by Susan Griffith

Art historian Ellen Landau will delve deeper into the lives of abstract artists Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell and Isamu Noguchi to understand how their experiences and fascination with Mexican art between World War I and the end of World War II influenced their artwork.

Ellen Landau

Landau, who becomes CWRU's Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities in July, will spend spring semester 2004 as a member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to finalize the research and to complete the book Mexico and American Abstraction.

She will reside at the institute, using nearby research sources in Princeton, New York City and New Haven, Conn., and will write the final pages of her new book. She is the author of a number of acclaimed books, which have explored the lives of Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner. In 2005, Yale University Press will publish her most recently completed book, Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, which is a methodological study of writings about the movement with an anthology.
Publication of more than a dozen journal and catalogue essays on abstract expressionism, Landau said, "has prepared me for this ambitious endeavor."

She said the inspiration for the book dates to 1994. The director of the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf asked her to write an essay about Pollock and his connections to the revolutionary muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros for the museum's retrospective of Pollock's work.

In a monograph, Landau had written called Jackson Pollock, she wrote generally about his connections with Mexican artists.

"This project reconsiders a key phase of American art in the framework of contact with another culture and interaction with other disciplines," Landau said.
Her goal, she added, is to overturn ideas that abstract expressionism had its origins primarily in Europe.

She will argue her point through case studies of the artists' lives and their connections to Mexico in an effort to "understand the role of Mexico as a catalyst" for abstract expressionism.

In her preliminary research she has found each of these four major artists of the 20th century had ties to Mexico-and in particular, "Siqueiros emerges as a major facilitator," she said.

While Pollock never traveled or lived in Mexico, Landau points to other connections such as the "little-known mid-1930s mural experiences of Guston and Noguchi in Morelia and Mexico City" and Motherwell's interaction with displaced European surrealists during the early war years and his later return in 1941 to paint and eventually meet his wife, a Mexican actress.

Landau said her book will be the first full-length study written that shows "the centrality of a Mexican experience for a significant cadre of the American avant-garde."

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