Picasso is a phony and Pollock was a drunk as$hole!!!!

I forget most of whatever I knew about the artistic development of both Picasso and Pollock. I don't mind that they lived, became famous, and made money. Their work sometimes broke major boundaries, cracked the code. If I'm going to research anyone anew, it will be Lee Krasner. Neither Picasso nor Pollock interest me very much though I get their role in the movement of art (I'm way more attracted to the work of Kandinsky and a lot of other folks).

Why are you so angry, Amigo?

I agree, Osso. Actually I prefer the work of Lee Krasner to that of her husband, Pollock. The latter was the student of Bentham, but he actually rebelled against his teacher. His dripwork was, I understand (I've never seen it in person) something one had to see directly to appreciate.
But, frankly, the work of the misogynist, Pablo Picasso, was great (perhaps the greatest) in part because of the FREEDOM that it reflects. Picasso was a great drawer, and even his "expressive distortions" of the objects he sought to represent were products of his drawing skill.

Picasso stated later in his career that one of his greatist wishes was to learn to draw like a child again Picasso through a child's eye?

Sorry, I think I've repeated myself. I agree with Picasso that one of the painter's goals might be to paint like a child--or even a chimp or cat. Freedom of creation is of great value.

Krasner never broke the barrier beyond decorative painting but sold well because of Pollock -- there's always that connection of having a famous spouse and tagging along for the ride. Plainly, she did not have the affinity for color of Jackson -- a sixth sense of not using colors just to please, like the artwork for a set of china:



Sorry, but the more one looks at Krasner, the one more figures out how innovative and revolutionary Pollock's work quickly became the inspiration for all of the abstract expressionists. That he was a hopeless drunk and lived for the satisfaction of his own ego is not the mark of a bad artist -- it's usually always the mark of a great artist.

OK, OK, I'll consider this all tomorrow..

It may take you more than tomorrow.

I wonder if Picasso had not dropped out of the art academy he attended for less than a year would his art have been different. His formal training was with his father who was also an artist and a carpenter. Picasso also studied carpentry with his father. I would venture to say that his carpentry (mathematical theory) and his drawing abilities was the source of the cubnistic movement.

Sglass, interesting thought. I wonder what the determining influences were for Braque's contribution to cubism.

Cezanne was the real father of cubism and Braque always seemed to be painting for an audience -- there's a distinctive decorative element to his subject matter and execution. One can see Cezanne's influence with these two canvasses:



Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Bibemus Quarry (oil on canvas, 1895)




Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Factory, Horta de Ebbo (oil on canvas, 1909)

In a sensational senior moment I referred to T.H. Benton, as Bentham (or something like that).
George, I've always perceived Braque's work as painted to please only/mainly himself--it's rarely "pretty." Art is so subjective (and that's its power).

I agree that Krasner's work is very "decorative", but--except for some works, like your example--it also tries to go beyond prettiness. My problem with Pollock is his virtual absence of negative and positive spaces: they are all positive--as is most wallpaper. I feel a need for background VERSUS foreground integrated as yin-yanging (interdigitating) positive and negative spaces.

I was too brief in assessing Braque's work and, in any case, I only find his early fauve work which he tried to suppress as being too close to "prettiness" in comparison to the other painters in the genre. I think I got the impression that he started painting for an audience when he became repetitious but it's, of course, intuition just as some art historians and critics have reached the same conclusion. Art can run the range of objective, to subjective, to entirely abstract (no discernable object or subject) and Pollock falls into the latter category. There are Pollock earlier paintings where he utilized negative space and then there was a resemblance to Krasner's work. Ed Harris referred to that in his film even if it was somewhat subtle.

I do see background and foreground in Pollock's work and it can be very pronounced as his later work which the critics didn't take as much of a shine to. I never found that he, in effect, every tried to fill in all negative space -- it existed mysteriously in the depth of the painting, but, once again, can barely be seen in small reproductions. We're back to the comparison of seeing a film in IMAX against seeing it on a small computer screen. The paintings are almost impossible to reproduce as all the textural motion become obscured in shrinking it down.

I think another problem in going by the film is that all the paintings were actually created in the studio's art department and it was rather too obvious. Although his technique and color-ways are not that hard to ape, there's an almost metaphysical power to his really great paintings that cannot be reached by any attempt to recreate them. As the artists who did the fake Pollocks didn't really try to literally copy any one masterpiece, they became set design.

Early Pollock when he began to abstract the style he learned from Thomas Hart Benton.



Naked Man with a Knife, 1939

By 1942, he hadn't abandoned the drawing technique of Benton but had evolved considerably into subjective abstraction -- notice the tension of negative space against the strong lines of the forms:



Man Against Woman

The title gives away his strife in dealing with women who he seemed to deal with only as sex objects, not an uncommon modern neurosis.

Good examples, LW. I definitely prefer these earlier stages of Pollock's oeuvre to his dripwork (admitting, as I say this, that I've never seen an example of the latter "in person"). But that's the way I feel about much of the final stages of most artists' work, the more salient examples, to my mind are Matisse's cutups, Diebenkorn's Ocean Part abstractions, and, understandably, deKooning's sketchy final works and Hilton's scribbles.
BTW, do you see the influence of Orozco on the first of your Pollock examples?

Pollock was influenced by Orozco but also by Duchamp. Duchamp influenced modern art a great deal more than Picasso who is really permanently frozen in the 30's.

Yes, it's impossible to judge Pollock without seeing his work in museums, but preferably in a retrospective exhibition like the MOMA 1998-99:

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1998/pollock/website100/index.html

So many artist, especially in modern art, were libertines, sometimes close to anarchy, and strive to be non-political. Movies are, of course, going to delve into the darker side of their personal lives at the expense of actually showing their growth, or sometimes stagnation as what happened to Picasso after the Thirties, to make a dramatic presentation.

I have an unread book about Duchamp. Until I read it I guess I will continue to have trouble sensing his influence on art--other than the general rebellious character of dadaism.
I agree that Picasso's influence on art has not been as great as, say, that of deKooning. But the former's freedom with which he examines his navel is thrilling.
Thanks for the Pollock link. Very interesting.

What does early De Kooning look like? This (kind of a cross between Picasso and Modigliani):



He began his career really by making money creating paintings for interior designers in specific color ways, but images such as the one above is derived right out of Duchamp's philosophy of color. Duchamp also pioneered optical art.

Aack, I, of course, meant de Kooning. I guess K's confuse me.

Yeah, I get de Kandinsky and de Kooning mixed up a lot.

Well, at least I don't mix up either of them with Koons.