Pollock Matters, The McMullen Museum of Art: Part I

For Part II, click here.

Lee Krasner, Mercedes Matter, Jackson Pollock, Herbert Matter

Herbert Matter recalled that in 1942, when they first met over dinner, Jackson Pollock said to him, “It’s a really wonderful time to be living.” He added,“That gave us plenty to think about the rest of the evening.” I wonder how many people would say that today. For my part, after rehearsing a string of problems and miseries irrelevant to the present topic, the amazing exhibition, Pollock Matters, which closes this Sunday (December 9) at the McMullen Museum of Boston College, I would say that we take controversy too seriously. As the debates among the presidential candidates drivel on in equivocation, and the incumbent goes about his work of ruining the country, those Americans who are interested in one of their country’s greatest painters may or may not find themselves sufficiently clear-headed to realize that this exhibition has been so much wrapped up in controversy, that few see its real issues or even care about them. It concerns the discovery of a cache of small experimental works, according to a label made by their owner, Herbert Matter, in 1958, the work of Jackson Pollock, and the collision of the discoverer, Matter’s son, Alex, with the blue-chip institution established by Pollock’s widow.

The fact is, however, that the attribution of these works which have attracted all the attention are certainly germane, but not entirely essential to the argument of this rich, complex, and brilliantly executed exhibition. They are important pieces of evidence, and their study has led to the discoveries which unfold as the exhibition tells its story, but these discoveries about Pollock’s development and the origin of his mature style, which, thanks to the work of the scholars who participated in the exhibition, is now beginning to be fully understood, are far more important than the crux about whether the paintings—some or all of them—are in fact the work of this highly mythologized hero/antihero among American painters. This exhibition tells a story. It is constructed around a story of relationships and marriage among artists, the friendships they brought about, and the crucial stimuli and influences they fomented.

It is curious that this isn’t the only exhibition in our area, which has, at least in its most important aspect, whether intentionally or not, focussed on the relationships of artists. The exhibition, The Unknown Monet, at the Clark Art Institute (rescued from being a dry study exhibition by a room full of stunning pastels), presented a recently discovered memoir by a wealthy friend and patron of the artist during his youth. Little was known about Monet’s relations with this cultivated Parisian family and its important influence on his early development, because, it seems, Monet deliberately concealed it, wishing to create an image of himself as a self-taught fauve. Making it New, offered almost simultaneously by the Williams College Museum of Art, set out to tell the story of Gerald and Sara Murphy, a moderately wealthy, moderately young American couple who settled in France and exercised their social gifts on creating a sphere of friendship among the artists and writers who entered into it, for the most part entranced with Sara and grudgingly tolerating Gerald, who, it turns out, was quite a decent artist himself over his seven-year career. Pollock Matters invites us into the microcosm of two couples, their close friendship, their mutual influence, and the influence of the friends and teachers they brought together.

Most people love gossip, but there is only one reason why we should find all this interesting. Jackson Pollock’s work has become accepted as representative of his country and of his generation. Many would call him the greatest American painter of the twentieth century, whether that is true or not—whether such a statement can be true—and there is an elaborate mythology which has accrued around it. Jackson played his part, of course—the American genius from the wild west, the provincial taking over New York, bluff in manner, clumsy with words, unschooled, uninterested in things European, alcoholic—and Lee played hers, promoting her husband, playing down or even concealing sources of influence which might diminish his reputation for originality. In her catalogue essay Ellen Landau shows quite precisely how Lee distorted certain stories into legends, for example, making him ruder to her teacher, Hans Hofmann, than he actually was. In particular, she had a falling out with the Matters, the epicenter of the environment in which Jackson matured as an artist. And also there was Herbert Matter himself (who believed in Pollock’s talent as Pollock believed in his), Sweeney, Guggenheim, Barr, Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Life Magazine, not to mention American political interests. Whether he is the greatest American painter of his generation or not (and I would not question that he is a great artist), he is the most American. Rothko’s work may be more resonant and otherworldly, but he was born in what was then Russia, and he remained in essence very much the eastern European Jew. (Contrast Krasner, who was born in Brooklyn and was more assimilated.) De Kooning’s art retains a vital human referentiality Pollock’s internalized abstraction lacks, but he was identifiably a Dutchman, who only emigrated to the United States in his early twenties and never got rid of his accent.

