed and forced, whereas this thing just lets loose a fantastic cavalcade of energy in a way that's very premonitory of the large later drip paintings.

GROSS: But he's not dripping yet?

VARNEDOE: No. This is all done with a brush.

GROSS: Kirk Varnedoe is chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He'll be back in the second half of the show. The Pollock retrospective is on view at the museum until February 2.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, I'm Terry Gross.

Back with Kirk Varnedoe, lead curator of the Jackson Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also wrote an essay in the catalog published by the museum.

When we left off, we were talking about Pollock's breakthrough painting, a mural commissioned in 1944 by Peggy Guggenheim for the hallway of her townhouse.

So, he does this mural for Peggy Guggenheim, a couple of years later moves to East Hampton, Long Island which is a, you know, beautiful, kind of rural area on the outer part of Long Island. Why did he and his wife, Lee Krasner, move from Manhattan?

VARNEDOE: Well, Lee had -- who was -- Lee Krasner was four years older then Jackson, and she had met him around 1942 and she saw that he had a lot of troubles and that the troubles were closely tied up with alcohol. And I think that she felt -- she certainly had a strong vision of his potential as an artist. She was very convinced that he was a great talent.

And they had gone out for the summer to visit friends in the Hamptons, and she saw that he was much more at ease in nature and that being away from the city did him a lot of good. She had a very strong idea that if they moved there, he'd be able to concentrate on his art better and their life would be simpler because he would be away from his cronies in the city and away from the bars.

So, she put down the ultimatum that they get married because she, for one thing, didn't think that outside the city cohabitation without marriage would be so favorably looked on by the villagers around East Hampton, and they bought a small 19th century farmhouse with a little barn right on the area called The Springs in the East Hampton Village.

And they had no automobile, they had a bicycle and they walked for the first couple of years they were out there. And this was not the Hamptons of today; this was truly isolated. It was a long way out. And Pollock had now contact with the ocean. He said that he thought the vast span of the Atlantic Ocean was the only East Coast equivalent for the spaces that he'd grown up with as a child in the West.

And you see right away that the two series that he painted in 1946, the first year that he's really fully painting out there, are titled "The Acobonic (ph) Creek Series," which is right after the small strain that runs by their property, and the other one was called "The Sounds in the Grass Series." And both of them are evocative of his new closeness to nature.

So, it's the distance from the bars, in some sense, and the closeness to nature on the other, and just the sheer isolation and focus which I think had a crucial role in promoting the advance of Pollock's art in that period.

GROSS: He set up his studio in a little barn, which you describe as really being more the size of a tool shed. You've been in that barn. What was it like to be in there and what was surprising about the experience of being inside it?

VARNEDOE: I really thought that one of the cores of my experience in doing the show and my feeling about Pollock was the moment when I stepped up -- and you actually, it's almost like going onto a stage, because he moved this little barn and put in a new floor, so you actually step up a foot or so onto the floor that he painted on.

And the floor is still the same. When Pollock got a little money at the end of his life he put insulation on this barn and white wall board, and then Lee Krasner used it is a studio and put up lights. But you have to imagine it as was when Pollock first worked in it: bare boards, the wind whistled through, you could see through the boards to the outside. He had no electricity in it, he could only paint in the daytime, and he could really only paint in good weather, he couldn't use it all winter.

The astonishing thing about the space, however, is how incredibly small it is. If you're used to the large paintings that we see regularly in New York, the big one, "Number 31, 1950" that the Museum of Modern Art owns, or "Autumn Rhythm," which the Metropolitan owns, these things are colossal and they seemed to have a vast, expansive space. And suddenly find yourself in this closet

And the feeling first is: no, I just don't believe it, these canvases couldn't fit. And then you take the tape measure out and you see that, indeed, when he put them on the floor they nearly touched both walls and left him only a narrow zone to work in.

And after you accept that physically they fit, then you have to come to terms with how it is possible to imagine the spaces that are in those paintings when you are physically in such a restricted and small space.

We have a lot of photographs of Pollock working in this space, and they're taken by Hans Namuth (ph), the photographer of Pollock at work; and Namuth would often get himself up into the rafters to take pictures of Pollock, looking down at Pollock working on the canvases.

And the photographs are very deceptive, they would lead you to believe the spaces is like a New York loft -- not at all, it's like a tiny New York closet in a way. And it's truly striking to stand there and see how little distance Pollock could get from these works.

We're used to standing back 15, 20 feet, you know, and then moving back further. This was a 21-foot square, this little room, and its sides were stacked out with the canvases that he had already completed, so he had even less working room and all the pictures he had already made pressed into from all sides around him.

It's astonishing readjustment of the mind to stand in that space. And for that very reason in the exhibition at the Modern we have recreated to exact scale and with old barn board the studio so that the visitors to the exhibition can get precisely that shock of disjunction between the material circumstances and the results.

