Off the Easel and off the Wall

John Haber
in New York City

Jackson Pollock: Mural

Knotted, Torn, Scattered: Post-Minimal Sculpture

The art scene grew quiet in summer back in 1943, too, but Peggy Guggenheim was not losing time. She had her midtown gallery, Art of This Century, but she also had an apartment in a townhouse on East 61st Street, and she had an insight: Jackson Pollock could paint big.

She commissioned a mural, as the first thing she or a guest would see on the way in. It was to be like nothing one often encounters in an upstairs apartment, much less a rental—twenty feet long by some eight feet high. It was also, the Guggenheim Museum argues, a breakthrough for Pollock on the way to all-over painting. With "Away from the Easel," it shows him immersing himself for the first time in the epic scale of Abstract Expressionism. It accompanies Mural with three much smaller works and some talk about her and the extended Guggenheim family, to suggest a context in Pollock's career and the birth of the museum. It also shares a tower gallery with half a dozen sculptors from the 1970s to claim them for the movement, too.

Really? From a mural to sculpture—and from Pollock to Post-Minimalism? Confess: when you think of Richard Serra, you think of anything but postwar optimism and postwar painting. Should you think again? With "Knotted, Torn, Scattered," the Guggenheim aims to place his and other sculpture context of Abstract Expressionism.

Thinking big

Mural was literally a breakthrough. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner had to demolish a partition in their Village apartment so that he could work on it. No less than Marcel Duchamp had suggested that he work on canvas and not on the wall, so that it would be portable. Duchamp, who had made the transition from anti-art to semi-retired elder statesman, may have had more in mind Guggenheim's needs than art's future. This was, remember, only a rental. But it changed how Pollock approached painting.

How he made it is not a slam dunk. It must have spent some time on the floor, judging by splashes and pours. Still, Pollock must have met it more often face to face, pinned to the wall. It has a clear top and bottom, with thick areas of white punctuated by curves just off the vertical. There he overlays his bright primaries, so that they gather into a greater darkness and freer trace of his hand. They also surround what could well be faces, in yellow with small dark lips and sharp red eyes. Something serious is going on, and it contains multitudes.

Even before, he was thinking big. He had been painting murky but bulky Surrealist figures for years. They had outgrown the easel in size and feeling, just as they had outgrown the detailed Surrealist fantasies of Salvador Dalí. Recent work was growing fast as well. Stenographic Figure nears five feet in length, and Guardians of the Secret, possibly the last work before Mural, reaches six. Still, they seem downright controlled by comparison, with a more untroubled blue backdrop for the first—and one dense rectangle within the overall rectangle of the other.

He was making a bigger and bigger impression as well. Guggenheim had included Stenographic Figure in her gallery's spring salon of young artists, on 57th Street. Piet Mondrian declared it the "most interesting work" that he had seen in America. It squeezes its comic title figure between a tabletop and a window, with calligraphic touches in red across the whole. Mondrian might have seen something of his own play between asymmetric motion and the urban grid. That fall, she gave Pollock a stipend and a solo show—where MoMA purchased The She-Wolf, his first to enter a museum.

As far as he was concerned, everyone that mattered was thinking big. A mural may sound awfully old fashioned, a reminder of when one stood way, way back to grasp art's whole rather than way, way close to feel the drips. Still, Pollock had learned from the Depression-era murals of Thomas Hart Benton, whose bulky industrial workers influenced his darker presences. He admired nothing so much as Mexican muralists like José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera—and he could have seen the replacement for Rivera's mural in Rockefeller Center, by José Maria Sert, taking shape in 1932, plus Sert's murals for the Waldorf Astoria hotel. As for sticking to canvas, if it was good enough for Pablo Picasso and Guernica, it was good enough for him.

Pollock, though, is not making an old-fashioned statement. Mural has no interest in politics, working class or Latino, and it is starting to emerge at last out of Surrealism's bad dreams. This is about his encounter with himself and unseen others, and his pours and his loaded brush are key to that. They all keep changing as one walks beside the canvas, inch by inch. One cannot stand all that far back in the Guggenheim tower gallery, and no one seems to want to try. He is finally coming not just off the easel, but also off the wall.

From brightness to grayness

It did not happen all at once. It did not even proceed in a straight line. If anything, Pollock drew back after Mural, and he never painted as large again. The show does not include Stenographic Figure (which MoMA picked up in 1980) or Guardians of the Secret. It does, though, have The She-Wolf, which returns to nested rectangles and tormented representation. And that back and forth matters—in the case of Mural, within a single outsize work.

The show also has Untitled from perhaps 1949—the year that Life magazine asked whether Pollock were the greatest living painter. It is a drip painting, with the sheen of enamel, and it had taken him years after Mural to find the drips. They are not a simple consequence of abandoning the easel. Untitled, a drip painting from the Guggenheim's collection, would fit on one, and drips start to turn up in 1947 and 1948 in works on paper, small enough to fold or to file away. Yet they did reshape his compositions. Even in painting small, he is leaving the corners free as he walks and leaps around unstretched canvas on the floor.

