Jackson Pollock's 1943 Painting "Mural" Contains His Name?

Fascinating?

I hope it's not true.

If it is, it renders "Mural" as a gimmick; a Highlights find the "___" in the picture game.

If we stare at the center of the painting for 30 seconds and let our vision blur, will be see his name?

I read "Cisyd". AM I close?


PS, Ive read several of the interviews that Selden Rodman had with Pollock. They bothe were a couple of squirrels.

Reading the article, it almost seems like they could be right, then it reads too much like artspeak. The painting is again depending on its size and the obvious remnants of Benton's teaching Pollock (it reminds be of Benton's prize fighting canvasses) but it's gestural, action painting and glyphs are bound to show up in all of his canvases. I found it fascinating that anyone could believe Pollock didn't begin by underpainting a basic composition and structure for an eventual image before he "let it fly." Of course, this is brushwork and several years before the dripping and flinging paint technique began.

I haven't met any of the famous modern painters who weren't a bit squirrely. Rauschenberg was a hoot -- he was having an exhibition and keeping tipsy with a bottle of Jack Daniels in the desk drawer where he was signing books, etc. Rothko was very withdrawn and so was Warhol, kind of like meeting inmates in an asylum. Serious professional artists are probably are all crazy (just in devoting their lives and trying to make a living), keeping sanity by expressing themselves on canvas. They were, by nature, all anti-establishment which accounts a good deal for that impression of "squirrely."

Have you read any of the comments that have now come in?

yes I read some of the comments. I like it when the logic of one or two commentors prevail.
When it comes to "Artspeak" I think that Dali and Ad Reinhardt were in worlds of their own. They transcended squirrelness.

There's no improbability to their find and there is no real logic to painting even though it's been tried to a degree by Duchamp and others. Even a compositional error, no matter how gross, is not "illogical." It's just bad painting. If there was any logic to art, the abstract expressionists were trying to pull as far away from it as possible. It's no a Where's Waldo game being played, it's a conjecture that every artist signs their painting but why not just use their name as a basis for the composition? If you look at it closely, there is a asymmetry to the proportion of the letters. This could be discerned as a design process which is what every painting teacher I've ever studied under has instructed me not to do. It does loose the intuitive basis of the talent for painting. So even though it may read a bit like artspeak, that's an objective opinion as well. Real artspeak, heard mostly in openings at Soho and usually by some wealthy client, is almost certainly a kind of psycho-babble.

Dali was completely off his rocker in the later years, Reinhardt I'm not so sure about him. If any painter was really trying to approach logic in painting, it was Ad. However, like his Stations of the Cross series, you'd have to still read logic into the image -- it doesn't communicate logic.