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The International Council at
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
JACKSON POLLOCK: 1912-1956
(São Paulo and Europe)

Critical reviews
Page 22

7. London, England showing
   From: Times, London, November 7, 1958
   (Daily, moderate conservative, circulation 221,972)

    The name of Jackson Pollock has long been one of the more essential passwords in the discussion of action-painting, although only to the knowledgeable few in this country has he tended to be more than an enthusiastically cultivated legend....

    The exhibition on all counts is something of an eye-opener. Impeccably displayed, the huge panels are overlaid with tangled skeins of paint trailing in and out, layer upon layer, describing wide flung arcs where it has been thrown like membranes of living tissue threaded with exposed nerves; and they appear in the event not anarchic but exquisitely contrived. Perhaps when action-painting was still a new and unprecedented idea, and all that could be seen beyond the debris of conventional concepts of art was a limitless and destructive license, these extraordinary paintings looked more than anything else nihilistic and explosive. At the Whitechapel, however, it is their grace and sensibility which make the deepest impression, and a quality which seems peculiar to Pollock of intense nervous vitality contained within alarge and flowing expansiveness.

    Pollock's most celebrated style was evolved between 1947 and 1950, and 10 fine paintings belonging to those years culminate in a huge mural decoration called simply One, coloured like the plumage of a dove with an enthralling effect of quiet sumptuousness. These are preceded, however, by examples of a powerful expressionist style belonging to the early 1940's.