Hans Namuth’s Photographs and Film Studies of Jackson Pollock: Transforming American Postwar Avant-Garde Labor into Popular Consumer Spectacle

Abstract

Abstract Expressionism is often regarded as the first purely American art movement and the first to gain mass cultural recognition. Prior to the 1940s, the consideration and appreciation of abstract art belonged to a certain intellectual elite, but the intimidating complexity of Abstract Expressionism, the daring allure of its artists, and the particularities of mid-century American culture converged to transform the avant-garde into consumer spectacle. This shift represented, and was symptomatic of, a larger societal rearrangement: information and commodity superseded industrialized labor as the core of American culture. Jackson Pollock, America’s first avant-garde superstar, stood at the center of this shift, at once representing both active creative labor and the commodification of the idea of that labor. Hans Namuth’s photographs and films of Pollock placed him and his art firmly in the realm of consumable popular spectacle, underlying further connections to Hollywood film and prominent print media. This article examines how Pollock became a paradigmatic figure in the avant-garde’s proliferation into mass culture and asserts that mass culture did not simply subsume the avant-garde. Rather, the two realms engaged in a mutual construction that pushed the avant-garde across numerous social boundaries. The artistic, critical, and popular receptions that grew out of this convergence erased distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.

1. Introduction

“The avant-garde’s specialization of itself, the fact that its best artists are artists’ artists, its best poets, poets’ poets, has estranged a great many of those who were capable formerly of enjoying ambitious art and literature, but who are now unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation into their craft secrets. The masses have always remained more or less indifferent to culture in the process of development. But today such culture is being abandoned by those to whom it actually belongs—our ruling class. For it is to the latter that the avant-garde belongs. No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real. And now this elite is rapidly shrinking. Since the avant-garde forms the only living culture we now have, the survival in the near future of culture in general is thus threatened.… Academicism and commercialism are appearing in the strangest places. This can mean only one thing: that the avant-garde is becoming unsure of the audience it depends on—the rich and the cultivated.”1

Clement Greenberg wrote these words in the late 1930s as America struggled to recover from the Great Depression and Europe braced for war. These epochal forces would shape the opposition Greenberg defined in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”: how does a modernist avant-garde exist alongside commodified culture? With his text, he had already anticipated a shift in the reception of avant-garde art in the United States. Previously the exclusive domain of an elite class, the avant-garde was now slowly seeping into mass consciousness, endangering the critical high/low division he described in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”. The complex theories behind the abstract art of the time ensured that the avant-garde remained on the margins of popular culture. Nevertheless, we can read Greenberg’s observations as forecasting a shift in the role of the avant-garde in society, predicated essentially on its reception and interpretation in a larger popular and commercial consciousness. The watering down of the avant-garde through its presentation as consumer spectacle simultaneously relinquished it from the elite’s control and disseminated it into popular culture.

It is in this context that Jackson Pollock and his art—particularly as they were seen through the various lenses of Hans Namuth—become paradigmatic in the history of the avant-garde. Pollock’s rise to prominence in the public eye both represented and coincided with a larger societal shift, one in which the core of American culture was recentered from an industrialized production society to one based on commodity information and consumerist spectacle. This transformation, as we shall see, diminished the reception of the avant-garde not only along class lines, as Greenberg predicted, but also along gender lines, in which the avant-garde as masculinist artistic action and labor is redefined as commodified consumer product, traditionally coded as feminine. The emergence of a popular conception of Pollock depended largely on Hans Namuth’s widely broadcast photography (and to a smaller extent, his films) of Pollock at work, and it is this media-packaged and commodifiable image of Pollock that suitably represents the larger societal transformation in question.

By closely examining the relationship between Pollock and Namuth, we may begin to understand its significance in terms of a larger cultural sphere. Namuth originally set out to record the simultaneously frenetic and elegant actions of a masculine artist engaged in a daring new form of painting, foregrounding Pollock’s body and physicality as key in the creation of his art. In this sense, Namuth’s work embodies the ideals of the industrialized pre-shift society in question, depicting Pollock as a laborer. The resulting body of work, consisting of hundreds of black & white photographs and two short films, also laid a foundation for the popular conception of Pollock as a feminized consumer spectacle that would subsequently emerge. Barbara Rose’s essay “Hans Namuth’s Photographs and the Jackson Pollock Myth” outlines the impact of Namuth’s work with Pollock. Her assessment at once recognizes the artistic merit of Namuth’s endeavor, the power of Pollock’s persona (even drawing comparisons between him and a wild animal),2 and, most importantly, the effect of the collaboration on the public perception of the avant-garde.

