Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings are notoriously difficult to comprehend. Viewers are often baffled by them, even angered by their apparent nonsense. David Lubin proposes that these paintings can become radiantly meaningful and all the more appealing to the eye when understood in the various contexts of their time, among them the cold war, the space age, movies, and jazz.
Lubin is Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University and the author of several books including Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images, which won the Smithsonian Institution’s Charles Eldredge Prize for “distinguished scholarship in American art.” His latest book, Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016, the same year he received the inaugural Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professorship at Oxford University.
Thanks to the generosity of Bank of America Private Bank, this event is now presented free of charge.