e in Vanity fair un story despre o pictura controversata, Red, Black & Silver, al carui autor inca se mai discuta daca este sau nu Jackson Pollock.
pictura s-a aflat pina acum 2 ani in posesia amantei lui Pollock, Ruth Kligman (care amurit in 2010) si urmeaza sa fie scoasa la licitatie in septembrie.
cum ultimul Pollock licitat s-a vindut cu 140 milioane de dolari, e de inteles de ce acest tablou si controversa din spatele lui suscita mare interes.
mai jos e un fragment genial din articol, in care autoarea, Lesley M. M. Blume, incearca sa o caracterizeze pe Ruth fara sa numeasca direct ce fel de om se spunea ca este. e minunata tehnica doamnei Blume de a descrie ceva, prin fapte, nu prin vorbe, iar tot articolul reuseste o performanta rara: vorbeste despre evaluari de picturi, despre critici de arta, despre context in istoria artei, pe foarte multe pagini, dar are suspence si e minunat- accesibil- placut de citit.
inainte de a citi fragmentul de mai jos, va rog sa nu o condamnati pe Ruth pentru alegerile ei; nu stiu cite dintre femeile pe care le cunosc ar fi rezistat tentatiei de a fi nevasta unui geniu. sau amanta.
In 1956, Kligman was a 26-year-old art student, working at a minor Midtown Manhattan gallery. A voluptuous former Seventh Avenue model, she was said to strongly resemble screen sirens Elizabeth Taylor and Rita Hayworth. Pollock biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith state in Jackson Pollock: An American Saga that Kligman, as a child, had fantasized about becoming a great artist—and, just as frequently, about being “the wife or mistress of a genius.” Artist Audrey Flack recalls that in early 1956 Kligman befriended her and asked her to explain the nuances of the New York art scene.
“Ruth asked, Who are the best artists, who should I know, [and] in what order—one, two, and three?” Flack says. “I said, ‘Jackson Pollock, Bill de Kooning, and Franz Kline,’ and told her they all go to the Cedar Bar. She said, ‘I gotta meet Pollock.’ I took a piece of paper and drew a map. I told her, ‘This is where Pollock sits at the bar,’ and what he looked like. That night, she goes to the bar and meets him, all set for it. It was very, very pre-determined.” In her 1974 book, Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock, Kligman would assert that her Cedar Bar meeting with Pollock had been coincidental, and that “he had meant so much to me for so long as a heroic figure.”
For Pollock, 1956 was a year of eclipse. To many in the art world, it appeared that the artist had passed the pinnacle of his career. The art critic Clement Greenberg—Pollock’s onetime champion—would later say that by this time “Jackson knew he’d lost the stuff” and was “never going to come back.” Pollock was drinking heavily and had fallen into an abyss of nonproductivity; he was in a “death trance,” according to another biographer friend, Jeffrey Potter.
Pollock’s marriage to Lee Krasner had dramatically unraveled. Krasner, enraged by her husband’s affair with Kligman, decamped to Europe that summer. Kligman promptly moved into the Pollock-Krasner home in the Springs, a hamlet in East Hampton—by some accounts, on the very day that Krasner boarded a transatlantic ocean liner. One source says that Kligman hung her clothes in Krasner’s closet and set up shop in her painting studio.
