14/09/15
Jackson
Pollock’s Mural: Energy Made Visible
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
23 April – 16 November 2015
23 April – 16 November 2015
In 1948, Clement Greenberg wrote his essay The
Crisis of the Easel Picture. The previous year, Jackson Pollock (1912-56),
applying for a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, wrote (highly likely with the
aid of Greenberg): “I intend to paint large movable pictures which will
function between the easel and mural. I have set a precedent in this genre in a
large painting for Miss Peggy Guggenheim. […] I believe the easel picture to be
a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or
mural.”1 The mural he mentions is a vast
panorama spanning a canvas six metres long, the largest painting he ever made,
and credited by Willem de Kooning as “[breaking] the ice” for abstract expressionism.
Now on display at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the work forms the
basis for a small but enlightening exhibition, exploring the context in which
it was produced and showing something of the effect it had on the contemporary
art world.
Read the rest of this review here
No comments:
Post a Comment