Comments on the Jackson Pollock Catalogue Raisonné

Leonardo,Vol. 13, pp. 4546. Pergamon Press 1980. Printed in Great Britain COMMENTS ON THE JACKSON POLLOCK CATALOGUE RAISONNE Harry Rand* Resting within its dark slipcase, the four boxed volumes of the Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue RaisonnP of Paintings ,Drawingsand Other Works [l]seem a genuine squat monument to the artist. Just so massive an enterprise is this set, a portable cenotaph, conceived as a perdurable achievement. Indeed, in the authors’ General Introduction by Francis Valentine O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw one is informed that these books fulfil a codicil to Pollock’s will of March 1951 instructing his wife or executors to attempt to keep ‘as intact as possible’ the body of paintings he had produced. While there is no museum in the world to which one can go to find a study collection of this artist’s works, the catalogue raisonne gathers his production in tight compass. The labor of severaleditors, in at least four campaigns of scholarship, the work was completed 20 years after Pollock’s death. The four volumes are separately designated: Paintings, 193M7; Paintings, 1948-55; Drawings, 1930-56; Other Works, 1930-1956. Such an arrangement seems utterly straightforward and benign, and the authors explicitly expressed the notion that, ‘there is no “theory” of Jackson Pollock in these volumes; we intend to inform theory, not promulgate it’ (p. viii), and, were the catalogue treating another artist, such a statement could rest as the most salutary of foundations. But in Pollock‘s case, precisely his contribution to the development of 20thcentury visual art calls into question the otherwise classically useful division of the artist’s work. In Michael Fried’s words: “After Pollock the determination of what, in a given instance, constitutes drawing is a problem without a general answer. We no longer know beforehand what drawing is.. ..’ [2]. And, judged even by traditional criteria, Frank OHara lauded Pollock’s painting for its qualities of drawing: ‘There has never been enough said about Pollock’s draftsmanship, that amazing ability to quicken line by thinning it, to slow it by flooding, to elaborate that simplestof elements, the line. ..tobuild up an embarrassment of riches in the mass of drawing alone.’ Thedisclaimerof O’Connor and Thaw at thebeginning of their work segregatesthe art by material, a legitimate, if unspoken, ordering that nevertheless insinuates a definite conceptual organization-perhaps better suited to a less audacious artist. Works on canvas are ‘paintings’, on paper ‘drawings’, although some of the pieces on paper clearly share artistic parity and ambition with works on fabric. The black enamels on paper from 1950-51 are among Pollock’s most vigorous and successful works, [31. *Curator, 20th Century Painting and Sculpture, National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Eighth and G Streets,Washington,DC20560,U.S.A.(Received 30Aug. 1979) and, executed in the same manner as his works on fabric, are otherwise indistinguishable from pieces found in the other volumes.Certainly, in the sense in whichdrawing is seen as something preparatory (sketches leading to designs, to plans, to paintings) the separation of drawing from painting makes little sense in regard to Pollock‘s work; he himselfwrote: ‘NosketchestacceptanceoflwhatI Here we encounter the disharmony that is bound to arise from the desire of the editors for a rational ordering of events that were, at least in some sense, triggered by a notion of spontaneity, such as resides at the heart of the Surrealist movement and impulse. A taxonomy of the irrational cannot precede, except at the most superficial level,by media divisions;the automatic gesture (a refined and channeled sensibility reigning over the artistic enterprise ) literally colors and shapes whatever it touches. The proper scheme for such an organization would be, ultimately, iconographic and psychologically narrative, but such a future endeavor will owe a tremendous debt to the cataloguing of Pollock’s art. In many ways the fourth volume is the clearest as an expression of reasoned cataloguing, the inclusion and exclusion, of works attributed to Pollock. Here one finds painted ceramics, watercolors, collage, sculpture and prints; the issue is not confused by their contiguous presentation, although had all four volumes presented works in this fashion a heavy burden would have been placed on the...