Well, we found the actual Critics’ Table—at Julius’ on West 10th Street and Waverly Place. I am very grateful to critics Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jarrett Earnest, and David Rimanelli for joining me to puzzle through the issues raised by Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock’s dual retrospective. Organized by curators David Breslin and Brinda Kumar at the Met, it is the first major New York show for either artist in two decades. Sitting in the window of the city’s oldest gay bar, we debated Krasner’s mosaic coffee table and revelatory collages, wondering if an overdue art-historical paradigm shift and brilliant exhibition design could successfully introduce her to the public anew. Regarding Pollock, we dug into the early work and butt heads regarding the traditional Modernist narrative, and the end-game drip paintings that did or did not take our breath away. —Johanna Fateman
Johanna Fateman: Okay, we’ve got someone who is, right now at this table, having a very strong reaction to the show, so perhaps that’s where we’ll start, and we can all bounce off of Jarrett’s initial response. Jarrett, tell us.
Jarrett Earnest: So, I just saw the show. I came here directly from the Met. I think that’s part of my reaction: it’s totally fresh. And wow. It’s not that I had low expectations but I realized, while I was in the exhibition, that I had never seen many Krasner paintings together. I’ve seen Krasners in group shows, I’ve seen them one at a time, and I never thought that much about them. When I heard about this show, I thought it was a really bad idea, that it was going to make them both look bad. And I’m shocked that, actually, it made them both look incredible. It allowed me to see them both as very strong artists—Krasner, most of all.
Julia Bryan-Wilson: Yes. When I heard of the idea, I too was very skeptical—almost distraught—because it’s a typical pairing of artists who we know were together, where the man was always in the spotlight. And the narrative around the woman is very tired. You know, she’s finally coming out of his shadow; finally, the world is going to recognize her; finally, she’ll take her rightful place. So, I felt that it was going to be a trap, that the same clichés about “finally” seeing Krasner would be repeated when, in fact, women artists and feminist art historians have been loving the work for decades, you know? Decades.
The triumph of the exhibition is that it shows Krasner’s resourcefulness, her limitless creativity. And, sure, Pollock looks great, but to me, the Pollocks were less interesting. The freshness, the energy, the muscularity, the dynamism were all coming from Krasner—especially when she’s reusing old work, and in the collages. What excites me most is that so much is what’s going to come out of this exhibition in terms of art history: new stories about these artists, about that moment, and about how artists make work in relation to larger networks of friends and lovers.
Earnest: What I realized looking at the show is that the formal problems Krasner was working through, which may have made her look more conservative, actually make her much more relevant to the concerns of contemporary painting.
Bryan-Wilson: I agree. I really felt that when we got to the “Little Images,” works she started in 1946. She goes back to the grid.
Earnest: Totally.
Bryan-Wilson: Look, marrying Pollock destroyed her drive. That’s the narrative—an explicit story of the show—which I thought was astonishing: that she had to self-annihilate in order to be with him. For her, it was a devastating choice creatively. But she re-emerged after the move [from Manhattan] to Springs, working in the upstairs bedroom, through the grid, through its endlessness. The grid’s plentitude is still a resource for contemporary artists. She used the structure that it offered, but also its mysticism. The grid was a way through that impasse.
Earnest: But she doesn’t stop at the grid.
Bryan-Wilson: Yes, that’s a phase.
Earnest: And then she goes back into the problems of composition.
Bryan-Wilson: Of negative space and color.
Earnest: So, there are resources here, in Krasner, for thinking about painting that’s happening right now. What you see with Pollock is that there’s no way out of the drip paintings. Like, you look at the great Pollocks of 1950, then you look at what he’s doing in ’53. They’re a reversion. He’s going back to the image—unsuccessfully.
David Rimanelli: Well, this is what Clement Greenberg says about them. He said Pollock had lost his stuff after ’51 or ’50. At least according to the 1989 Gregory White Smith biography, this has a devastating effect on Pollock’s deteriorating psychology—Greenberg’s withdrawal of support. You would think Pollock wouldn’t care, but he did. He cared a lot.
