The retrospective of paintings by Jackson Pollock at the Museum of
Modern Art was organized as an effort to define a figure whose place
in twentieth-century art has long been formidable. In its scale and
presentation, the MOMA show milks both Pollock the artist
(ambitious, tumultuous, and flawed) and Pollock the myth (heroic,
hard-drinking, and radical) to impressive, if not altogether
convincing, effect. Reviews of the exhibition itself have been, on
the whole, laudatory, yet the new consensus
on Pollock’s “mastery”
is less certain. Put another way: man and myth aren’t as
inextricably linked as they once may have been. Even defenders of
the status quo admit that Pollock was, at best, an erratic painter.
Do I recall correctly one critic stating that Pollock painted only
three or four good pictures? Out of a hundred or so at MOMA?
Art isn’t a matter of bean counting, but such statements signal
a turn in the artist’s reputation. While it is doubtful that our
museums will be sliding their Pollocks into the storage racks
anytime soon, it is worth recalling that commemorations of an artist’s
oeuvre sometimes run contrary to their organizers’ intentions.

I was reminded of the vagaries of reputation while attending the
exhibition “Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben
Shahn”—on view at the Jewish Museum until March 7. It
can scarcely be said that Shahn’s work has
occupied a prominent place in artistic thought since his death in
1969 (he was born in 1898). Yet