150 MARCH 2016 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
whole idea that they could represent a betrayal of American
art is going to strike many visitors as overheated. And yet,
Pollock defined his own task in terms steeped in modern-
ist notions of progress (“new needs need new techniques”).
A return to figuration and away from the radical allover
abstraction he had pioneered would seem to be a failure on
those grounds. Greenberg later accused Pollock of “turn-
ing to the other extreme, as if in violent repentance.” Other
critics were baffled by the Betty Parsons exhibition, a stance
confirmed by initial lackluster sales, and then fully codified
in later retrospectives, which, as the show’s curator, Gavin
Delahunty, documents in the catalogue, featured progres-
sively fewer examples of black paintings through the 1980s
and 1990s.
he exhibitionairmed the idea that diference can exist
within an artist’s body of work—that not everything has to
conform to a supposed signature style. You can walk away
with a new understanding of Pollock working in a minor key,
an important correction for an artist who continues to be
assessed on the basis of major statements. he presentation of
black paintings is bolstered by the inclusion of drawings on
handmade paper, screenprints that show an artist whose repu-
tation rested on the supposed authenticity and spontaneity
of his gestures embracing a technique for repeating imagery,
and sculptures in which knots of plaster on wire barely hang
together, looking abject and experimental.
However, the last room in the exhibition, which features
a return to garish, sometimes acid color in 1952, reveals a
potential blind spot of the exhibition itself. Paintings like
Convergence: Number 10(1952)show that Pollock had hit
upon a potentially rich vein, though these works receive scant
treatment in the catalogue, which is limited by its continued
reliance on traditional formalist analysis of Pollock’s work.
he anchor here is the masterfulPortrait and a Dream(1953),
in the DMA’s collection. It’s a double image: a ield of drips
on one side of the canvas, and on the other a igurative head
that appears partially covered by a kind of mask. Formally,
the work shows an artist moving back and forth between
approaches, both of which are tied to a sense of self, with the
drips quoting former signature and the portrait image ofer-he very ordinariness of this scene adds to its efect.
Indeed, there is nothing overtly, or at least assertively, political
about Parks’ images, but by straightforwardly depicting the
unavoidable truth of segregated life in the South, they make
an unmistakable sociopolitical statement. While the world of
Jim Crow has ended in the United States, these photographs
remain as relevant as ever. Fueled in part by the recent wave
of controversial shootings by white police oicers of black
citizens in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere, racial tensions have
lared again, providing a new, troubling vantage point from
which to look back at these potent works.
—Kyle MacMillanDALLAS
JACKSON POLLOCK
Dallas Museum of Art
ON VIEW THROUGH MAR. 20
“Blind Spots,” the subtitle of this exhibition, is an allusion to
the idea that Jackson Pollock’s late works, especially his so-
called black paintings—monochrome drips on unprimed can-
vases—have been written out of the canon. By assembling an
impressive range of works made between 1950 and 1953 (the
artist died in 1956), the show, co-organized by Tate Liver-
pool, ofers grounds for a reassessment of the received wisdom
about the arc of Pollock’s mature career, which is thought to
span from the development of a style indebted to Surrealism
in the 1940s, a classical period of allover abstraction that
peaked in 1950 with such large-scale masterpieces asAutumn
Rhythm, to a time of decline when the artist succumbed to
alcoholism and his art regressed into mannerism.
he heart of the exhibition is a group of more than 30
paintings from 1951, many of which were shown together
that year at Betty Parsons Gallery. Gone are the metal-
lic paints and overlapping webs of color characteristic of
the classic pieces. hese black paintings are also somewhat
smaller than those pieces and are generally rendered in pours
of paint that are more variable in width, length and density.
It’s possible to see calligraphic forms or even full-on igures,
elements that had seemingly been purged from Pollock’s work
by the end of the 1940s.Echo: Number 25, 1951,fromNew
York’s Museum of Modern Art, epitomizes this mode: a forest
of long, sinewy pours of black paint suggests an ensemble of
creaturely bodies and biomorphic blobs. Short, tight vertical
lines nest in the curves of the longer ones. hese hash marks
appear to be both free-lowing and constrained, rippling
across the dense canvas. Clement Greenberg was right to see
in such work (on his initial assessment) “a maximum charge at
the cost of a minimum of physical means.”
If you like Pollock, you’ll like these paintings. If you
have good taste, you might like them even better than the
classic ones, since the monochrome palette allowed Pollock
to avoid potentially embarrassing decisions about color. TheJackson Pollock:
Number 7, 1951,
enamel on canvas,
56½by66inches;at
the Dallas Museum
of Art.