The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present five drawings by American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) in connection with its landmark exhibition of works by the great 16th-century painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614) -known to posterity as El Greco. The drawings will be on view in the Museum's Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery for the duration of the El Greco exhibition, from October 7, 2003 through January 11, 2004.
Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum, stated: "The work
of El Greco was decried for its extravagance until 19th-century Romantics and such artists as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin renewed an emphasis on individual expression. More recently, El Greco exerted a profound influence on the major proponents of 20th-century modernism, including Jackson Pollock, who, three centuries after the Spanish Mannerist's death, was so moved as to have made drawings after the great master."
El Greco, one of the most original artists of his age, was celebrated for his
highly expressive and visionary religious paintings. The Metropolitan's international loan exhibition will place particular emphasis on his late works, in which mystical content, expressive distortions, and monumental scale are taken to even greater extremes. The
five Pollock drawings on view will emphasize the inherent rhythm and bold dynamism
of El Greco's style and foreshadow similar qualities in the modern artist's great "drip" paintings of 1947-1950.
Four paintings on view in the Metropolitan's El Greco exhibition provided inspiration
for three of the drawings on view in the neighboring Johnson Gallery. They are The Annunciation (about 1597-1600, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), The Opening of the Fifth Seal (The Vision of Saint John) (1608-14, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Laocoön (early 1610s, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and Christ Healing the Blind (about 1570-5, Galleria Nazionale, Parma).
Jackson Pollock, the premier Abstract Expressionist artist of his generation, studied (early in his career) with the well-known Regionalist, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975). Following his teacher's methods, Pollock made diagrammatic drawings after the great works of Old Masters using geometric forms. Pollock especially admired El Greco and made no fewer than 28 sketches after paintings by the Spanish master. Although Pollock undoubtedly saw examples of El Greco's work at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, he never traveled abroad and copied black-and-white reproductions from art books that
he owned.
The drawings on view come from two early Pollock sketchbooks acquired by the Museum in 1990 from the estate of the artist's widow, Lee Krasner Pollock. They were unbound for reasons of conservation before the Metropolitan Museum acquired them.
The installation of Jackson Pollock drawings was organized by Samantha Rippner, Assistant Curator in the Metropolitan's Department of Drawings and Prints.
In 1997 the Museum published facsimiles of Pollock's early sketchbooks, which are boxed together with an 88-page book containing essays by Katharine Baetjer,
Curator, European Paintings; Lisa Mintz Messinger, Associate Curator, Modern Art; and Nan Rosenthal, Consultant, Modern Art, all of the Metropolitan Museum. The limited-edition boxed set is available for sale in the Mezzanine Gallery of the Museum's bookshop.
El Greco is funded by the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation in celebration of its 25th Anniversary.
The exhibition has been organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the National Gallery, London.
An indemnity has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
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