ART APPRECIATION THREAD Jackson Pollock works found (hidden in storage space)

BALTIMORE SUN ^ | May 11, 2005 | By Diane Haithman

[Liz]

An example of Pollock's work (not one of the missing)

32 artworks were discovered a little more than two years ago in a wrapped package in Long Island.

The son of two artists who were friends and contemporaries of Jackson Pollock has announced that 32 previously unrecorded works by Pollock were found among his late parents' belongings.

Alex Matter -- son of photographer, filmmaker and graphic designer Herbert Matter and abstract painter Mercedes Matter -- said through a spokeswoman that the 32 artworks were discovered a little more than two years ago in a wrapped package in Herbert Matter's storage space on Long Island.

.....Alex Matter did not announce the discovery until now because of intermittent ill health and because the pieces required cleaning and stabilization.

The works, ranging from 5-by-7 inches to 16-by-17 1/2 inches, date from 1946 to 1949.

They include 22 mixed-media "drip" paintings on boards as well as drawings.

None of the pieces is signed, although three bear the artist's initials.

Ellen Landau, a Case Western Reserve University humanities professor who has written a book on Pollock, said five or six of the pieces are unfinished.

Landau said she believes Pollock did not sign the works because he never planned to exhibit them but that they bear unmistakable characteristics of his style. "Their provenance is excellent," she said.

Landau, who co-curated a retrospective of the works of Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, in the late 1980s, said she has been asked by the Matter family to organize a touring exhibition including the recently discovered pieces...........

[Age of Reason]

Just looking at a Wright designed house gives me a headache.

His interiors are like fingernails on a blackboard. Ugh.

[satire]

Good statement.

I'd suggest that he was frustrated and depressed by comments in his day similar to those expressed here by the envious and the untalented - the envious and the untalented who won't go down in history, won't ever do anything truly creative or groundbreaking, won't have movies made about them, and, therefore, will have nice safe lives wherein nobody has to even say the nasty and ignorant things said here.

Fear of envy being, of course, the main reason people post bitter blah-blah online in safe havens of the likeminded, rather than make history.

[Liz]

Art appreciation is an intellectual exercise, particularly in the discussion---or debate---over an artist's works.


As for Pollock, Picasso, and so on, my view is that it's not so much what's on the canvas, but how one feels when one looks at it, and what it says about the culture----coupled with the artist's unspoken contribution to stimulating the ensuing dialogue.

[AnAmericanMother]

See post #34. Kinda pathetic, really. But at least he found a schtick and a way to put bread on the table.

I like Benton. He's as much a historian as an artist. His murals in the Missouri State Capitol are fascinating - and he snuck in quite a lot of truthful commentary on certain politicians who didn't realize he was having at them until too late . . .

[Liberty Valance]

LOL!

[AnAmericanMother]

. . . it's not so much what's on the canvas, but how one feels when one looks at it, and what it says about the culture . . .

This is where you and I part company.

Characterizing or evaluating art on the basis of an individual, subjective emotional reaction is analogous to the liberal notion that what IS or what is DONE is not important, it's just how you FEEL. What that winds up meaning is that there are no standards of craftsmanship or technical facility, just "art is whatever you can get away with."

It's irreproducible, unverifiable, and (forgive me) about 99 and 94/100ths B.S. And I cannot agree that it is "art" in any true sense. Divorcing feeling and intellect from the basic craftsmanship that traditionally forms the basis of "art" is what got us into all this ultra-pseudo-intellectual mess in the first place.

You have a bunch of jurors, mostly located in NYC and LA, who award money that isn't theirs to artists based on "standards" that are tied to absolutely nothing but the jurors' own high opinions of themselves and their associates in their rarified circles. It's incestuous, it's totally unrelated to any standard of the good, the true, or the beautiful, and it's IMNSHO a complete waste of federal and foundation money.

[Enchante]

"Pollack's strength is that he bested Picasso in finding a new novelty act"

I agree, except that I find that whole trendy trend of seeking "new novelty acts" to be utterly trivial and unimpressive. I guess I don't see much value to any of Modernism from Pollack onward, but then I'm too retrograde to appreciate mere novelty without aesthetic significance (I know, my opinion). :^)

[Mark in the Old South]

I am no fan of McMansions myself. They have no understanding of Classical forms and sense of proportion. That doesn't stop them from using elements that they do not understand. Rarely do they look good and are often poorly built as well. My favorite is the apprentice/contractor era of houses of the South, mostly pre architects. This from a fella who wanted to be an architect so bad he could taste it. Most were built in Virgina, Maryland and the Carolinas by gentleman using style books and a well trained contractor whose sense of design was formed by experience. Thomas Jefferson is the ultimate prototype. If you notice most have no halls except the main one that contains the stairs and had a very practical function in the days pre-AC. They were a very efficient use of space and often had large lavish windows giving all the light you might desire without making heating and cooling impractical. Some of these halls were quite beautiful and useful. In some of the larger they did double duty as a ballroom. Check out Wilton if you are ever in Richmond Va or Sabine Hall in Richmond County. They are perfect. Of course pre indoor plumbing but a modern design can work these in.

