Foreground: Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2019 (acrylic paint on fabric) - Background: Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943 (oil paint and milk paint on canvas)
At the MFA through February 23, 2020 is a two-painting exhibition titled Mural: Jackson Pollock | Katharina Grosse. Pollock's work is the 1943 masterpiece Mural, an 8' x 20' oil-and-milk-paint canvas that Peggy Guggenheim had commissioned him to create for the hallway of her apartment in Manhattan while he was still an unknown janitor. The painting filled an entire wall there until Guggenheim relocated to Venice in 1947 and donated the work to the University of Iowa. German painter Katharina Grosse's 2019 work Untitled is a 16' x 48' acrylic-on-fabric installation commissioned by the MFA. Like flowing stained glass, its mass hangs from the museum gallery's ceiling and drapes onto its floor. Notably, the work can be viewed from front and back.
The MFA was brilliant in hanging the two paintings in one gallery, but not for the reason suggested by the show's title. Neither work is a mural, which is a painting applied directly to a wall; neither is some "anti-mural" statement despite suggestions made by the museum’s wall text and video; and neither tackles the issues of permanent placement. What Mural and Untitled do have in common, however, are that they are grandly gestural and coexist within the vernacular of landscape painting. Rather than centering the show around a misplaced thematic concept, the MFA might have done better by focusing on how two such dissimilar paintings can be experienced as landscapes. It would have decoupled the works from each other but done nothing to de-legitimize their being the basis for an exhibition. Since the museum did not do that, I will with the intention of encouraging people to view the extraordinary paintings for themselves.
Jackson Pollock, Canvas, 1943 (oil paint and milk paint on canvas) - 6’ 8” x 19' 10"
It is futile to try to reckon with art entirely by pondering why an artist has created a specific image; art is ambiguous and its creators’ minds are too complex for us to draw comprehensive relationships between them. When we try, we might find some connections, but they can only partially inform our experience of what is in front of us. The rest is up to us. Such is the case with Jackson Pollock, a man of great emotion and intellect who absorbed theosophy, Wassily Kandinsky’s spiritual writings and Jungian theory. In interviews he frequently discussed North American indigenous shamanism and the belief of Pacific Northwest Indians that spirits animate everything in nature. Pollock, who maintained that he would enter trance states while painting, considered the physical world a veil that concealed an enduring, force – or set of forces – permeating everything. He could not fully represent this invisible realm, but he was a master of orienting us toward it. His paintings from the mid-1940s onward are open-ended invitations for us to reconsider what is real. That journey remains our own.
Mural lifted Pollock out of obscurity because it was commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim, who was a well-known art collector and insatiable socialite. Looking at the painting, we should bear in mind that it originally hung only a few inches off the floor and that Pollock had intended it to be seen up close, for Guggenheim’s entry hall was only 13' wide. Serving as a vertical framework is a procession of stick figures that would have stood on about the same plane as visitors to Guggenheim’s apartment. The procession anchors Mural in the genre of landscape painting; and the land they inhabit is one of emergence and disappearance. Here thickets, eddies and ribbons of paint briefly settle into letters, biomorphic forms and disembodied faces that rise and fade as we walk the painting’s length. These combined details suggest a space in which time, generation and spirits are perpetual and entwined. In that respect Mural befit the nature of Peggy Guggenheim’s home where, through circumstances of wealth and war, expatriates, artists and intellectuals converged to drink, commingle thoughts and then disburse – one day after the next.
Today the artist, his patron and members of her circle are gone. Mural, however, has outlived the specifics of its origin and placement. From the confines of museum walls, it still points in the direction of something essential.
Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2019 (acrylic paint on fabric) - detail
Grosse's painting Untitled is differently and equally engaging. By using a permeable fabric and thin spray paint, she could compose on one side of the work and let a reverse image bleed through to the other side. From there Grosse applied more paint - apparently to both sides - without a bleed. The artist is a master of her materials and this was no aesthetic gimmick. The difference between the painting’s two sides is more than a reversal of image; it is also an energetic reversal of place. Seen from the front, Untitled reads as a landscape, where flora, geology and shafts of light converge as they might in forests and on mountainsides. On its reverse, color and complexity remain but there is more empty space, out of which emerge suggestions of urban structures and roadway interchanges, of sound and movement. In this work Grosse performs the remarkable feat of presenting two versions of the world we inhabit, each imbued with its own sense of place and purpose. Walk slowly around Untitled and you will feel part of a binary environment much bigger than yourself.
When you have an hour or two, pay a visit to Mural: Jackson Pollock | Katharina Grosse. The MFA deserves praise for presenting the artists’ works side by side. Nonetheless, my suggestion would be that, once there, you move beyond the show’s title and much of the its explanatory material. Neither sheds light on what is in front of you. Try this instead. Walk the gallery mindfully and know that, like three-dimensional landscapes, the multifaceted nature of these paintings can produce moments of wonder and knowing.
Jim Kiely