Paintings as Walls: Peter Blake, Jackson Pollock, and the Myth of Unframed Space

© Helen A. Harrison, 2015

This paper was delivered on 21 March 2015 at the 11th Biennial Symposiumof the Latrobe Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in Washington, DC.

In 1949, the architect Peter Blake, who would later become the chair of architecture and planning at the Catholic University of America, designed a building that he felt would be the ideal showcase for Jackson Pollock’s paintings. Blake intended it to be constructed on the grounds of Pollock’s home in Springs, on eastern Long Island, and built a scale model to illustrate his concept. Writing about the project in the January 1950 issue of Interiors, Arthur Drexler coined the misleading term “unframed space” to characterize Blake’s “treatment of paintings as walls,”which he saw as a modern version of the Renaissance fresco, “but his time without message or content.”

My paper will address the misconceptions behind this interpretation of Blake’s project. The first is that, as Blake presented it in his model, the architectural matrix in which existing paintings are displayed is undefined. Second, the notion that Pollock’s work has no message to convey ignores the rich metaphysical content of his abstract forms. A central question raised by the “ideal museum” is whether, if it had beenbuilt, it would have been an appropriate setting for Pollock’s imagery.

Blake discussed the project’s genesis in his 1993 memoir, No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept, and with me in 1994-95, when he oversaw the construction of a new version of his original model. [See color image above.] It was made by his former Catholic University student, Patrick Bodden, with the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Some of the following information comes from those conversations, and revises the rather fuzzy chronology in Blake’s memoir.

Blake was introduced to Pollock in East Hampton in 1947by the graphic designer Herbert Matter and his wife Mercedes, an artist who moonlighted as a model for Blake’s mother, a fashion illustrator. Mercedes and Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, were old friends from their days together on the WPA Federal Art Project. Mercedes claimed that they met in jail after being arrested for participating in a 1936 sit-down strike atthe FAP office in New York, and she encouraged Lee to study with her mentor and former lover Hans Hofmann.

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Pollock, who lived year-round in the East Hampton hamlet of Springs, invited Blake to his studio. Blake was captivated; in his book he described the experienceas “like entering a palace.” He was especially taken byone large painting in progress, probably Cathedral, stretched out on the floor: “The colors were dazzling—silver, shades of off-white, traceries of black, lavender, blue—the splashes all quite controlled, the finished canvas luminous, almost translucent, shimmering in the sunlight.” Recalling his reaction some 45 years later, he said he “was overwhelmed by thesheer beauty of [Pollock’s] work. I had never been so moved by any contemporary painting, and I guess Jacksonknew it.” [110-111]

If we accept Blake’s retrospective account, he immediately sensed the relationship of Pollock’s imagery to the surrounding environment. “I don’t know what I expected,” he wrote, “but it was clearly the work of someone who understood light and space, and thetransparency of the wide, horizontal landscape of the inlets just beyond the little shack”—that is, the converted storage barn that served as Pollock’s studio.[111] In those days the building sat in an open field that sloped down to a salt marsh bordering Accabonac Harbor, a view that has long since been obscured by volunteer trees and undergrowth. A window in the east wall looked directly onto the expansive prospect. Pollock later covered the window because it distracted him. Rather than looking outside for inspiration, he preferred to process his observations and experiences of nature to arrive at subjective, intuitive responses.As he put it, “I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.” [Wright interview]

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Evidently the synergy between the Springs topography and what he perceived as Pollock’s sense of light and space sparked Blake’s architectural imagination. As he and the artist got to know one another, he conceived ofa novel way to exhibit the paintings that would highlight their affinity with the “relentlessly horizontal landscape of that end of Long Island.” [112]At that time Blake was the curator of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As he freely admitted, his precedent was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s proposal, commissioned in 1943 by Architectural Forum magazine, known as Museum for a Small City, which derived from Mies’s German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona and subsequent conceptual variations.

The plan and interior elevation of Museum for a Small City are now in MoMA’s collection. According to MoMA’s catalog entry, in the elevation, “photographs of foliage and water in a linear band suggest the perimeter of an otherwise limitless architectural space. Floating in the space are three artworks: Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937) framed by Aristide Maillol’s sculptures Monument to Paul Cézanne (1912–25, left) and Night (1909, right). The artworks are architectural elements, creating the spatial divisions that organize the vast space of the museum.” [http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=757]

As Blake described Museum for a Small City in his 1964 book, Mies van der Rohe, Architecture and Structure, the space is neither limitless nor vast, but uses glass walls to minimize any sense of enclosure. “Mies . . . had tried

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to make the architecture ‘almost nothing’ and the paintings and sculpture (for which the museum would be built) everything,” he wrote, adding:

