Jackson Pollock painting sells for record $181m at auction

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[BenLurkin]

A Jackson Pollock artwork, described as one of history's "first truly abstract paintings", has sold at auction for $181m (£135m) in New York.

Number 7A, 1948, which went under the hammer at the renowned Christie's auction house on Monday, smashed the previous record for the most a work by the late American artist has taken at auction.

Christie's called Number 7A, 1948, which depicts black drips of paint with touches of red on a huge canvas spanning more than three metres, a key piece of art history.

"It is with this work that Pollock finally frees himself from the shackles of conventional easel painting and produces one of the first truly abstract paintings in the history of art," it wrote in its description of the piece online.

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TOPICS: Arts/Photography
KEYWORDS: jacksonpollock

[dfwgator]

Actually. Hunter’s paintings show more skill and creativity than this garbage.

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Hitler’s too.

[KarlInOhio]

It fails my museum janitor test. What is the reaction of the janitor if he sees it sitting there?

Mona Lisa: pretty young woman, but she needs to smile more. Art!

Jackson Pollock painting: Who left the drop cloth out? Not Art.

Duchamp Fountain: What #$_&(@ idiot union plumber misread the blueprint and installed a urinal on the gallery side of the wall? And he put it in without pipes! And it's mounted 90 degrees off so it will never drain. Not Art! And I'm taking a lunch break before I get my hammer to remove it. Maybe I can hang that picture of the pretty woman so I don't have to patch the wall.

[Flaming Conservative]

A sucker is born every minute.

[montag813]

Money laundering via non-profits, etc.

[NorthMountain]

My Dad’s house was built in the early 1900s. It’s presently electrified, as one might expect ... indeed it has been “re-electrified” twice, and some of the old wiring is still present, but disconnected.

Interestingly, it wasn’t always electrified ... during a renovation some years back, we found a network of still live (!) natural gas pipes inside the walls, capped off where they had once fed fuel into various appliances ...

Among those appliances were certainly Gas Lights.

Your post reminded me of all that ...

[chajin]

Having taught art history over the years, I have learned to understand what Pollock was thinking, and what he was trying to accomplish, and so in that sense I appreciate his work.

That doesn't mean I would pay $18.10, much less $181 million, for any of his abstract expressionist paintings. My house is filled instead with woodblock prints by a Japanese artist, Tomikichiro Tokuriki, whose work I have admired for the last half century; anyone looking at the link might not like the prints, but no one could say that it wasn't an attempt at art.

"So frowned he once when, in an angry parle,
He smote the sledded Pollacks on the ice."
(Hamlet, Act I, scene 1, lines 73-74)

[NorthMountain]

Thanks for linking the Japanese prints ... Definitely, they are art, although not particularly to my taste. Except the black cat. But that’s more because I like black cats. It recalls to mind one of my little furry friends.

[lula]

I wouldn’t pay a dollar for this at a yard sale. They call this art?

[Puppage]

Not a fan, but then again, art is in the eye of the beholder.

[The Louiswu]

"Art is what you can get away with."
Andy Warhol

[catnipman]

“In Philadelphia, it’s worth 50 bucks.”

or

it ain’t worth butkus when the shit hits the fan ...

[dfwgator]

“In Philadelphia, it’s worth 50 bucks.”

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Bo knows.

[GunsareOK]

Garbage pure and simple.

[xp38]

I do like the nickname he got...Jack the Dripper

[Zathras]

Oh I got ya.
Now would I pay more than 10000 for a Pollick?
Nope.
In person it just looks way more complex than on-line.

When I saw my first Monet, I sat and stared at it for 30 min trying to figure out how he painted it without a 6’ brush.

[mairdie]

Jackson Pollock worked on commercial, unprimed, or unsized canvas, as well as using unconventional materials, which have presented unique conservation challenges. His choice of materials, such as house paints, has required significant, delicate restoration.

I can barely remember my professor discussing some example of a museum buying one of his works and TRANSFERRING THE PAINT to a properly sized (prepared) canvas.

I switched to History of Art in the middle of my senior year at U of Chicago from physics. Bless Schrodinger Equations. We worked in the Lorado Taft studio in all the art techniques used in the works we were studying - priming canvas with rabbit skin glue (YUCK!), gessoing walls, using shims to build molds to cast statues, stone lithography, etc. Wonderful times.

[newzjunkey]

Looks like a drop cloth

[Tommy Revolts]

That looks to be worth $181 million.

[lado]

Yup, abstract paintings, which a 4-year old can do on a sugar high, is the playground of the rich and well-connected.

But that’s the game, isn’t it? As long as they can call it ‘art’, and therefore pay whatever they think it’s worth, that’s how they keep getting away with buying political patronage or money laundering through their ‘art’ deals.

Also, the left loves abstract art because it is meaningless (as opposed to painting George Washington or some other ‘evil’ white dude).

While I understand there are different types of art, I personally only give deference to art that can only be put together by people with a very high degree of skill, taking thousands of hours of practice or just natural ability. Not some jamoke who throws paint on a canvas.

[Liz]

Interesting.......