Bryan-Wilson: Also, none of those pre-1950 works that were considered failures are in the show, like the cut-outs from 1948-49.
Earnest: Yeah, I was also interested in the things that were left out. They were trying to make Pollock look as strong as possible. And it becomes clear in certain moments—like when I was standing in front of that enormous pink Krasner work Combat [from 1965], one of the strongest paintings in the show—that Krasner can match Pollock even at his signature scale. She can match him, and she is the interpretive frame through which we can read him. She was the first—literally, the first person—who understood him. She was the person who articulated his own work to him. Then she spent her entire life working that out for herself. And she is shown to have this astonishing intelligence that Pollock, for all of his greatness, did not have.
Fateman: Let’s go back for a minute. David, did you also initially feel like the show was maybe a bad idea?
Rimanelli: No, I thought it was a good idea. You know, Pollock-Krasner, Krasner-Pollock: they reverse the usual order of the names in the title, and it seemed kind of pre-fab but, whatever. To interpret the question more broadly, I’d say I thought it was a good idea to do a big show about Abstract Expressionism at the Met. It’s not a museum renowned for its commitment to, or collection of, 20th-century artworks, certainly not compared to the other big museums in New York. This turned out to be a much better show than what it would seem to be. So, in fact, it was a good idea. I think it was good for the Pollocks and good for the Krasners.
But, you know, I’m the oldest person here, and when I was growing up, there was a different narrative about Abstract Expressionism, and particularly about Pollock as being transformative for art history, and a tremendously consequential figure through the ’60s and ’70s. Is he so important in our own time? I don’t know. I’m not sure. Regardless, it is worthwhile—I think—to reconsider the genesis of their works, of both artists, and their roles in the “movement” or whatever you want to call it. How did the old narrative of Modernism enable all of these things we think of as terribly important today? Like performance, like video. These things come out of the expanded frame.
And, about the Krasners: Previously, I’d seen so few of them. Like Jarrett, I’d seen them one at a time. When I did see them, Pollock was part of the internal wallpaper of my mind.
Fateman: Pollock as the “internal wallpaper”—that’s one of the things David Breslin said to me about this show, early on: “Yeah, we could do a Lee Krasner retrospective, but when people look at her work everyone’s thinking about Jackson Pollock anyway.” He’s there no matter what. So, why not just…
Earnest: Why not actually look at the Pollocks too?
Bryan-Wilson: It is a really strong and smart curatorial move to start with Krasner’s collages, because those works are dissecting that internal wallpaper. That room presents a material encounter which the two artists did engage in.
Fateman: Okay, yes, so, let’s break this down. To start, we have this small gallery, almost like an antechamber, with Krasner’s small or mid-sized collages from 1954–55, including Bald Eagle, which becomes an emblem for the show; it’s on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, used for the publicity materials, and so on. To make it, Krasner used, among other things, spattered scraps of canvas from Pollock’s studio—to show, as Julia said, how they materially intersect. There’s no collaboration per se, but we get this evidence of them working in the same place at the same time. So, the curators come out guns blazing with an argument for Lee. Let’s give her the first moment, and then, of course, she outlived Pollock, so her work bookends the show.
Earnest: Basically, without Krasner, we don’t have Pollock. This is the argument. You cannot separate them. That’s how I interpret the decision to start with the collages that she made with his scraps. This is the way that we can begin to imagine the other work that she did. Of course, almost all of it is invisible—emotional and intellectual—and it disappeared into… a gendered arrangement. At a certain point in the show, I had the realization, Oh, maybe I’ve never seen a show like this, which is about reconstructing what it is for people to actually make art together. That’s what I loved about your essay for the catalogue, Johanna. I thought you really nailed it.
