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Aug. 18--The title of the Pollock-Krasner house's current show, "Jackson Pollock, Small Poured Works, 1943-1950," suggests modest ambitions, and it is a little exhibit. Yet this compact, concentrated show is in fact monumental, a hoard of rarely seen gems from Pollock's most productive years. True, their scale is small, but their ambition is colossal, their achievement grand.
Oddly enough, this is the first time the museum has displayed a group of Pollock's paintings, even though it makes its home in the cottage he shared with his wife, the painter Lee Krasner. The show marks the 50th anniversary of the night the drunken artist crashed his car into a tree and died: Aug. 11, 1956.
The exhibit maps his progress from innovative practitioner to radical genius. It tracks how he evolved from troweled-on, congested images toward breathing traceries; how iconic, head-on compositions gave way to elegant, all-over patterns where figure and ground meld imperceptibly into one another.
The oldest piece here, "Composition with Pouring II" from 1943, started as a dense set of interlocking, thickly brushed shapes in ivory, blue and red. Somewhere along the line, Pollock began to spill black paint over his composition, and it splashes across the canvas in a tangle of delicate threads.
In the autumn of 1945, Pollock and Krasner transplanted themselves from Greenwich Village to the East End of Long Island, and soon his reactions to the saltwater marshes, wind-waved grass, huge boulders and flowered hillocks began to show up in his paintings. In 1947's "Composition with Black Pouring," the black lines unfurl against a shimmering pewter background smudged with touches of pink, yellow and orange, like skeletal branches set off against a late-fall twilight.
In "Number 23" of 1949, Pollock daringly allowed his ribbons of paint to float against an all-white ground. The effect is marvelous. The picture seems to breathe, the air to flow in and around its diaphanous forms. He seems to have been not entirely comfortable with the lack of structure, however, and in another piece painted more or less at the same time, he filled in those same areas of white and superimposed a series of thick, gridlike lines that act as architecture after the fact.
The year 1950 marked the end of Pollock's creative frenzy. That fall, the photographer Hans Namuth photographed the artist leaping and twisting, drizzling and throwing paint; those pictures, published in Life magazine, made him a star. According to legend, no sooner did Namuth finish shooting than Pollock rushed into the house and downed the first shot of whiskey he had had since 1948.
Thereafter, he seems to have lost his nerve, and his pictures their radical edge. But the show at the Pollock-Krasner House doesn't follow that depressing path. It ends at the peak of the artist's career, the moment when he was still making history as "Jack the Dripper."
JACKSON POLLOCK: SMALL POURED WORKS, 1943-1950. On view through Sept. 17 at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, 830 Fireplace Road, East Hampton. For exhibition hours and admission prices, call 631-324-4929 or visit pkhouse.org.
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Copyright (c) 2006, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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