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If there is any one moment of decisive change in American art, it seems the moment when Jackson Pollock, freshly released from the Westchester Division of New York Hospital, where he had been treated for acute alcoholism, "went for the first time abstract," as his older brother Sanford McCoy wrote.(5) "After years of trying to work along lines completely unsympathetic to his nature, he has finally dropped the Benton nonsense and is coming out with an honest creative art." Sanford wrote this in May 1940, two years after Pollock was hospitalized "in serious mental shape," and one year after he began Jungian psychoanalysis, still suffering "from isolation and extreme emotional deprivation in early childhood," as Joseph Henderson, his therapist, thought. It seems ironic that it was schizophrenia that liberated American art from provincial realism -- that the abstract turn was taken by an artist who suffered from "a pathological form of introversion."

It was Henderson who made the diagnosis of schizophrenia, noting Pollock’s "paralysis or withdrawal," alternating with "violent agitation" -- deep depression followed by drinking binges, as Sanford’s wife Arloie Conway observed -- and who, over a period of 18 months, received 69 "psychoanalytic drawings" and one gouache painting from Pollock. Interpreting the symbols in the first drawing, which depicts a bizarre crucifixion, Henderson stated: "The patient appears to have been in a state similar to the novice in a tribal initiation rite during which he is ritually dismembered at the outset of an ordeal whose goal is to change him from a boy to a man." Did Pollock ever reach the goal? It seems not, considering the fact that he died (1956, aged 44) driving under the influence, indicating that he remained an alcoholic until his death, apart (apparently) from the few years (1947-50) during which he made his "breakthough" all-over paintings. Nor does the fact that dismemberment became the method and theme, not to say substance, of his art -- a dismemberment of the traditional figure, and of the traditional idea of painting, that, I want to suggest, signals Pollock’s unending identity crisis, indeed, his perpetual process of disintegration. Like a seismograph, Pollock’s painting registers the shattering. Every tremor left a painterly trace, quixotically estheticized into tragic elegance.

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