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made obvious by his undeniably great drip paintings of the previous years. This argument is similar to one made against Kandinsky's late work such as Ambiquite, which is inevitable seen as weak in comparison to early work. But this line of argument trivializes the effort of artists and leaves unheard a good deal of what great artists like Kandinsky and Pollock have to say about painting. I dare say that in Pollock's case no one, other than Pollock himself perhaps, would be able to appreciate the efforts involved in bringing abstract painting to life, if it weren't for Pollock's own literal expression of these problems in paintings such as Portrait of a Dream. The best drip paintings seperated from their predecessors and successors would appear as isolated, rarefied jewels, truly remote abstractions, and we kid ourselves if we believe that we can recognize pictorial quality outside the context of its effort. Furthermore, it is from understanding and recognizing the problem solving effort which goes into creating the quality in painting that we understand, as much as we can, what painting is or, perhaps, should be about. We have only to look in our museums to see that Pollock, for example, was closer to Renaissance painting (in this case with a Northern twist) than he might have imagined. Take as an example Jan Gossaert's painting of St. Luke Painting the Virgin with the Child in the Vienna Kunst-historisches Museum. It seems to be a fairly straight-forward, albeit vertically oriented, version of what Pollock himself re-lived in the Portrait of a Dream: the experience that spatial incongruity is an unshakable companion to pictorial effort.
Gossaert's painting recalls other paintings in Vienna which trace what has been called the painter's history of painting. It