Jackson Pollock's Mural (1943) is now in the collection of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, but was painted in a single 15-hour Dyonisiac burst ("it was a stampede": Pollock's words), for Peggy Guggenheim's appartment. Nearly 20 feet long, he had to knock out a wall in his appartment/studio to fit it in. And Anthony Lane reminds us that it too had to be resized:
When the mural reached its destination, it was too long, and eight inches needed to be chopped off one end. Marcel Duchamp said they weren't needed, and he was right; you feel that the painting has neither beginning nor end - it could be a slice of a loop, and you want it to go on forever, like a Bach chorale. [Lane, Nobody's Perfect, 2002, 343]The backstory: The mural arrives at the appartment and Peggy calls Duchamp and David Hare in to deal with the crisis.
Duchamp coolly advised cutting eight inches off one end. According to David Hare, "Duchamp said that in this type of painting it wasn't needed". Pollock apparently had no objection, so the painting was relieved of its superfluous inches. [Tomkins, Duchamp, A Biography, 1996, 362]Did MD and David Hare perform the cutting? Do the remnants, those supplementary inches, still exist?
MD once said that that Pollock "still uses paint, and we finished that… [Pollock] never will enter the Pantheon!" (Duchamp had somewhat self-righteously declared painting dead with his last oil on canvas, Tu m’ from 1918). On the other hand, Duchamp convinced Guggenheim to give Pollock his first one-man show, and he also who suggested that Pollock paint the mural on canvas rather than directly on the wall so that it could be exhibited publicly.
But despite this ambivalence (typically Duchampian) towards abstract expressionism, we shouldn't be surprised that Pollock didn't mind it being truncated - from an interview in the New Yorker, 1950: "There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment."
Also: Arthur C. Danto sees the very first Pollockian drips in Mural, albeit marginally and probably unintended.
Comments