The rise of the cultural middlebrow presaged by Greenberg in 1939 was well underway by the time Pollock and Namuth met, and it was driven by economic, political, and cultural forces alike. The propagandistic value of a daring new American form of art, undergirded by a belief in the value of individual expression rather than any political ideology, is well-studied. The conditions of postwar economic expansion—low unemployment, the rise of labor unions, a historic baby boom—created a growing populace with disposable income and leisure time. A burgeoning market for consumer media played a role, too. As television sets became fixtures in American homes, networks searched for programming to air between advertisements. The American variety of modern art provided a ready subject. Print media of the time, such as Life magazine, addressed later in this essay, sought subjects such as Pollock for its pages. In brief, the culture of Greenberg’s elites now had a much broader audience.3

2. Packaging the Avant-Garde for the Public

Rose examines the aspects of Namuth’s work that were particularly instrumental in the creation of Pollock’s media image, arguing that the mass proliferation of Namuth’s photographs marked them with at least as much significance in the public eye as Pollock’s actual paintings. Rose writes, “the images of Pollock in action attached themselves as additional meanings to his works to a degree that they began to color the perception of his paintings, which remained for most people, including artists and critics who admired their obvious energy and daring, largely incomprehensible.”4 To a certain extent, the intimidating complexity of Pollock’s work became a moot point in the frame of Namuth’s photographs. The visual nature and psychological effect of photography encourages the viewer to ignore Pollock’s art and instead focus on his persona; photographs reproduce art imperfectly, and it is in this context that the public became aware of Pollock and his work.5 Conversely, photography tends to enlarge personae. Thus, in Namuth’s work, Pollock’s painting as a complex aesthetic product took on a diminished role in comparison to his demanding presence.

Rose assigns further significance to this phenomenon by acknowledging that, by the end of the 1950s, Namuth’s work had been circulated widely enough to provide an alternative basis for the interpretation and conception of Pollock’s painting.6 Her assertion provides a foundation for the manner in which the public and critics alike perceived and responded to the art.

The scene of Pollock painting on glass is extraordinarily vivid, an inventive collaboration of artist and filmmaker that is unforgettable to anyone who has seen it. Because of this sequence, the idea that Pollock’s images mysteriously projected themselves in front of the picture plane in the space between viewer and canvas became inextricably attached to the meaning of the poured painting.7

Even Rose’s own description of Namuth’s Pollock relies heavily on spectacular phrases, and it outlines a tightly-bound relationship between artist and art: “Pollock attacking the canvas spread out on the floor in front of him like a boxing ring or a bullfighting arena, with paintbrush extended aggressively, in the manner of banderillas—Pollock pictured alone, isolated from any frame of reference save his own creation which obviously dwarfed and engulfed him—what images could more poignantly conjure up a literary vision of the existential hero?”8 Rose’s language not only unifies Pollock and his art, making one implicit in the other, but depicts Pollock as an actor of sorts, fulfilling the role of a romanticized version of himself. She goes on to draw a comparison between Namuth’s photos of Pollock and Man Ray’s photographs of Marcel Duchamp in his varied alter-egos. The most famous among these is perhaps Rrose Selavy, a coquettish and refined female persona. While Namuth depicts Pollock laboring above the canvas, and thus focused away from a direct acknowledgment of the camera (and, by extension, the viewer), Duchamp’s sole action in front of the camera is to engage it, but with the protection of a disguise. Namuth’s photos depict Pollock acting in the role of artist as maker, while the photos of Duchamp are “images of inauthenticity, of the artist as an intellectual alienated from the physical processes of manual labor.”9 While Namuth’s photographs depict Pollock engaged in an intense process of creation, they nevertheless bear a resemblance to Ray’s Duchamp: Pollock acts the part of the aggressive Abstract Expressionist artist engaged in an existential struggle to create.10 Both artists put themselves in front of the camera to be consumed, but employ contrasting methods of disengagement.11

We have reason to ascribe larger cinematic ambition to the endeavor. Beyond the professional credence bestowed by Namuth’s collaboration with Paul Falkenberg, who edited Fritz Lang’s M,12 Pollock also sought advice on how to portray an artist. Kent Minturn cites Naifeh and Smith:

Inspired by his sessions with Namuth, Jackson became obsessed with the subject of the artist as an actor. Frequently … he quizzed friends like John Little, Clement Greenberg, and Harold Rosenberg on the “persona” of the modern artist, collecting fragments of a portrait like pieces of a puzzle to be assembled at the next session before Namuth’s lens.13

