Enrico Crispolti, “Pollock, a Critical Essay,” translated from Italian by Lucinda Byatt, originally published as Pollock, un saggio critico (Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1958), 13–20 (excerpt)

The eminent art historian Enrico Crispolti was one of the first to provide Italian audiences with a detailed assessment of the aesthetic development of Jackson Pollock’s work. Pollock’s crisis was therefore one of growth, and perhaps it served as the prelude to a conscious development, both personal and productive, of a new problem, common to artists on both sides of the Atlantic, although it took widely different forms. Pollock breaks with a local cultural tradition, rehashed from European tradition, and opens a new cultural situation, imposing new values of anti-conformism and creative freedom on the North American cultural scene. A straightforward reading of some of Pollock’s major paintings from the years between 1947 and 1953 shows how the hypothesis of his deep pessimism is unfounded, often said to be combined with a blatant anti-mechanistic protest.