헨리 아담스가 쓴 기사의 내용은 현재 아이오와 주립대 (University of Iowa) 미술관 (http://www.uiowa.edu/uima/) 이 소장하는 잭슨 폴락의 벽화에 Jackson Pollack 라는 이름이 숨겨져 있다는 것이다.
위의 작품에서 jackson pollack 라는 글자를 찾아 낼수 있으신지?
이에 대한 평도 제각각인데, 대략 'Gold is where you find it' 이 되겠다. :-) jackson pollack 을 찾아내고 싶으면 어떤식으로든 그것을 찾아 낼 것이고, 다른 글자들을 조합해내려고 한다면 역시 그것을 조합해 낼 것이다. 내 눈에는 온통 나체의 여성들이 뒤 섞여 있는것처럼 보이기도 한다. 사람들이 이 그림에서 여러가지를 상상해 낸다는 사실이 내게는 오히려 재미있게 여겨진다. 잭슬 폴락이 대단한 사람이긴 한가보다.
아 그나저나 페기 구겐하임이 소장하다가 아이오와 주립대에 기증한 이 그림은 대략 1억 4000만 달러 (1달러=1000원으로만 계산해도 대략 천사백억 원 (나 이거 계산 잘 못해서 종이에 동그라미 그려가면서 환산했다) 정도로 가늠이 되고 있다. 2008년 여름에 아이오와에 물난리가 나서 당시 아이오와 주립대의 예술대 건물들이 물에 잠기는 사태가 발생했는데, 당시 이곳의 미술관도 피해를 면치 못했을 것이다. 어떤 이들은 이 그림을 팔아서 미술관을 살리자는 논의를 하기도 한다고 전해진다.
기사 원문 카피
It was my wife, Marianne Berardi, who first saw the letters.
We were looking at a reproduction of Jackson Pollock's breakthrough work, Mural, an 8-by 20-foot canvas bursting with physical energy that, in 1943, was unlike anything seen before.
The critic Clement Greenberg, Pollock's principal champion, said he took one look at the painting and realized that "Jackson was the greatest painter this country has produced." A Museum of Modern Art curator, the late Kirk Varnedoe, said Mural established Jackson Pollock as the world's premier modern painter.
I was researching a book about Pollock's lifelong relationship with his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, the famed regionalist and muralist, when I sat puzzling over a reproduction of Mural after breakfast one morning with Marianne, herself an art historian. She suddenly said she could make out the letters S-O-N in blackish paint in the upper right area of the mural. Then she realized JACKSON ran across the entire top. And finally she saw POLLOCK below that.
The characters are unorthodox, even ambiguous, and largely hidden. But, she pointed out, it could hardly be random coincidence to find just those letters in that sequence.
I was flabbergasted. It's not every day that you see something new in one of the 20th century's most important artworks.
I'm now convinced that Pollock wrote his name in large letters on the canvas—indeed, arranged the whole painting around his name. As far as I can tell, no one has previously made this assertion. Nor is there evidence that Pollock himself, who was loath to talk about his art and left behind few written records, ever mentioned this coded gesture.
I've shared my theory with several Pollock experts. They've had mixed reactions, from "no way" to "far-fetched" to "maybe."
"It's feasible," says Sue Taylor, an art historian at Portland State University, who has studied Pollock's 1942 canvas Stenographic Figure, which includes written symbols. "Pollock would often begin with some sort of figurative device to which he would then respond—and eventually bury under layers of paint. Letters and numbers, moreover, frequently appear in works of the early 1940s."
It may not be possible to answer the question definitively unless scientists use X-ray scanning or some other method to trace which pigments were put down first. At the moment there are no plans to do such an analysis.
If my theory holds up, it has many implications. Mural, commissioned by the collector Peggy Guggenheim for her New York City apartment, is the stuff of legend. Owned by the University of Iowa since Guggenheim donated it in 1948, the painting is said to be worth $140 million. (A later Jackson Pollock painting, Number 5, 1948, reportedly sold in 2006 for $140 million—the highest price ever paid for a work of art.) Mural is so central to the Pollock mystique that in the 2000 movie Pollock, the artist (played by Ed Harris), having stared perplexedly at a giant empty canvas for months, executes Mural in a single session the night before it's due to be delivered. That (standard) version of events, originally advanced by Pollock's wife, the artist Lee Krasner, reinforces the image of Pollock as an anguished, spontaneous genius. But the art critic Francis V. O'Connor has debunked the story, saying Pollock probably executed Mural during the summer of 1943, not in one night in late December.
Pollock's possibly writing his name in Mural testifies to an overlooked feature of his works: they have a structure, contrary to the popular notion that they could be done by any 5-year-old with a knack for splatters. In my view, Pollock organized the painting around his name according to a compositional system—vertical markings that serve as the loci of rhythmic spirals—borrowed directly from his mentor, Benton.
Pollock had studied under Benton for two years and once told a friend that he wanted Mural to be comparable to a Benton work, though he didn't have the technical ability to make a great realistic mural and needed to do something different.
I have found no evidence that Pollock wrote his name in such fashion on any other canvas. In a way, that makes sense. To Pollock, I think, Mural announced that he was replacing Benton, a father figure whom he once described as "the foremost American painter today." It was Pollock's way of making a name for himself.
Henry Adams is the author of Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, to be published in November by Bloomsbury Press.
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