Open your eyes to Pollock
During our recent trip to Venice a surprising number of us managed to make it past the bars and as far as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Peggy Guggenheim was the grand-daughter of mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim, the Swiss patriarch of the phenomenally wealthy Guggenheim family. She was also the neice of Solomon Robert Guggenheim the famous American art collector and philanthropist.
While not as wealthy as many of the family, by 21 Peggy was in the money and into art. Time in Paris, london and New york in the first half of the last century saw her mixing with a new wave of artists and she started to collect all the surrealist and abstract art she could lay her hands on.
Opened in 1951 in her incedible Venitian home, the collection is the permanent home of all the work she collected from artists including Dali, Man Ray, Magritte and many more.
I’m no art connoisseur but the collection was definately a highlight of our trip to Venice and probably challenged a few peoples ideas. Personally I’d written off Jackson Pollock as an artist. Maybe because of the bad prints of his work or the way he is lampooned by much of the media, his work seen as infantile and, rather handily, his name rhyming with… well, do i need to spell it out!
Maybe it was the setting, maybe the fact it was surrounded by work from the likes of Kandinsky, Picasso and Giacometti but I really found myself in awe of Pollocks work.
So, should you happen to be wondering about Venice, as you do, it is well worth seeking out this collection.
if it’s a good pollock you’re after - why not make your own?
this is a nice little Flash site that enables you to make your own!
http://jacksonpollock.org/
On the recent sale of a Pollock for $140m, Jasper Gerard writing in The Observer (observer.guardian.co.uk) mentions that in ‘Seek My Face’, a novel based on Pollock’s life: “Updike has Pollock’s widow report that the couple would dream up names for the works once they were finished; Pollock wasn’t painting anything in particular, even in abstract.”
It’s always amusing to hear the Art Critics spank on about the meaning and emotion and thought in his works when really, he was just a very (at the time) unconventional-drunken-trailblazing-artist. I quite like some of his paintings, even ‘Blue Poles’ which hangs in the National Gallery of Australia, was purchased for $2 million in the 70’s, and caused enormous controversy at the time. I just take issue with modern price tags on works massively inflating the importance of artist’s contributions - not to mention the egos of art critics and the self-importance of the industry in general! Yes, it oftens seem like a mere industry. No ‘art-will-change-the-world-stuff’ really happening, I’m afraid.
Difficult to put a value on it but it does seem obscene. As a very one dimensional art lover it doesn’t matter to me that there’s no real subject to the paintings. Not even sure why they appealed, but they really did.