PARIS.- The Musée national Picasso-Paris presents a new temporary exhibition devoted to the American artist Jackson Pollock. First exhibition in France since 2008, it focuses on his early works, from 1934 to 1947.

The exhibition "Jackson Pollock: The Early Years (1934-1947)" revisits the early career of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), marked by the influence of regionalism and Mexican muralists, right up to his first drippings in 1947. This body of work, rarely exhibited for its own sake, bears witness to the diverse sources that nourished the young artist's research, crossing the influence of native American arts with that of the European avant-gardes, among which Pablo Picasso figures prominently. Compared to the Spanish painter and the great names of European painting by the critics, Pollock was quickly established as a true monument of American painting, and in so doing, isolated from the more complex networks of exchanges of influences that nourished his work during his New York years. The exhibition aims to present in detail these years, which were the laboratory for his work, by restoring the artistic and intellectual context from which both were nourished.

The exhibition focuses on several key moments in the young Pollock's artistic and intellectual development during these years of experimentation. By calling on key figures in his artistic career (Charles Pollock, William Baziotes, Lee Krasner, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Janet Sobel...), the exhibition highlights the intensity and singularity of his work in its various dimensions (painting and working with materials, printmaking, sculpture). The exhibition features some one hundred works from prestigious international institutions such as New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Tate and the Stedelijk Museum.

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INTRODUCTION

Jackson Pollock and his gestural style of painting are emblematic of the triumph of American art following the Second World War. The artist’s origins, career and spirit embody the iconic, almost legendary face of American culture in the 1950s.

Born on the plains of West Wyoming in 1912, Pollock spent his youth near Los Angeles. He was a disciple of Thomas Hart Benton’s social regionalism during the years of the Great Depression, and reinforced his leftist political sensibility through the powerful programmatic wall paintings produced by Mexican muralists. Then, in 1936, he joined David Alfaro Siqueiros’s studio within the context of the WPA’s Federal Art Project and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. It was to be however, his encounter with Pablo Picasso’s work in the late 1930s that led him towards a unique, figurative and informal style of expressive painting. He was fascinated by Guernica but equally by the ensemble of Picasso’s work shown at the MoMA in 1939, and in particular the hybrid figures of the 1930s paintings. He became involved in the New York scene, which was driven by the European Surrealists in exile, and was sensitive to automatic writing and drawing, as well as to psychoanalysis. His painting was nourished by native American myths, stylised forms and signs, technical experimentation and a fresh gestural approach.

The years leading up to the production of his large, abstract, numbered drip paintings, championed by the critic and theorist Clement Greenberg, reveal the complex, artistic and intellectual construction of one of the greatest American artists, and, through his dialogue with Picasso, the full extent of the latter’s influence on his work. This dialogue would seem to embody the shift of artistic predominancy from the Parisian art scene to the New York school.

Pablo Picasso

The work of Pablo Picasso was a key reference for Jackson Pollock. It was initially the article “Primitive Art and Picasso” (1937) by John D. Graham which made an impact on the American artist. It echoed with his own attraction to Native American culture. After having seen the vast, anti-fascist painting Guernica in May 1939 at the Valentine Gallery, a few months later he discovered Picasso’s entire oeuvre at the MoMA, during the “Picasso: Forty Years of His Art" retrospective. Inspired by Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) or Girl before a Mirror (1932), he produced a large series of drawings of hybrid creatures, a bestiary bringing together Picasso-like sources and borrowing from Native American sculptures and masks.

The artist and theorist John D. Graham was undoubtedly the first person to have shown interest in Jackson Pollock. After introducing him to the work of Pablo Picasso, in 1942, he organized a major group exhibition entitled “American and French Painting”, bringing face to face great names from the Parisian art scene such as Georges Braque, André Derain, Henri Matisse and Picasso with American artists Stuart Davis, Walt Kuhn, Lee Krasner and Pollock. The latter showed his work Birth with its vertical composition made up of fragments of deformed, stylised faces recalling a totem pole and a clear allusion to Kwakwaka’wakw sculptures.

