The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Post-War American Art

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. (Dec.)