Page 31 - Studio International - July August 1974

Vav 196o
Acrylic on canvas
102½ x 141½ in
Tate Gallery, London

together'. Pollock got the interrelationship he secure the canvas as a base, or support, like the variations of density. Pollock's continuousness
wanted by eliminating the traditional opacity base of a sculpture, rather than a quite of pressure across the picture plane really sunk
of the cubist plane, leaving the drawing 'around' arbitrary expanse of flatness. into Louis; he was obviously taken by the clear
it, to get a net-like configuration with very Much has been written about Louis's visit demonstration, in paint, that 'composing', the
great and evident integration all across the to New York in April 1953, in the company of most cherished and most conservative factor
surface, Pollock's linear tangle was open, Kenneth Noland and Clement Greenberg, and of the cubist style, was not indespensable to
covering without concealing, and the wholeness of the devastating effect of his exposure to the painting.
of the image and character of the line side- paintings of Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler, Louis said of Frankenthaler's Mountains and
stepped the ticklish problem of lining up parts particularly her Mountains and the Sea. The the Sea that it 'showed the way beyond Pollock'.
with the edge of the painting. He had only to evidence that he was strongly affected is there But the 'veils' show something else : that a
pull in here and there, to 'set' the painted image in his subsequent paintings, in an almost peculiar and little-discussed aspect of
on the canvas `base', to compensate for the programmatic way. For the remainder of 1953 Frankenthaler's style gave Louis the equipment
edge. The relative failures among the paintings he made paintings which were meek Pollocks. to 'clothe' the Pollock surface, to fill it out. Much
of Pollock's best period often make no But in 1954 he began the 'veils', which were has been written about Frankenthaler's staining
accommodation to the edge, don't 'thin out' pure combinations of the expressive potential of technique; of course Louis used it. But it was
along the edge. The accommodation was slight Pollock and Frankenthaler, a brilliant synthesis a matter of colour which really got to Louis,
but necessary. Though any number of lines of two styles to create a third, and a casebook just as deeply as the all-overness of the Pollock
could go off the edge there had to be some example of modernist stylistic conception. style. The colours of the Frankenthaler
visible `withinness', some degree of Though Pollock retained cubist planarity painting, including the canvas background, are
containment. This was needed to avoid a and the cubist insistence on centripetal of close enough value (light-dark difference)
pictorially destructive sense of randomness, as integration of forms, he threw out the cubist to enhance the effect of pictorial unity despite
if the edge simply cut the picture, and to manner of balancing and placing and plotted a lack of actual visual interconnection of pictorial

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