Caroline Jones’ book Machine in the Studio provides a theoretical analysis of Namuth’s and Falkenburg’s films of Pollock. She describes how the rhythm of their edits and cinematographic choices portray Pollock as a serious artist with an apparently mystic connection to his artwork and process and hint at an animating psychological turmoil. This description helps us understand the reactions to Pollock that proliferated in the wake of his collaboration with Namuth. Rose reminds us that few knew how to react to Pollock’s work; she notes that even Clement Greenberg wrote very little about him, despite being his most vocal champion.14 Her discussion of Donald Judd’s polemical appraisal of the state of Pollock criticism emphasizes this: “… Judd’s stance was typical of the attitude of those artists who assumed that Pollock’s painting could not be either critically assimilated or artistically superseded—that it was the ne plus ultra of what could be made with paint on canvas.”15 This bolsters the oft-mentioned idea that Pollock killed traditional perceptions of painting as a static, complex aesthetic object. Indeed, Namuth’s photos imbued Pollock’s ritualized and emotive creative processes into his finished works. Rose’s perception of Harold Rosenberg’s seminal essay “The American Action Painters” emphasizes the convergence of painting and action, art and life. She posits that Rosenberg referred to the photographic and cinematic images of Pollock created by Namuth when he wrote “[t]he painting itself is a ‘moment’ in the adulterated mixture of life. … The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.”16 (However, it is worth noting that, even as Rose asserts Namuth’s influence over Rosenberg, the actual pattern of persuasion may be more cyclical. It is possible that Rosenberg’s writing, emphasizing the equation of personality and psychology with artistic output, created a critical and theoretical basis for the commodification of artistic personality, which fully emerged in Namuth’s photo and film essays of Pollock as an active creator.) Nevertheless, Rose also cites Allan Kaprow’s response to Pollock. Kaprow closely echoes Judd’s sentiments: “… Pollock ‘created some magnificent paintings, but he also destroyed painting …. With Pollock the so-called dance of dripping, slashing, and daubing and whatever else went into a work, placed an almost absolute value on a kind of diaristic gesture.”17 Rose goes on to suggest that Kaprow’s response to Pollock was informed largely by Namuth’s photographs and film, similar to her assessment of Rosenberg’s writing. Similarly, Bradford Collins, in his essay “Life Magazine and the Abstract Expressionists, 1948–1951: A Historiographic Study of a Late Bohemian Enterprise,” recounts the magazine’s attempt to “clarify” modern art18 and disseminate an understanding thereof as something of a failure when faced with the Abstract Expressionists, particularly Pollock. The assembly of prominent art critics and patrons, including Greenberg, could only acknowledge the bold impact and importance of the work; none had any incisive thoughts on the matter.19 Perhaps not coincidentally, the panel considered the artwork on its own accord, free from the interpretation of Namuth’s lens.

Rose and Collins provide a definitive outline of the scope of Namuth’s influence: Namuth forced artists and critics to form their response to Pollock around a packaged spectacle in which Pollock’s emotive dance and furrowed brow not only demanded the same attention but also achieved the same significance, as the loops and splatters of paint that covered his canvases. The critical responses that resulted, such as those of Rosenberg and Kaprow, heavily followed the cues of this spectacle and perpetuated the convergence of high art and media personae. The avant-garde became even more tailored for mass consumption; the appreciation of its significance and value no longer remained the sole domain of an elite. Namuth spurred a mixing of the avant-garde with an individual creative personality wherein the artist mattered as much as the art. His work offered a convenient go-between, connecting a new and intensely complex form of painting, indescribable using traditional artistic language, with a critical community and public audience eager for something concrete to consider. More significantly, Namuth translated Pollock’s existential intensity and avant-garde work into the language of popular culture.

