György Szabó, “Buddha’s Heart and the Modern World,” translated from Hungarian by Jozefina Komporaly, originally published as “Buddha szíve és a modern világ,” in György Szabó, Képek és lagúnák (Budapest: Kossuth, 1964), 58–60, 61–65, 72–76 (excerpt)

From the viewpoint of a very personal Socialist Realism, Gyorgy Szabo thinks that Action painting goes far beyond abstraction in that it severs every bond to reality, refusing every kind of referentiality. He also points out the philosophical background of Pollock’s painting, which he finds in Zen Buddhism and irrationalist and mystic philosophies. The 1948 retrospective exhibition in Rome had a defining impact on the European recognition of his art: it advocated the lure of a new and extraordinarily original path, teeming with thousands of possibilities, and Pollock’s name had instantly succeeded in bringing together all those initiatives that had already been “in the air” as a result of various isolated attempts. Pollock’s paintings—and this brought about the distinctive turn—no longer belong to traditional abstract trends: they are beyond abstract in the sense that the “sign system” he developed deliberately shuns even the most extreme methods of abstraction from the object-world.