Pollock (2000) film review

John A. Walker (copyright 2009)

Jackson Pollock in his studio. Photo copyright Arnold Newman 1949.

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JACKSON POLLOCK

After World War II, New York replaced Paris as the Western world’s art capital and

paintings by the American abstract expressionists received national and

international acclaim. Pollock (1912-56) was the first of that generation to ‘break

the ice’, that is, to achieve commercial success and to make a splash in the mass

media. (Americans were looking for a native art star to rival Europe’s Picasso.) In

August 1949, Pollock was profiled in a Life magazine article that began with the

question ‘Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?’ and was illustrated

with photographs by Arnold Newman of Pollock standing in front of his drip

paintings. Pollock’s unconventional method of painting by pouring and dripping

fluid paint on to canvases laid out on the floor aroused curiosity and became a

talking point. The artist was photographed several times posing moodily with a
cigarette in his mouth while wearing a paint-splattered denim outfit and white T-

shirt or dressed in dark clothes like a beatnik poet. His once handsome face was

weathered and had a furrowed brow. Such portraits suggested a rugged but

emotional artisan, an outsider-rebel in the James Dean mould. (Earlier, Pollock had

had a cowboy image because he was a man from Cody in the West and one photo

showed him in cowboy gear with rifle and pistol.) Of course, at other times, such as

when he gave interviews to the media, Pollock dressed more formally in a jacket,

dark trousers, white shirt and tie.

Hans Namuth also photographed and filmed him during the early 1950s while

making his action paintings in and around the wooden barn that served as his studio

in The Springs, near East Hampton, Long Island. (Pollock and his wife, the painter

Lee Krasner [1902-84], bought a house and barn there in 1945.) Namuth’s dramatic

photos and films accompanied by Pollock’s voice-over commentary were highly

influential in terms of increasing Pollock’s fame and revealing his unusual creative

process and techniques. In March 1951, the British photographer Cecil Beaton was

commissioned by Vogue magazine to shoot fashion models with Pollock paintings as

a backdrop. This was an early indication that Pollock’s work might eventually lose

its apocalyptic charge and end up as mere wall decoration.

Within the New York art world, Pollock’s personal problems were well known:

depression and mental instability (he was prescribed tranquillisers and attended

psychotherapy sessions), drinking binges, aggressive anti-social behaviour, assaults

on women and adulteries, bar room brawls and urinating in Peggy Guggenheim’s

fireplace. (Mike Bidlo, the American appropriation artist, recreated Pollock’s

infamous urination event in a performance and photograph in the early 1980s.)

Pollock might have looked macho and acted tough but he was not considered fit

enough to serve in the military during World War II. His premature death in 1956

aged 44 in a self-inflicted car crash terminated his career in a dramatic, violent

fashion – again like James Dean. However, any sorrow at Pollock’s fate should be

tempered by the knowledge that he had been drinking, was in a foul mood and the

crash was the result of speeding and reckless driving. He had two women passengers

with him one of whom – Ruth Kligman, his lover - was injured and the other – Edith

Metzger - was killed. If he had survived, Pollock deserved to be tried and found

guilty of manslaughter.

Pollock and the other abstract expressionists achieved renown and affluence after

decades of poverty, struggle and public indifference, and some of them were ill

equipped to cope with sudden success. Pollock’s death was virtual suicide and

Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko did commit suicide. While Pollock wanted

attention and approval for his art, he was also tormented by self-doubt. Publicity

was not positive in all respects because it also prompted jokes, ridicule and insults

from conservative critics and outraged members of the public. The media’s

attention made him feel like a freak show, as if ‘his skin had been taken off’ and he

feared the envy and resentment of his fellow artists: ‘They only want me on top of

the heap, so they can push me off.’ One biography claims that, towards the end of

his life, Pollock boasted drunkenly in the Cedar Bar that he was ‘the greatest

painter in the world’, that he parodied himself and became ‘trapped by his own

celebrity … playing a role; feeling week by week, more like a fraud, more like the
phoney that his brothers had always accused him of being’. (1) The painter

Mercedes Matter observed sorrowfully: ‘The minute success entered into the art

world and it became a business, everything changed. It was all ruined.’ (2)

Subsequent generations, particularly the pop artists, were much more at ease with

living in the spotlight, with art as a business, and they developed strategies for

coping with media pressure.

