The Travelling Toe: Dallas Museum of Art: "Blind Spots" by Jackson Pollock

DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART

Dallas Museum of Art

On a cold, rainy week day The Travelling Toe and a Dear Friend ventured out to bravely face the icky weather conditions along with the ever-under-construction Dallas Freeway system. The reason for this adventure was to visit the Dallas Museum of Art's exhibit "Blind Spots" featuring Jackson Pollock.

The museum describes the exhibit on their website as follows:

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots is only the third major U.S. museum exhibition to focus solely on the artist hailed as “the greatest painter this country has ever produced.” On November 20, the Dallas Museum of Art will present what experts have deemed a “once in a lifetime” exhibition, organized by the DMA’s Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Gavin Delahunty: the largest survey of Jackson Pollock’s black paintings ever assembled. This exceptional presentation, which critics hailed as “sensational," "exhilarating," "genius," “revelatory,” and “revolutionary” on its UK premier at Tate Liverpool, will receive its sole US presentation in Dallas and include many works that have not been exhibited for more than 50 years.

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots offers critical new scholarship on this understudied yet pivotal period in the artist’s career and provides radical new insights into Pollock’s practice. With more than 70 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, the exhibition will first introduce audiences to Pollock’s work via a selection of his classic drip paintings made between 1947 and 1950. These works will serve to contextualize the radical departure represented by the black paintings, a series of black enamel paintings that Pollock created between 1951 and 1953. An unprecedented 31 black paintings will be included in the DMA presentation. Exhibiting works from the height of the artist’s celebrity set against his lesser known paintings will offer the opportunity to appreciate Pollock’s broader ambitions as an artist, and to better understand the importance of the “blind spots” in his practice.

Here are a few facts about Jackson Pollock. He was born in 1912, in Cody, Wyoming, but grew up in California. In 1930, he moved to NYC to study art and painting. During the time period of 1938-1942 Pollock worked for the WPA - Federal Art Project. He struggled with alcoholism from 1938 to his death in October, 1966. He married American painter Lee Krasner. To get him away from bad influences, Lee moved the couple out to East Hampton. There he perfected his big "drip" techniques with commercial grade paint. He began working in the black paint technique after 1951. He died at the young age of 44 in 1966, in an alcohol related car accident. Yet, his legacy lives on

In full disclosure The Travelling Toe must admit that she is not a big fan of abstract impressionism but discovered this exhibit to be surprisingly interesting. The pictures featured were amazing to view and to imagine what he was trying to say in the painting. Photos were allowed so here are a few that The Travelling Toe took with her trusty camera phone.