Rather he has been content to illustrate the Analytic Cubist and all-over Pollock pictures side by side 8 and let the reader make the connection. 7īeyond these statements, Greenberg has not clarified the relationship he postulates, nor has he mentioned the way in which the proliferating grids of late Analytic Cubism contributed historically to the integration of the all-over configuration. This is played off, however, against a far more emphatic surface, and Pollock can open and close his webs with much greater freedom because they do not have to follow a model in nature. The interstitial spots and areas left by Pollock’s webs of paint answer Picasso’s and Braque’s original facet-planes, and create an analogously ambiguous illusion of shallow depth. There is a curious logic in the fact that it was only at this same point in his own stylistic evolution that Pollock himself became consistently and utterly abstract. I do not think it exaggerated to say that Pollock’s 1946–50 manner really took up Analytical Cubism from the point at which Picasso and Braque had left it when, in their collages of 19, they drew back from the utter abstractness to which Analytical Cubism seemed headed. Nevertheless, Greenberg’s thesis seems to mr to contain a profound truth, however much he may overemphasize it and however little he has ever explicated or developed it:īy means of his interlaced trickles and spatters, Pollock created an oscillation between an emphatic surface-and an illusion of indeterminate but somehow definitely shallow depth that reminds me of what Picasso and Braque arrived at thirty odd years before, with the facet planes of their Analytical Cubism. (And Surrealism-though here more in the methodology and poetic spirit than in the plastic structure of the finished works.) I want to make clear at the outset that I do not accept Greenberg’s contention that the drip pictures “have an almost completely Cubist basis.” The reader will not be surprised that I consider Impressionism extremely important for him as well. A vivid appreciation of the painting surface as a potential architectonic organism has lent a consistent stylistic logic throughout his career even to Pollock’s freest inventions.” 5 “Picasso’s Cubism,” he wrote in the catalog of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1956 memorial exhibition, “impressed” on Pollock “the overriding importance and transforming function of plastic values. Even Michael Fried, the scholar whose critical methods have most in common with those of Greenberg, found that “despite Pollock’s intense involvement with late Cubism through 1946, the formal issues at stake in his most successful paintings of the next four years cannot be characterized in Cubist terms.” 4Īlone among other writers on Pollock, Sam Hunter hinted-but only round-aboutly-at the possible value of Greenberg’s thesis. Lawrence Alloway, for example, judges them “one of the most brilliant achievements of Late Cubism.” 3 But whereas these writers see Pollock rejecting Cubist structure in the all-over paintings of 1946–50, Greenberg considers that the Cubism-now Analytic rather than Synthetic-persists on what might be called the infra-structural level of the work. Moreover, Robertson’s contention that a break with Cubism took place in 1943 runs counter to virtually all other Pollock criticism which considers the paintings of 1942–46 profoundly influenced by Synthetic Cubism, Picasso in particular. Robertson’s, after praising Greenberg for his “consistent understanding of Pollock’s work and admiration for his achievement,” proceeds to attribute to him (Greenberg) the view that Pollock had by 1943 “broken away from the traditional conception of pictorial space that had extended from the Renaissance to the Cubist period in art and that Pollock was making a new kind of space.” 1 This astonishing attribution entirely reverses the burden of Greenberg’s actual views which are that even the drip pictures, not to say the paintings of 1943–46, “have an almost completely Cubist basis.” 2 Yet of the two monographs on Pollock to have appeared thus far, Mr. Yet the existence of such a relationship is the central thesis of Clement Greenberg, pioneer critic of the new American painting and particular supporter of, and commentator on, the work of Pollock if for no other reason, it is an idea which any serious criticism is honor bound to at least consider. So much in both the character and plastic structure of the drip pictures seems, at first consideration, diametrically opposed to that meditative, architectonic art. THAT THE ALL-OVER POLLOCKS should have any connection at all with Analytic Cubism is a surprising suggestion (at least this writer found it so some years ago). CUBISM AND THE LATER EVOLUTION OF THE ALL-OVER STYLE
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