3. Pollock as American Culture Hero

Pollock’s insertion into the landscape of 1950s popular culture came easily; Rose points to the dearth of American heroes at the time. As the unprecedented political violence of World War II had exhausted the traditional idea of a military or political hero, Rose claims that “the country was ready—for the first time—to acclaim a culture hero …”20 Bearing the external context in mind, we can now engage in a more specific examination of Pollock and his adoption into mainstream American culture. Dennis Raverty, in his article “The Needs of Postwar America and the Origins of the Jackson Pollock Myth,” asserts that, beyond the public’s desire for a cultural hero, certain traits particular to Pollock elevated him to prominence more quickly and readily than any other Abstract Expressionist. Pollock possessed an inimitable archetypal American quality. Raverty stresses Pollock’s heritage in the American West: “The literature is filled with references to Pollock’s Americanism, with particular emphasis placed on his roots in the West and his relative freedom from Europe. For example, in a review of his 1943 show at Art of this Century, Art News stated, ‘A former denizen of Wyoming, California, and Arizona, his abstractions are free of Paris and contain a disciplined American fury.’”21 Without the European characteristics that defined many of Pollock’s contemporaries, the public sought new cultural cues with which to consider him. Even Pollock’s closest colleagues—de Kooning, Rothko—were first-generation European émigrés, a stark contrast to his heritage in the American West; Pollock himself claimed to have “a definite feeling for the West: the vast horizontality of the land, for instance.”22 Pollock’s most famous teacher, Thomas Hart Benton, must have inspired, to some extent, Pollock’s rough but thoughtful masculinity. And, with his pragmatic t-shirt-and-jeans uniform contributing to his exemplar Abstract Expressionist persona, Pollock provided a distinct dissimilarity to the “bohemian dandy so dear to the French Surrealists.”23 The comparison supports the already-noted discrepancy between the portrayal of an artist as maker, engaged in creation, and the portrayal of the artist as an actor, with an intellectual disconnection from any act or apparatus of creation, a point recalled in Rose’s survey of Duchamp. Beyond that, though, it also emphasizes qualities particularly valued by the American public: that their heroes be “ordinary and available,”24 for instance. A crucial aspect of the Pollock “myth,” though, is that his art was “every bit as advanced as the Europeans and yet was quintessentially American.”25 Pollock’s Americanism stressed Abstract Expressionism’s emergence as the first wholly American art form (despite its synthesis of various modes of 20th-century European abstraction).

4. Pollock, Life, and the Dilution of the High-Brow

Beyond those factors of Pollock’s persona befitting a 1950s American cultural icon, key still was the proliferation of that persona. The influential tastemaker Life magazine consistently published on the topic of modern art, acting as an intermediary between the art world and the public. Collins sets out to dispel the oft-cited critical myth that Life was particularly antagonistic toward the avant-garde and does well, citing numerous examples of support published throughout the 1940s and 1950s26. At the same time, Collins carefully illustrates the varied ways in which Life influenced and manipulated its readers’ conception of modern art. For instance, Life attempted to frame the idea of taste and preference toward art in an intellectual hierarchy, noting three cultural strata: the high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow. The high-brow, as one might expect, displayed a predilection toward modern, abstract art.27 The division seems curious in retrospect, as, at the time, Life was implicit in the creation of the spectacular Pollock, the Pollock ready for consumption. Not surprisingly, Life’s understanding of the motivations of modern artists was based largely in identifying the personal character of the artist and thus his persona, his image.

The meaning of modern art is that the artist of today is engaged in a tremendous struggle—a struggle to discover and to assert and to express himself. He has been stripped in this struggle of the useful standards that sustained the artists of the past and helped to make them comprehensible—religious beliefs, moral codes, esthetic dogmas—the absolutes of other ages. He is on his own. And his one remaining criterion is a kind of personal honesty, a kind of integrity.… This tremendous, individualistic struggle, which makes modern art so difficult for the lay man, is really one of the great assets of our civilization.28

Clearly, the debate over art became refocused on defining artistic creativity as creative identity rather than simply being a part of a larger specialized intellectual and philosophical debate concerning artistic objects. Pollock, particularly as depicted by Namuth, falls cleanly into Life’s description of the modern artist circa 1950—a description plainly paralleling Rosenberg’s existential modern artist. Conveniently, promoting a new paradigm of artistic appreciation in which art and artist must be considered inseparably provides a firm basis for compelling journalism. Smith and Naifeh assert that, had Life focused solely on the art of the Abstract Expressionists, they would have been producing “boring journalism.”29 Thus, Life sought “personalities: good looks, charm, charisma, or, in a pinch, idiosyncrasy. They were looking for controversy. … Better to elicit anger, shock, or outrage from the reader than nothing at all.”30 Naifeh and Smith more than likely based these comments on the profile of Pollock that appeared on the pages of Life in August 1949.

Recently a formidably high-brow New York critic hailed the brooding, puzzled-looking man shown above as a major artist of our time and a candidate to become “the greatest American painter of the 20th century”. Others believe that Jackson Pollock produces nothing more than interesting, if inexplicable, decorations. Still others condemn his pictures as degenerate and find them as unpalatable as yesterday’s macaroni. Even so, Pollock, at the age of 37, has burst forth as the shining new phenomenon of American art. … He has also won a following among his neighbors in the village of Springs, NY, who amuse themselves by trying to decide what his paintings are about. His grocer bought one which he identifies for bewildered visiting salesmen as an aerial view of Siberia.31

“Unflattering inferences are here,”32 as Collins puts it, but the predominant impression given is that we can forgive Pollock his incomprehensible canvases in light of his quiet, ordinary demeanor. Having no basis for understanding or interpreting his painting, and clearly not expecting such of the reader, the writer leaves us to ponder the man who created those canvases. Pollock’s neighbors’ cheerful (if not comprehending) approval helps place his work within popular culture’s reach; Life once again aimed at manipulating readers’ outlook on modern art.33 Regardless of the profile’s purported sensationalism or negativity, the substitution of persona for artwork is clearly evident. Collins notes that even the Abstract Expressionists themselves may have been guilty of posturing when he writes, “[Pollock] and his associates may have understood, at some level of their consciousness, that their eventual success would depend not simply on their being the heirs of the nineteenth-century bohemians artists but on their appearing to be so.”34 For Life’s purposes, the complexity of the Abstract Expressionists presented numerous limitations, but Life strategically tapped the potential for human interest stories. Indeed, Life had an undeniable influence on Pollock’s paradigmatic transformation from productive artist—artist as laborer—to popular spectacle.

5. Pollock and Cinema

We cannot wholly attribute Pollock’s rise to Namuth and Life, however. Although the public knew little of Pollock or his contemporaries until the late 1940s, they may have been preconditioned to appreciate aspects of the avant-garde. The emergence of the Abstract Expressionists in mainstream thought came as a part of a larger proliferation of popular visual culture. Magazines provided a welcome format for images such as Namuth’s; spreads such as those in Life could tidily present photos of art and artist, creating a graspable artistic persona. The spectacle created by magazines echoed other facets of visual culture, namely film. Namuth aside, one can hardly deny that Pollock’s popular reception had something to do with his physical and behavioral resemblance to James Dean or a Streetcar-era Marlon Brando. It is worth noting that Time published the infamous article that dubbed Pollock “Jack the Dripper” and the New York School as “The Wild Ones” only months after the release of Brando’s film of the same name.35 Rose also draws connections to Hollywood when she notes that “although painting had no place as icon within the American tradition, photographs—specifically photographs of movie stars which served as domestic and public votive images—did.”36 Rose’s comments accentuate the idea that the popularization of the avant-garde did not occur autonomously of any larger social phenomenon. Rather, the rise of certain trends in visual culture predicated the commodification of Abstract Expressionism. Also, let us not forget that Namuth’s film of Pollock painting had already coded Pollock’s persona, not only in a temporal medium, but using a prevalent tool of modern visual culture.

Abstract Expressionism and cinema—specifically, film noir—share numerous characteristics. Kent Minturn, in his essay “Peinture Noire: Abstract Expressionism and Film Noir,” draws numerous parallels between the two movements, suggesting that each had a broad influence on the other. Beyond their obvious and significant chronological proximity, Minturn proposes a symbiotic, cyclical, and generally reflective relationship between the two movements. He even attributes their formation to similar causes, claiming that, “Like Abstract Expressionist painting, film noir attempted to give shape to times out of joint. … film noir deals with feelings of postwar alienation, the veteran’s reintegration into society, the social ramifications of the entrance of women into the workforce, and the portent of nuclear destruction.”37 Pollock himself made similar statements in defense of Abstract Expressionism: “It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.”38 Furthermore, Abstract Expressionism and film noir both disrupted the status quo within their respective realms. Film noir defied and shifted traditional standards in American cinema, just as Pollock did for painting as a medium39 (even “killing it” as Kaprow claimed).

Pollock’s rise to prominence, in particular, may be linked to the popularity of film noir. Within film noir, we find direct correlatives to a significant number of the characteristics that lent Pollock’s painting its avant-garde cachet. Much as Abstract Expressionism can be viewed as a fusion of various modes of 20th-century abstraction, film noir has a basis in the synthesis of several European artistic movements and schools of thought; Minturn cites German Expressionism, Existentialism, and Surrealism specifically.40 Pollock’s somber brooding and aggressive creations cast him in the same light as film noir protagonists caught in existential struggles. Aesthetically, film noir and Abstract Expressionism hold several affinities. Certain filmic techniques used periodically in film noir may have informed and prepared a visually attuned public for the aesthetic impression of Pollock’s work. The “web”, “labyrinth”, and “vortex” each refer to a variation on the same visual theme: a tangled mess of snaking lines appearing in front of a character to denote confusion or unbearable stress.41 The parallel to Pollock’s canvases is obvious; the metaphysical significance applies to Pollock as well. The movie-screen essence of Pollock’s canvases, owed to their size and horizontality, is a simple but important example of the cinematics of Pollock’s work. Minturn quotes Irwin Panofsky’s claims that cinema’s “unique and specific possibilities can be defined as dynamization of space and, accordingly, spatialization of time.42 Minturn in turn asserts that Pollock’s paintings do the same. The idea is particularly significant in relation to Namuth’s film of Pollock painting, which made extremely clear to the public the dynamic process of the creation of a Pollock painting: the film places the process of creation in a solidly temporal frame and with a unique spatial aspect.