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POPULAR AMERICAN AND NATIVE AMERICAN MODERNITY. 1930-1941

In September 1930, Jackson Pollock moved to New York and joined the Art Students League to study under the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. In his realist paintings, Benton depicted a picture of a country gripped by the Great Depression, greatly influencing both Pollock’s and his brother Charles’ work in the early 1930s. As they travelled from East to West, they stopped to sketch the workers coming out of local factories and those labouring in the fields.

Guided by Benton, the young artist became passionate about the art of frescos, from the Italian Renaissance to the Mexican mural painters. Accompanied by his friends and family, he travelled across the United States to see the most recent creations of José Clemente Orozco. Then in 1935, he began working in the mural department of the Federal Art Project – a program developed by the American Federal government to support artists. Pollock gradually moved away from social themes towards a form of painting that combined Pablo Picasso’s influence with that of the Mexican mural painters, from whom he borrowed both his symbolic language and colour palette.

The Mexican muralists

During the presidency of Álvaro Obregón, who had governed Mexico since the 1910-1920 Revolution, the mural painters José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros developed a monumental artform that celebrated both popular modern life and pre-Columbian cultures. In the early 1930s, the United States government commissioned several works from the trio, nicknamed “Los Tres Grandes”, who were living in the country at that time. It is in this context that Jackson Pollock joined Siqueiros’ studio in the spring of 1936.

During the summer of 1936, Jackson Pollock travelled to Dartmouth College in Vermont with his brother Sande and his friend the painter Philip Guston to see a mural which had been completed two years earlier by Orozco: The Epic of American Civilization. The work chronicled the American history from its pre- Columbian origins to its more recent industrial era. This complex composition, combining profiles of humans and animals, was reminiscent of Orozco’s scenes of war and had a long-lasting impact on Pollock.

Indian Art of the United States, 1941, MoMA, New York

In January 1941, the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a vast exhibition to Native American arts: Indian Art of the United States. The aim of this exhibition was to break with the primitivist reading of Native American cultures by restoring the history and diversity of their practices. More than a thousand artworks and objects were presented in a modern scenography organised into three main parts: “Prehistoric”, “Living traditions” and “Indian Art for Modern Living”. During the exhibition, Navajo artists gave demonstrations of traditional sand painting while at the museum entrance, a gigantic totem pole sculpted in 1939 by the Haida artist John Wallace was erected. Already receptive to these arts, which he had discovered in Los Angeles, Pollock visited the exhibition and later insisted on their influence on his work.

In a letter dating from 1932 Jackson Pollock, the young artist, who was at that time attending classes by the sculptor Ahron Ben-Shmuel wrote to his father: “Sculptoring I think is my medium.” This work, carved ten years later out of animal bone, bears witness to his taste for this technique and the interest he nurtured for Native American arts. Simultaneously outlining a human face and an animal profile, the work expresses the idea of metamorphosis and recalls the Haida totems he had seen at the MoMA exhibition in 1941.

The mask motif was omnipresent in the work of Jackson Pollock between 1938 and 1941, just like Masqued Image, which can also be seen in this room. It is a key symbol in the indigenous cultures of North America, believed to have the power to transform and to reincarnate. The psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung associated masks with the notion of persona, our external personality that defines who we are in the world in the eyes of others, and revealing as much as it hides.

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NEW YORK, A SURREALIST HUB. 1940-1943

The arrival of French artists and thinkers fleeing the Occupation contributed to the cultural vibrancy in New York at the beginning of the 1940s. In particular, the Surrealist circles – featuring André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Marx Ernst, Jacqueline Lamba, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Yves Tanguy – played a part in reinforcing the trend for psychoanalysis, the idea of expression through automatism and the unconscious. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, "New York is the conservatory, the collision of modern and archaic time”. Jackson Pollock got acquainted with several members of the Surrealist movement in the city. He took part in the automatic writing workshops organised by Matta. At this time the artist was undergoing psychoanalytic treatment with Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson, and was trying his hand at automatism.

Psychoanalytical drawings

In early 1939, Jackson Pollock underwent therapy with the Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson to treat his serious problem with alcohol. The artist was already very familiar with the principles of psychoanalysis which he had discovered thanks to a close friend, librarian and activist Helen Marot. During these sessions, Pollock brought almost seventy drawings to be used as therapeutic aids. These sheets, which reflect the artist's subjects of interest, were exhibited for the first time at the Whitney Museum in 1970.

