The Fate Of A Gesture: Jackson Pollock And Postwar American Art - Softcover

Ratcliff, Carter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813335442 ISBN 13: 9780813335445

Publisher: Westview Press, 1998

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

About the Author:

Carter Ratcliff is an award-winning art critic who has published several books on diverse American artists, including Andy Warhol, John Singer Sargent, Pat Steir, and Robert Longo. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Art Critics grant, and the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association.

About this edition

• Publisher: Westview Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0813335442
• ISBN 13: 9780813335445
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 372