His beautiful drawings and collages for this project show a large, glass-enclosed space, lightlysubdivided by free-standing walls and screens against which to hang paintings or place sculpture.Indeed, Mies’s incredible modesty was never better expressed than in the collages he prepared for thisproject: for these the only elements visible at first are the photographic reproductions of important paintings and pieces of sculpture; one must actually search with a magnifying glass for any evidence of the architecture that is supposed to enclose these works of art, for the only indication of any building whatsoever is a series of fine lines suggesting a few slender columns and the paving pattern of the floor. [87]

Blake’s adaptation of the Miesian proposal was even more architecturally minimal. He designed a 50 by 100-foot building, with no exterior walls, in which the paintings would be “suspended between the earth and thesky, and set between mirrored walls so as to extend into infinity.” [111] The paintings were not hung on supporting walls or partitions, but were installed as murals, with the mirrors at right angles to them. Blakedescribed the canvases as “floating,” with the marshes and inlets of the Springs landscape as the backdrop. Inother words, he envisioned the building in Pollock’s back yard.

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To illustrate his concept, in 1949 Blake built a roughly one-half inch to one foot scale model of the so-called ideal museum, financed by a $100 contributionfrom Alfonso Ossorio, a wealthy artist and collector who had recently bought one of Pollock’s paintings and befriended him. Unlike a conventional museum—an enclosed environment in which individual paintings are hung on solid walls—here the paintings themselves wouldbecome the walls, although they would not actually support the structure. As originally designed, the mirrored walls and a semicircular perforated metal enclosure held up the roof, with the paintings mounted on vertical posts that also served as roof supports. Blake made the model himself, using translucent glass for the roof, pegboard for the floor, and sheet metal, mirrors and wood for the walls and supports. Color photographs of several Pollock paintings were glued to cardboard and mounted on the wood posts, which were inserted into the pegboard.

Blake told me that he had hoped Pollock would take an active role in developing the museum proposal, but the artist contributed only passively, approving the architect’s suggestions but seemingly indifferent to the project. As the design took shape, Blake felt it needed sculptural forms to punctuate the space, as Mieshad done in his Museum for a Small City project. Pollock, who had studied sculpture early in his art training and created three-dimensional work intermittently throughout his career, agreed to make some small sculptures, although Blake recalled that he showed no real enthusiasm. A week or so later, however,much to his delight, Pollock presented him with three exquisite wire sculptures, dipped in plaster and

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spattered with color, that perfectly complemented the paintings and effectively animated the undecorated minimal architecture.

The model wasincluded inPollock’s November-December 1949 soloexhibition at theBetty ParsonsGallery [right],where it was billedas “Murals inModern Architecture: A Theatrical Exercise Using Jackson Pollock’s Paintings and Sculpture. By Peter Blake.” Calling it a theatrical exercise underscored its obvious impracticality. It would have been impossible to build a structure with a 100-foot roof made of a single sheet of glass, and even with a solid flat roof, an art museum open to the elements was out of the question.

Ignored by the art critics who reviewed the show, the model was featured in an article by Arthur Drexler in the January 1950 issue of Interiors. Drexler, who was the magazine’s architecture editor from 1948 to 1950, followed in Blake’s footsteps as curator of MoMA’s Department of Architecture in 1951. Unlike the art critics, he took seriously the notion of Pollock’s “paintings as walls,” defining both the structure and the purpose of the building. “The project,” he wrote, “suggests a reintegration of painting and architecture wherein painting is the architecture . . .” [90] He was especially taken with the idea of flanking Pollock’s

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canvases with mirrors, to make them appear “as though they might very well be extended indefinitely,” creating what he called “unframed space.”

Blake—a refugee from Nazi Germany who had been educatedin England and emigrated to the US at the start of World War II—maintained that openness was the quality that intrigued him in Pollock’s paintings and set them apart from those of the European modernists, whose vision was circumscribed. [113] By accommodating and highlighting their relation to “the seemingly endless broad horizons, the vastness of everything” that characterized the American landscape, the “ideal museum” would present Pollock’s work sympathetically. But as originally conceived, contrary to Drexler’s description of the building as unframed space, its dimensions are defined by the “paintings as walls,” andthe paintings themselves block the view of the open vista that Blake believed inspired Pollock’s concept ofspace and marked it as distinctively American.

Realizing this contradiction, Blake revised his “ideal museum” concept. Furnished with reproductions of canvases dating from 1946 to 1949, his model was implicitly a venue for existing paintings executed on opaque canvas, relying on the mirrored walls for the effect of indefinite extension. To achieve environmental integration, the imagery would need to interact more actively with the surroundings. In an architectural context, murals painted directly on transparent walls would be the most effective way to produce that result. As Blake recalled, “Jackson and I discussed the possibility of painting on tempered glassso as to make the paint seem suspended in space, with

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views of the landscape through the painting’s surface and beyond.” [118] Instead of being contiguous to the natural world, Pollock’s forms would appear as if they had sprung from it.