Jackson Pollock often spoke about the influence of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung’s thinking on his work. Jung was a pioneer of “depth psychology”, which affirmed the bond between the structure of the psyche and its cultural productions, the importance of studying dreams, myths and religion. Thus, in this work, the painter seems to illustrate the notions of anima/animus defined by Jung as the feminine side of a man and the masculine side of a woman. The symbolic union of masculine and feminine is further reinforced here by the fusion of abstraction and figuration.

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ART OF THIS CENTURY. NOVEMBER 1943

In November 1943, Peggy Guggenheim hosted Jackson Pollock’s first solo show at the new Art of this Century gallery. For the occasion, the artist presented some figurative works with a complex mythological vocabulary inspired by the automatic processes of Surrealism. The New York gallery-museum, which had opened its doors in October 1942, stood out for its groundbreaking scenography designed by the architect Frederick Kiesler. The gallery became a key place of European painting through its collection of Surrealist works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró or Kurt Schwitters. It was following this exhibition that Guggenheim commissioned Pollock a huge piece for the entrance of her home. The work, entitled Mural, was the artist’s first major monumental canvas.

In 1944, Jackson Pollock declared: "She-Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt an explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.” Despite the title of the work, “she-wolf”, which seemingly refers to the myth regarding the foundation of Rome, the artist himself suggested that the figure gradually appeared on the canvas through an unconscious manifestation.

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ACCABONAC CREEK SERIES. 1945-1946

In the autumn of 1945, Jackson Pollock and his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, left New York to set up home in a former farm in Long Island, Springs. It was in his studio, installed in the barn, that he developed his practice of painting on the ground: “I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West.”

The Accabonac Creek Series created in this new setting, testifies to an affirmation of the monumental in his work, both a legacy of his interest in Mexican muralists, the recollection of Guernica, and a continuation of Mural (1943). A few months after this series, inspired by the natural landscapes in his immediate surroundings, Pollock started working on more radical, more abstract compositions, where the surface was uniform and continuously handled, and where the paint was directly projected onto the canvas.

Atelier 17

In New York, Pollock frequented Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, which reunited European artists in exile such as Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst or André Masson along with young American artists. There, he experimented with drypoint engraving. The plates made between 1944-1945 mark a transitional phase in his work with more emphasis on line as a trajectory rather than contour.

The centrepiece of the Accabonac Creek series, The Key was painted on the artist’s studio floor. Jackson Pollock may have been inspired by Guernica, on show at the MoMA at that time, as acknowledged by the face motifs in the upper part of the composition and by the two outstretched arms. Although here, Pollock still used his paintbrush in a traditional way, as you can see from the impressions made by the parquet floor on the canvas, the gestural spontaneity and importance attached to the accidental are increasingly apparent.

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VEILING THE IMAGE. 1943-1947

From 1943 on, Jackson Pollock developed his experimentations with matter using industrial enamel paint combined with pouring and dripping techniques. These consisted of letting the paint drip directly onto the canvas, laid out on the ground, while at the same time, controlling the fluidity and thickness of the lines. His compositions testify to a new radicality, a process which he only systematised from 1947. Between these two dates, similarly to other artists such as Hans Hofmann or Janet Sobel, Pollock explored different ways of applying the paint onto the canvas while still retaining the figurative dimension in the rest of his work.

Thus, the first large drip painting series shown by Pollock at the Betty Parsons gallery in January 1948, which ended the period, appeared to be the result of the research and explorations around automatism and gesturalism, carried out by the artist during these early years. Although Clement Greenberg saw these large abstract compositions as the culmination of the autonomy of form, Pollock however, did not relinquish figuration, to which he returned in 1951.

Composition with Pouring II is part of a series of three works painted by Jackson Pollock at the same period he made Mural for Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment. Whereas the bottom layers of this composition are cleverly applied with a brush, Pollock used liquid black paint for the top layers applied with the pouring technique. This work marks a return to the technique he acquired in David Alfaro Siqueiros’s studio and which he systematized from 1947 onwards.