Jack The Dripper
car overturned near his home in East Hampton, N.Y., he was wearing “a black velvet shirt, gray pants, a brown belt, blue shorts, brown socks, no shoes, no jewelry and no ID.” The haphazard outfit offers a window into Pollock’s persona: disheveled, unconcerned about superficialities, powerfully intriguing.
Like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Pollock has entered the canon of American icons not just because of his artistic accomplishments, but also thanks to the myth surrounding his tortured life and premature death. (Many have surmised that even if he had survived the car crash, his severe alcoholism would have killed him.) No wonder fashion designers keep bringing him up: he’s the archetype of the all-American, ruggedly handsome, bottle-swilling man with plenty of talent and a (well-hidden) sensitive side. A year ago, Hedi Slimane borrowed Pollock’s drip artworks for Dior Homme; in the late ’90s, Helmut Lang started a trend for paint-splattered denim, sending enthusiastic imitators to their garages. (As with Pollock’s art, the do-it-yourself versions never quite matched the original.) This season, Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurentrefreshed the action-painting look with pants, shorts and shoes smudged
with practically every color in the Benjamin Moore catalog; in New York, Adam Kimmel took a complementary approach, focusing not on the Abstract Expressionist’s artwork but on what the artist actually wore.
“Pollock famously said that modern art is the expression of the contemporary aims of the age we’re living in,” Kimmel says. “I find that very inspirational, because every generation has to deal with issues in its own way. His work was the result of a true need to express, and with his jeans, T-shirts and overalls, he embodied the idea of man as creator. He was at the forefront of existential masculinity.”
In 1949, Pollock’s fame skyrocketed when Life magazine rhetorically asked, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” Soon after, he became the subject of a well-publicized documentary — but the accolades came at a price. Pollock abandoned his signature drip style; his work turned darker. Seemingly frozen by the pressure to live up to his reputation, he plunged deeper into alcoholism and was hardly painting at all by the time of his death, at age 44. Pollock was one of the first celebrity artists of our time, and, as it turned out, one of the first celebrity casualties. An expression of the age we’re living in, indeed. [?][?][?]Armand Limnander
1. Pollock at work in 1949. 2. A painterly look by Helmut Lang for spring 1998. 3. Dior Homme’s Pollock moment for fall 2007. 4. Spring 2008 looks from Adam Kimmel (left, modeled by the artist Jack Pierson) and Yves Saint Laurent.
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