Fateman: Well, thank you. It’s interesting now, you know, because that essay [“Krasner and Pollock’s Common Time”] was written really based on my fear of… Lee looking bad…
Bryan-Wilson: …of being subsumed…
Fateman: …and not wanting that to happen. Not wanting to make a disingenuous argument about her work. I do really love Pollock’s drip paintings. I’m just a sucker for those. I don’t pretend that I’m saying something interesting or unique here. I’m saying something banal and basic, that I’m aligned with art history—with David’s “old narrative.” I’m saying I feel that art-historical rupture. And I don’t feel that same thing in my encounters with Lee’s work. You know, that’s okay. Anyway, I took the historical example of Merce Cunningham and John Cage as a couple, using them as a lens to see if I could get somewhere new. Because, as an essayist, I wanted to consider Pollock and Krasner “equally.” I didn’t want to invoke a stereotypical feminist position regarding Lee. You know, that she was consigned to the upstairs bedroom and put in the role of caretaker, and that explains her secondary status. Well, that’s the narrative I grew up with. Maybe it’s true. I don’t know.
Rimanelli: Look, I really care about art, so I’m going ask: Do we think that? How do we feel about that biographical narrative, which looms so large in people’s understanding of Pollock and Krasner at this point? How do we feel about their lives? Is that true? Does it matter? Was Lee, like, a terribly passive, if not actively abused, housewife, devoted to her husband and his advancement, and kept down by that?
Earnest: One of my responses to that question, which I think is completely correct to pose, is another question: Why do we need these exhibitions of major figures? My understanding is that we can only encounter these works for what they are, and their fullness and complexity, in person. That every generation of young artists, and everyone who cares, we have to be able to reconnect and reconsider and see what’s actually there as opposed to the story. Because the story is oppressive. That doesn’t mean it’s untrue; it just means that there is something else there. And that is… the art.
I’ve been thinking about Elaine and Bill de Kooning, and them as a mirror couple. Elaine is so important to me as an art critic. She was a genius, and part of Elaine’s genius was meeting Bill de Kooning when she was 20 years old and thinking, This person is the best artist, and I’m going use everything in my power to help support, contextualize, bring forward, understand, and appreciate this person that I think is the greatest. I think Lee does the same thing, right?
Rimanelli: Her devotion. Intelligent devotion. Yes, Lee did have a crystal ball, and she did see the future.
Bryan-Wilson: I thought that the show tread pretty lightly in terms of biography.
Rimanelli: It did, it did. But this is something that comes with the work now regardless. Look at this conversation.
Bryan Wilson: I don’t have a problem with it, because as people, we are situated within our historical moments. Our biographies delimit the horizon of possibilities of what we can do.
Fateman: I sensed in your question, David, that you long to see the work without the biography.
Rimanelli: I mean, that seems to me something like a prejudice from an earlier era, which maybe has come full circle, because that’s how the proponents of Pollock and Krasner, and Abstract Expressionism, would have seen it. They would have thought that to bring elements of their lives to the reading would be degrading to the art. And while I only know the basic lineaments of Krasner’s biography, my sense is that she would be revolted by the way she’s contextualized. I don’t think she could have imagined being absorbed into the discourse in this way.
Bryan-Wilson: Well, in her lifetime, the criticism was ruthlessly gendered. The paintings were called “feminine” and “quietly innocuous.” Those are direct quotes.
Rimanelli: Right, Abstract Impressionism.
Bryan-Wilson: Or it was said that she was “tidying up” Pollock’s motifs.
Rimanell: Yes, like she was the housekeeper.
Bryan-Wilson: The first time they showed together, in 1949, it was in a show called “Artists: Man and Wife.” That says it all.
Earnest: But I think a purely formal reading is what this show is set up to offer! Because of the installation, there are sight lines allowing you to see their work in relation, but the artists aren’t presented side-by-side except in very specific instances. So, in that first gallery you walk into, after the Krasner collages, where it says, on the wall, “BEFORE KRASNER, BEFORE POLLOCK,” they’re on opposite sides of the room. Then you go into a gallery of Pollocks alone, and then there’s this little set-away of Krasners. And there are cutouts in the walls, where you can see through one gallery to another. There are temporary walls set up, so you can see Krasner’s collages across from the big, heroic Pollocks. I thought the rhetoric of the exhibition design itself set up this visual dialogue between what she was doing and thinking about Pollock, even after his death.
