No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock [Paperback]

David Anfam (Author), Susan Davidson (Author), Margaret Ellis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 2005

While legendary artist Jackson Pollock has been comprehensively investigated in recent shows, a focused exhibition examining his drawings has not been organized since 1980. No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper features a compelling group of 75 artworks drawn from the holdings of institutions and private collections worldwide. Curated by Susan Davidson, this long-awaited exhibition to be held at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Guggenheim Bilbao and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice considers the artist's works on paper as an essential component in his signature transformation of the traditional figurative line into a non-figurative graphic expression. This catalogue of the exhibiton begins chronologically with Pollock's early sketchbook studies based on old master paintings by Michelangelo and El Greco, as well as those influenced by his contemporaries, mainly the Mexican muralists Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. These early works reveal a figurative treatment that Pollock ultimately rejected as he moved at first toward pieces that mirrored his advancements in painting, and eventually, by late 1947, to abstract compositions. Throughout his career, Pollock experimented with different media on paper, alternating the same themes on watercolor and lithography, and later adding gouache to engravings to provide interesting variations. In the last years of his life, Pollock's fascination with different types of paper led him to special handmade sheets that allowed the paint to permeate below the main layer, thus achieving fortuitous variations of his well-known poured painting technique. This fully illustrated catalogue, which shows the full range of Pollock's works on paper, includes a reassessment of his skills as a draftsman by David Anfam, a noted scholar of Abstract Expressionism. Susan Davidson contributes a text that focuses on Pollock's stylistic development and the reception of his works on paper during his lifetime. A technical analysis of Pollock's working method is provided by Margaret Hoben Ellis.

Product Details

• Paperback: 140 pages
• Publisher: Guggenheim Museum (April 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0892073268
• ISBN-13: 978-0892073269
• Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 9.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,092,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars development of Pollock's art style, April 30, 2005

By 

Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock (Paperback)

The German subtitle translates "works on papers." The three essays in German discuss the tools, materials, and techniques Pollock used for his art works on paper. The third essay has photographs of pencils, felt-tip pens, and eye droppers this major modern artist used in creating such works. Seventy-eight are pictured in color one per page in chronological order in one gallery-like section of this larger, rectangular-shaped book. Pollock's works are familiar, and need no general commentary. The more-focused, particularly revealing artistic theme of the essays is Pollock's liberty with lines, or edges. As the numerous works on paper show, his progress in this technique and impulse gave him unprecedented freedom and novelty as an artist. One follows the expansion of Pollock's liberty with line and corresponding new dimensions of artistic freedom over the course of this time. Early, roughly representational works and others indicating the probable influence of Miro and de Kooning lead to the more complex, abstract art that is regarded as typifying Pollock. The chronological presentation and analytic essays (in German) allow one to gain a particularly revealing understanding of the artistic achievement of this groundbreaking modern artist. The work is the catalog for an exhibition of these works of Pollock's that was in Germany and is in New York until the Fall 2005.