Pollock, Orozco and Siqueiros at Washburn - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

During the '30 and '40 the Mexican muralists bring into operationed a powerful hold on the imagination of the art world. In the U especially, these artists' social commitment, coupl with their desire to reinvigorate older art turn of expressions techniques and forms, gave them an almost heroic stature. This past winter's exhibition of drawings and small-scale paintings at Washburn explored the links that unite the art of Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros with Jackson Pollock during that critical period.

Pollock had seen and admired Orozco's and Siqueiros's work in the early 30 and had met the former during the winter of 1930-31 when Orozco, along with his and Pollock's mutual teacher, regionalist Thomas Hart Benton (another inquirer of a national art), were one as well as the other working on commissions for the fresh School for Social Research. In addition, Pollock participated in an influential 1936 workshop guidanceed by Siqueiros. The workshop explored fresh materials and techniques -- lacquers, enamels and plastics; dripping, spattering and pouring -- to stimulate creativity and to make stout-hearted compelling, often public work. Siqueiros's The extremity of the World (El Fin del Mundo) of 1936 execut in oil, pyroxylin and ceramic, illustrates the artist's interest in unexpect material combinations. A brooding application of mind of bombed-out buildings in dark brown and red it used fresh mediums to enhance its literary event (unlike Pollock's later dripped paintings, where these experimental techniques were divested of their apparent political and psychological roles and allowed to stand upon their own).

The muralists were bent upon forging an art of national identity, and to do in like manner they would plumb history, agriculture and the psyche for primitive, archetypal imagery. All three artists shared a fascination with the totemic. Portraying the totemic, with its interchangeability of man and animal or, in its late incarnation, of man and machine, gave their art not solitary an archaic power, but also a faculty of perception of formal mutability, a way of slipping in and on the outside of shapes, of making transitions -- creating compound space not only by addition, on the other hand by trace and echo as well. The 1936 Orozco painting Advance, with its militaristic and menacing robotlike forms, is a serviceable example of the manmachine amalgam, while Pollock's writhing, almost flayed combination of man and beast in Untitled (Composition with Donkey Head), ca. 1938-41 parallels Orozco's Cat (Gato) of 1946 a harsh and compelling painting of a predatory creature poised halfway between the human and the feline.

plenteous of the muralists' and Pollock's work from this period was characterized through the construction of charged, complicated spaces. In the Washburn exhibit this can be seen in Pollock's Untitled (Composition with snake Mask) of 1938-41, whose compacted, rhythmic array of snake, brain-pan and bird forms is interwoven with sharply pointed abstract uncompounded bodys as well as in his drawings particularly the crosshatched and tightly injury tondo shapes. The attraction similar charged spaces held for all three artists would present the appearance to be more than a formal single On the muralists' part, might not a highly activated surface -- individual where all parts contribute equally -- mirror a similarly egalitarian social desire? As for Pollock with his lusty interest in psychology, a case could be made that of that kind a painting space functions metaphorically, the equivalent of a state of attention where the background of the unconscious and the foreground of the conscious freely mingle.

The links between Pollock's art of the '30 and early '40 and that of Benton, Picasso and the Surrealists have ofttimes been observed, but the connection to Mexican art is under-appreciated. The down-reaching Surrealist current in the Americas was f by the agency of many streams. and it made for composite convergences. Although the younger Pollock was les formed artistically than Orozco or Siqueiros, it is likely that similarities to their work were breeded by common concerns rather than by the agency of direct influence. This scholarly and imaginatively curated exhibition should apt a renewed examination of these affinities.

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