Jackson Pollock: The Figure of the Fury
Palazzo Vecchio
Florence, Italy
15 April – 27 July 2014
by
Joseph Nechvatal
Published at Hyperallergic.com asJackson Pollock’s Renaissance Connection
http://hyperallergic.com/136418/jackson-pollocks-renaissance-connection/
The city of Florence is paying homage to Jackson Pollock, well-known for his all-over
syncretistic paintings, by connecting his work to that of Michelangelo’s. This unusual
connection was conceived and curated by Sergio Risaliti and Francesca Campana
Comparini under the organization of the Opera Laboratori Fiorentini – Civita Group.
The site chosen to exhibit sixteen small to medium-sized works by Pollock (the best
being “Earth Worms” (1946) and “Square Composition with Horse” (1937 – 1938) -
albeit it has more to do with Picasso than Michelangelo) is the top floor of the majestic
Palazzo Vecchio. Therein lays the curiosity.
The title, The Figure of the Fury, refers to Pollock in the act of painting as he moved
around his canvases, while simultaneously alluding to the expression, “fury of the figure”
by the 16th-century art theorist and painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1584). Lomazzo
pointed out that what bestowed furious qualities to a figure is a sensed motion similar to
that of a flame; the same swirling motion that Michelangelo gave to his figures that is
here assigned to Pollock (even though Pollock only become acquainted with
Michelangelo through book reproductions during his studies under Thomas Hart Benton).
Wilfred Zogbaum, “Jackson Pollock portrait” (1947) from Wilfred Zogbaum in the
atelier of Fireplace road.
Jackson Pollock, “Untitled” (1937-1939), Colored pencil and graphite on paper. TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Jackson Pollock, by SIAE 2014
Jackson Pollock, “Untitled” (1937-1939), Colored pencil and graphite on paper. TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Jackson Pollock, by SIAE 2014
Usually when we encounter large classic Pollock drip paintings of some figural-depth,
we are pummelled and overwhelmed by their connectively immersive suggestivity - and
by the extent to which the immediacy of the field is forgrounded. The resulting
radicalization, as regards their distribution of visual incident into the optical field,
manifests an omni-perspectivalism that is exemplary of omni-directionality.
As evidence of this ambient trend's beginnings, Pollock famously painted the engulfing
“Mural” (1943) for Peggy Guggenheim where he transformed the canvas into a whole
wall instead of a small object of contemplation which is visually and physically
dominated by the viewer. “Mural” set the precedent for the scale of Pollock's celebrated
all-over drip-paintings (with their even distribution of compositional interest across an
entire large surface) largely inspired by Clement Greenberg's review in the Nation's art
column of February 1, 1947 of Pollock's previous show at Art of This Century in which
Greenberg wrote: "Pollock points a way beyond the easel, beyond the mobile, framed
picture, to the mural."
Pollock's ensuing appeal for mural commissions increased and in a 1949 letter to his
dealer, Betty Parsons, he wrote, "I want to mention that I am going to try to get some
mural commissions through an agent. I feel it is important for me to broaden my
possibilities in this line of development." The same year Pollock told an interviewer,
"The direction that painting seems to be taking is away from the easel, into some sort of
wall painting. Some of my canvases are an impractical size ... 9 by 18 feet! But I enjoy
working big and whenever I have a chance I do it whether it's practical or not."
Pollock sought to create a spatial continuousness that no longer distinguished between the
pictorial space and the area in which the viewer stood. As such, Pollock's imposing
paintings demand that the observer relinquish intellectual control (as the beholder is now
torn free of unyielding renaissance perspective) and dive into the energetic
color/movement (through the eye being drawn into the excessive aspect of the painting)
and therein dissolve into the dazzling chaos of the individual lines which are also, at the
same time, creating a uniformly structured whole-field.
In contrast with the devises of European renaissance perspective, Pollock sought to draw
the viewer into the canvas, not by establishing a distant vanishing-point, but by
conceptually eliminating the frame so as to permit the eye to follow the curvilinear
patterns beyond the canvas and into the implied surrounding space without being stopped
by the edges.
