In 1943, as the WPA Federal Art Project was dismantled, Jackson Pollock was commissioned to produce a large painting as the centerpiece for his first solo show at Peggy Guggenheim鈥檚 gallery Art of This Century. Although not painted directly on the wall, the immense oil on canvas听measures more than 19 by 8 feet听and is entitled听Mural. 听With its all-over composition of interlaced forms and colors, the frieze-like abstraction is widely regarded as a 鈥渂reakthrough鈥 work whose significance is regularly acknowledged if not fully understood.听While Pollock鈥檚听Mural听is听heralded as a starting point in American art, this talk will address the artist鈥檚 conception of the painting as a mural, exploring the ways in which it was a willful continuation of more than a decade of large-scale public painting in the United States, and also how it was used to set the agenda for postwar abstraction.
Dr Jody Patterson is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Plymouth. She completed her PhD at University College London and has held Terra Foundation Fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution鈥檚 American Art Museum, Washington, DC and the Institut national d鈥檋istoire de l鈥檃rt, Paris. Her research interests lie in the field of public art and the relations between art and politics. Her work has appeared in numerous books, exhibition catalogues, and journals. Her manuscript Modernism for the Masses is forthcoming with Yale University Press in February 2019.
Organised by Professor David Peters Corbett (The Courtauld)听