How a seminal American artwork divided Australians

The Age

06-05-2025

ART
Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the Painting that changed Australia
Tom McIlroy
Hachette $34.99
My parents did not think highly of Blue Poles. When Gough Whitlam agreed in 1973 to spend $1.4 million dollars on Jackson Pollock's enormous painting, they suddenly found a focus for their rancour about everything that was wrong with the world. Such malarkey was a decadent waste of money and any of their children could have done better. Indeed, if their children had done anything like this, they would have been in trouble for making a mess.
They were not alone. One of the many pleasures of Tom McIlroy's superb account of the Blue Poles phenomenon is hearing the Australian public in uproar about a painting. Fifty years later, cultural debate in Australian has not matured much. Still plenty of name-calling. Not much listening.
Ten years after it arrived, I saw Blue Poles for the first time and have returned regularly since. People come to Australia just to see it. Blue Poles packs a punch, different to almost any other work I have experienced. Yet it is not easy to describe quite how or why it does so.
McIlroy quotes Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) as saying that if you look at a bed of flowers, you can appreciate their beauty without needing to know what those flowers mean or represent. Pollock was committed to art that was not figurative in any way.
We all know that flowers are an essential part of nature and the fertility of Earth. They are useful. What about Blue Poles? Its power is that you simply can't articulate why it is so powerful. It creates a spiritual space in the same way as other wonderful forms of exuberant uselessness such as the Taj Mahal.
McIlroy is a gifted writer who finds clear lines of storytelling as he unpacks an intricate story. He is dealing with pivotal moments in two cultures: mid-century USA and 1970s Australia. He begins with Pollock himself, the alcoholic son of an alcoholic father who died driving a car while he was drunk, killing one woman and injuring his love interest of the time. Nothing in his bloodline was arty or pretentious. He was lucky to find a rock in the artist Lee Krasner, his wife. She endured a difficult relationship, to say the least. One of her own fine works, Cool White, hangs alongside Blue Poles.
Blue Poles was completed in 1952 and took 20 years to reach our shores, thanks to the inaugural director of the national Gallery, James Mollison. McIlroy's portrait of Mollison is riveting, as is his portrayal of the business of art which Mollison negotiated