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When organizers for a Jackson Pollock exhibit at the Museo Correr
in Venice, Italy, needed a keynote speaker to open a show commemorating
the 50th anniversary of Pollock's first major European exhibit,
Ellen G. Landau, CWRU's chair of the department of art history
and art, was called upon to deliver that talk.
Italian art critic Bruno Alfieri, who was in attendance for
Landau's speech at the Salon Napoleonica on St. Mark's Piazza
where Pollock's first exhibition was hung, described Pollock in
his 1950 review as "chaos" on canvas. The Italian press hailed
"Pollock's America" this spring as "Italy's most important show
ever on Pollock."
The exhibit brings together many of the 23 works from the 1950
exhibit, along with other examples from major museums and private
collections from around the world. The pieces trace the development
of the artist with his action art of dripping or pouring paint
from cans over large canvases and the resulting changes from this
new form of artistic expression that revolutionized the art world.
In Landau's talk, she said that Pollock epitomized and encouraged
the myth that he was a specifically American kind of independent
and original artist.
"He co-opted cultural clichZs," she said, encouraging such ones
as the laconic cowboy that "twirled lariats of color."
"Pollock succeeded in refocusing the viewer's attention on how
a work has been created, as opposed to merely what it represents,"
said Landau, who is a world-renowned scholar of Pollock and his
wife, abstractionist Lee Krasner.
As part of Pollock's search for meaning through his work, Landau
told how in the late 1930s he would take his drawings with him
to visits with his psychiatrists in order to find what his work
said about himself.
"Pollock demonstrated a new way to encode identity by making-as
he put it-his 'energy and motion' visible in pictorial space,"
Landau said.
She also said that she stood in awe being in the ballroom of
the Salon Napoleonica where Pollock's art was originally introduced
to the Italian public through an exhibit of his works owned by
Venice's most flamboyant resident, former New York art collector
and gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim.
"It was exciting," said Landau, who has published a major monograph
on Pollock's work in 1989 and has written three of the essays
for the catalogue accompanying "Pollock's America." Two of these
(on Pollock's personal and artistic relationship with Krasner)
pertain to a related exhibition now on view at the Candiani Cultural
Center in the neighboring city of Mestre, Italy, that features
such Pollock contemporaries as Krasner, Mark Rothko, Pousette-Dart,
Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, Willem Boziotes, Ad Reinhardt,
Adolph Gottlieb, Willem De Kooning, Hedda Sterne, James Brooks
and Jimmy Ernst.
"These artists are known as the 'Irascibles' because of a protest
they staged against the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American
survey in 1951 that excluded most abstractionists," Landau said.
These artists formed what has become known as the New York School.
The talk and visit to see the exhibits this spring afforded Landau
an opportunity to examine in color for the first time approximately
five of Pollock's works from private collections that she had
only previously studied in black and white reproductions from
books.
Landau described the 1950 exhibit as marking the start of a transition
period in Pollock's life where he began to explore the use of
the action art. The current exhibits, organized by the Centro
Italiano per le Arti e la Cultura and the Musei Civici Venezia,
continue through June and span Pollock's career.
In addition to key essays in "Pollock's America," Landau has
written the catalogue essays on Pollock for a 1995 exhibit of
his work in DYsseldorf, Germany; a 1993 show in Munich; and a
1989 joint exhibition with Krasner held in Switzerland. She travels
throughout the world, lecturing on Pollock, Krasner and other
post-1945 artists. She also is the author of Lee Krasner: A
Catalogue Raisonne (1995) and Reading Abstract Expressionism:
Context and Critique, which is forthcoming from Yale University
Press.
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