|
In
fact, it was in the course of writing her doctoral dissertation
about Krasner at the University of Delaware (Ph.D., 1981)
that Landau became interested in Pollock, the deeply troubled
man and brilliant painter with whom Krasner lived for 14 years.
Landau's contributions to our understanding of the work of
Pollock and Krasner have been recognized with numerous scholarship-in-residence
appointments at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center,
a project of the Stony Brook Foundation, in East Hampton,
New York, where her appreciation for the unique visions and
abiding legacy of this extraordinary couple continued to deepen
and expand.
A
series of articles written for prestigious American and European
art journals such as Les cahiers du musée nationale
d'art moderne, which published Landau’s "Jackson
Pollock—L'equipée sauvage" in the spring of 1988,
won her growing respect among contemporary art historians.
And in 1989 she was invited to co-curate the Krasner/Pollock
exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland, the first
show featuring the pair's work to be mounted in Europe.
Since
winning the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1991, Landau has continued
to make important contributions to Pollock and Krasner scholarship.
In 1993 Landau wrote the catalogue text for an exhibition
of Pollock's work at the ACA Galleries in Munich, Germany,
and in 1995 she published an essay reconsidering the influence
of Mexican art on Pollock for a joint exhibition of the work
of Pollock and Mexican painter and political activist David
Siqueiros organized at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf.
The same year saw the publication of Lee Krasner: A Catalogue
Raisonné (Harry N. Abrams), written with the assistance
of Jeffrey D. Grove under the auspices of the Pollock-Krasner
Foundation and the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, which
examined the steadily growing reputation of Pollock's widow
as an artist in her own right.
In
1998 Landau was appointed to chair the joint program in art
history and museum studies sponsored by the Cleveland Museum
of Art and Case Western Reserve University, where she has
been a member of the faculty since 1982 and holds the distinguished
title of University Professor. Her special area of concentration
is 20th-century American and European art and theory, particularly
Abstract Expressionism.
In
2001 Landau was invited to the World Congress of Jewish Studies
in Jerusalem to present a paper on the painter Philip Guston,
which is part of a book in progress
on abstract expressionism and Mexican art. Her anthology and
methodological
study of abstract expressionism will be published by Yale
University Press in 2003.
text by
Dennis
Dooley
1986 Winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature
|
|
At
exactly what point and why Jackson Pollock decided to
focus his efforts on a deliberate and sustained exploration
of the possibilities of creating an entire composition
by dripping or pouring paint is another “fact”
of art history that will never be definitively established.
A full four years after his first experimentation with
this technique Pollock returned to it with a vengeance,
but also now with a logic and control that signaled
his maturity and independence of all of the well-known
precedents for it. No longer content with the interruption
to free movement caused each time he had to reload his
brush, Pollock devised a handy way to create a more
continuous line by tilting a commercial can of thinner,
more liquid paint, and allowing it to run down a stick
placed in the can at an angle. In this way he believed
that the energy behind his imagery could literally “flow”
straight from his unconscious.
—Jackson
Pollock (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989)
|
|