Bryan-Wilson: I come back to the moment that is literally at the exhibit’s core: the Stable Gallery collages that are hung in an open, free-standing arrangement. You can see that the substrates of them are those 1951 paintings, from her show at Betty Parsons Gallery, that were pilloried in the press, and on top, she’s layering things, including textured fabrics—the raw canvas with the unraveling threads. Those are amazing. They’re larger than life. They form a kind of inner sanctum, where you’re surrounded on all sides by this incredible, vivid sense of invention; the surfaces are unstable in these exciting ways.
Fateman: I’m sorry. We were ordering more drinks. Which paintings?
Bryan-Wilson: The Stable Gallery work.
Fateman: Oh my god. That was really a moment.
Bryan-Wilson: I want to hear what you guys thought of Krasner’s mosaic table.
Rimanelli: It’s horrible. Hideous. It looked like something in my mother’s San Miguel de Allende country house. That’s what it looks like. It’s terrible.
Bryan-Wilson: But what do you think of its inclusion in the show?
Rimanelli: Oh, I think it’s cool.
Earnest: What’s cool to me about the table was seeing it in relation to Pollock’s Full Fathom Five [from 1947], where there’s, like, actual junk embedded in the paint: the gesture of putting the junk in the table versus the junk in the painting.
Rimanelli: It is a good rhetorical thing, definitely.
Bryan-Wilson: I love the table. And the fact that they both worked on it. It wasn’t necessarily a collaboration because she designed it, but he poured the concrete. It was something they made together.
Earnest: I like how it extended the idea of those little Krasners that flanked it, those extremely dense paintings, their accumulation of little marks that form a kind of all-over shimmer. And I like it because it’s tacky.
Fateman: I didn’t like the table. In the late ’90s, I was working for the painter Mary Heilmann around when she began making her tables and chairs. It was so great because Mary was extremely self-conscious and self-aware about the relationship of painting and décor, and specifically her paintings’ relationship to décor, and she was making a point about it. Krasner is not doing that. So, if you are saying that you like the table in part because it’s bad, okay. Of course, so do I. I mean it’s, like, camp. But that was not Krasner’s point.
Rimanelli: Right, that’s a contemporary reason to like the table. Of course, it’s fabulous. It’s hideous!
Earnest: I’m not even saying that. I’m saying this because I am invested in the life. I am a form person in the most hardcore, extreme way, but the only reason that the form exists is because of the people who did it, and the lives that created it.
Fateman: Well, okay, but that has nothing to do with the table itself.
Rimanelli: I hadn’t even thought about it this way, but now that you say it, Julia, I realize it has to hold a lot of rhetorical weight, because it is their only collaboration.
Bryan-Wilson: And isn’t it interesting that it’s terrible? The one thing they do together is terrible.
Earnest: The table is the only thing in the show that is horizontal, when the whole innovation, the move that they made together was…
Rimanelli: …before Carl Andre, there was Lee Krasner’s tacky cocktail table…
Earnest: …honey, get Rosalind Krauss on the phone. She needs to know about the table!
Bryan-Wilson: I knew the table would be polemical! I also like it precisely because it’s tacky, it’s decorative, it’s domestic, and it is in a different register than painting. But the table also makes a few crucial points—about reuse, about piecing together the stuff of the world. I celebrate how kind of trashy it looks in the middle of this show. It brings us back to the texture of their lives together and the stubborn messiness of cohabitation.
Earnest: Am I wrong that the tesserae are left over from a WPA project? The other thing that’s so amazing about Krasner’s work is the way that she’s bringing in so much of the world and letting it still be what it is. If I had curated the show, I would also have put the table in. It brings a totally different dimension to the visual argument—these were also people who were living a life and, like, this is stuff that they made.
Rimanelli: Well, a different kind of show could lean more into that.
Fateman: When we approached the exhibition, for the press preview, David’s first words were “Oh, pure kitsch,” because we saw Jackson and Lee, images of them, in that video-mural-montage thing at the entrance—the photos of the artists and the house and the studio in Springs.
Rimanelli: Oh, my God, I was horrified by that.
Earnest: When I was walking out, I wondered, is that somebody’s video art or is that just exhibition design?