The Pollock who emerges from this show was the closest of friends ("You know I really love that guy. I love Herbert Matter." cat. p. 38) with Herbert Matter, an artist with seemingly universal creativity, extending from drawing to photography, to interior design and cinema, and a powerful intellect, and he absorbed profound influences from Krasner’s Bavarian teacher, Hans Hofmann, from Stanley William Hayter the English printmaker, as well as the eurocentric American sculptor, Alexander Calder. Far from being the intuitive, primally physical American, he did, in fact, absorb some theory, mostly from Matter and Krasner, if in a largely nonverbal way. What’s more, they say Americans love success stories. However today, it seems Americans of today like stories of degradation even more. Pollock provided both to posterity: he descended into the gutter in a Cadillac. Perhaps that’s another difference between the more optimistic generation of Pollock, who, protected from military service by a psychiatric deferment, could make such a life-affirming declaration to Herbert Matter at such a dark moment in the war.

To get back to the Matter paintings, the worst thing about the controversy is that it distracts the public from the truly substantial pleasures to be found in this exhibition. The visitor will see some brilliant work by Herbert Matter, including his wonderful film, Works of Calder (surely due for restoration and wider distribution on DVD), small but very fine works by Hofmann, Hayter, Calder, and Pollock himself, delightful works by Mercedes Matter, whose expansive talent was decidedly less forced than Krasner’s, particularly at this early date, not to mention Mercedes herself, who appears, her torso lightly veiled by Provincetown sand, in a stunning 1940 photograph by Herbert. Even the disputed paintings are pleasurable to look at, although they are in terrible condition. When Alex Matter found them in his parents’ storage locker and unwrapped them, the paint of some of them had already disintegrated to a powder, and the craquelure and pitted surface of the displayed works testified to the instability of the medium. The blue composition boards on which they were painted had buckled in many instances, and the process of flattening them did the paint layers no good, particularly since the first restoration was incompetently done. According to Herbert Matter’s inscription on the brown wrapping paper in which they were enclosed, they were “experimental” made between 1946 and 1949 with “Robi paints.” Robi is Herbert’s brother-in-law, Robert Rebetez, who kept an artist’s supply shop in Basel, considered by some to be the best in Europe. Ellen Landau cites an instance of an artist travelling to Basel from Paris just to buy paints. Evidently, if Pollock is the maker of these works, he was not only experimenting with style, but with materials as well, and over period of three years, the period in which his dip technique was emerging. These pigments were obviously not Robi’s most successful product.

Apart from their patently distressed look and their experimental function, the paintings provide the sort of pleasure one expects from works of art. Even on the cramped surface of the drawing boards, they show the fluidity and energy we associate with Pollock. In other words, the all-important first glance, betrayed nothing radically un-Pollockian about them. The basic patterns of Pollock’s secure works are there, and so is their relationship to the edges of the board. Pollock worked from the edges, of necessity in his large works, and by choice in these small ones, if in fact he made them. The layers of paint and their interrelationships are important in Pollock, and their are evident in these works for the most part. Pollock frequently constructed his compositions around a core, laid in at the bottom of the paint layers, often in black, and this is present in most of them. In a few of them it is hard to see, because the artist has so heavily charged the surface with paint. Possibly this was in the nature of the experiments, but also the poor condition of the works, above all the buckled support and it effect on the paint layers played a role in this. On close examination, however, it is possible to find the core. With the exception of a few of the slighter paintings on the versos, which are hardly more than trials of the brush, all appear to be by the same hand, and I see nothing in the forms or facture to rule out Pollock’s authorship. There is also no trace of the conceptual, intellectualized stiffness one might expect to find in an imitation or a forgery. Ellen Landau has pointed to a particular hooked, or horseshoe-like pattern which she has observed often in his secure works. All of them represent Pollock’s mature drip technique, which emerged in 1947, although the formal language was already present in of 1946. They fit most comfortably with works like of 1948 and of 1950, although they are free of the obsessive horror vacui of the experimentals. Although it is problematic that the earlier part of the period indicated by Matter’s inscription is not represented, the visual evidence fits comfortably within a contained period of Pollock’s production. In other words, internal stylistic evidence is positive.

