Legacy of Jackson Pollock the Artist Jackson Essay

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Legacy of Jackson Pollock

The artist Jackson Pollock was renowned for using non-traditional methods to create very untraditional pieces of art. At the time that he was working and up to the modern historical moment, many people look at a piece by Pollock and do not see it as art. Instead, they may likely proclaim that it is just lines or random colors on a canvas and thus does not have the intrinsic meaning of more traditional pieces of artwork. Either one understood modern art and accepted it as a new and innovative type of art, or one was likely to deride anything in modernity as just a mess on canvas or whatever medium the artist chose to work in. Despite this perspective, Pollock and artist like him began a whole new artistic movement which is known as modernism. What is considered to be modern art has been the source of debate since the introduction of the movement in the 1930s and its popularity in the 1950s and especially into the 1960s with the popularization of the likes of Andy Warhol. The question then becomes not whether modern art is art but how society can define modern art in terms both of itself and in terms of the larger artistic vocabulary. In two articles, Clement Greenberg's "Modernist Painting" and Allan Kaprow's "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," the authors discuss and debate what constituted modernism and what place this movement has in the history of art.

In order to understand the two arguments that are being debated, it is important to first have at least a simplistic understanding of what modernism is in its most basic forms. Unlike traditional artwork, modern pieces are usually far more representational. That is to say that, the painting or sculpture's meaning will not be obvious. Instead, the work requires interpretation from the viewer in order to be understood.

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Usually, the modern work has a purpose which is in some way a reflection of the artist's perception of the world around them and of the fallacies and impurities that they view in that society. There are many different types of modern art, such as sculptures and paintings and living artistic presentation. Film is another media for the modern artist to express his or herself. Among the most prevalent in the movement is abstract art wherein the subject is representational rather than obvious.[footnoteRef:1] Very often the representative component of the artwork is not readily understood. Often color and geometric shapes are used to represent something with larger meaning, leading to many people dismissing modern art as nonsensical. [1: Nancy Jachec, "Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg," Oxford Art Journal, 21, no. 2 (1998): 129.]

Author Clement Greenberg asserts that the reason modern artists have taken to creating works without specific form or traditional appearance is in order to reject the ideology of the present and to create something more universal. If they do not endeavor to do this, then the art is not so much individualistic but instead part of the propaganda of the society in which the artist lives.[footnoteRef:2] According to Nancy Jachec, the rise in modernist art was a direct correlative of the decline of more traditional American values. Or, as Clement Greenberg calls it, a "decay of our present society."[footnoteRef:3] Following World War II, there was an ideological shift in the perspective of the majority of American citizens, creating a more homogenized idea of what constituted acceptable behavior and a rigidity of social morays and accepted norms.[footnoteRef:4] More than art itself, Jachec focuses on one Clement Greenberg and how this one man responded to the change of the American….....

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