Rimanelli: Rachel Rose did it.
Earnest: No. Really?
Rimanelli: I’m lying. No!
Bryan-Wilson: When [Met director] Max Hollein and the curators were speaking at the press preview, they set up very intentionally in front of Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm [from 1950], which is in their collection. I thought it looked puny, honestly, even though it can be pretty imposing. I know what it holds in terms of its threshold importance in art history, but it was hard to see it anew.
Rimanelli: Why do you think that was?
Bryan-Wilson: It just felt thin as a backdrop for their speeches in this installation. I don’t know why.
Earnest: Do you think it was the temporary walls?
Rimanelli: The partition walls were aesthetically unfortunate.
Earnest: I had a different experience. I think if you really open yourself up to the unfolding of the show, by the time you get to that room with Krasner’s “Little Image” paintings, and then Pollock’s Eyes in the Heat [from 1947], it’s really simmering. Then, when I walked into the room where the scale shifts, I really felt it. I don’t like paintings on temporary walls. But I actually found the expansion of the scale with the Pollocks pretty thrilling. To feel the paintings getting larger and larger and… the all-over drips, I thought, like, Wow, I get it, I get why everyone’s pussy was on fire from this.
Bryan-Wilson: I have a harder time with them. There’s so much baggage with Pollock, and I cannot fully separate his work from its circumstances. It’s not autonomous. I see Peggy Guggenheim giving him a stipend. I see him taking over the barn. I see her, Lee Krasner, sitting on the stool while Hans Namuth is photographing him. I see the CIA-funded programs circulating his work abroad to function as propaganda for the U.S. during the Cold War.
Fateman: I wonder if the partition walls worked to right-size the Pollocks, in a way. Because they don’t go to the ceiling, there wasn’t that cathedral effect.
Bryan-Wilson: That’s right, there wasn’t. There was no way to stand very far away from them.
Earnest: I think that once you get to those paintings, it’s like getting to Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings. If you believe in a teleology, there’s no beyond this.
Fateman: Exactly, he rewrote the rules of the game so that he won, and then it ended.
Earnest: That’s why Krasner feels so fresh. She didn’t get stuck there. She was thinking forward and backward at the same time. And, if once that was a kind of liability—in the terms of that game—now it’s not.
Rimanelli: So, she is Postmodern and Pollock is Modern.
Earnest: As you were saying, David, that’s why Abstract Expressionism, as an ending, becomes the beginning of Conceptualism and performance art and whatever. But those things, as movements, have also ended. So, what we have now is the continuous presence of painting as a language that transcends time and space and is having multiple conversations in many directions. That is where Lee Krasner was always working.
Fateman: Oh, wow, you really love her, Jarrett.
Earnest: It’s the zeal of the converted.
Bryan-Wilson: Let’s talk about that last room a little bit.
Earnest: Yes. Yes.
Bryan-Wilson: Because it was really wild to have these large Krasner canvases from the ’70s—like the title work, Past Continuous, which is stunning, black-and-white collage, with one red square—and then weirdly, they put that Pollock in.
Rimanelli: Yes, right, that’s where they put Portrait and a Dream, singled out by de Kooning as an example of Pollock’s deliquescence as an artist in 1953!
Earnest: I felt like that placement was a narrative device. When you have her outliving him, you need him to recur in some way. I thought it was quite touching to bring him in at this moment where she is going back, cutting up or recycling her charcoal drawings from her student years in this massive canvas. Because of course she didn’t stop thinking about Jackson Pollock when he dropped dead.
Rimanelli: No, because she loved him so much, and she really believed in him. She was so important to why he is so important to us now. She conserved his legacy after his death more than anyone did. If you’re sick of hearing about Jackson Pollock, you can thank his wife!
Earnest: She was so fucking smart and yes, again, we would not have Pollock without her. I would have loved to have somebody explain in the catalogue what she did as the steward of Pollock’s work. But, David, I want to ask you about your interest in Pollock or Modernist painting because it’s obviously a passion, but I think of you as representing an extremely specific, different moment in art discourse.
Rimanelli: Oh, tell me what that moment is! I’m so excited for this to be about me now.
