Jackson Pollock : Art & Celebrity excerpts (2003)
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. Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) 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. [...]
Jackson 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 Mark Rothko did commit suicide in 1970. 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. [...]
References:
[1] Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. (1989). Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. (New York: C.N. Potter), p. 759.
[2] Mercedes Matter quoted in Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, p. 763.
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