This document provides a critique of Jackson Pollock's painting One. It argues that while previous art movements built upon each other to further explore how humans can express their view of the world, Pollock's painting celebrates the absence of meaning through its unpredictable splatters and drizzles. The critique asserts that Pollock squandered the opportunity to provide meaning for a postwar culture hungry for it. Instead, Pollock demonstrated that art meant nothing other than a raw experience for which the subject was irrelevant.

1. Critique of Jackson Pollock’s One
J A M E S W W A D D O M S
If it is true that the worshipful Gothic elevated the dowager Romanesque, both literally and
artistically; if it can be said of the Florentine Renaissance that the patronage of an affluent
merchant class made possible the stylistic experiments of Ghiberti, Angelico, and Botticelli; if it
may be accepted of the High Renaissance that craftsmen achieved recognition as Artists whose
new titular capitalization spoke to the shifting influence of the rendering of beauty from the
qualities of the subject to the skills of its interpreter; and if it is permitted that the various ‘isms’
as definitions of Artists’ many perceptions of their world allowed for the penultimate achievement
of Art as a distinct field of endeavor independent of the needs of its observers, then Jackson
Pollock represents that sad, fatalistic and ultimate achievement of art at its historical impasse.
Completing a full circle from the ancient Egyptian copyist, Pollock uses the perceived stalemate of
20th century art to honor himself, with devastating consequences. Instead of building upon
precedent, Pollock demonstrated that for him
there was nothing left of Art but stalemate, and
his compulsion to ‘create’ without regard to
subject or style leaves the observer of One to
wonder if the composition’s artful splatter and
calculated dribbling is of any real significance.
The pedantic sophistry of this work stands in
sharp relief to the attempt at dialectic which the
recent ‘isms’ had shared with the grand and
evolving story of art, a tale described by some as
a succession of attempts to solve artistic
problems. The Greeks inherited and solved the problem of foreshortening. The Romans
completed the development of classical architecture. The impressionists, fauvists, cubists,
dadaists and surrealists all continued the work of exploring the ways in which man could express
his view of contemporary surroundings. Thus, the next step in the evolution of art, should Pollock
have intended his work as such a next step, would necessarily involve the recognition that the
voices which previously had been championing the story of art as the story of the human
condition had quieted in a postwar world where things no longer made sense. Jackson Pollock,
with the unease of an dinner guest who dreads a lull in conversation, thrust One upon the world
with much more concern that he be heard than the substance and cacophony of his conversation.
Pollock squanders the unique positioning of mid-20th century culture’s confluence in a
public hungry for meaning. Pollock’s One is a celebration of the absence of meaning, instead
embracing nihilism and dissonance. The post-World War II culture of Europe was certainly tired
of the divisiveness which had plagued the continent for thousands of years and which had most
recently incited the blind nationalism and despotic messiahs who sowed the seeds of conflict. But
it also cherished its past, illustrated in the looting of paintings from conquered lands by Nazi
Germany; the country of Holbein the younger and Durer had felt the pangs of secular oblation so
strongly that it could only sate itself with the absorption of the great masters of Europe into the

2. German pantheon. It was in the wake of this atmosphere that Pollock tried to prove that Art
meant nothing except a raw experience for which a subject was irrelevant. Pollock, who had
proven himself in the 1940’s as an artist of considerable skill within the abstract expressionist
movement, relinquishes his Art to the unpredictability of contrived wrist motions and sweeping
drizzlings.
The Artist, in the great irony of abstract expressionism, proved that Art cannot exist
without a subject, whether physically extant on the canvas, or as an object of human controversy
in the academic arena or the coffeehouses of 60’s counterculture. The subject of One is not the
omission of form or the attempt for nothingness, but rather, it is the opposite, it is the unblinking
dissection of the motives for its creation and success, the will of the Artist and the willingness of
his public to share in his posterity.