Art history blog - Assignment Example

13 February Art History By definition, legacy means something that has been left in a will by a deceased person. In other words, legacy can be understood as something that is transferred from one person, supposedly dead to an alive person. According to Kaprow, the legacy of Pollock means his individualistic style of painting that was unique in many ways in general and in its form, space and scale in particular. Precisely, the legacy of Pollock is the “esthetic” of Pollock. Pollock’s paintings are full of his ideas and innovation.

While making the paintings, Pollock immersed himself into them so that the paintings became more of environments and infinite spaces than what a regular painting is. The fundamental difference between Pollock’s paintings and the traditional paintings is that unlike the traditional paintings, there is little respect of any boundaries in Pollock’s paintings. His paintings have the power to provide the audience with a way out of the materialistic world into a world which Pollock created using his exceptional sense of art.

As Kaprow mentions in his article, Pollock’s art is unique in that it tends to break free of the constraints of the materialistic world in terms of looks, impulse and meanings, this feature of Pollock’s art adds many metaphysical and superficial properties to it. Kaprow puts a question in front of the audience that now that Pollock has died, it is for us to decide what do we do with the kind of art Pollock proposed. Kaprow himself offered two alternatives for this in the same article. The first one suggests that Pollock’s art be taken further.

This can be achieved by varying his esthetic without going away from it. The second alternative suggests that the making of paintings according to the conventional concept of oval or rectangle painting be given up.