By Jean Packard

One of Jackson Pollock’s controversial classics.

All About Art

This question is and has been the battle cry of Jackson Pollock dissenters for 50 years. Of course, the answer is yes! He studied with the best: Thomas Hart Benton, Hans Hoffman and the great Mexican muralist David Alfaro Sequeiros.

Pollock was maligned, scoffed at and made out to be some sort of art misfit, by big and small publishers and broadcasters, outside the inner circle of the art world. They parsed “a few drips couldn’t possibly be art.”

As projected in the current film, “Pollock,” showing at the Guild Theatre in Menlo Park, there is the issue of Pollock’s drinking. (Marcia Gay Harden won an Academy Award this year as Best Actress in a supporting role for her work as Pollock’s wife Lee Krasner in the film.) Alcoholism ultimately led to his death in 1956 in an auto accident at age 44. To focus on either his alcoholism or his much-discussed depressions is to miss the point of Pollock’s genius and the colossal contribution he made to the arts of the United States. In short, it was he and the abstract expressionist movement that made New York the Art Center of the World in the 1950s. It retains this mantle today.

To better understand this movement, let us take a peek back in time to the mid-1940s and early 1950s when World War II had ended. There was a social climate of excesses.

Painters were searching for a market in provincial America when jazz ushered in the new renaissance of self-expression.

Abstract expressionism was an existential ideal in which the artist became innovator and the viewer became the interpreter. It was the first art movement to make painting democratic. Instead of art critics or cultural power elites telling viewers what to think, viewers were left to their own opinions.

The drip-drip concept opened the eyes of the general public. All kinds of people from all walks of life suddenly felt included, that they too could produce this kind of art. People dripped paint over everything.

Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, who as a philosophy professor at Columbia University, articulated the group’s purpose.

Pollock, an artist with a revolutionary new concept, may remain an enigma to many, but has been embraced by many and allowed many to feel included.

NOTE: Last month in an article on Toulouse-Lautrec, the phone number for the Legion of Honor was incorrect. The number is (415) 750-3600.

Packard is an artist, teacher and owner of the Packard Art Studio in Los Altos for contemporary art study. You can reach her at 941-7033, or e-mail: packardartstudio@mymailstation.com.