Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of “get acquainted” period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well. Jackson Pollock, quoted in Poligrafa'sWorks, Writings, Interviews.
Edited by Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel. Essays by T.J. Clark, Robert Storr, James Coddington, Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, Rosalind E. Krauss, Anne M. Wagner, Jeremy Lewison, Pepe Karmel and Kirk Varnedoe.
Hbk, 10.5 x 8.5 in. / 112 pgs / 322 color. | 9/2/2002 | Not available $24.95
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. By Carolyn Lanchner.
This book features 11 paintings by Pollock selected from MoMA’s substantial collection of his work. His groundbreaking drip paintings of the late 1940s and ‘50s are here, along with early and late works. A lively essay by Carolyn Lanchner, a former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum, accompanies each work.
Published by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Edited by Michael Juul Holm, Anders Kold. Text by Poul Erik Tøjner, Jeremy Lewison, Axel Heil, Courtney Martin.
In the years during and just after World War II, the Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914-73) and the American painter Jackson Pollock (1912-56) came to play major roles in the development of a new Abstract Expressionist art. Both drew on Surrealism and Picasso to explore automatism in painting, each breaking through to a unique style around 1943, when Pollock had his first show at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, and Jorn established the groundwork for working collectively that would lead to the founding of the CoBrA group. In both cases, this led to an incredibly energetic, primitive-seeming painting (although Jorn retained more figurative elements than Pollock). Alongside more than 100 color reproductions, Jorn & Pollock: Revolutionary Roads includes the essays "Image Revolutions - Abstract Expressionism and What Looks Like It in Jorn and Pollock" by Anders Kold; "In the Shadow of Picasso: Asger Jorn and Jackson Pollock" by British art historian Jeremy Lewison; "Sounds in the Grass" by Axel Heil; and "Simpler Evolutions" by Courtney Martin, which discusses the British critic Lawrence Alloway's comparisons of the two artists.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Text by Charles Stuckey.
In the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), now recognized as one of the most important Abstract Expressionist artists, began experimenting with a new method of painting that involved dripping, flinging and pouring paint onto a canvas laid flat directly on the floor. This process engaged his entire body, and the resulting images were an index of the antic dancing energy he expended to create these works. “One: Number 31” (1950), among the handful of very large paintings he produced by this method, is a virtuoso showcase of his mastery of materials and technique. A lively essay by former museum curator Charles Stuckey offers an in-depth exploration of the painting, one of many groundbreaking works by Pollock in MoMA’s collection.
Published by Ediciones Polígrafa. Text by Nancy Jachec.
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) is without doubt one of the most influential American painters of the twentieth century. Dead at the age of 44, he nonetheless bequeathed a substantial body of pioneering work to countless subsequent artists for whom he stood as a model of fearlessness, courageous improvisation and balletic grace. Throughout his life, Pollock wrote very little about his own art or that of others, but in the few completed writings that do remain, and in a few unpublished, undated notes--all of which are gathered in this volume--the concerns are remarkably consistent. Pollock routinely referred to his interest in the unconscious as the source of modern art, and in abstraction as enabling both the direct expression of an "inner world," of individual feeling, and the urgencies and tensions of modern American life (famously characterized, in his words, by "the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio"). Pollock's most famous statement on his method exemplifies this concern with a creativity arising from an unconscious: "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about." In this introduction to Pollock's art and thought, Nancy Jachec traces these and other themes across 120 color reproductions.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Text by Carolyn Lanchner.
Jackson Pollock made a tremendous impact on Modern art in the twentieth century. As a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, he was a key figure in the postwar tradition that brought American art to the forefront of the international scene. This new volume in the MoMA Artist Series, which explores important artists and favorite works in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, guides readers through a dozen of the artist's most memorable achievements. A short and lively essay by Carolyn Lanchner, a former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum, accompanies each work, illuminating its significance and placing it in its historical moment in the development of Modern art and the artist's own life. This volume provides a unique overview of someone who shaped the development of American art since mid-century and is an excellent resource for readers interested in the stories behind the masterpieces of the Modern canon.
