Drip Paintings and Fractal Analysis

It has been claimed [1-6] that fractal analysis can be applied to unambiguously characterize works of art such as the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. This academic issue has become of more general interest following the recent discovery of a cache of disputed Pollock paintings. We definitively demonstrate here, by analyzing paintings by Pollock and others, that fractal criteria provide no information about artistic authenticity. This work has also led to two new results in fractal analysis of more general scientific significance. First, the composite of two fractals is not generally scale invariant and exhibits complex multifractal scaling in the small distance asymptotic limit. Second the statistics of box-counting and related staircases provide a new way to characterize geometry and distinguish fractals from Euclidean objects

Picturing Pollock: Photography’s Challenge to the Historiography of Abstract Expressionism

In the summer and fall of 1950, photographers Rudy Burckhardt and Hans Namuth documented Jackson Pollock in his studio as he was creating what have become his iconic Abstract Expressionist paintings. The photographs quickly dominated the critical discourse of the new painting and initiated a crisis in the historiography of Abstract Expressionism. This paper argues that despite being produced to serve an illustrative role for the Art News series ‘An Artists Paints a Picture’, Burckhardt and Namuth’s photographs of Pollock provide a glimpse of the analytic complexity photography offered art criticism

Fractal Dimensions in Perceptual Color Space: A Comparison Study Using Jackson Pollock's Art

The fractal dimensions of color-specific paint patterns in various Jackson Pollock paintings are calculated using a filtering process which models perceptual response to color differences (\Lab color space). The advantage of the \Lab space filtering method over traditional RGB spaces is that the former is a perceptually-uniform (metric) space, leading to a more consistent definition of ``perceptually different'' colors. It is determined that the RGB filtering method underestimates the perceived fractal dimension of lighter colored patterns but not of darker ones, if the same selection criteria is applied to each. Implications of the findings to Fechner's 'Principle of the Aesthetic Middle' and Berlyne's work on perception of complexity are discussed.Comment: 21 pp LaTeX; two postscript figure

Was Jackson Pollock the Greatest Modern American Painter? A Quantitative Investigation

A survey of the illustrations in textbooks of modern art demonstrates that scholars do consider Jackson Pollock the most important modern American painter, but not by a wide margin over Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, the leading artists of the following generation. The distribution of the illustrations furthermore reveals a sharp contrast in the careers of the major artists of these two generations: the Abstract Expressionists produced their most important contributions late in their careers, whereas their successors innovated early in theirs. This difference resulted from the differing approaches of the artists, for the Abstract Expressionists were experimental innovators, who developed new visual images by a process of trial and error, while the leading artists of the 1960s were conceptual innovators, whose work embodied new ideas.

Fusing Both Arts to an Inseparable Unity: Frank O\u27Hara as a Visual Artist

Frank O’Hara, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a published poet in the 1950s and 60s, was an exemplary yet enigmatic figure in both the literary and art worlds. While he published poetry, wrote art criticism, and curated exhibitions—on Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock—he also collaborated on numerous projects with visual artists, including Larry Rivers, Michael Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Joe Brainard, Jane Freilicher, and Norman Bluhm. Scholars who study O’Hara fail to recognize his work with the aforementioned visual artists, only considering him a “Painterly Poet” or a “Poet Among Painters,” but never a poet and a visual artist. Through W.J.T. Mitchell’s “imagetext” model, I apply a hybridized literary and visual analysis to understand O’Hara’s artistic work in a new way. I highlight O’Hara’s previously under-acknowledge artistic collaborations that secure his place as both a poet and an artist

The Life Cycles of Modern Artists

There have been two very different life cycles for great modern artists: some have made their major contributions early in their careers, while others have produced their best work later in their lives. These patterns have been associated with different artistic goals and working methods: artists who peak late are motivated by aesthetic considerations and work by trial and error, whereas artists who peak early are motivated by conceptual concerns and plan their work in advance. This paper shows that Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and the other leading Abstract Expressionists, who were experimental innovators, produced their best work considerably later in their careers than did Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and the other leading conceptual innovators of the generation that followed them. These results not only yield a new understanding of the life cycles of creative individuals, but also provide new insights into the value of works of art.

«Las flores del infierno. Manolo Millares y Jackson Pollock».

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