POLLOCK Blue Posts
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was an artist described by critics as revolutionary, brave, anarchic and irascible. An American painter who had a great influence on the history of contemporary pictorial art. His work was filled with immense force, giving a huge push to abstraction against the realism that was being implanted from Soviet art. Pollock became a prestigious figure, even appearing on the cover of the iconic Life magazine.
In a PROFESSOR we invite you to discover the Meaning and Commentary of Pollock's Blue Posts, one of the most outstanding works of him.
Pollock He began painting in the early 1930s, approaching at this initial moment the Mexican realistic socialism of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. But, after discovering the european surrealism in an exhibition in New York in 1936 and get closer to the figure of Picasso, the painter will begin to discover his own style. Among the most outstanding features of this style:
- The dripping or dripping it is his pictorial technique of reference. A technique that consists of making the color fall directly from the brush or from the tube or bottle onto the canvas.
- This type of technique is part of the action painting, an artistic trend in which the artist is free to move and that has its origin in the automatic creations of the surrealists, but, to Unlike them, Pollock, attracted by Jungian analysis, tried to bring out the unconscious, in addition to drawing inspiration from motives. primitive.
- Pollock was the central and inspiring figure of the abstract expressionism.
We begin by understanding the meaning ofBlue poles, a work exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia. A large painting, 4.9 meters long and 2.10 meters high, painted by Pollock in the year 1952, a moment in which abstract expressionism was already notorious and in which its drip technique it was in its prime. The work is made on an unstretched canvas and placed on the ground, in which the dripping, the splashing and spilling paint shows us the great physical effort required by this technique of Pollock.
A technique that can even be considered as a performance, almost a show, since Pollock did not use the usual painting tools, opting for the use of sticks and cans of paint, all forming part of an unconscious experience, a kind of show. A work that contrasts sharply with Pollock's classic works by including electric colors, colors that do not appear in the more traditional and natural palettes of previous paintings by the artist, with pastel shades.
Blue poles it is therefore a very ambitious and transitional work in every sense. Thus, it is not only a transformation in terms of color, but also in the management of the composition. Pollock continues in this work with the all-over composition, that is, the more or less uniform distribution of the pictorial elements over the entire surface of the canvas, but with a further step in abstraction by presenting eight blue bars crossing the canvas. And it is that the blue bars reintroduce the conventional notion of figure, but without making concessions to perspective.
Continuing with the comment of Blue poles we must emphasize that it became a highly praised and celebrated work, the impact of the complexity of Pollock's pictorial work being enormous. The painter, ridiculed at first by the American press when describing him in 1949 as "Jack the Dripper" became recognized as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century with this construction site.
Pollock pointed out that in his technique nothing was left to chance and that everything was meditated and thought so that the viewer could feel everything that was in the unconscious of the modern world. In the case of Blue poles, the canvas shows poles that resemble schematic figures on a background, recalling figures such as trees or masts in the mind of the viewer.
The painter built the work in a meticulous and very elaborate way of many layers of colors and interlacing lines. Pollock applied the paint quickly on a canvas spread on the ground and without a bore he defined until he was framed. In the central area the blue posts are concentrated, concentrating the abstraction on the edges and corners.
The painting caused some controversy when it was acquired by the Australian National Gallery in 1973. The price for which it was sold was a world record for a work by a 20th century artist, as well as being the basis for many of these criticisms and controversies. The discussions extended to the artistic quality of the painter, although the global impact of the abstract expressionism it was already indisputable and Blue poles like no other work embodied the ideology of this artistic movement, Pollock being its highest representative.
