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Art Criticism, Scholarly Interpretation, and Curatorial Intent: A Reassessment of the 1998 Jackson Pollock Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art

In 1998, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective exhibition of artworks by Jackson Pollock. Curators Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel worked in an art historical context that had been significantly shaped by the early critical writings by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. The curators’ stated intention for the exhibition installation was to provide “a fresh chance for new generations of artists to come to terms with a legendary figure” and to enable “the broader public to reassess a quintessentially American artist in light of three decades of new scholarship,” without “ hewing to any particular critical dogma.” Despite this curatorial intention, this thesis examines the ways in which the retrospective inscribed Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s theories, while disregarding subsequent scholarship that did not explicitly inscribe or align with the mid-century criticism in its account of Jackson Pollock.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:vcu.edu/oai:scholarscompass.vcu.edu:etd-1438
Date04 December 2012
CreatorsAlvarez, Andrea
PublisherVCU Scholars Compass
Source SetsVirginia Commonwealth University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceTheses and Dissertations
Rights© The Author

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