Earnest: I think of it as being a moment where conversations on form and Modernist painting were completely passé…
Rimanelli: Yes and no. I think, if you mean an early ’80s kind of discourse and, like, October magazine, yes, sort of. But the background of all of that thinking is Modernism, traditionally conceived, even when it’s concerned with a critique of authenticity or whatever. Modernism is ultimately about progression. Whether you’re Roger Fry or Clement Greenberg, it’s still about a certain kind of progression. One thing comes after another.
Bryan-Wilson: This is why I have some resentment about Pollock’s fame. Why I hold on to that.
Rimanelli: Okay, wonderful, I love resentment.
Earnest: Say more.
Bryan-Wilson: I resent the space he’s taken up critically and institutionally. I mean, maybe it’s deserved, but maybe it’s not.
Rimanelli: He was better than her. I hate to say that. I’m going to be the evil person here…
Earnest: Well, you finally got there.
Fateman: Someone has to be evil.
Rimanelli: He’s more important than she is.
Bryan-Wilson: Strong disagree.
Rimanelli: I mean, I expect you to disagree, and I want you to. I’m not divorced from that sensibility myself, and I think that’s what Jarrett was getting at, in a way.
Bryan-Wilson: There is a lot that is around him that has cushioned him and pushed him up into this idol status. And not all of it was about the art, you know?
Rimanelli: Of course it isn’t!
Bryan-Wilson: There is a materialist point to be made about the market, economics, and politics around his fame. There were powerful people—critics and dealers—who started endorsing Pollock and promoting his work, and suddenly there was not just money but ideology behind it. His straight white male cowboy persona fit into a certain American ideal. So, it’s not as if he floated to the top purely because he was quote unquote great. Sorry, that’s not how talent works, and we all know that.
Some artists were collected, and many were ignored. The concept of greatness itself is loaded and biased. I mean, there’s Janet Sobel, a Ukrainian artist who was doing drip paintings before Pollock did. She didn’t get hailed as the next great thing. She didn’t get written about by Greenberg as the culmination of modernist art history and commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim to make a mural in her apartment.
Fateman: Well, she didn’t have Lee Krasner for a wife.
Bryan-Wilson: Exactly. Very importantly, she did not.
Rimanelli: That’s all art, though. So, what do you want to be possible now? Do you want it to be possible to at least engage with the work at the level of what people actually wrote down or presented? Do you want to be able to do something that is, you know, extra-sociological? If we want to make statements about form, in Modernism’s own terms or not, everything can’t be entirely…
Bryan-Wilson: It’s not either/or.
Rimanelli: Of course, but you have to pick your sides a little bit. Otherwise…
Bryan-Wilson: I’m just not the person who stands in front of a Pollock and feels myself dissolve into his supposed greatness. That’s garbage language to me. I’m not someone who can, like, surrender to…
Rimanelli: But no one expects you to surrender. Who wants you to?
Bryan-Wilson: You said he’s a better artist.
Rimanelli: I think that. I think that. But I go along with the traditional narrative. I understand why he has a large profile in the history of art, that generic history.
Earnest: I love this exchange, because I think that a big exhibition like this is an opportunity to think anew. It’s really important for us to believe that this is a living thing, that these judgments and these narratives are always in play. They’re always being reevaluated based on the present, based on what artists are actually doing right now. So, I think the idea that Pollock is more important than Krasner, that was absolutely true at a particular moment, but that isn’t necessarily true now. That’s what we’re trying to figure out.
Fateman: Yes. When I said that before about Pollock, about my being aligned with art history in my response to the drips… well, that can be true and Lee Krasner can take on a new meaning and importance in my thinking and my own narrative.
Bryan-Wilson: I predict that this is the show that will shift the larger narrative.
Fateman: I want to believe that. Can a show do that?
Bryan-Wilson: Well, I would say it can track a shifting narrative. The Alice Neel exhibition, which was also at the Met, marked and shored up her shift from a minor figure in her own era to a major one in ours. She has become a touchstone for so many artists now working in portraiture and figuration.
