Towards Pragmatic Painting

Résumé du livre

This dissertation investigates the pragmatic meaning of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, produced between 1947 and 1950. By "pragmatic meaning," I designate meaning grounded in the observation that those paintings, to different degrees and in different ways, instantiate modes of perceptual experience for viewers which are unavoidably associated with the reciprocity of an organism in an environment. Reciprocity, a key feature of the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, provides a platform for generating an account that avoids stressing the work's transparent expression of discursive categories (such as the unconscious, the primitive, the archetypal, and the personal). One method for substantiating these claims is comparative. I show how Pollock's early training under Thomas Hart Benton laid the groundwork for his later rejection of the theory and practice of Hans Hofmann, whose technique of "pictorial creation" (Gestaltung) provided the most influential explanation of modern pictorial structures to the Abstract Expressionist generation. Hofmann codified his knowledge in Form and Farbe in der Gestaltung [1915--30], translated as Creation in Form and Color: A Textbook for Instruction in Art [1931]. Both the German version and the English version remain unpublished. My research reveals the discursive formations within which Hofmann tried to constitute his practice. Early in his career, Pollock sought a means to activate a viewer's apprehension of three-dimensional spatiality in ways that were similar to Hofmann's tactile and Cubist approach. However, Pollock's drip technique allowed him to produce an effect that suspended these pictorial structures.