Where is blue poles

The first thing to ask is: who is the artist? What do we know about them? The footprint and the paint not running down the canvas tell us it was painted flat on the floor. It was not made with brushes or intended to represent identifiable things in the world. Clearly, Pollock rejected that historical idea of painting — the small canvas on the easel on which paint is arranged to look like a real thing, like a landscape or a bowl of flowers.

So, the lack of recognisable symbolism in Blue poles is deliberate. Both Pollock and Smith got extremely drunk during the painting session, and by the end of the evening they were smashing glass on the canvas and treading it in with their bare feet.

You can see shards of broken glass on the canvas if you see the actual painting. Certainly Pollock was a legend in his own lifetime, and Blue poles was produced at the height of his career. He then applied white paint, allowing this to run down the canvas. After this stage, he returned the canvas to the floor and continued with his characteristic pouring and dripping technique. It took nearly a week for each of the layers to dry. Pollock used sticks, brushes and syringes to build up rhythmic splashes, and finally created the vertical blue poles cutting through the wild drips and gestures.

This element — to which various figurative connotations have been attributed, from totems to the masts of a ship — differed significantly from his previous works, as the poles created strong vertical focus points in the painting. The oranges, the yellows were terrific, the whites splendid. It was first and foremost an initiative of James Mollison, the inaugural director of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

It depends on your ambition. It also depends on the sort of funding you have. If funds are low and the ambition is low, then you might make yourself a gallery which is for the local community. Pollock was at the forefront of the Abstract Expressionism movement and in developed a radical new painting style that involved pouring and dripping paint onto large unstretched canvases laid on the ground. The paintings appeared to have no subject and their huge scale, power and unconventional technique were often confronting to viewers.

What was going on the canvas was not a picture but an event. National Gallery of Australia. The early s were a turbulent era in Australian history. After 23 years of conservative Liberal and Country Party government, many voters felt that the Menzies era had run its course. In less than three years in power, the Whitlam government passed a raft of progressive legislation that pushed the nation in a new direction. Its laws and policies included the Racial Discrimination Act, no-fault divorce, equal pay for women , land rights for Indigenous Australians , abolishing tertiary education fees and increasing access to health care for all Australians.

The government made the arts a priority by doubling funding for Australian artists through the reconstituted Australia Council for the Arts. Because we look for the poles and miss much of the rest, the name is simply too distracting.

The painting has become one of the most popular exhibits in the gallery, for both its value as a major work of s abstract expressionism as well as its significance in Australian politics and history. For Australians, the purchase of Blue Poles is still frequently cited by the Labor Party faithful as proof of the wisdom of Gough Whitlam. All Rights Reserved.