These affinities make clear the idea that popular film anticipated and facilitated the avant-garde’s and Pollock’s public reception and was not simply an origin for its appropriation. Remember Naifeh’s and Smith’s suggestion that Pollock manipulated his own persona in an attempt to better play the role of artist; Pollock began to follow Duchamp’s example of portraying artist as actor. More importantly, Pollock’s posturing stresses the cyclical relationship of Abstract Expressionism and film noir and pop culture’s emerging acceptance and subsumption of Abstract Expressionism.

The influence of film’s singular perspective stretched beyond aesthetic realms and into critical discourse. Rose approached the topic of the possible influence of Namuth’s film on high modernist criticism.

In the only serious attempt to deal critically with the issues raised by the poured paintings, Michael Fried … saw the 1949 paintings with areas removed, cut out from the web, by Pollock, Cut-Out and Out of the Web, as solutions to achieving figuration without resorting to conventional drawing, within the context of the “optical” all-over style of the poured paintings. The relationship of No. 29, 1950 to the problem of reconciling figuration with the opticality seems quite clear. For No. 29 represents an inversion of Out of the Web in which what has been “removed” from vision is not the figure but the optical field.43

Building on the late modernist criticism of Greenberg, Fried in “Art and Objecthood” and “Three American Painters” analyzes Pollock’s complex gestural abstractions in optical terms. His critical language replicates the visual effect of Pollock painting on a pane of glass in Namuth’s film, in which he drips pigment over the camera, creating a painterly web which appears to float in mid-air as a purely optical structure devoid of material substance and severed from a physical ground. It is unlikely that Fried could assess No. 29, 1950, the work Pollock creates in Namuth’s film, without being highly influenced by the film itself. The role of Namuth’s film in shaping Fried’s notions of modernist opticality denotes the vulnerability of modernist criticism to the mass culture it ostensibly resents. Although the relationship between criticism and mass culture is not as interconnected as that between mass culture and the avant-garde, the influence indeed exists.

The co-option of Jackson Pollock’s persona continued decades later, namely through Ed Harris’ 2000 biopic Pollock. The fine line that once divided the avant-garde from its popular conception had been completely erased by this time, however, and Harris presents us with a film not about Pollock, but a film about Pollock’s media persona.

Just as Namuth’s photographs foregrounded Pollock’s images, and just as his film placed Pollock into the context of popular visual culture, the Harris film centers almost chiefly on the myth of Pollock. The artist and critic Richard Kalina baldly states in a review “[t]his is a movie ultimately about that modern American staple, celebrity, and its always visible underside, self-destructiveness.”44 Kalina also notes Namuth’s influence on the movie: “[w]hether [Harris is] painting with a brush, squeezing a line directly out of a tube or dripping with a stick, his movements feel absolutely right. He obviously paid close attention to the Namuth films of Pollock painting, and he has the dance down perfectly. …”45 Another critic, Leonard Quart, takes the movie’s lack of genuine theoretical discussion to task.

A brief, stagy scene set in a smoky Cedar Tavern of Pollock sitting and drinking with his fellow artists, De Kooning, Tony Smith, and William Baziotes reveals nothing either about who they were as people, or about the nature of their artistic vision. We do get some smart art talk from Krasner and Greenberg, but even they provide no real sense of the artistic breakthrough made by the Abstract Expressionists. (A fictional film cannot provide us with a long disquisition about the esthetic significance on the New York school, but a touch more of the historical context wouldn’t have hurt.). … Pollock’s strength as a film lies in its depiction of Pollock as a painter, man, and husband to Lee Krasner.’46

Harris himself echoes the sentiments of critics in an interview, making it clear that he had no ambition to chart anything other than Pollock’s emotional trauma, disregarding the significance of his artistic growth. Harris states, “… you spend a lot of time in the cutting room. The danger is that you’ll be too indulgent, but then again, the script was written from Pollock’s point of view and everything that happens supports his emotional journey. It’s not an art history lesson.”47

For all of the film’s convincing 1940s and 1950s environs, the skilled acting, and Harris’ studied depiction of Pollock, it amounts to little more than an artificial representation of a genuine artistic persona. Instead, we have a view of Pollock cleanly packaged in the context and language of 21^st-century cinema, and we are one step further removed from pure understanding. The film appropriates the few standards for considering art that remain—intention and subjectivity, namely—and transforms them into portioned consumer spectacle.

