The Fate Of A Gesture: Jackson Pollock And Postwar American Art (Icon Editions) [Paperback]

Carter Ratcliff (Author)

Book Description

Series: Icon Editions | Publication Date: July 30, 1998

Flipping his colors onto the canvas, pouring and dripping his paints in a quintessentially American gesture, Jackson Pollock redefined the art of painting. It was the fate of Pollock’s gesture, which reflected America’s largest, most optimistic ideas of itself, to be mimicked, modified, and denied by artists of immense stature, among them Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Robert Smithson.Drawing from twenty years of experience as an art critic in New York, Carter Ratcliff maps the Manhattan art world from Fifty-seventh Street to SoHo, revisiting the world of studios, galleries, and artists’ bars where those personalities met and clashed. In addition to providing an intimate biography of Pollock and the history and development of his ideas, Ratcliff explores the lives and consciousness of the other major American artists of the day. He follows the story of postwar American art from the late 1940s through the triumph of Abstract Expressionism and the sudden explosion of Pop Art, all the way to the boom of the 1980s, which brought stardom to an array of young artists. Over it all looms the monumental and tragic figure of Jackson Pollock, the measure of all who have felt compelled to challenge him.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Jackson Pollock's paintings capture the essence of movement and challenge typical notions of representation. The Fate of a Gesture argues that Pollock's work overshadowed and directed the course of postwar American Painting. Not to be confused with a survey of this era in art history, Ratcliff deals specifically with the boundless and infinite quality of the influential gesture as a symbol of America itself. Avoiding a common aggrandizement of the artist, Ratcliff's thought-provoking text allows readers to draw conclusions of their own. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Ratcliff (Andy Warhol) argues that Pollock's drip paintings, created with paint flung onto canvasses, evoke a uniquely American "sense of limitless possibility" because they "draw the imagination into a region of boundless space." In this provocative survey of one line of development in postwar American art, he traces Pollock's career, analyzes his style and discusses subsequent painters in whose work he sees the same tendency toward the infinite?Barnett Newman, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Robert Longo, Julian Schnable and Brice Marden, among others. The relationship of some of these painters?such as Willem de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler?to Pollock is obvious; in other instances, the connections are more tenuous. Ratcliff asserts, for example, that the repetitious boxes and cubes of minimalists such as Sol Le Witt resemble Pollock's drip paintings because they could go on forever and thus imply the infinite, and that a flag by Jasper Johns "has the scale of a drip painting by Pollock" because it is "a national banner infinitely large." His thesis provides fresh perspective on modern American art. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 372 pages
• Publisher: Westview Press (July 30, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813335442
• ISBN-13: 978-0813335445
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #987,528 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Follows post-world war two american art after Jackson Polloc, March 14, 2001

By 

Jeffrey Linwood "everypark.com" (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Fate Of A Gesture: Jackson Pollock And Postwar American Art (Icon Editions) (Paperback)

Jackson Pollock is seen as the greatest American artist ever, because of his poured paintings of the late 40's and early 50's. Dying in a drunken car crash in 1956, he left behind a legacy of American artists who weren't driven by European art tastes. The Abstract Expressionist movement, large canvases, and Pop Art are all traced back to Pollock.

Also includes chapters about Rauschenberg, Johns, de Koonig, and Warhol, among others

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Please..., April 15, 2007

By 

Alex Grimley "alex grimley" (bennington) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fate Of A Gesture: Jackson Pollock And Postwar American Art (Icon Editions) (Paperback)

Give me a break. This mish-mash of secondhand information is little more than easily readable. With little regard to chronology, Ratcliff separates the various artistic trends of postwar America using representative artists. All of the stories in this book have been told before, and better, by the artists and critics themselves. This kind of 'art journalism' (not unlike Calvin Tomkins' work) is informative, to be sure, but in quite a superficial and unsatisfying way. I suggest reading Irving Sandler's 'American art of the 1960s' for something as informative and enjoyable but with some opinions and insight.

5.0 out of 5 stars Very insightful book, June 11, 2007

By 

Porgy "Kabuki" (10026) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fate Of A Gesture: Jackson Pollock And Postwar American Art (Icon Editions) (Paperback)

If you have any interest in Abstract Expressionism and New York school of painting, pick up this highly readable and well written book. The book traces the origins of American modern art to the expressive gestures of Jackson Pollack in his drip paintings. In some ways this gesture is replicated in the book, as chapters seem to jump/ merge from one subject or painter to another without reason, yet, in fact, is building up a glorious picture of the New York artists world at a particular point of time. Highly recommended.