Hans Namuth's Photographs of Jackson Pollock - Week 1

Taken From: 'Mathieu Paints a Picture' by Fred Gross.

Namuth, Pollock in his studio, 1950

The collaboration between Namuth and Pollock has its roots in Namuth's knowledge of earlier projects involving Picasso. Namuth knew about Paul Haesaert's film "Visite á Picasso," shot in 1949 and released in spring 1950, in which Picasso paints on a vertical pane of glass, behind which the camera recorded the master in action.7 Pollock would probably not have seen illustrations from Haesaert's film, but he certainly would have seen the next best thing: Picasso's Space Drawings photographed by Gjon Mili and notonly widely published in 1950 but exhibited as well at The Museum of Modern Art. (figure 3).8
Mili's photograph of Picasso captures him drawing in space with a flashlight what appears to be a bull or a minotaur. The long exposure arrests Picasso's motions as one continuous, flowing line of light. The vertical, two-dimensional plane of the photograph, then, becomes the plane of the canvas. Picasso wears nothing but shorts and sandals, and has finished his gesticulations with the flashlight in a balanced, athletic crouch that emphasizes his physical agility. The light drawing, arrested for our eye by the long exposure, only exists by the intersection of photography, just as the gait of a running horse was proven by Muybridge to have all four hooves off of the ground simultaneously--information about movement unavailable to the naked eye. Movement through space and the duration of this movement are arrested and coded by the photograph. The phenomenological articulation of Picasso's movements become the sum of their parts; for Namuth's photographs of Pollock, this meant that the creation of art rests upon the articulation of that movement within the space of the studio frozen by the camera and reproduced in popular magazines like film stills.

Picasso’s Space Drawings, photograph Gjon Mili.

Namuth's photographs of Jackson Pollock (figure 4) were taken in the summer and early fall of 1950 in Pollock's studio with the intention of mythologizing the already-infamous painter. Pollock had first appeared in a magazine in December 1947 when Time reported the opinion of Clement Greenberg, critic for The Nation, that Pollock was one of the three best American artists.9 Pollock appeared in Vogue in 1948, and twice in Life. In 1949, Life asked its readers, "Jackson Pollock: Is he the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?"10 The photographs and text seemed to indicate that the answer was "yes."11 During this period, Namuth made over 500 photographs, a black and white movie, and a color movie (with Paul Falkenberg), all of Pollock at work. These photographs and films are pivotal to reckoning Pollock as a mythical figure.12 Namuth's photographs of Pollock moving around the canvas on the floor of his studio served to confirm the persona of Pollock, which had been developed by numerous articles and photographs appearing in the mass media.13 Pollock sought non-traditional artistic sources such as Native American shamans to engage the space "between the easel and the mural,"14 but still was acutely aware of his position within the larger development of avant-garde painting, which had been abstracted into model form by Alfred Barr in 1936.15 In 1947, Pollock stated that "I believe the time is not yet ripe for a full transition from easel to mural. The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, an attempt to point out the direction of the future, without arriving there completely."16 Due to the influx of influential European surrealists before or during the war, American artists like Pollock were forced to reconsider their approaches to art production. Disenchantment with political strife in Europe and a rejection of what was considered "decadent" classical aesthetic sources led both the Surrealists and American artists to search for non-western sources for their inspiration. The Surrealists's belief in the use of dreams, metamorphosis, and myth as subject matter for art radically altered the American artists's perception of what their own role as an artist should be. Barnett Newman looked at the art of Oceania and the pre-Columbian Americas, Pollock at Native American sand painting and shamanic ritual dance. Adolph Gottlieb examined prehistoric petroglyphs, and Mark Tobey was deeply influenced by Bahai and Zen. Such sources were romanticized by American artists to a degree; however, the tropes of such non-Western sources were not utilized to draw attention to these cultures, but to engage their "primitive power" as a means of circumventing the outmoded stylistic conventions of European art.

Through the Surrealists, Pollock developed an acute interest in psychoanalysis. In 1939, Pollock began four years of psychotherapy that would aid him in an identification with the growing interest in the themes of Jungian thought. Pollock identified with Jung's notion of a "collective unconscious" that all human beings share at a level of archetypal recognition.17 Jung's postulation of a "phenomenology of the self" fused tenets of psychoanalysis and phenomenology into a construction of the "self" (analogous the to the Freudian ego) whose unconscious was regulated by internal and external stimuli, creating a "field" of experience and a response to stimuli of which the conscious ego is but one part.18 The other part is an "extra-conscious" psyche whose "contents are impersonal and collective...form[ing]...an omnipresent, unchanging, and everywhere identical quality or substrate of the psyche per se."19 For Pollock, Jung's thought seemed homologous with the mythic subject matter of American Indian ritual, which involved a process of engaging the tangible world to express the universal or mythological. Such a process for Pollock involved a fundamental reorientation of the role of the artist from that of the thinker to that of the "act-or."

Harold Rosenberg, for example, described this meaning as the transcription of an artist's inner emotions by means of a pictorial or sculptural "act." "A painting that is an act," Rosenberg wrote, "is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a moment in the inadulterated mixture of his life."20 Or, again, "Art...comes back into painting by way of psychology. As Wallace Stevens says of poetry, it is a process of the personality of the poet."21 Rosalind Krauss mentions that

In speaking this way, Rosenberg is equating the painting itself with the physical body of the artist who made it. Just as the artist is made up of a physiognomic exterior and an inner psychological space, the painting consists of a material surface and an interior which opens illusionistically behind that surface. This analogy between the psychological interior of the artist and the illusionistic interior of the picture makes it possible to see the pictorial object as a metaphor for human emotions that well up from the depths of those two parallel inner spaces.22

For Rosenberg, the picture surface as a locus of gestural marks demanded that one look at it as a map on to which one could read the complexity of the artist's psychological condition--a physical transcription of the artist's inner self.23 Rosenberg's seminal article re-affirmed Steichen's encoding of the image of the artist as an isolated genius, but not as "le penseur," the inert and bearded demiurge. Rosenberg's "action painter" moved through his work and through the world, linking the body of the painter and his genius with the artwork itself. Thus the "inner life" of the painting is a physical register of the phenomenal experience of the painter, and a tangible articulation of his psychological, existential necessity.

http://dsc.gc.cuny.edu/part/part8/articles/gross.html