In the decades since his death, Pollock’s artistic reputation has grown because of

biographies, monographs and retrospective travelling exhibitions and the huge

prices fetched by major paintings in salerooms. In 1989, a blockbuster biography

(934 pages long) written by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith was published

and later awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Pollock’s studio was preserved and turned into a

national historic landmark and research library: the Pollock-Krasner House &

Study Center (see website http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/CAS/pkhouse.nsf). It is

administered by the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Visitors are

required to wear padded slippers to protect the studio’s paint-splattered floor. A

replica of the studio appeared in the Pollock retrospective held at the Museum of

Modern Art in New York in 1998. MoMA’s shop also sold Pollock-related

merchandise such as a jazz compact disc, a silk scarf and a poster. The complexities

of Pollock’s drip paintings lent themselves to jigsaw puzzles: in 1965, Springbok

Editions issued a 360-piece puzzle of the 1952 canvas Convergence.

Puzzle and lithograph. Photo Amazon.com.

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THE POLLOCK FILM

Somewhat belatedly, the established American actor Ed Harris (b. 1950) made a

biopic – Pollock (Brant-Allen and three other production companies) - in 1999-2000.

(The delay may well have because Pollock was primarily regarded as an abstract

painter.) Harris directed and played the part of Pollock while Val Kilmer played his

main rival Willem de Kooning. The screenplay, written by Barbar Turner and Susan

Emshwiller, was based on the Naifef and White biography. Harris physically
resembled Pollock and had learned all about his painting techniques. Harris spent

some years in the 1990s learning to draw and paint in preparation for the film.

Some scenes were shot on location on Long Island. Naturally, in this film – which

received mostly favourable reviews - Pollock’s private life and personal problems

figured as much as his paintings.

There are now sufficient semi-fictional biopics of fine artists to constitute a genre.

Such movies are generally acted and filmed in a naturalistic manner with a

conventional narrative structure, that is, beginning, middle and end. The favourite

subject of such films is a man of extremes, a famous genius, a tormented soul,

burdened with disabilities such as alcoholism, depression and self doubt who

struggles for recognition and commercial success, and the love of a good woman,

and who triumphs in his art but dies prematurely, or violently and tragically.

In addition, the subject tends to be a romantic rather than a classical artist – one

cannot imagine a biopic of the abstract painter Piet Mondrian for instance and a

Andy Warhol biopic would be problematic because he was cool rather than hot, and

devised a mask to protect himself from all the media attention. (Although there are

several feature films in which Warhol appears as a character.) Pollock conforms to

the rules of the genre but it is a sincere, well-crafted film, which provides more

coverage of his paintings and painting techniques, and the art world, than is often

the case. Also, it recognises the tremendous contribution to his career of his wife and

fellow painter Lee Krasner (played by Marcia Gay Harden.)

.

All fictional films involve impersonation and simulation. A common problem with

films about artists is how to simulate the works and art and the creative act. Often

the estates of artists will not allow actual works to be filmed or copied – as in the

case of a recent film about Francis Bacon (see my review of Love is the Devil) . Ed

Harris did gain permission from the Pollock estate to copy paintings and he went to

great lengths to imitate Pollock’s painting methods; however, viewers should realise

that the artist Lisa Lawley was employed to make the pre-drip paintings and

Krasner’s early work was produced by Margaret von Biesen. They are plausible

simulations. Francis V. O’Connor, a Pollock scholar, acted as the film’s art history

consultant.

Ed Harris as Pollock in action. Image may be subject to copyright.

