Charles Pollock New Mexico 1956 photo Sylvia Winter © Charles Pollock Archives
Charles Jackson © Charles Pollock Archives
The first exhibition in Italy and the first full retrospective of
the painting of Charles Pollock, oldest brother of Jackson Pollock. The majority of the more
than 120 paintings, sketches, drawings, photographs, and documents, some never before
exhibited, are loaned by the Charles Pollock Archives, Paris, thanks to the artist’s widow and
daughter, Sylvia Winter Pollock and Francesca Pollock. A small number of works by Jackson
Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton and two works by Sanford McCoy complement Charles’s early
years in New York and Washington, shedding light on what amounted to a family enterprise—
studying to be artists—of the Pollock family before World War II. Additional loans come from
other members of the Pollock family, from the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian
Institution, the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, The Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, the O'Brien American Art Collection, Sewickley, the
American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich and several private collections.
Fireworks 1950 © Charles Pollock Archives
Homage to Mexico 1955 © Charles Pollock Archives
The story of Charles Pollock (b. Denver, Colorado, 1902; d. Paris, France, 1988) is extremely
interesting, exemplifying what has been called ‘the American Century’. The oldest of the five
sons of LeRoy and Stella Pollock, he moved to New York in 1926, where he studied art under
Thomas Hart Benton. In 1930, he and his brother Frank persuaded their youngest brother,
Jackson, to join them there. Charles’s studies at the Art Students League, his social
commitment, Regionalist content, and mural work for the Works Progress Administration – the
largest and most ambitious American New Deal agency employing millions of unemployed
people to carry out public works projects – make his biography prototypical of artists’
experiences in the decade of the 1930s. In 1935-36 he left New York for Washington, DC to
work for the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal U.S. federal agency, alongside Ben
Shahn, moving in 1937 to Detroit where he worked on the weekly newspaper of the Union of
Automobile Workers. These choices disconnected him from the emerging group of avant-garde
painters in New York, the same that was eventually to engender Jackson Pollock’s
‘breakthrough’ to a new art in the late 1940s. No less characteristic of American art of the time
was Charles’s crisis of confidence in Regionalist painting in 1944, following the completion of
a mural at Michigan State University, East Lansing, and his transfer to abstraction (reversing
Benton’s rejection of Synchromist abstraction around 1919). After a period of teaching design
and typography in Michigan in the late 1940s, he made his first major abstract painting
(Fireworks, 1950). In 1956, he produced his first substantial body of abstract work, the Chapala
series, inspired by a protracted stay on Lake Chapala in Mexico. In 1962-63, on a sabbatical
year from his teaching commitments he traveled to Europe—the first of the Pollock brothers to
do so. Settling in Rome, he traveled extensively to see the Italian old masters and met American
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni Dorsoduro 701 30123 Venezia (39) 041 2405 415 guggenheim-venice.it
and Italian artists such as Piero Dorazio, Giulio Turcato, the Pomodoro brothers, James Brooks
and Giorgio Cavallon, He produced another substantial group of color abstractions, the Rome
series. In the mid 1960s, Charles and his wife Sylvia, now befriended by Clement Greenberg,
brought artists such as Dorazio, Tony Caro, and Barnett Newman to Michigan. Henceforth, with
regular exhibitions, a growing body of accomplished paintings, and a widening circle of
colleagues, Charles connected to avant-garde art, that of color-field, post-painterly abstraction,
from which he had broken a generation earlier. He continued to make superb color abstractions
after his move to Paris in 1971.
Collage 1959 © Charles Pollock Archives
The catalogue (Italian and English, 212 pp. Marsilio Editore, Venice) republishes an exhaustive
essay by Terence Maloon (first published in The Art of Charles Pollock, Sweet Reason, Ball
State University Art Museum, Muncie, Indiana, 2002), leading authority on the art of Charles
Pollock, and includes an anthology and commentary of Pollock family letters selected by
Kirstin Hübner from American Letters 1927-1947, Jackson Pollock and Family, Cambridge
(UK), Polity Press, 2011.
Charles Pollock: A Retrospective is one of three exhibitions promoted by the Peggy
Guggenheim Collection to celebrate both Jackson and Charles Pollock. From February 14
through April 6 the museum presented Alchemy by Jackson Pollock. Discovering the Artist at
Work, and from April 23 through November 9, the museum hosts also Jackson Pollock’s
Mural: Energy Made Visible. All three exhibitions enjoy the patronage of the U.S. Mission to
Italy and the support of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York.
Black and Grey 7 1960 © Charles Pollock Archives
Untitled Black 1961© Charles Pollock Archives
Rome Eight 1962 © Charles Pollock Archives
Untitled Post Rome Blue Green Black 1964 © Charles Pollock Archives
Delta 1967 © Charles Pollock Archives
lOVE all these, thanks for sharing
ReplyDeleteReally interesting and didn't have a clue Jackson had a brother who was also a painter..shame he doesn't get similar recognition for his work. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteHi Siobhan, I didn't either hence the post. I think Jackson's work was more inventive and his manipulation of paint more impressive but Charles's work certainly deserves wider acclaim.
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