Is he the greatest?

(Leaf 134) – Art Inspired

 

Jackson Pollock - Blue Poles (1952) National Gallery of Australia

This poem is an attempt to synthesise my fascination for the paintings of Jackson Pollock (see also, Leaf 135). I first became interested in Pollock around the time that the biopic, starring Ed Harris, was in the cinema (Pollock, 2000). I went to see it at the Barbican in London. I also read a book about Pollock’s works, borrowed from my local library in Stoke Newington around the same time, which really grabbed a hold of my mind and has stayed with me. This poem riffs off of the famous article about Pollock from 1949, published in Life Magazine, which asked: ‘Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?’ – I find it curious how so much of modern art in the West is based upon a kind of cult of personality. It seems to me that inherent talent often needs to be refracted through a prism of personality before it can attain any sort of permanence. Common cultural outlooks tend towards a systematic second-order need to categorise and compartmentalise, a priori or a posteriori – but there is something in the structured vs. erratic mix of expression which characterises Pollock’s most famous works, and those of prominent jazz musicians with whom he was a contemporary, which I think manages to wink at this and simply content itself with doing its own thing, regardless. And that’s what I like most about Pollock, Coltrane, and Davis. For me, at least – it’s more about being guided by feeling, and less about thinking.

 

 

Is he the greatest?

 

Blue Poles

Blue Train

Kind of Blue.

 

 

 

John Coltrane - Blue Train (1958)

Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (1959)

Hans Namuth - Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner (1950)