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In Pollock, there is a film within a film, namely the documentary that Namuth made
in 1951 of Pollock drip painting. As Harris’s film shows, Pollock himself wanted the

publicity but he realised the creative act was being staged for the camera, that he

was impersonating himself and this caused a feeling of inauthenticity. So, Ed Harris

impersonates Pollock who was impersonating himself. There are layers of

simulation.

Since every biopic involves reduction and simplification, there may seem little point

in arguing about what has been put in and left out but one does note that Pollock’s

radical past was omitted (the narrative goes back as far as 1941) – there is no

indication that he was once a critic of American society and that in the 1930s he

worked with communist artists such as the Mexican muralist David Alfaro

Siquerios. So, Harris’s Pollock is depoliticised. (3) Some of the people around him

are also reduced to caricatures – the critic Clement Greenberg’s views on art, for

instance are so simplified as to be absurd (see my article on Greenberg and the

British). There are also unresolved contradictions such as Pollock saying that his art

came from within, from the unconscious, but also that his abstraction and new

painting methods were a response to what was without - the age of radio and the

atom bomb.

Arguably, Pollock was the first American artist-celebrity or art star. Harris’s film

does show how the mass media, specifically the Life magazine article of 1949, and

photographs and films by Newman and Namuth, helped to make Pollock famous

and how he found it hard to cope with success after decades of struggle and poverty.
Why are Hollywood directors and film stars drawn to films about fine artists? Many

of them collect art, appreciate art and some even paint in their spare time. Art still

has a cachet of being high culture - above the mass culture and commerce associated

with Hollywood movies. Perhaps the main reason is that filmmaking is a effort

involving many compromises, and directors and movie stars pine for the total

artistic control a painter or sculptor in a studio seems to have.

I do wonder about the audience for such a film, which was a decade-long personal

project for Harris. I suspect that most of those who will see it will belong to the

intelligentsia – who already know about Pollock and have seen his paintings.

Harris’s film will tell them little they did not already know – so what was the point?

I doubt that it will attract members of the general public and make them want to see

his actual works of art – the film also lacks pace and drama in its middle section.

Naturally, the film concludes with the fatal car crash in which Pollock dies. A

mythic, James Dean type end to a major artist who in many ways was a deeply

unattractive individual. We should not feel too sorry for Pollock because if he had

survived the crash, he could have tried for dangerous driving and manslaughter for

killing his passenger Edith Metzger. It seems to me that society is too willing to

forgive artists’ anti-social behaviour because of the merit of their art.

A basic objection to biopics – voiced by John Berger in the 1950s regarding the film
Lust for Life (about van Gogh) - is that an artist becomes known because of his or

her art but the biopic reverses this priority by focusing on the life rather than the

art. (However, in this case, there is quite a lot about the art.) Of course, the art and

the life of the artist are interrelated but it is by no means a simple matter to explain

that relationship. Some art is clearly autobiographical - think of David Hockney or

Tracey Emin - but other art is not - constructivist art, for instance.

Another objection can be made: the Pollock film shows how the art being produced

in the 1940s was for a small circle of other artists and critics, and a few rich patrons

such as Peggy Guggenheim. There is no indication why anyone outside these elite

circles should be interested in Pollock’s work except repeated assertions ‘Jackson

you are the greatest artist in America’. Whereas, in the 1930s, when many American

artists – Pollock included - were figurative painters supported by the public

programme, the WPA (Works Progress administration), there was an attempt to

take art to the people by producing public murals and also easel paintings that

addressed social and political issues. The transformation of this social realist art

with a social purpose into abstract expressionism may well have been a source of

anxiety to the artists concerned.

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(1) Steven Naifeh & Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: an American Saga, (NY;

C.N. Potter, 1989), p. 759.

(2) Matter quoted in Naifeh & Smith, p. 763.

(3) For a political analysis of the film from a socialist perspective, see the article by

David Walsh:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/mar2001/poll-m31.shtml

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John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of Art and Artists on

Screen and Art and Celebrity (some of the above appeared in the latter book).