GROSS: You know, it's funny the first color plate in the catalog of the Pollock show, I thought it was a really nice painting -- it turns out it was the photograph of the floor of his with all the paint splattered on it.

VARNEDOE: That's right. The floor was covered -- Pollock covered the floor with board when he got a little money, but -- and then Lee Krasner used it with this board covered for a long time. But when Lee died, they discovered that they could take the board up and there's the floor as it was in the early '50s and late '40s when Pollock was painting the pictures on the floor.

And you can actually find edges and bits of known paintings where particular types of color that comes off the side and the traces and ghosts of those pictures are still there. And it's one of the things that makes this a kind of place of pilgrimage for Pollock devotees.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Kirk Varnedoe, and he's the lead curator of the Jackson Pollock show which is on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also wrote the main catalogue essay.

What was the painting that you consider his first great drip painting, the painting that really established the process that was the process he became best known for?

VARNEDOE: I don't think there's any one breakthrough painting. There are a group of paintings where he used a lot of poured paint to cover pre-existing compositions, and they're clearly transitional. And then there are a body of paintings in 1947 that are done entirely with the drip method -- "Cathedral" in the museum in Dallas, "Lucifer" in a private collection in California. These are the first pictures where you feel the painting is determined very strongly in its whole, complete from-beginning-to-end existence by the poured process.

GROSS: You write that Pollock had one great overpowering idea that came to him at the end of 1946, produced some of the most inexhaustible artworks of the century over almost four years, and then was over as abruptly as it had begun. What happened? Was he blocked? Was he tired of a style he had created?

VARNEDOE: The million-dollar question, in a certain sense, is why he stopped. There are many contingent factors. Pollock, who had a problem with alcoholism throughout his life, was in fact sober from '48 to '50, partly because of a doctor who prescribed tranquilizers for him and who he trusted. And the doctor was killed in a car crash in the spring of '50.

So, when the great tension came for Pollock's largest show of drip paintings in the fall of '50, he had no fallback position; he started drinking again very strongly; the show didn't sell; he got profoundly depressed and started drinking more; and things began spiraling down.

What's clear is that he was unwilling to repeat himself. Having risen to a certain summit on this motif and this way of painting, that though they were still in demand, he was unwilling to go back. He wanted to find some new way. And he simply never found himself again as strongly.

GROSS: Now, the problems that he had with depression and alcoholism, those are problems that originated when he was much younger.

VARNEDOE: He started drinking when he was 15, and it's clear that he had no tolerance for it, that he was very weak for it. And he clearly had emotional disturbances. He was a pugnacious youth, he slugged a couple of instructors in grade school and high school. He was thrown out of high school a couple of times. He clearly had a real problem with authority and discipline.

Even though he sought out father-like mentors in Benton and Graham (ph) and the other instructors that he had in art, he had a real social problem, and he had a drinking problem, and the two of them linked together. And it's very hard now to know, psychoanalytically, what the roots of these issues were for him.

GROSS: My guest is Kirk Varnedoe, curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: My guest is Kirk Varnedoe, lead curator of the Jackson Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Describe how Pollock died.

VARNEDOE: Pollock, at the end of his life, had been drinking a great, great deal. He had split up with his wife more or less, Lee Krasner. They were on very bad terms. Lee had gone to Europe in the summer of '56 and a girlfriend that Pollock had met in a bar in New York came out to the Hamptons to visit on Saturday August 11, 1956, and she brought a friend of hers with her.

Pollock drank all afternoon and they started driving at night; they were driving towards Pollock's house, and Pollock was driving too fast. The friend of the girlfriend started shrieking: let me out of the car. That goaded Pollock to drive faster. He flipped his Oldsmobile convertible. And his girlfriend survived, but her friend was crushed beneath the car and Pollock was thrown out of the car and hit a tree and died instantly.

GROSS: How do you think his early death affected his reputation and his legend?

VARNEDOE: I think that the market for New York art was poised to accelerate anyway; the late '50s were a period of time for enormous expansion for American culture in the world in general and prices started going up sharply. But Pollock's death, and the rarity that introduced into his work, obviously boosted his prices enormously as this general wave happened in the late '50s.

And I think that it's clear that he was not headed in a good direction when he died, and the fact that the life was snuffed out and stopped short gave it a kind of tragic wholeness that made it mythic in the eyes and minds of many people, made it -- confirmed his role in the popular imagination as a tragic rebel, and that can't have hurt.

On the other hand, I think it was great art. It always was great art that he produced, it's proved to be over the years fabulous and terrific art, and the art transcends whatever myth surrounds it, I believe.

GROSS: Now, how do you think critical evaluations of him have changed over the years?

VARNEDOE: I think in the 1950s and even afterwards one tended to look at Pollock's art as a kind of direct extension of his life; that you had a turbulent turmoil of a life that realized itself in an angst-filled, storm- tossed set of pictures.

