Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series)

Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) Read Online Free PDF
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
such a tableau had been demanded by the passions of himself and his century. He had been meticulously trained in his craft by, among others, that most exacting American master of representational art, a genius of antimodernism, Thomas Hart Benton.
    “Pollock was a civilian throughout World War II, although in the prime of life. He was rejected for military service, possibly because of his alcoholism, which he would conquer from time to time. He went without a drink, for example, from 1948 through 1950. He continued to paint and teach and study during the war, when the careers of so many of his American colleagues were disrupted, and when painters his own age in Europe had been forbidden by dictators to paint as they pleased, and used as fodder for cannons and crematoria and so on.
    “So—while Pollock is notorious for having broken with the past, he was one of the few young artists who during the war pondered art history uninterruptedly and in peace speculated as to what the future of art might be.
    “He should be astonishing even to people who do not care about painting—for this reason: He surrendered his will to his unconscious as he went about his job. He wrote this in 1947, eight years after the death of Sigmund Freud: ‘When I am
in
my painting, I’m not aware of what I am doing.’ It might be said that he painted religious themes during a time of enthusiasm in the Occident for peace and harmony to be found, supposedly, in a state which was neither sleep nor wakefulness, to be achieved through meditation.
    “He was unique among founders of important art movements, in that his colleagues and followers did not lay on paint as he did. French Impressionists painted a lot alike, and Cubists painted a lot alike, and were supposed to, since the revolutions in which they took part were, for all their spiritual implications, quite narrowly technical. But Pollock did not animate a school of dribblers. He was the only one. The artists who felt themselves at least somewhat in his debt made pictures as madly various as the wildlife of Africa—Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning and James Brooks and Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman and on and on. Those named, by the way, were personal friends of Pollock’s. All vigorous schools of art, it would seem, start with artificial extended families. What bonded Pollock’s particular family was not agreement as to what, generally, a picture should look like. Its members were unanimous, though, as to where inspiration should come from: the unconscious, that part of the mind which was lively, but which caught no likenesses, had no morals or politics, and had no tired old stories to tell yet again.
    “James Brooks, at seventy-seven a dean of the movement, described in conversation with me the ideal set of mind for a painter who wishes to link his or her hands to the unconscious, as Pollock did: ‘I must lay on the first stroke of paint. After that, I insist that the canvas do at least half the work.’
    “The canvas, which is to say the unconscious, considers that first stroke, and then it tells the painter’s hand how to respond to it—with a shape of a certain color and texture at that point there. And then, if all is going well, the canvas ponders this addition and comes up with further recommendations. The canvas becomes a Ouija board.
    “Was there ever a more cunning experiment devised to make the unconscious reveal itself? Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one: that there is a part of the mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless is expert on what is beautiful?
    “Has any theory of artistic inspiration ever urged painters so vehemently, while they worked, to ignore life itself—to ignore life utterly? In all the Abstract Expressionist paintings in museums and on the walls of art lovers, and in the vaults of speculators, there is very little to suggest a hand or a face, say, or a
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