6. Pollock and the Destruction of Cultural Strata

Considering Pollock’s representation of the industry-to-information shift demands examination within a broader theoretical framework. Andreas Huyssen’s essay “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other” provides such a framework. Huyssen addresses the recurring modernist phenomenon of mass culture’s alignment with the feminine; many of his key arguments and observations apply directly to issues surrounding the emergence of Pollock as a pivotal figure in both the avant-garde and larger contexts.

Huyssen finds a parallel for the mutually constructive relationship between the avant-garde and popular visual culture in the opinions of the Greenberg and Adorno: “… both Adorno and Greenberg were quite aware of the costs of modernization, and they both understood that it was the ever increasing pace of commodification and colonization of cultural space which actually propelled modernism forward, or, better, pushed it toward the outer margins of the cultural terrain.”48 Pollock’s rise to artistic and critical prominence coincided neatly with his emergence as mass culture spectacle. As Adorno and Greenberg could have predicted, one could not occur without the other for a number of reasons: the influence of Namuth’s film on critical notions of modernist opticality, the critical perceptions shaped by Life write-ups, or simply the effect of Pollock’s fame on his contemporaries and their careers—remember de Kooning’s famous assertion that “Pollock broke the ice”. Huyssen reinforces this symbiosis with an incisive deconstruction of the foundation of the gendered dichotomy.

What I am saying is that the powerful masculine mystique … has to be somehow related to the persistent gendering of mass culture as feminine and inferior—even if, as a result, the heroism of the moderns won’t look quite so modern anymore. The autonomy of the modernist art work, after all, is always the result of a … resistance to the seductive lure of mass culture, abstention from the pleasure of trying to please a larger audience, suppression of everything that might be threatening to the rigorous demands of being modern and at the edge of time. There seem to be fairly obvious homologies between this modernist insistence on purity and autonomy in art … and Marx’s privileging of production over consumption. … Thus, despite its undeniable adversary stance toward bourgeois society, the modernist aesthetic and its rigorous work ethic as described here seem in some fundamental way to be located on the side of that society’s reality principle, rather than on the side of the pleasure principle. It is to this fact that we owe some of the greatest works of modernism, but the greatness of these works cannot be separated from the often one-dimensional gender descriptions inherent in their very constitution as autonomous masterworks of modernity.49

For our purposes, Huyssen’s argument implies that, no matter the extent to which mass culture co-opted Pollock’s image, mass culture is already an intrinsic and essential component of the existence of that image. Thus, he emphasizes the inextricable nature of our contested dichotomy. By aligning Marxist production with modernist purity and autonomy, Huyssen accentuates the industrial society/information society schism represented by Pollock. Production complements consumption, and so autonomy must also have a (perhaps contradictory) socially predicated or contextual complement. The proliferation of Pollock’s image embodies that contradiction.

Huyssen notes that, although modernism or postmodernism no longer tout an alignment of mass culture with the feminine, the alignment now comes with whatever is devalued in relation to high culture. This idea is rooted in the modernists artist’s fear of “being devoured by mass culture through co-option, commodification, and the ‘wrong’ kind of success,” and his desire to “stake out his territory by fortifying the boundaries between genuine art and inauthentic mass culture”. Huyssen then recenters the debate, asserting that “… the problem is not the desire to differentiate between forms of high art and depraved forms of mass culture and its co-options. The problem is rather the persistent gendering of that which is devalued.”50 This drive to maintain distance between high and low is indeed found in Abstract Expressionism, as voiced by Adolph Gottlieb.

