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The International Council at
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
JACKSON POLLOCK: 1912-1965
(São Paulo and Europe)

Critical reviews
Page 23

7. London, England showing
From: The Sunday Times, London, November 9, 1958 by John Russell
(Weekly, independent, conservative, circulation 606,346)

One of the most important exhibitions of modern painting that has come our way since the war is the large retrospective of "Jackson Pollock, 1912 - 1956," at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

"Important" for three reasons. First, Pollock has let his mark upon painters in every country in the world where painting is practiced. Second, this show (we owe it, by the way, to the generous activity of the Museum of Modern Art in New York) includes a number of very large paintings which are unlikely to revisit Europe for many years to come. As Pollock is not a painter who can be judged in reproduction the opportunity is an irreplaceable one; we have barely a month in which to seize it.

The third reason is that, in England at any rate, Pollock has not yet been classified. His work is still more potent, that is to say, than the things which have been said about it. Much of the gossip about him has, in fat, been misleading, in that the element of automation has been stressed to a point at which Pollock's entire activity has been given the air of a stunt....

But what is likely to strike an attentive visitor to Whitechapel is something quite different: for these paintings, so often acclaimed for the apparently haphazard method of their execution, are in fact most carefully and conscientiously designed. Every accent is in place, and the great pounding rhythms which batter their way across the eighteen-foot canvases never for a moment get out of control.

In the earlier pictures the repertory of images has a frantic and ferocious quality, traceable in part to Mexican and American Indian sources; European readers of Professor Praz's "The Romantic Agony" may, however, see in these the last violent spasm of a yet older tradition.

But when Pasiphae and The She-Wolf make way for the gigantic poems in paint of 1946 and after, direct allusion vanishes and we are left with a kind of painting which exists in, and by, and for, itself.

The problems raised by all this are too complex for discussion here. What matters is that we should see the pictures before opinion solidifies; for although Pollock himself worked in conscious opposition to the accepted notions of popular culture, one of the results of his great influence is that a certain idea of him will become part of that culture; Whitechapel makes it possible for us not to be taken in.