How People Reacted to Jackson Pollock's Paintings [by David Lehman]

Abstract art seemed to fly in the face of good old American horse-sense. The standard response to a reproduction of a Pollock [pictured above] was, "Why, my five-year-old could do that." Or, “It looks like inedible spaghetti.” To this day, the works of the Abstract Expressionists retain their power to disturb if one measure of that power is the still-widespread impulse to mock them. In the movie An Unmarried Woman (1978), Alan Bates playing a famous New York painter tells Jill Clayburgh that when he was six his mother threw a pickled herring at his father. It missed its target and splattered against the wall. “At that moment I became an Abstract Expressionist,” Bates says, to which Clayburgh replies that his work does resemble pickled herring. That occurs in a movie sympathetic to the myth of the Abstract Expressionism. There are less friendly ways of responding. A prizewinning biography of Jackson Pollock maintains that his “drip” paintings originated in the haunting boyhood memory of standing on a flat rock beside his father urinating. Pollock is supposed to have said to himself, “When I grow up, am I ever going to do that!”^[i] Others have tried to put that reductive psychoanalytic theory into practice. At a show at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions in Los Angeles in 1995, a painter by the name of Keith Boadwee presented fifty pieces of so-called body art that he had produced by giving himself enemas of egg tempura paints and then squatting over canvases. Boadwee had the Abstract Expressionists in mind. "I wanted to prove that I can make just as good a painting as they can, with my butthole," he said.^[ii]

[i]. See Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Life (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), for an alaborate version of this theory.

[ii]. Above the paintings in the gallery were TV monitors showing videotapes of Boadwee in action, including his squatting nude over canvases. Buzz, August 1995; Art in America, October 1995.

Comments

[Joseph Gerver]

I don't think people in the 1950's felt that way about abstract art in general. They were reacting against abstract expressionism. They didn't feel that way about Mondrian, for example.

[Escape Road]

This is such an interesting take on how abstract art still manages to provoke strong reactions, even decades later. It’s wild how people often dismiss it as nonsense or just random splatters, but the fact that it challenges traditional ideas of what art ‘should’ be is what makes it so powerful. I love the anecdote about Keith Boadwee—talk about taking things to the extreme! It’s a perfect example of how artists will go to any length to test the boundaries of art and expression