14/09/15
Jackson
Pollock’s Mural: Energy Made Visible
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
23 April
– 16 November 2015
In 1948, Clement Greenberg wrote his essay The
Crisis of the Easel Picture. The previous year, Jackson Pollock (1912-56),
applying for a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, wrote (highly likely with the
aid of Greenberg): “I intend to paint large movable pictures which will
function between the easel and mural. I have set a precedent in this genre in a
large painting for Miss Peggy Guggenheim. […] I believe the easel picture to be
a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or
mural.”1 The mural he mentions is a vast
panorama spanning a canvas six metres long, the largest painting he ever made,
and credited by Willem de Kooning as “[breaking] the ice” for abstract expressionism.
Now on display at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the work forms the
basis for a small but enlightening exhibition, exploring the context in which
it was produced and showing something of the effect it had on the contemporary
art world.
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