Warren Neidich
KRASNER-POLLOCK:
ACCIDENTAL PAINTINGS, A CATALOGUE RAISONEE
According to Helen A. Harrison, recently retired
director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study
Center, the splattered paint on the floor of the
former Jackson Pollock studio was a result of
Jackson Pollack’s large scale fluid applied painting.
Easel-ess poured performative paintings which
took place on the horizontal surface of un-
stretched canvas strewn on the floor and beyond
its borders.
Pollock’s brother had given him a large collection
of square Masonite baseball game
boards, and in 1953, Pollock used them to cover
the floor of the house and studio which was later
removed by conservators to expose the wooden
floor covered with paint. After Jackson’s death in
1956, Lee took over his studio to make it her own
from 1957-1984 the time of her death. The paint
splatters on the chairs, walls, stools and the boots
are all residues of her unplanned and uninten-
tional efforts. Lee Krasner worked upon canvases
secured and taped to the walls and as a result her
accidents were mostly reflected there. (For a
while the floor was covered so in fact there was no
mixing of the paints of both there.) In effect these
unplanned results of the actions of different paint-
ing techniques resulting in left over residues of
splashed and sprayed paint on the walls, Krasner,
and floors, Pollock, are the result of an inadvertent
collaboration between Lee and Jackson, husband
and wife, in time. Not a work of synchronous and
aligned gestures of collaborative judgement but
the result of the spatial and temporal circum-
stances brought on by Jackson’s death and Lee’s
successive inhabitation. Frozen events as archi-
tectural and art historical memory
In 1994 with the permission of the study center,
Neidich removed all the framed objects on the
walls of the former studio now a study center
and exposed the wall surface behind them with
its square and horizonal shadows and impressions
left by years of oxidation between the framed
objects, air and walls; a process analogous to the
photographic process itself. The wall surfaces now
exposed present abstract patterns that are unin-
tentional and accidental works of art in their own
right. This removal was reminiscent of an earlier
work Neidich had done at the Paris Bar, Berlin in
1994 entitled Elevenement at the Paris bar, with
the late painter Martin Kippenberger and Michel
Wurtle, its owner, when he had removed all the
paintings of Kippenberger’s invited famous artist
friends who had together created a kind exquisite
corpse exhibition there. Then and there like at
the Krasner-Pollock Study Center he had docu-
mented similar oxidative effects on its yellow walls;
square and rectangular faded ghostlike shapes
appeared as a result of his “unhanging”.
What was exposed in the “unhanging” in East
Hampton were the same ghost as patterns as well
as the cleats that had supported the framed pic-
tures and text labels, printed on white foam core,
that had served as titles and descriptions for the
now displaced framed images. Without the orig-
inal framed material, that these labels addressed,
and described, the labels served another purpose.
They are transformed into a haiku, that serves as
a skeleton for a viewer’s imagination. A scaffold
for the production of scenario visualization in the
spectator’s mind’s eye. Imaginary texts to create
wonderment. Neidich added another dimension
by documenting his action and used the ready-
made patterns which now appeared as inspirations
for new works of first photographic and now, 30
years later, UV-printed transformed paintings on
gesso primed linen, blending the photographic and
painterly. The accidental and the
intentional.