ABSTRACT
Jasper Johns showed in detail how a set of well-chosen premises can sustain a career. This was a lesson Jackson Pollock did not teach. Brushing aside his predecessors, Pollock opened the way to an infinite and filled it with a lingering, expansive present. The sweep of his arm denied the need for a future, for descendants, and in the fifties he seemed to have none. For two successive months in 1958, Artnews published memoirs of Pollock. The prevailing tone was elegiac, as if a glory that had departed from the world were fading from memory, too, and needed to be recalled. Only a young artist named Allan Kaprow looked from Pollock to the future.
