Jackson Pollock—and True & False Ambition: The Urgent Difference
By Dorothy Koppelman

I learned that the only way to like the world honestly is to see it as a oneness of opposites; and further, that seeing it this way is the means to honestly liking yourself. The more I study this Aesthetic Realism principle stated by Mr. Siegel, the more I am thrilled at its truth: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." 

I shall be talking tonight about my life, what a woman learned in Aesthetic Realism consultations and about the famous 20th century American artist whose works, as one critic put it, "embody the supreme level of pictorial ambition," and whose tumultuous life is the subject of the recent film made by Ed Harris.

Jackson Pollock's famous action paintings exemplify his true ambition—to like this world, and they are a thrilling sight of a man loving the way weight and lightness, thickness and airiness, impediment and release—are one in reality and showing them in tangible paint handled with a knowing technique.

What gives us such a lift are those solid, well placed, low and thick obstructions. But they don't hold us down! There is a whirling, wild sense of freedom here, and at the same a most cunning arrangement of space as to line, thick as to thin, rise as to fall, abrupt angle and surprising dash. Here, impediment is a means of freedom, and the artist's beautiful, central ambition is satisfied, and we are satisfied. We feel we can be ambitious to be free like that. It is a sign, as Eli Siegel has described, of the world itself making beautiful sense, and we like it. 

But Pollock also went after contempt—he was surly as a child, and felt the way to be free was angrily to get rid of interferences, just annihilate things. How much did that swooping desire to get rid of a reality he saw as impeding him lead to his early drinking, which was to ruin his life? 

This is a letter written as an 18 year old which shows both his true ambition, and how contempt was hurting him: 

I shall be an Artist of some kind. If nothing else I shall always study the Arts. People have always bored me....I have been within my own shell and have not accomplished anything materially. In fact, to talk in a group I was so frightened I could not think logically....

He had relatively few interests. He saw things as having no real connection with one another;

[You can view clips of Pollock painting on the Museum of Modern Art website, http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/pollock/website100/vid_clips.html]

Blue Poles

Aesthetic Realism shows that what Jean Hartman wanted, what Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock wanted is like the technique of art itself. It is in Jackson Pollock's beautiful painting Blue Poles.

Aesthetic Realism is the means for satisfying that ambition all the time, sitting here, walking down the street, talking to another person, in whatever one meets—and I am very happy to be able to say this.