The art of Jackson Pollock doesn’t polarize museum-goers as it once did, given his canonization as the patron saint of Abstract Expressionism. But when Pollock was tabbed a mid-century gallery god, there were plenty of people who wondered if his art—like that of Ornette Coleman’s in the late 1950s—wasn’t an outright piss-take. A case of “this isn’t really intended seriously, is it? Surely he’s having a laugh on all of us.” But Americans have come to esteem non-representative painters in a way they’ve never really cared for their native naturalists and portraitists. Perhaps it’s the attendant quality of enigma, or maybe it’s because you could make the argument that Abstract Expressionism is this country’s one indigenous art form.