Most fascinating of all is the context in which Pollock’s drip work emerged. If the visitor makes forays from the sequestered gallery into the rest of the exhibition, he or she will see works by Hofmann, Hayter, Calder, and Matter, which give a vivid idea of the examples and principles which moved Pollock in that direction, that is, helped him to overcome his reliance on drawn forms referenced to visual experience, when he was striving for an art which reflected the nature within himself. Hofmann experimented with automatic drip painting in the early forties. The untitled work included in the exhibition provides a striking analogy to Pollock’s Free Form and the experimentals. Matter himself worked obsessively with movement as an embodiment of the energy forces of the living human organism. He experimented with strobe-based methods inspired by Harold Edgerton’s experiments at MIT, as well as collage, even in his commercial work. He photographed the patterns created by ink dropped into glycerine. He drew with light, both by photographing a moving figure in darkness and directly on the negative, producing patterns strikingly similar to Pollock’s dripped forms. He also made images with pure electrical energy. Matter’s close friend, Alexander Calder, brought energy and movement into three dimensions in his mobiles. Matter photographed them on numerous occasions, going beyond the mere document and experimenting with creative lighting. Eventually he made the film, Works of Calder, which at the time seemed to him to indicate that his future lay in cinema. In the exhibition Calder is represented by his wire sculpture of Josephine Baker, displayed next to a large Pollock of 1950, marking a return to figural forms amid his mature abstraction. There was a theoretical foundation for this concern with human energy, subsumed in the catalogue under the term “vitalism.” (I shall discuss this in the second part of this review.) These comparisons are really the core of the exhibition. They show the influences under which Pollock’s mature method appeared, and the argument they support stands, whether the experimentals are by Pollock or not.

The exhibition succesfully creates a sense of this relatively upbeat period in Pollock’s life, when he was first achieving recognition, his marriage was still fresh, and he was enjoying the creative influences of the Matter milieu. The Matters, whatever problems arose for them later, are an extremely appealing couple, and in fact Herbert emerges as the true hero of the exhibition. Revered even today in the world of design, he should be better known in the context of the fine arts. Seen on a broader level, the exhibition documents the intimate connection between the fine and the applied arts. As for the quite convincing stylistic arguments in favor of the experimental paintings, these are seriously undercut by material evidence, which is amply discussed in the catalogue, and which I shall discuss in the second part of the review. Some of the pigments used in the paintings were not patented until well after Pollock’s and Matter’s deaths. In a recent paper, James Martin has expressed the view that the composition board on which they are painted was not manufactured until the 1970’s, although earlier analysis showed that they had to have been made before the inception of atmospheric tests of the atomic bomb. The conundrum presented by these works is nowhere near a solution. Materials are often manufactured and sold long before they are patented. If the paintings are forgeries, it makes no sense for the forger to have used anachronistic materials. Then, the fluidity and artistic quality of the facture has to be explained. Although Herbert might perhaps have been able to create them, everyone who knew him regarded him as a man of the highest integrity, incapable of deliberately mislabeling the paintings.