The Abstract Expressionist says to the public …: “You’re stupid. We despise you. We don’t want you to like us—or our art”. As for me, I’d rather be an artist today, for all this lack of status than at any other time in history. … I’d like more status than I have now, but not at the cost of closing the gap between artist and public. I’d like to widen it!51

Gottlieb’s statement, for all its polemical posturing, seems mired in contradiction. If the status he desired would not come from the public, we can assume it might come from within artistic and critical circles. As we have seen, though, these realms have a tendency to overlap. Huyssen cites Nietzsche’s criticisms of Wagner, which, in a sense, fall in line with Gottlieb’s sentiments: “[Wagner] becomes for [Nietzsche] the paradigm of the decline of genius culture in the dawning age of the masses and the feminization of culture: ‘[t]he danger for artists, for geniuses … is woman: adoring women confront them with corruption. Hardly any of them have character enough not to be corrupted—or ‘redeemed’—when they find themselves treated like gods; soon they condescend to the level of the woman.”52 Nietzsche’s concern works as an analogy for the opposition between modernism and mass culture, complete with gender inscriptions. Thus, we may also interpret the specific case of Pollock within this dichotomy. Namuth’s packaging of the Pollock myth pushed modernism and the avant-garde into new cultural space while simultaneously bringing the modernist avant-garde closer to its demise. Thus, Pollock’s identity is emphasized as a paradigmatic figure representing the antagonism between modernist vanguard culture and mass culture and that antagonism’s eventual obsolescence in a shifting cultural landscape.

Huyssen’s discussion of Nietzsche also broaches his contempt for “spectacle, theater, delusion,” and places blame on theater for the “decline of culture.”53 Huyssen explains why women are implicit in this decline: “… acting was seen as imitative and reproductive, rather than original and productive.”54 Language is key here, not only in the assignment of reproduction as a feminine characteristic but also in the alignment of masculinity with productivity. The subsumption of modernism by mass culture transforms that crucial productivity into reproductivity and spectacle, ultimately combining and confusing the distinction between the two. The delineation of theater’s traits within the language of modernism reinforces the notion that modernism and mass culture could not exist without the other. Huyssen writes, “… ever since their simultaneous emergence in the mid-19th century, modernism and mass culture have been engaged in a compulsive pas de deux. To [Nietzsche], autonomy was a relational phenomenon, not a mechanism to justify formalist amnesia.”55

This is extremely significant, as Pollock was essentially the first representative of modernist vanguard culture to be translated, art and persona, into a consumable spectacle. The idea of theatricality is especially pertinent in the context of Abstract Expressionism’s and Pollock’s affinities with film noir; it emphasizes the reflective engagement between the two visual media, each representing a side of the seemingly adversarial modernist/mass culture divide. Once again, Pollock can be seen as an impetus for the movement away from modernism’s emphasis on masculine production and toward a focus on consumption and spectacle.

In an attempt to “construct an ideal type notion of what the modernist art work has become as a result of successive canonizations”, Huyssen describes it as “autonomous and totally separate from the realms of mass culture and everyday life,” “self-referential,” “ambiguous,” “rigorously experimental,” and “the expression of a purely individual consciousness rather than of a Zeitgeist or a collective state of mind,”56 among several other characteristics. Pollock’s work, when considered alone, fulfills these demands. To regard Pollock’s work on its own terms is nearly impossible, though, as the development of Pollock’s mature style so closely coincided with the creation of the Pollock media spectacle; the two events are inextricable. In fact, the substitution of Namuth’s works for Pollock’s in the popular collective consciousness renders many of Huyssen’s defining characteristics of modernist art void, if not negating them directly. Once again we find evidence of the Pollock myth contributing to the demise of modernist avant-garde culture. Mass culture did not simply subsume Pollock and his modernistic tendencies, the convergence instead confused or even destroyed the division between high and low culture.

7. Conclusions: Pollock and Pop

In her book “A Taste For Pop,” Cécile Whiting incisively demonstrates this confusion perpetrated by Pollock and Namuth through a study of four Pop artists and their engagement with consumer culture. Whiting predicates her argument by considering the permeability of the boundary between high and low (coded as masculine and feminine) as a foregone conclusion, a concept initiated by the media perceptions of Pollock.

In this book, I, like many of my predecessors, analyze the complex relationship between Pop art and consumer culture, paying special attention to Pop art’s appropriation of consumer culture associated with women. … I describe not only how Pop art borrowed from consumer culture, but also how consumer culture reappropriated and disseminated Pop art. 57

The pattern of appropriation I describe throughout my study of Pollock—Film Noir, Life, Huyssen—surfaces here. Namuth’s photographs and films of Pollock facilitated the ready integration of Pop with the consumer sphere that Whiting rightly recognizes. While the overt masculinity performed by Pollock was perhaps an attempt to resist the feminizing effect of mass media consumption, Pop artists needed no such deflection; they were ready to embrace a commercialized artistic identity. The Pollock Myth redirected the course of the avant-garde by creating and occupying an ambiguous cultural space where high and low constructed each other. It is this engagement, this destruction of boundaries, that created Pollock and Pop and ultimately vexed Greenberg’s attempts to create a cultural hierarchy.