Jackson Pollock's paintings capture the essence of movement and challenge typical notions of representation. The Fate of a Gesture argues that Pollock's work overshadowed and directed the course of postwar American Painting. Not to be confused with a survey of this era in art history, Ratcliff deals specifically with the boundless and infinite quality of the influential gesture as a symbol of America itself. Avoiding a common aggrandizement of the artist, Ratcliff's thought-provoking text allows readers to draw conclusions of their own.


From Publishers Weekly
Ratcliff (Andy Warhol) argues that Pollock's drip paintings, created with paint flung onto canvasses, evoke a uniquely American "sense of limitless possibility" because they "draw the imagination into a region of boundless space." In this provocative survey of one line of development in postwar American art, he traces Pollock's career, analyzes his style and discusses subsequent painters in whose work he sees the same tendency toward the infinite?Barnett Newman, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Robert Longo, Julian Schnable and Brice Marden, among others. The relationship of some of these painters?such as Willem de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler?to Pollock is obvious; in other instances, the connections are more tenuous. Ratcliff asserts, for example, that the repetitious boxes and cubes of minimalists such as Sol Le Witt resemble Pollock's drip paintings because they could go on forever and thus imply the infinite, and that a flag by Jasper Johns "has the scale of a drip painting by Pollock" because it is "a national banner infinitely large." His thesis provides fresh perspective on modern American art. Illustrations not seen by PW. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Michael Peppiatt
Jackson Pollock's inspired scattering and dripping of pigment on canvas ... to a large extent [directed] the subsequent course of American painting through the second half of the century. That is the basic argument on which the New York art critic Carter Ratcliff has based The Fate of the Gesture, and he traces the gesture's development decade by decade, movement by artistic movement, from an informed, wry, fin de siecle perspective.


From Booklist
In his earlier books about individual artists, and here, in this survey of the last 50 years of American art, Ratcliff displays an uncanny knack for matching words to images and abstractions. The strongest passages in this history are his descriptions of technique and process, from Pollock's drip paintings to Jasper Johns' textured "hatchings," and Warhol's down-and-dirty photo-silk-screening. As the title suggests, Pollock is the ur-artist in this history, and Ratcliff portrays him as a frightened, enraged, inarticulate, and hard-drinking man who was utterly incapable of coping with everyday life but whose paintings were transcendent, painted dances expressing all the fierceness and energy of nature. His chronicle of Pollock's life is set within an illuminating account of how New York artists survived the Depression, but, unfortunately, Ratcliff fails to provide as meaningful a social context as he moves forward in time. He does, however, discuss the work of more than 20 artists, establishing several intriguing artistic genealogies and providing his readers with much food for thought. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
A rather bland history of modern American painting, using the career of Jackson Pollock as its focus. Pollock was already a hard-drinking, macho brute when he washed up in New York from Cody, Wyo., in 1930, at the age of 18. Under the tutelage of the painter Thomas Hart Benton he learned to bash the Europeans and embrace his American heritage (expressed in the tenets of self-will and the quest for purity), but it was the artist Lee Krasner, sacrificing herself to take on Pollock as a husband and a cause, who declared that to be great he would have to take on and best Picasso ``to show that modernist progress had led to the New World.'' By the late 1940s Pollock's work was arousing fervent applause and heated controversy in equal measure. Upon seeing one of his paintings, the heiress and art patron Peggy Guggenheim denounced it to her escort, Piet Mondrian, hoping to win his approval, but Mondrian proclaimed it the most exciting thing he'd seen in awhile. Guggenheim promptly ``dedicated'' herself to Pollock and provided a stipend so that Krasner could shuttle him out to the Hamptons, where, it was hoped, the fresh air would sober him up. Pollock did his best work there; it was also the site of his fatal 1956 car crash. Art critic Ratcliff (Andy Warhol, not reviewed, etc.) sets Pollock's career within the larger context of the lives and works of other artists (de Kooning, Rauschenberg, et al.), and surveys the artist's influence, which ranges from color- field painting to minimalism and extends to Brice Marden as a present-day heir. In tracing the lineage, Ratcliff argues persuasively that Pollock is the figure looming largest over postwar American art, but his writing has a bell-jar effect on it explosive center, dissipating it into the muted sounds of a drab lecture in the gray halls of the Whitney. A decent but unsurprising overview of modern art history, ideal for those more comfortable with facts than critical opinions. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A subtle study of Jackson Pollock's influence on a half century of postwar American art. In addition to providing an intimate biography of Pollock and the history and development of his ideas, Carter Ratcliff explores the lives and consciousness of the other major American artists of the day. 4 color and 93 b&w illustrations.

FROM THE CRITICS

New York Times Book Review