Relevant to these concerns are the semi-pejorative statements made by Aldous Huxley
concerning Pollock's painting Cathedral from a 1948 Parsons exhibition. Huxley made
these remarks as a participant in the Roundtable on Modern Art, a panel discussion held
at the Museum of Modern Art from which excerpts were reproduced in Life magazine's
issue of October 11, 1948. In it, Huxley points out Cathedral's lack of focus due to its all-
over compositional approach, saying "It raises the question of why it stops when it does.
The artist could go on forever. (Laughter) I don't know. It seems like a panel for a
wallpaper which is repeated indefinitely around the wall."
Taking this "wallpaper (...) repeated indefinitely around the wall" aspect seriously, the
architect Peter Blake, in planning the architectural strategy for what was proposed to be
the Jackson Pollock Museum, had the idea (with Pollock) to extend the paintings
indefinitely around the space. In an article concerned with the project named "Unframed
Space: A Museum for Jackson Pollock's Paintings" in Interiors magazine, Arthur Drexler
wrote that Pollock's paintings "seem as though they might very well be extended
indefinitely, and it is precisely this quality that has been emphasized in the central unit of
the plan." About the continuous rhythms of Pollock's paintings Drexler goes on to
describe how, in the model of the museum, "a painting 17 feet long constitutes an entire
wall. It is terminated on both ends not by a frame or a solid partition, but by mirrors. The
painting is thus extended into miles of reflected space, and leaves no doubt in the
observer's mind as to this particular aspect of Pollock's work."
This immersive Pollock effect is here radically reversed - as we encounter his modest-in-
scaled work after a lengthy, massively engulfing, walk through the Palazzo Vecchio
itself, with its extravagant connected rooms after rooms of Mannerist Grotesque murals,
ceiling paintings and stucco. Most notably here was the Room of Lorenzo the
Magnificent, covered, as it is, in immersive stucco murals (1556-1558) by Leonardo
Ricciarelli, Giovanni Boscoli and Mariotto di Francesco based, supposedly, on drawings
by the architect Bartolomeo Ammannati.
Bartolomeo Ammannati (drawing), Leonardo Ricciarelli, Giovanni Boscoli & Mariotto di
Francesco (stucco) (1556-1558)
Bartolomeo Ammannati (drawing), Leonardo Ricciarelli, Giovanni Boscoli & Mariotto di
Francesco (stucco) (1556-1558)
Bartolomeo Ammannati (drawing), Leonardo Ricciarelli, Giovanni Boscoli & Mariotto di
Francesco (stucco) (1556-1558)
Bartolomeo Ammannati (drawing), Leonardo Ricciarelli, Giovanni Boscoli & Mariotto di
Francesco (stucco) (1556-1558)
Bartolomeo Ammannati (drawing), Leonardo Ricciarelli, Giovanni Boscoli & Mariotto di
Francesco (stucco) (1556-1558)
Even after consuming only one glass of wine and a plate of spaghetti, this room made my
head spin softly - the way a great Pollock does with its all-over connectivity, full of
dynamism.
These great immersive stucco rooms are deliberately anti-actual, often including
elaborate depictions of multiple figures bound together in tendrils.
This Grotesque (in Italian Grottosesco) became an arabesque style of all-over decoration
based on a linked mêlée of fantastic, diminutive figures deriving from Roman mural and
vault decoration which had been unearthed during the Renaissance (such as at the Golden
House of Nero); mural decorations which themselves suggested ancient expressions of
religio-sexual inter-penetrability - fanciful imagery mixing animal, human, and plant
forms together. First revived in the Renaissance by the school of Raphael, the Grotesque
came into fashion in 16th-century Italy and subsequently became popular throughout
Europe.
Hence, while I found this modest show fairly uninteresting in terms of the Pollock-
Michelangelo connection, I was flattened by the reversal of all-overness connectivity that
we associate with Pollock, and for that alone, I found this exhibition to be absolutely
fascinating.
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