GREGOIRE
JEANMONOD
Art and its stories as an inspiration
Jackson Pollock
Wall
1943
Take up the challenges
In 1943, Jackson Pollock was an artist with promising talent but very moderate success. If his work is praised by some connoisseurs, Pollock is meanwhile devastated by the awareness of his own limits. His painting is then not yet that of dripping , a technique by which later he will squirt paint on a canvas stretched out on the ground. For the time being, he is rather following in Picasso's footsteps, drawing inspiration from the master without being able to match him.
That year, the billionaire Peggy Guggenheim commissioned an extraordinary work from him: a canvas of over
6 meters long. Pollock never painted on such a format. Yet he takes up the challenge, installs the canvas in his apartment, and spends several months not knowing where to start. Two days before the deadline, he finally got started: in one night, he produced a founding work. Not knowing how to arrange shapes on such a surface, he painted Mural , a picture with no background or pattern. Each part of the canvas, from the center to the corners, contains the same semantic charge. This practice, dubbed by critics “ all-over “, will be at the heart of the dripping which will, shortly after, the triumph of Pollock.
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What we can take away:
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Faced with a request that does not seem to be within our limits, our reflex is often that of being cautious. However, it is in these conditions of discomfort that the most audacious ideas can be born. We would therefore like to thank our most demanding customers and interlocutors: they are the ones who make us progress.