Earnest: Similarly, right now, Krasner is extremely relevant to painting. I think there’s no chance that people who walk into that show will walk out not thinking that Krasner’s as great an artist as Pollock.
Rimanelli: I think you’re wrong. That would be nice, but she was not as great an artist. She was an excellent artist who… did not change the course of art history in the same way.
Bryan-Wilson: Does it even matter anymore?
Rimanelli: That’s really the question. And, no, probably it doesn’t matter.
Bryan-Wilson: There are so many other people to consider, even in terms of American postwar painting: Jack Whitten, for example. I am still waiting for the Met to do a comprehensive Howardena Pindell show. What artists today are going to the studio with Pollock on their minds?
Rimanelli: None.
Earnest: Can we talk about the bad Pollocks? Like, the one with the numbers on it? It’s such a fucking bad painting, it’s astonishing.
Bryan-Wilson: There are a few bad ones.
Rimanelli: Well, now are we talking about things in a way that’s evaluative, like, hearkening back to Modernist aesthetics?
Fateman: We aren’t going to settle that question today.
Rimanelli: Right. Well, really the early “bad” work looks the most like contemporary art. The most influential Pollock work, perhaps unbeknownst to the people doing it, is the early Pollock, the bad, geeky Pollock. He’s trying so hard to be like Matta, like Masson, or any number of Surrealists or Mexican muralist precursors. Am I going to ask contemporary artists, “Are you influenced by Jackson Pollock’s work from 1934?” No, I would sound like an idiot, and yet…
Earnest: I think it’s interesting that Pollock studied with Thomas Hart Benton, and comes from all that reactionary macho posturing, but really everything in those quote unquote ugly early Pollocks that is interesting really precedes and exceeds Benton. The whirly surfaces and the images coming in and out…
Rimanelli: Well, yes, that really goes so far beyond, and before, Benton. There’s so much more there. To me, Benton is all of those things you said, very much reactionary and conservative, but also so beautiful, so transcendent…
Earnest: You are dirty. Bitch, you are dirty right now.
Rimanelli: No, I’m not. I’m right. I’m right! From a different era, I’m right. Why are you saying that? Because of something you read? Because he was a homophobe? So fucking what!
Earnest: No, because I have eyes in my head and I can look at the paintings. I mean, girl, I love that we are screaming at each other at Julius’ about this, but I can’t go there.
Bryan-Wilson: I can’t either.
Rimanelli: Well, I don’t love the paintings, but I see where they go.
Earnest: Look, I actually think it matters what someone does on the canvas and what someone does in their life. And I feel like we have to start from scratch to find a discursive position with which to modulate that relationship.
Rimanelli: I know it’s very stupid, and I’m positioning myself in the worst way, but when I think about Lee and Jackson, I think about love. I really do.
Earnest: I don’t think that’s wrong.
Rimanelli: Why did Lee stay?
Earnest: I think she saw that Jackson Pollock was an artist who she could talk with for the rest of her life, and she did.
Rimanelli: Whether you think of her as being a victim, or…
Bryan-Wilson: She wasn’t a victim.
Earnest: The victim was Ruth Kligman [an artist with whom Pollock had an affair, who was in the car when Pollock had his fatal car accident, injuring her and killing her friend].
Bryan-Wilson: No, the victim was the other woman in the car, Edith Metzger [a 25-year-old art student], who died.
Rimanelli: Poor Edith. She didn’t want to get in the car. Let’s do the Edith Metzger group show.
Fateman: No.
Rimanelli: Get out of the car! Get out of the car, Edith!
Bryan-Wilson: Well, maybe we should wrap it up here.
Fateman: Yes, I think this is the right place to stop. Thank you. You were all so good.
More of our favorite stories from the Critics’ Table
Is LA Still a Painter’s Town? Juliana Halpert on the City’s Fall Gallery Openings
Five Nights on Elizabeth Street: Whitney Mallett’s Guide to the Fall Openings
Conceptualism’s Resurgence, a Growing Critics’ Table, and More Reflections on This Season in Art
Does a New Exhibition at the Tate Dim the Power of Ana Mendieta’s Legacy?
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