There is no denying that the Matter paintings, because of their experimental nature, their size, and their condition, are basically study works, documents of great academic interest, but little wall-power. In an ideal world, Alex Matter, the minute he found them in his parents’ storage locker, should have brought them untouched to the Straus Conservation Center and donated them to the Fogg, the pre-eminent research museum in this country. However, that implies superhuman self-control and very deep pockets. No one, except, it seems, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, can really blame him for approaching his mother’s dealer with them, but the result was tragic. The already poor condition of the paintings, noted already by Herbert in 1958, was made much worse by a restorer’s inept attempt to make displayable (and presumably saleable) objects out of them. Artifacts of such potential importance should be openly and freely studied with no restriction of access or opinion. Yet, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, while adopting the public position that it is not in the business of authenticating works of art, has made every effort to thwart their display and study. A serious academic museum of the McMullen’s high reputation is the proper place for this exhibition, which scrupulously adopts a neutral position in regard to the attribution of the paintings. Ellen Landau is one of the most respected experts on Pollock, as is Claude Cernuschi. Scientific evidence has also come from unexceptionable sources, with material research being conducted at the Straus Center and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston under Richard Newman, and the question of fractal analysis (broached by the publications of Richard Taylor, commissioned by the Pollock Foundation) of was investigated by the distinguished Boston College physicist, Andrzej Herczynski in collaboration with Cernuschi. Nancy Netzer, director of the McMullen, deserves our admiration for seeing this complex exhibition through under such difficult circumstances. Given the neutrality and quality of the research which has emerged from their efforts, it seems highly inappropriate for the Foundation lawyers to have placed restrictions on the display in the galleries and in the catalogue presentation. The organizers were only able to juxtapose images of the Matter paintings with necessary comparisons by Pollock by restricting the size of the illustrations to the point where they are useless for research. After two visits to the exhibition and close examination, I have a good memory of what I saw in the galleries, and the small reproductions in the catalogue failed to convey crucial details necessary to a proper interpretation of the paintings. If the catalogue illustrations were a particularly weak part of this project, we have only the Foundation lawyers to blame.

I can’t help thinking of Jackson’s rosy, probably boozy optimism at his first meeting with Herbert: “It’s a really wonderful time to be living.” That give me plenty to think about, as I contemplate our own times, in which the legacy of this great artist has become institutionally fossilized, and lawyers play a decisive role in art historical research. (For Pollock Matters, Part II, click here.)

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The catalogue will be discussed in Part II.

Pollock Matters, edited by Ellen G. Landau & Claude Cernuschi.
Published : Chestnut Hill, MA : McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College ; [Chicago] : Distributed by the University of Chicago Press, c2007.

Description : 178 p. : ill. (some col.), ports. ; 28 cm.
Contents : Director’s preface / Nancy Netzer -- Introduction / Claude Cernuschi and Ellen G. Landau -- Action/re-action : the artistic friendship of Herbert Matter and Jackson Pollock / Ellen G. Landau -- Jackson Pollock’s vitalism : Herbert Matter and the Vitalist tradition / Jonathan D. Katz -- Cutting Pollock down to size : the boundaries of the poured technique / Claude Cernuschi and Andrzej Herczynski -- Abstract expressionism and fractal geometry / Claude Cernuschi, Andrzej Herczynski, and David Martin -- Scientific examination of the paint on nine Matter paintings / Richard Newman and Michele Derrick -- Analyzing Jackson Pollock : scientific methods and the study of the Matter paintings / Nicholas Eastaugh -- What it says on the tin : a preliminary study of the set of paint cans and the floor in the Pollock-Krasner studio / Nicholas Eastaugh and Bhavini Gorsia -- Fingerprinting Jackson Pollock? / Peter Paul Biro -- Appendix 1 : notes on conservation of the Matter paintings -- Appendix 2 : chronology of the relationship of the Matters and Pollocks / prepared with the assistance of Nancy Cohen, Jeffrey Head, and Michael R. Weil, Jr.