Viewing page 72 of 82

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

13

Maybe the one thing that Pollock couldn't really do was to break with the easel picture. When Mondrian realized that the freeing of his spanning grid had the simultaneous and equivalent effect of freeing the background, he put these discoveries to work in "Broadway Boogie-Woogie" and "Victory Boogie-Woogie", but he never lived long enough to face, as Pollock had to, the inevitable expansionist consequences of these ideas. Anyway, it is certainly possible that Pollock never saw that Mondrian's grid could be "in front of itself", and that paintings like "Blue Poles" and "Autumn Rhythm", which seemed so expansive and so surely to be pointing to a wider vision, were anomalies. But we have to wonder, because most of the time Pollock used his space as though he owned it.

In the end, it was left to Barnett Newman to truly break with easel painting and to account finally and determinedly for the emergent binocular vision of 20th century abstraction. It is a vision that gives more room, a vision that confirms the potential spatial fecundity that Mondrian and Pollock suggested when they made us realize that with our two moving restless eyes we could sense more than one spatial location at a time for shapes and their silhouetted backgrounds. The marvel of it all is that through the magic of abstract art we can almost digest this space as one experience, with one gasping stare. But herein lies the rub: abstraction has, no doubt, enlarged our vision, but Picasso's realism still challenges us to strengthen it.