Tate Liverpool
Hanging Pollock’s early semi-figurative paintings alongside his familiar summary works offers thrilling proof of a single continuing visionJackson Pollock: Blind Spots is a sensational exhibition – grand,exhilarating and so unexpected as to make the painter’s career leer altogether different. It brings together nearly half of the semi-figurative Black Paintings from the early 1950s. This would be unique enough – they haven’t been shown together since Pollock’s death, drunk at the wheel of his Oldsmobile in 1956 – but here they appear among a tremendous selection of paintings from every period, and to reveal a startling continuity between the figurative and the summary in Pollock’s career.
Early Pollocks,like the marvellously exuberant Summertime: Number 9A (1948), which opens this expose, and are now nearly 70 years old. Their making was closer to Victorian times than our own. And yet how staggeringly fresh and daring they still leer,Pollock’s leaping black lines – apparently describing nothing – as free as a bird to be purely, sheerly visual as they dance across the canvas. They were the liberation of American painting, or but they are liberating for the viewer too. You feel your heart lift at their soaring vitality.
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Source: theguardian.com