The only modern house I liked was designed and built by a second cousin of mine living in Tenn. Very nice the kitchen was round and very clever and convenient. But it had the hall down the bedroom wing. The biggest problem I have with modern is they are slavish to a design theory over all practical considerations. How ironic when you think it was meant to break away from all conventions. Flat roofs leak every time. Large planes of glass, lovely until the summer electric bill arrives, winter bill as well. They are practical in cool arid climates only. They never caught on in the Southeast for a reason and culture is not the only reason. There are those who love them but they rarely sell as well as a good well built Georgian, Federal or Greek Revival house. I lived in Atlanta I bet the modern house has a smaller market there as well.

[stylecouncilor]

ping

[AnAmericanMother]

We agree on the McMansions. . . the spec. contractors who are building them are in the biz to make money, not because they are knowledgeable or inspired (as the old plan-book builders were). I did a study of Chattahoochee River Valley architecture awhile back, and an amazing number of those houses were built out of Andrew Jackson Downing's plan book (he was really Gothic Revival, though, not Greek Revival - there was about a 20 year overlap and of course the farther down into the Frontier South you got, the longer it took his ideas to get there!)

The secret to a contemporary house in the South is twofold: (1) NO FLAT ROOFS (no butterfly roofs either - they're even worse) (2) shield the south-facing glass with a roof overhang calculated for the latitude. If the south-facing elevation is staggered (by means of a solarium, for example) multi-level windows can be screened from the summer sun but take in the lower winter sunlight.

Our first house was designed by an architect with a background in engineering. He also worked for his dad, a building contractor, as a young man. So the house worked from a practical standpoint. It had a central staircase from which all the living areas opened - high ceilings - lots of glass on the south and NO glass on the north. It was extremely efficient and a very comfortable house, but it was very small (we were young marrieds) and once we started having kids we had to sell it, much to our regret. The new owner is an older fellow, remarried with no kids, and he loves the house.

I would have absolutely no objection to living in one of the old classic center-hall Greek Revival houses. There are four or five of them that were built by my family still extant. We were going to move one of them up to Atlanta, but the cost of disassembly, house-moving, and reassembly on our site was prohibitive. It's still sitting down in rural Georgia gathering spiderwebs and mice. Maybe someday . . .

I don't think contemporaries are unpopular in Atlanta because they don't work. Your average "imitation Georgian" house with the narrow stairhall, traffic-jam floor plan, and add-on kitchen like an excrescence at the back doesn't "work" either, but the folks around here buy them up like hotcakes. Contemporaries are unpopular in Atlanta because too many people here are corporate transfers and/or social climbers, who buy a house for what its public persona states and for quick resale value, not intrinsic merit.

[ABG(anybody but Gore)]

I look at a Jackson Pollock piece, and I think of the scene in "Animal House" where John Belushi impersonates a zit.

[Liz]

Granted, many of the people involved in the art world are not people with whom we'd wish to pal around with, or invite as dinner guests into our homes. Thank goodness very few ever run for public office.....and won't be making our laws and public policy.

As it has been, and always will be, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

And doesn't the critical concept of art lie in its intrinsic value? Finding something in the work that speaks to each of us individually, that awakens in us an awareness of beauty, spirit, completeness, a dream, and so on?

While great art works "speak" to more people, one can find relevance in any work of art.

An artist captures one's attention through the way he develops a concept, crafts the technique, and then executes his idea.

One, or all, of those gives a work of art its monetary value to a collector.

Abstractionists and Cubists relegated their canvases to thumbing their noses at the Masters----exhibiting a deliberate and complete absence of sentimentality.

Lichtenstein and some of the Warhol oeuvre appeal at an intellectual level as much as for what's on the canvas as for technique, and the artists' choice of execution........as in Warhol's silk screens.

Working with stencils, Lichtenstein developed a technique using rows of dots that mimicked the commercial printing patterns used in the production of comic books. The resemblance was further emphasized by his palette of bright primary colors replicating the chromatic range of comic books.

Quite remarkable, even though I would not necessarily admire, or purchase such works.

[AnAmericanMother]

It reminds me too much of the Deconstructionists in literature. Nothing has meaning, it's only what the reader/viewer "brings to the table."

That may be a point of discussion, or an interesting thesis, or a commentary on something ephemeral like comic books or halftone printing . . . but it's not art.

[onedoug]

"...said five or six of the pieces are unfinished."

How can he tell?

[Illya Kuryakin]

Ha! I thought you were going to say the scene where he pours mustard all over his toga. This "painting" kind of reminds me of a food fight with ketsup & mustard condamints bottles.

the scene in "Animal House" where John Belushi impersonates a zit.