Death as Art/The Car Crash as Statement

Abstract

when might a car crash be more than just a car crash? When at least one of the victims is (a) famous, (b) in some sense “important,” or (c) when his or her life or work has something tragic pervading it. Jackson Pollock, American painter and one of the founding fathers of Abstract Expressionism, satisfied all three of these conditions. So was the car crash in which he died while speeding along an East Hampton road on the evening of August 11, 1956, more than just a car crash? What else could it have been? A message? A suicide? A work of art in its own right? And to what extent was this “something else” a product of Pollock’s own interests, concerns, desires, or, alternatively, those of his family, friends, colleagues, the news media, art historians, or the public at large? It is with this difficult complex of questions that the present chapter is concerned.

To “die at the top” for being his kind of modern artist was, to many, I think, implicit in [Pollocks] work before he died. It was this bizarre consequence that was so moving. We remembered Van Gogh and Rimbaud. But here it was in our time, in a man some of us knew. This ultimate, sacrificial aspect of being an artist, while not a new idea, seemed, the way Pollock did it, terribly modern, and in him the statement and the ritual were so grand, so authoritative and all-encompassing in its scale and daring, that whatever our private convictions, we could not fail to be affected by its spirit.

—Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958)

The Pollock myth has the function of diverting our attention from the actual paintings which bear his name. It confers on “mere painting” a status which places it beyond the reach of a criticism which is solely concerned with painting. It insists that Pollock be judged as a cultural hero rather than as the author of certain works of art which may be good or bad, according to the standards one applies in judging them…. Pollocks pictures are now a kind of currency used in the commerce of his reputation.

—Hilton Kramer, “Jackson Pollock and Nicholas de Stael: Two Painters and Their Myths” (1959)