Jackson Pollock - KunstHalle (Postcard from Berlin 2016 (4))

Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943 (Click on image to enlarge)

Jackson Pollock’s Mural: Energy Made Visible is at Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin until 10 April 2016.

This small but focused exhibition contextualises Mural painted by Jackson Pollock in 1943/4 for a commission from Peggy Guggenheim. The painting, owned by the University of Iowa Museum of Art (UIMA) was bequeathed to them by Peggy Guggenheim. In the 1940s Guggenheim ran a gallery in New York called ‘Art of This Century’ which specialised in exhibiting European Surrealism and the young American artists who were to become the New York School – the Abstract Expressionists. In 1943 Pollock signed a contract with the gallery and was commissioned to make a mural for the entrance hall of Guggenheim’s new apartment in Manhattan. As the UIMA website recounts:

The choice of subject was to be his, and the size, immense—8' 1 1/4" x 19' 10", meant to cover an entire wall. At the suggestion of Guggenheim's friend and advisor Marcel Duchamp, it was painted on canvas, not the wall itself, so it would be portable. Pollock wrote of his commission that it was:

"...with no strings as to what or how I paint it. I am going to paint it in oil on canvas. They are giving me a show November 16 and I want to have the painting finished for the show. I've had to tear out the partition between the front and middle room to get the damned thing up. I have it stretched now. It looks pretty big, but exciting as all hell." […]

Pollock spent weeks staring at the blank canvas, complaining to friends that he was "blocked," and seeming to become both obsessed and depressed. Finally, according to all reports, he painted the entire canvas in one frenetic burst of energy around New Year's Day of 1944—although the painting bears the date 1943… As soon as the canvas was dry to the touch, Pollock broke down the stretcher, rolled the canvas, and transported both to Guggenheim's townhouse. Some accounts have said that the painting was too long for the space by almost a foot, and when Pollock discovered this he became quite hysterical. Marcel Duchamp and another artist were said to have cut eight inches from one end before it was installed. However, close examination by numerous experts over the years has revealed no evidence of this.

The other legend associated with this commission – but which no ‘serious’ accounts of Pollock seem to include – is that at the polite party thrown by Guggenheim at the unveiling of Mural Pollock got drunk and stumbled into the living room, where guests had already gathered to celebrate the installation, unzipped his fly, and urinated into Peggy’s marble fireplace. (Wetzsteon, R. (1988) Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia,1910-1960, Simon & Schuster, p531).

The painting itself is impressive – and, historically, something of a game changer, opening the door to large scale, full blown abstraction. UIMA notes that Clement Greenberg, destined to become the authoritative critical spokesman for Abstract Expression had written encouraging but less than whole-hearted endorsements in his Pollock reviews, but, he said after he saw the big mural in Guggenheim's townhouse, "I took one look at it and I thought, 'Now that's great art,' and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced."
(Click on images to enlarge.)

Herbert Matter, Jackson Pollock standing in front of 'Mural', c1947

George Kargar, Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock in fron of 'Mural', 1943

The exhibition includes several other paintings, notably by Lee Krasner and RobertMotherwell as well as interesting archive material and a display of contemporary photography experimenting with abstraction and the representation of movement. (Although it pains me to say so, a painting by Andy Warhol is probably the least interesting thing here!)

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No.126, 1965-75

Lee Krasner, Another Storm, 1963

László Moholy-Nagy, Pink, Red anity Lights, 1937-40

Aaron Siskind, Chicago 8, 1948

Andy Warhol, Yarn Painting, 1983

Postcard from Berlin 2016 (3) - Memorials and Monuments

A short walk, north-east, from the hotel, along Griefswalder Straβe leads to Ernst-Thälmann Park, named for a former Communist leader, and featuring an impressive 14m bronze monument, by Lev Kerbel, in his memory.
[Click on images to enlarge]

From the S-Bahnhof Griefswalder Straβe it is an easy journey south-east to Treptower Park and the astonishing, vast, Soviet War Memorial.

Completed in 1949 it commemorates Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin, April-May 1945. It is estimated that some 80,000 Soviet soldiers lost their lives in the battle, 5,000 of whom are laid to rest in Treptower Park.

Near the entrance to the park is a statue of a woman – the Motherland weeping at the loss of her sons. 

From here an immense vista opens up to a huge figure in the distance framed by a pair of angular constructions. 

These constructions – it turns out – are two ‘stylized Soviet flags’ built out of red granite and each flanked by the statue of a kneeling soldier.

From here to the, still distant, monument the space is lined by 16 stone sarcophagi (one for each of the then 16 Soviet Republics) with relief carvings.

Finally, one reaches the 12m tall statue, on top of a substantial mound, of a Soviet soldier, with a sword, holding a German child and standing over a broken swastika. 

Impressive.

Not a monument, but at 30m high, a monumental sculpture, Jonathan Borofosky’s Molecule Man stands in the River Spree close to Treptower Park.

 

Further West, in Tiergarten is another Soviet War Memorial. This one, erected in 1945, comprises a curved structure topped by a statue of a Soviet soldier, flanked by a pair of Howitzer guns and a pair of T-34 tanks!

Two more memorials are nearby – on the edge of the Tiergarten is The Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism...

and near to Berlin’s most famous monument: The Brandenburger Tor...

is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (designed by Peter Eisenman and Burro Happold.

The Brandenburger Tor stands at the end of Unter den Linden on which are to be found Bebelplatz - the site of one of the Nazi's book burnings, now memorialised by the Empty Library  by MichaUllman: a glass plate set into the cobbles looking into a room of empty shelves, big enough to hold the estimated 20,000 burned books...

 and the 'NeueWache', the sublime neo-classical  memorial to victims of war, by Karl Friedrich Schinkel: the interior is an austere, plain but beautiful space containing only Käthe Kollwitz's Mother with her Dead Son and lit by a central, circular opening in the ceiling. 

Finally, I paid my respects to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, sculpted by Ludwig Engelhardt for the Marx-Engels-Forum between Alexanderplatz and the Spree river.