Subverting the dominant installation, part five

From yesterday: Considering a gallery that breaks up MoMA's Pollock-centric storyline/room, and that shows MoMA's great Pollock in the context of other works painted in 1950. (Also: When possible I'm going to post paintings from MoMA's collection.)

You didn't think I'd make it through these posts without talking about Clyfford Still, did you? At left is a Hirshhorn Clyfford Still painting from 1948 -- sorry, I couldn't find a decent image of a 1950 Still. Neither of MoMA's Stills is online, which is an inadvertently poetic measure of revenge.

For reasons that aren't clear, Still despised MoMA. After a major 1959 show at the Albright Art Gallery, Still wrote a letter to Albright director Gordon Smith, telling him about the NYC reaction to the Buffalo show: "Like roaches, they scattered at first. But the herd instinct reasserted itself and they all returned to their mother, the Great Gas Chamber of culture on 53rd Street [that would be MoMA] -- jackal-yapping the old clichés and lies to cover their retreat."

While Still hated pretty much everyone, near the end of Pollock's life the two were apparently on their way to a kind of friendship. (In one bizarre letter to a friend, Still claimed that if they'd been closer, sooner, that Still could have saved Pollock's life.) There's no way of knowing why Still warmed up to Pollock when he hated everyone else, but I'd like to think that subconsciously it had something to do with them both bein' boys from the Mountain West and because of how landscape (subconsciously) impacted their work. Putting a big Pollock next to a big Still would sure get that point across.

I'll close out these posts with a wrap-up thought tomorrow or on Monday.

Previously: Ellsworth Kelly. Philip Guston and Franz Kline. Richard Diebenkorn and Mark Rothko. Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt.

Related: This Walker painting is from '50, but it doesn't look right via JPEG. I don't remember the color in the lower two-thirds of the painting looking so milky-consistent in person.