And yet, now when we look back at these pictures we see that there are elements of real lyricism and beautiful, delicate, decorative properties in these pictures that are absolutely the opposite of the macho bar fighter that everybody presumed earlier.

Similarly, I think people looked at the pictures earlier as the representation of the kind of fragmentation of the atomic age or kind of alienation or apocalyptic energy. Whereas now one can see then as suffused with a kind of romanticism.

I think that over the years we've come the deal more with the pictures themselves as a life lived on canvas independent of or separate from the life that the man lived and related to its time, but also larger than that. And we're still in the process of understanding these pictures.

GROSS: Why do you think the differences between the great and the not so great paintings that he did -- how do you critically evaluate one from another?

VARNEDOE: People may differ on which pictures they think are the most successful, but I think it's clear that Pollock was working with an edgy technique. It certainly was no guarantee a success. There were all sorts of things that could possibly go wrong, and when they'd go wrong they'd go wrong in several directions.

On the one hand, his use of material can get grotesque, choked, too meaty, no sufficient air left in it, lumped up like just detritus material. On the other hand, he had a kind of weakness for pretty effects, and things can get almost too fussy and very lavish colors; he uses silver; he flirts with really vulgar taste in some of the colors.

So, the pictures can fork off towards a kind of over-fussy prettiness or a kind of over meaty grotesquery. When he's at his best, they have a kind of wonderful aerated surge of energy where all of the properties of angriness -- anger and joy are brought together and held in suspension.

GROSS: Now, you spoke a little bit earlier about how you think Pollock's paintings influenced other painters and other sculptors. I'm wondering about how you think his life influenced younger artists -- younger artists who are always trying to live up to their role models and copy them?

VARNEDOE: You know, I think Pollock's life is one of those things that people like to dream about but not imitate. Almost immediately after Pollock died in the late 1950s and early 1960s you got the model of Jasper Johns or then Andy Warhol, much more detached from the work.

Warhol's model of an artist building a career, in a certain sense, living in the city being hip, being urban, being ironic, being detached, the sense of burning yourself up for your art, which was a kind of ideal of Pollock's generation, a Beat generation idea of authenticity gained by spurning the world and plunging into the work.

That's not an ideal that was very attractive to artists in the '60s who wanted something a little more distance, a little more cerebral, and more ironic. And I think that the sort of romanticized Pollock, the bohemian, tragic Pollock, has not been the kind of thing very many artists have been willing to model their actual working life after.

GROSS: When it came to actually hanging the show what were the biggest issues for you?

VARNEDOE: I was clearly determined at the outset that the core, the emotional core of the show would be the reuniting of the three great monumental canvases that he painted in the summer and early autumn of 1950. One is owned by the Modern, one is owned by the Metropolitan, and one is owned by Dusseldorf.

So, I had to design the show to give these things both enough space to breathe and enough proximity that one could feel their energies working together in the way they did in the Betty Parsons (ph) show.

And then subsequent concerns were: how to deal with the decline in his talents in the later years so that one was honest about the full range of the career without burdening the viewer who has been so exhilarated by the highs of the middle part of the show with a long, dreary trajectory to end the show on a whimper.

There were many problems about being complete and being exclusive that had to be solved room by room.

GROSS: Are there any questions you most wish that you could have asked Jackson Pollock?

VARNEDOE: You know, I don't think that Jackson Pollock was a man of words, and I'm not sure how profitable it would have been to ask him questions. I think that in the best sense much of what he did was, if not unconscious, then certainly at an intuitive level that didn't lend itself to expression.

All the radio interviews, all the things I've ever -- and he is on tape, you can hear him, you can read him. I think Jackson Pollock's most effective, most powerful form of communication was in paint on canvas. And while it was very hard for me and very difficult to do the entire exhibition never having known the man, I've talked to people who did know him and they said: don't be so quick to believe this is a disadvantage.

GROSS: Well, Kirk Varnedoe, I want to thank you very much for talking with us about the Pollock show.

VARNEDOE: Thank you very much.

GROSS: Kirk Varnedoe is the lead curator of the Jackson Pollock retrospective which is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until February 2. Varnedoe wrote an essay in the catalog published by the Museum.

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Dateline: Terry Gross, Washington, DC
Guest: Kirk Varnedoe
High: KIRK VARNEDOE is the chief curator for the Jackson Pollock exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It shows November 1, 1998-February 2, 1999. Pollock is widely considered the most challenging and influential American painter of the twentieth century and one of the primary creators in modern art since 1945. Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. Varnedoe has written the accompanying book "Jackson Pollock"
Spec: Entertainment; Lifestyle; Culture; Museums; Art; Jackson Pollock

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Copy: Content and programming copyright 1998 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1998 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Jackson Pollock Exhibit
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