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Essays by Susan Davidson, David Anfam and Margaret Hoben Ellis.
While legendary artist Jackson Pollock has been comprehensively investigated in recent shows, a focused exhibition examining his drawings has not been organized since 1980. No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper features a compelling group of 75 artworks drawn from the holdings of institutions and private collections worldwide. Curated by Susan Davidson, this long-awaited exhibition to be held at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Guggenheim Bilbao and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice considers the artist's works on paper as an essential component in his signature transformation of the traditional figurative line into a non-figurative graphic expression. This catalogue of the exhibiton begins chronologically with Pollock's early sketchbook studies based on old master paintings by Michelangelo and El Greco, as well as those influenced by his contemporaries, mainly the Mexican muralists Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. These early works reveal a figurative treatment that Pollock ultimately rejected as he moved at first toward pieces that mirrored his advancements in painting, and eventually, by late 1947, to abstract compositions. Throughout his career, Pollock experimented with different media on paper, alternating the same themes on watercolor and lithography, and later adding gouache to engravings to provide interesting variations. In the last years of his life, Pollock's fascination with different types of paper led him to special handmade sheets that allowed the paint to permeate below the main layer, thus achieving fortuitous variations of his well-known poured painting technique. This fully illustrated catalogue, which shows the full range of Pollock's works on paper, includes a reassessment of his skills as a draftsman by David Anfam, a noted scholar of Abstract Expressionism. Susan Davidson contributes a text that focuses on Pollock's stylistic development and the reception of his works on paper during his lifetime. A technical analysis of Pollock's working method is provided by Margaret Hoben Ellis.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited by Pepe Karmel.
This anthology surveys five decades of critical response to Jackson Pollock, bringing together essential and hard-to-find texts from newspapers, journals, and catalogues. It includes all of Pollock's statements about his art as well as interviews with his wife, painter Lee Krasner, providing firsthand testimony about his goals and methods. Reviews of Pollock's early exhibitions reveal the intense interest his work aroused even before he arrived at his famous technique of "dripping" paint. Later articles trace the growth of Pollock's myth after his death in 1956 and document the continuing debate over psychological and mythological interpretations of Pollock's work.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited and with Essays by Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry.
Jackson Pollock is widely considered the most challenging and influential American artist of the 20th century. In his revolutionary paintings of the late 1940s, he dripped paint into complex webs of interlacing lines, rhythmically punctuated by pools of color. With their allover composition, apparent abstraction, and spontaneous but controlled paint handling, these powerful works announced the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. This sumptuously illustrated book offers a fresh overview of his achievement, reinterpreted for a new generation and features a complete visual record of the artist's work, including over 200 color reproductions of paintings, drawings, and prints, enhanced by life-sized details, foldouts, and documentary photographs. An essay by Kirk Varnedoe explores Pollock's life, the mythology that so quickly grew up around him as the prototypical "action painter", and the different critical schools that have tried to lay claim to his legacy. Pepe Karmel offers new insight into Pollock's famous "drip" technique, as revealed by an intensive, computer-assisted study of photographs and films of Pollock at work. This volume was published to accompany the first major survey of the artist's career since 1967, held in 1998 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited by Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel. Essays by T.J. Clark, Robert Storr, James Coddington, Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, Rosalind E. Krauss, Anne M. Wagner, Jeremy Lewison, Pepe Karmel and Kirk Varnedoe.
Presenting nine critical essays by leading scholars--among them T.J. Clark, Robert Storr, James Coddington, Rosalind Krauss, and Kirk Varnedoe--this collection offers dramatically different ways of understanding Jackson Pollock's art and influence. Revealing not just the richness of Pollock's work, but also the vitality and diversity of contemporary criticisms, these texts discuss the crisis of easel painting, Pollock's relationship with his wife, artist Helen Frankenthaler, the Americanization of Europe, and the place of chaos in Pollock's work. Based on a symposium held in 1999 during The Museum of Modern Art, New York's retrospective exhibition of Pollock's oeuvre, this volume is a companion to Jackson Pollock: Key Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, a collection of older texts by or about the artist.