Jackson Pollock and Marxism

The alleged separation of art from politics proclaimed throughout the “free world” with the resurgence of abstraction after World War II was part of a general tendency in intellectual circles towards objectivity. The idea of any staunch political opinion from intellectuals therefore, was shunned by intellectuals of the late 1940s and 1950s. Abstract Expressionism, by giving an artist such as Pollock an individualist emphasis and eliminating recognizable subject matter in his paintings, succeeded in creating an important new art movement. They also contributed, whether they knew it or not, to a purely political phenomenon – the supposed divorce between art and politics which so perfectly served America’s needs in the cold war.

I decided to look at the art of Jackson Pollock and in particular his painting Blue Poles: Number 11 in order to prove or disprove what I had originally thought, that Pollock’s work does not fit into theories of art from a Marxist perspective. If we believe that one of Modernism’s central aims was to eschew the “institutionalized” setting of representational art and to escape the role of art as a commodity form as suggested by Marxist art theorists such as Jameson and Marcuse, then Blue Poles has not achieved this aim at all; it currently hangs in Australia’s National Gallery and was bought for close to US$1 million in 1973, a huge amount of money, and the work has increased in value over time. Arguably the nature of a painting such as Blue Poles is very personal, it is not created for society but rather as a form of expression for the artist to release his inner turmoils, at the same time if this is the case then the artist is reliant on some form of financial support from a fan of his work; usually being a rich patron, art gallery or large corporation. Ironically, Pollock’s work was also used as a visual expression of American political ideals during the Cold War, being held up as an example of the freedom of the American capitalist system when compared to the sanctioned “social-realist” works of the Soviet Union. Therefore, I would suggest that Blue Poles: Number 11 and the majority of Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist work does not adhere to Marxist principals.