One might argue that he needed three breakthroughs—off the easel, into abstraction, and into drips. They do not come simultaneously, but they influence one another. In past shows, I kept waiting for him to finish with Surrealism so that he could achieve postwar American art. Here one can appreciate the back and forth. Willem de Kooning unsettled the onward march with those huge swerves between abstraction and his Women. Like that of Arshile Gorky, the movement's senior figure, Pollock's haunting runs throughout.

The Guggenheim makes all that part of its own family history. Before Pollock found a dealer, he lived off a job at the Guggenheim's predecessor, the Museum of Non-Objective Art. The curator, Megan Fontanella, explains that he worked as a "custodian and preparator." In practice, that meant running the freight elevator, repairing stretchers, and hearing out the museum's voluble director, Hilla Rebay—the aristocrat, patron, and talented modern painter. You will not learn that Solomon R. Guggenheim made a policy of hiring artists, to lend them a hand. They had a turnover familiar from starving artists in museums today.

Peggy Guggenheim was not all that close to Solomon—the niece of a man with many siblings. Where he did nothing to hide his roots as a European Jew or his source of money in mining, she was never less than stylish. She gave Mural to the University of Iowa when she shut the gallery, founded her Guggenheim Foundation, and moved to Venice. It is on loan from the university's Stanley Museum of Art. New Yorkers last saw it in 1998, in MoMA's Pollock retrospective (when I attempted a much longer and more ambitious look at the artist, so do check it out). Now they have a mini-retrospective of just four works.

The show's last work, also from the museum collection, takes its own step back. Ocean Greyness from 1953 returns to the face-like ovals of Mural three years before Pollock's death, but on closer to an easel scale. It also dispenses with the gleam of enamel in Untitled—and such telling titles as Lucifer and Phosphorescence. Yet the overlay of color deepens into that grayness just as his last drips pare back to black. Faces now are fewer and more threatening, as were his final drunken, unfaithful years on eastern Long Island. They are no less skilled and moving for that, but one can remember when he had his ambitions and plenty of company.

A weightier AbEx

Faced with rusted steel plates, I for one have more to worry about than the triumph of American painting. (How about, say, emerging alive?) Yet as late as 1967 Richard Serra stuck closely to the wall in a lighter mode, with six leather belts—not the kind that hold pants up, but harnesses in a variety of shades from soft brown to burnished red. And he spoke of them as "drawing in space." (Tell me where you have heard that before!) Is it still Post-Minimalism and is it still sculpture, or is it "action painting" once again?

Two-hundred ton plates are no small feat either, and their experience is as modulated as brushwork as one passes between their inexorable curves. And Serra modulates Belts as well—side by side like brushstrokes in an epic painting. Still, the artist and his pants are notably absent, and the experience is also chastening. Art has entered a whole new age after Pop Art and Minimalism, of found images, found materials, and found results. Robert Morris rips pink felt, only to deposit it in a pile in a corner. He spoke of trusting to gravity and chance, much as a show to come at the Guggenheim speaks of material and motion.

Not that Jackson Pollock was above either one, not with drip painting. And the six sculptors do share that tower gallery with Pollock's Mural, with a single work or pair apiece from the museum's holdings. Tony Smith, it turns out, studied at the Art Student League, just like Pollock, before heading to Chicago to learn from Frank Lloyd Wright. Could he still be the student of architecture when he constructs his black steel cubes? Here he starts with tetrahedrons, before soaking them in white plaster and combining them in a wiggly row on the floor. If they seem as physical and unpredictable as a flick of Pollock's wrist, he calls them his Wingbone.

Smith really did come in the wake of David Smith (no relation) and postwar sculpture. Wingbone came in 1962, just as painters like Frank Stella were declaring past stories over. Carl Andre and Donald Judd were getting not quite literally off the ground. The others date from the next decade, with new rhythms. A second felt piece, in black, drapes over six nails, one above the next. Together, the long strips gather slowly, rise into a sudden wave, and sink again to the floor. So does Senga Nengudi in performance, in 1978.

Senga Nengudi wears little more than pantyhose, which stabs off in all directions. Is she, too, drawing in space? Does it set her loose or tie her down, rein her in or allow her to dance? Either way, it is women's wear, and (to the Guggenheim's credit) three of six artists are "bad girls" while two are black. Maren Hassinger trained as a dancer before moving from Bennington College to LA, and she pairs drawing in space with constraint, too, with nautical rope in 1972. Many associate Lynda Benglis with dance as well, because of her deftly tied white bows. She also applies gilding and glitter, so that they sparkle.

Fair enough, but her Juliet is not an innocent and fated lover. Benglis names the 1974 work for J in the NATO phonetic alphabet. Hassinger's ropes cross and hang apart, in a collective pattern that makes it easy to overlook the shortness of each one. And for all her associations of vines, hair, and umbilical cords, they are nooses set for a hanging. Serra's belts also start with a twist of neon, the kind that pairs men in mutual punishment for Bruce Nauman. When Serra comes his own closest to drip painting, with ladles of molten lead, I for one am getting out of his way.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Jackson Pollock and "Knotted, Torn, Scattered" ran at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through September 19, 2021. A related article looks at Pollock in retrospective.