This effect defines the proposed building’s spatial dimensions much more ambiguously by dissolving the structure’s vertical elements, but it nevertheless establishes the paintings as foreground to the background landscape—a reframing, not an unframing, of space. As a curatorial gesture, this juxtaposition forces an interpretation of Pollock’s imagery as directly related to the natural world, rather than derived from a purely imaginary source. Pollock himselfseemed to reinforce this notion when he did paint on glass, for a film made by the photographer Hans Namuth in the fall of 1950. While Blake later wrote that this happened “several years” after he and Pollock discussedit, [118] in fact it was not long after their conversation.

By then the “unframed space” catchphrase had been picked up and echoed by Krasner when she and Pollock were interviewed by their East Hampton neighbor Berton Roueché for an article that appeared in the August 5, 1950 issue of The New Yorker. During the interview, Pollock remarked: “There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning orany end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.” Krasner chimed in: “That’s exactly what Jackson’swork is, sort of unframed space.” [16] Whether at Roueché’s behest or his editor’s, “Unframed Space” became the article’s headline.

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Namuth had seen Blake’s model in the 1949 Betty ParsonsGallery show, and again in Pollock’s studio the following summer, when he photographed the artist at work. Although he maintained that he got the painting-on-glass idea spontaneously—“One evening it came to me,” he said—Blake was adamant that it was inspired by his proposal for the revised “ideal museum” concept. Whatever the source, Pollock was receptive. When Namuthsuggested that Pollock paint horizontally, as usual, but on glass so he could film him from underneath, “with his face in full view, becoming part of the canvas.” the artist replied “that yes, he had often thought about working on glass.” [Pollock Painting, n.p.] Again it was Ossorio who provided the financing, including the purchase, on October 20, 1950, of a 4 by 6-foot sheet of tempered glass from the Riverhead GlassCompany for $30. Pollock built a platform to support it, and after a false start made a collage of found objects, including string, plasterer’s lath, pebbles and strips of colored glass, glued down with looping strands of black and silver house paint poured directlyfrom the cans.

The finished 10-minute film, produced with help from cinematographer Paul Falkenberg and premiered at MoMA in June 1951, shows little of the improvisational but deliberate process by which Pollock composed the collage elements and gradually unified them with paint.It also completely excludes a sequence in which, after the paint has dried, Pollock holds the glass panel vertically, resting it on the concrete pad behind the house—the original floor of the barn that became Pollock’s studio after the building was moved to open up the view. As the camera pans across it, the painting

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frames the landscape, its vine-like tendrils complementing the waving grasses and sun-dappled creek that are visible through its surface. Simultaneously, the landscape frames the painting, surrounding it with natural analogies to its organic structure, as such a juxtaposition would have done in the revised “ideal museum.”

This film sequence tacitly affirms Pollock’s affinity with nature; as he once remarked to his friend Jeffrey Potter, “The land is alive, tells youthings when you letit.” [TAVG, 89] Notwithstanding his

famous statement, “I am nature,” uttered a few years before his move to Springs, and his references to memories of the “vast horizontality” of the Western landscape in which he spent his youth, [Karmel, 15] it was the eastern Long Island environment that liberated his innate creative genius. Far from lacking “message or content,” as Drexler maintained, Pollock’s imagery is deeply meaningful, expressing his subjective responses to the elemental forces that he perceived in his surroundings. Finding visual equivalents for those feelings and communicating them to others was a primaryaim of his art.

Nearly 60 years after Pollock’s death, many of the visitors to his home and studio who are familiar with

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his work perceive the connection between the poured paintings and the place where they were created. If Peter Blake’s “ideal museum” had actually been built inthat environment, the affinity would have been even more obvious.

REFERENCES

Blake, Peter. No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

__________. Mies van der Rohe, Architecture and Structure. London: Penguin Books, 1964.

Drexler, Arthur. “Unframed Space: A Museum for Jackson Pollock’s Paintings.” Interiors CIX, January 1950.

Harrison, Helen A., ed. Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999.

Karmel, Pepe, ed. Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews. New York: The Museum of Modern Art / Abrams, 1999.

Museum of Modern Art, New York. Collections catalog entry for Museum for a Small City Project, Interior perspective. George Danforth, delineator. Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of the architect, 1963.

Rose, Barbara, et. al. Pollock Painting. New York: Agrinde Publications Ltd., 1980.

Roueché, Berton. “Unframed Space.” The New Yorker 26:24, August 5, 1950.

Wright, William. Audio recording of an interview with Jackson Pollock, late 1950. Transcription in Karmel, op. cit.

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