Today's Program: Jackson Pollock, "Lavender Mist", 1950

Ilene Segalove

1973 · Collage of offset lithographs · Photographs

Segalove explores the unlikely intersection of the avant-garde, Hollywood, and suburban middle-class life. In this work, the artist collages a reproduction of Jackson Pollock’s abstract painting Lavender Mist over a 1950s image of smartly dressed airplane passengers watching an in-flight movie. As a result, she wittily deflates the highfalutin claims made by critics such as Clement Greenberg that abstraction can exist autonomously from mass culture. Released from the binds of cultural hierarchy, the cinematic scale and melodramatic title of Pollock’s painting find common cause with movies such as Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life and Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause from the same historical moment—high and low, avant-garde and popular culture, are fused together in the improbable scenario of Ozzie and Harriet “watching” the painting for a couple of hours.

Artist

Ilene Segalove

Date

1973

Medium

Collage of offset lithographs

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011