![]() The hell with museums! Put the paintings in a room and look at ’em - isn’t that enough? You remember that old building where the Museum of Modern Art started? What was wrong with that? I was in a house designed by Mies once I felt so taut I couldn’t say anything. Paintings don’t need all this fooling around. Later, he takes a jab at Frank Lloyd Wright, who had designed the Guggenheim Museum’s iconic cylindrical structure, and the very notion of museums:Īs for Wright, he’s a great architect, I guess, but what a That museum! We’ve had all this trouble in doing away with the frame - and now this. ‘Autumn Rhythm’ by Jackson Pollock, 1950, enamel on canvas Bits of Renaissance pastiche are still bits of Renaissance pastiche, no matter how blurred you make them. When you try to emulate the old masters … you get corn, real corn. That would be too precise a statement to lend itself to painting as we practice it. Perhaps it’s why we’re not interested in making portraits. This indeterminacy comes out in our painting. We know there’s good and bad in everyone. YOu don’t call a thing or a person ‘good’ or ‘bad’ the way you could one. ![]() ![]() Morals are indeterminate compared with other times. Later in the conversation, Pollock reflects on the inherent duality of human character: Something in me knows where I’m going, and - well, painting is a state of being. When Rodman probes about Pollock’s process, the painter offers a strikingly articulate addition to history’s finest definitions of art: We’re all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. But when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. “I don’t care for ‘abstract expressionism,'” he said, “and it’s certainly not ‘nonobjective’ and not ‘nonrepresentational’ either. When asked “to elaborate on the business of labels,” Pollock grunts: In respect to his art, of course, he is and this may be the tragic conflict that both makes his painting what it is and accounts for his inability to carry it further. He is friendly and warm-hearted - though he resists showing it, and no doubt would like to be though ruthless and without sentiment. He is uncouth and inarticulate and arrogant and very sure of his place in art and of the importance of the movement with which he is associated, but there is not a race of showmanship or phoniness in his make-up. He talks with difficulty, searching painfully, almost agonizingly, for the right word, with constant apologies “for not being verbal.” The sincerity of the man is overwhelmingly apparent. Eventually, he makes his way to the family’s home in East Hampton, where Pollock emerges to greet him “in nondescript blue slacks and a T-shirt, bearded and bleary-eyed, like a bear.” Pollock’s way of conversation, Rodman notes, bespeaks a great deal of his character: He coordinates with his wife, Lee Krasner, an abstract painter herself. ![]() The words printed on it said: “There are good jobs for everyone in the telephone business.”Ībout a month later, Rodman calls Pollock - who famously doesn’t answer letters - to arrange a visit. ![]() … Thish tree’s got everythin’ … beautiful … beautiful …!” And he drifted off into the moonlit fog of dawn, dropping a package of matches. Leave it alone and it’ll grow and grow an’ be beautiful. “What’s the use of going further than this?,” he muttered. When Rodman, tipsy as well, runs into Pollock near Astor Place, the painter suddenly reaches out, grabs the runt of a nearby tree, and weaves into an oddly philosophical meditation: Among the conversations is one with Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912–August 11, 1956) - beloved artist and son of one particularly great dad - which took place eight weeks before Pollock, driving under the influence of alcohol, crashed in his Oldsmobile convertible into a tree and died.īut on that June evening in 1956, Rodman bumped into a tipsy Pollock en route to a dive bar party following the opening of Willem de Kooning’s show at the Sidney Janis Gallery. In 1957, writer, public intellectual, lifelong art aficionado, and self-described “aging anthologist” Selden Rodman collected several dozen of his informal, lively, amusing, and insightful interviews with iconic artists and architects - including Frank Lloyd Wright, Willem de Kooning, and Saul Steinberg - in Conversations with Artists ( public library). ![]()
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