ABSTRACT
Some of the visitors to The Family of Man might have been reminded of Pollock's highly praised first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in 1943, which displayed some striking similarities to Steichen's presentation. Two aspects of Pollock's drip technique are worthy of note: first, that the focus is on act of painting rather than on painting's subject, and second, that the composition has no centre; the traces of paint run far beyond the canvas's edges. The term 'all-over' is also used by Rob Kroes to describe The Family of Man in a discussion of the symbiotic relationship between Paul Rudolph's exhibition architecture and Steichen's 'overall narrative strategy'. The architecture of his exhibition attempted to accommodate this lofty moral aspiration on a fundamental level by presenting photographs of various sizes and formats at various heights. The nomenclatural analogy establishes the connection to Steichen’s multifocal exhibition, which conveyed its information in the form of a photographic mosaic.
