Published: December 17, 1996

“All the News

We Hope to Print”

An Artistic Father for Half a Century

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI THE FATE OF A GESTURE Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art By Carter Ratcliff

To the public, Jackson Pollock was the avant-garde's cowboy existentialist, the brawling action painter whose famous drip paintings had been immortalized in Life magazine and whose death in an auto accident at the age of 44 forever sealed his fame. To his colleague and rival Willem de Kooning, he was the American who ''broke the ice'': the artist who opened the floodgates of innovation that then swept the New York art world in the 1940's and 50's. Pollock was typically more taciturn -- and grandiose -- when it came to describing himself: ''I am nature,'' he declared. In deciding to tackle the question of Pollock's

achievement and legacy in ''The Fate of a Gesture,'' the art critic Carter Ratcliff has taken on a huge subject, a subject that turns out to be unwieldy for him. Pollock's influence, after all, is both breathtakingly wide and strangely amorphous. Artists as diverse as Helen Frankenthaler and Walter De Maria, Claes Oldenburg and Richard Serra can claim him as an ancestor; Color Field painters, Minimalists, environmental sculptors and even performance artists can all cite him as an inspiration. It is Mr. Ratcliff's contention that Pollock's best work evoked a feeling of ''limitless possibility,'' a ''pictorial equivalent to the American infinite that spreads through Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass,' '' and that this sense of the infinite can be traced through the work of many American artists after him. This is not a terribly new idea; Robert

Hughes astutely made the Whitman analogy some two decades ago. But it initially seems like a useful prism through which to examine Pollock's convoluted legacy. Describing the grandiosity that animates the paintings of Pollock and his friend Clyfford Still, Mr. Ratcliff writes: ''It is an idea of losing one's tiresome, ordinary self in the unbounded promise of the New World; liberated from history, one is reborn with primordial strength and integrity.'' It is an expansive impulse with roots in the American landscape tradition, and an impulse, Mr. Ratcliff suggests, that would be picked up, in Pollock's

(who drew tracks in the Nevada desert with a motorcycle) and Sol LeWitt (who stacked groups of cubes in different combinations, a process that in itself implied a sense of the infinite).

In the course of this book, Mr. Ratcliff tries to formulate several dialectics, contrasting Pollock's expansiveness with Rothko's peaceful sense of containment, and Pollock's fiery introspection with the Pop artists' cool-eyed observation of the outer world. These contrasts are not new either; nor are they fleshed out in any new or meaningful way. Indeed, ''The Fate of a Gesture'' quickly devolves into a series

Laura Franco Santos Group: 524 N.L.:9

Dec. 17, 1996

of chapters that read like individual essays, cobbled together thematically in only the most perfunctory way. Once again, we are treated to an overview of Pollock's short, intense life: his childhood in the West, his stabs at representational drawing, his struggles to make ends meet, his work with the Federal Arts Project, his meeting with Lee Krasner, his drunken high jinks, his embrace of the drip technique, his accelerating fame. For some reason, the important role played in Pollock's development by the theories of Wassily Kandinsky (who argued that art had the ability to limn the rhythms of the universe and an artist's inner state of mind) are passed over glancingly, as is the painter's dabbling in

Jungian psychology. ''The poured paintings,'' Mr. Ratcliff writes, ''show an ego construing its isolation as its triumphant unity with the universe – not the commonplace universe overrun by others but a universe made bearable, made glorious, by the absence of every ego but one's own. When Pollock painted, he transcended ordinary life. Then he felt sufficient. Away from the studio, his being grew thin and turbulent; he felt himself begin to tatter.'' And what of the thesis advanced in the controversial 1990 biography of Pollock by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith that Pollock's drip technique was associated with his childhood memories of watching his father urinate on a stone? Instead of

putting this highly reductive argument into some sort of perspective, Mr. Ratcliff simply writes that ''we should expand it until intimations of all the body’s processes appear in Pollock's stained, smeared, encrusted canvases.'' ''Currents of paint lead us past the visible to an obscure sense of the body's interior, pulsing and wet,'' he adds. ''Glistening allusions to blood and guts refer as well to substances the body expels, sometimes explosively. From metaphors violently mixed come evocations of the body that imply boundless space, as if the infinite were bodily and the body were infinite.'' This sort of windy, pretentious prose does not inspire much confidence on the reader's part. Nor do some of Mr. Ratcliff's esthetic judgments. While he is quick to denounce Thomas Hart Benton, Pollock's early mentor, as a jingoistic manipulator of cliches, he carefully hedges his bets on Julian Schnabel, writing that he ''looked like a virtuoso of

Americanism -- a producer of big, brash, overbearing paintings, '' an artist who made '' gestures big and desperate enough to count as signs of life or, at least, theatrical vitality.'' Elsewhere in the book, Mr. Ratcliff wildly inflates Andy Warhol's achievement, arguing that he ''was as authentic an artist as Jackson Pollock'' and that his work ''unfurled an image of America as boundless as Pollock's.'' Such assessments do a serious injustice to Pollock (while distorting Warhol's own distinctive contributions), and they ultimately undermine the more compelling arguments in this messy and prosaic book.