Book launch at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection of unpublished letters between american painter Jackson Pollock and his family.
4 May 2011, 7 pm, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection will present the book Jackson Pollock & Family. American Letters 1927-1947. As Michael Leja writes in the introduction: “The letters collected in this volume were written principally between 1927 and 1945 by members of the Pollock family: parents LeRoy and Stella; their five sons, Charles Marvin, Frank, Sanford, and Jackson; and the sons’ wives, Elizabeth, Alma, Marie, Arloie, and Lee. The correspondence begins as they are leaving high school and moving away from home in search of jobs, professional training, excitement, and challenges. It ends just the youngest of them, Jackson, is beginning to attract attention as one of the most daring and original painters in New York.” The book is illustrated with paintings and drawings by Charles Pollock (1902-88), Jackson’s oldest brother, who, for Thomas Hart Benton, their teacher, was the most talented of the brothers.
For the occasion, members of the Pollock family will travel to Venice and will read from the letters, including Francesca Pollock (daughter of Charles Pollock), who selected the letters, Sylvia Winter Pollock (widow of Charles Pollock), who edited and annotated the letters, and by others such as Karen McCoy and Jason McCoy (children of Sanford McCoy Pollock, brother of Jackson) and their children. The presentation will be in English. Drink will follow.
Peggy Guggenheim considered the support she gave to Jackson Pollock between 1943 and 1948 the single most important achievement of her career as a gallerist and collector. She commissioned from him his largest painting (the Mural, now in the University Museum of Art, Iowa City), gave him four one-man exhibitions and sold and donated many of his paintings to museums and collectors internationally, including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome and the Museum of Art, Tel Aviv. In 1950, Peggy Guggenheim organized Jackson Pollock’s first exhibition in Europe, in the Ala Napoleonica of Museo Correr, Piazza San Marco, Venice. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection owns eleven paintings by this artist, considered among the most important American painters of the 20th century, as well as a painting by Charles Pollock (Gift of Charles Pollock Archives, courtesy American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich, 2009).
Jackson Pollock & Family. American Letters 1927-1947 was first published in French as Lettres Americaines (Grassert & Fasquelle, 2009). The augmented and enlarged edition is published by Polity Press, Cambridge (UK), 2011. The presentation of the book has been co-organized with the American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich.