JACKSON POLLOCK'S 

FULL FATHOM FIVE 

An Appreciation by Gene Vincent

FULL FATHOM FIVE

The non-objective paintings of Pollock are not devoted entirely to joy or sorrow. With means continually more inventive and radical, he pushed a wide range of expressive utterances to remarkably personal lengths. Despite his intense activity, the works never became categorical or doctrinaire. Each is an individual, a single experience. Full Fathom Five is full of nostalgia, its dominant color a green that is like a reminiscence of blue, with linear trailings of black, flowery-white and aluminum, with exclamations of orange, and a number of extraneous objects imbedded in the surface, like souvenirs of accident: a cigarette, half its paper torn off to expose the tobacco, two keys, nails, a cluster of tacks, and paint-tube tops making little blind eyes here and there. Earlier the “eyes” were painted to a more Expressionistic effect in Eyes in the Heat, and they also are hinted at in the heavy impasto of Shimmering Substance. Cathedral is brilliant, clear, incisive, public—its brightness and its linear speed protect and signify, like the facade of a religious edifice, or, in another context, the mirror in the belly of an African fetish, the mysterious importance of its interior meaning (as anticipated in Magic Mirror, another “white” painting of 1941). Eyes in the Heat II, on the other hand, is a maelstrom of fiery silver; it is one of those works of Pollock, like Shimmering Substance, 1946, and the White Light, which has a blazing, acrid and dangerous glamor of a legendary kind, not unlike those volcanoes which are said to lure the native to the lip of the crater and, by the beauty of their writhings and the strength of their fumes, cause him to fall in. These smaller paintings are the femmes fatales of his work.