Review of exhibitions - Brief article
"...This past winter's exhibition of drawings and small-scale paintings at Washburn explored the links that connect the art of Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros with Jackson Pollock during that critical period.
Pollock had seen and admired Orozco's and Siqueiros's work in the early 30s, and had met the former during the winter of 1930-31 when Orozco, along with his and Pollock's mutual teacher, regionalist Thomas Hart Benton (another seeker of a national art), were both working on commissions for the New School for Social Research. In addition, Pollock participated in an influential 1936 workshop conducted by Siqueiros. The workshop explored new materials and techniques -- lacquers, enamels and plastics; dripping, spattering and pouring -- to stimulate creativity and to make bold, compelling, often public work....
The muralists were bent on forging an art of national identity, and to do so they would plumb history, culture and the psyche for primitive, archetypal imagery. All three artists shared a fascination with the totemic. Portraying the totemic, with its interchangeability of man and animal or, in its modern incarnation, of man and machine, gave their art not only an archaic power, but also a sense of formal mutability, a way of slipping in and out of shapes, of making transitions -- creating complex space not only by addition, but by trace and echo as well. The 1936 Orozco painting Advance, with its militaristic and menacing robotlike forms, is a good example of the manmachine amalgam, while Pollock's writhing, almost flayed combination of man and beast in Untitled (Composition with Donkey Head), ca. 1938-41, parallels Orozco's Cat (Gato) of 1946, a harsh and compelling painting of a predatory creature poised halfway between the human and the feline.
Much of the muralists' and Pollock's work from this period was characterized by the construction of charged, complicated spaces. In the Washburn show this can be seen in Pollock's Untitled (Composition with Serpent Mask) of 1938-41, whose compacted, rhythmic array of snake, skull and bird forms is interwoven with sharply pointed abstract elements, as well as in his drawings particularly the crosshatched and tightly wound tondo shapes. The attraction such charged spaces held for all three artists would seem to be more than a formal one. On the muralists' part, might not a highly activated surface -- one where all parts contribute equally -- reflect a similarly egalitarian social desire? As for Pollock, with his strong interest in psychology, a case could be made that such a painting space functions metaphorically, the equivalent of a state of attention where the background of the unconscious and the foreground of the conscious freely mingle.
The links between Pollock's art of the '30s and early '40s and that of Benton, Picasso and the Surrealists have often been observed, but the connection to Mexican art is under-appreciated...."
By Richard Kalina
COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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