ABSTRACT
As Pollock sank, the currents of his infinite reached into paintings by Grace Hartigan, Harry Jackson, Al Held, Norman Bluhm, Alex Katz, and other recent arrivals on the scene. Plying brushes and palette knives, never pouring their colors, these artists felt safe from the charge of mimicking Pollock's gesture. He had dismantled standard structural devices. Now Hartigan and the others did the same. For a few seasons, downtown studios filled with approximations of Pollock's dripped and spattered fields. These paintings look inadvertent, almost entranced. Pollock's art worked on newcomers like a daydream of the abyss. After sinking into it for a while, they'd pull away and return to the solid realm of well-built compositions. Only the veteran Willem de Kooning made a thoroughly conscious effort to redesign Pollock's intimations of infinity. The result was a canvas called Excavation (1950).
