Out of the Web: Number 7, 1949

As the German army swept across Europe in 1939 to 1941, and as Japanese forces conquered the Pacific, the United States remained wary of being drawn into another tragic and costly overseas war. Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941 ended the uncertainty; the country became unified behind President Roosevelt’s ensuing declaration of war. The first several...

Jackson Pollock’s paintings have endured intense critical scrutiny since their first exhibition, and over the years, through repetition, elaboration, and consolidation of selected propositions, an orthodox assessment of their evolution and significance has become established. There are, to be sure, tensions and instabilities within this prevailing account of Pollock’s oeuvre, and there is considerable disagreement among scholars over some of its details and emphases; but its principal aspects, …

Once Upon a Time. When I first came across the lines by the duke of Aquitaine some years ago, naturally I imagined them in Jackson Pollock’s mouth. They put me in mind of modernism; or of one moment of modernism, which I realized I had been trying (and failing) to get in focus ever since I had read Harmonium or looked at Le Bonheur de vivre. Two things were clarified. Not just that modern artists often turned away from the detail of the world in order to revel in the work of …