Pollock and the Drip A characteristically handsome painting by
Joan Mitchell is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in the
exhibition American Art: 1940-1970. I think of it as a kind of
footnote to the retrospective exhibition of Jackson Pollock on
the museum's third floor (until February 2). Mitchell was one of
the strongest painters in the so-called second generation of
Abstract Expressionists, and she painted Ladybug, as it is
titled, in 1957--the year after Pollock was killed. There was
not to be a third generation, as things turned out: The movement
came to an end in 1962, giving way to forms of art, like Pop Art
and Minimalism, that could not have been more alien to Abstract
Expressionism's founding vision. Ladybug is a little lexicon of
Abstract Expressionist devices: the smear, the swipe, the drop,
the drip. It is the drip, however, to which I mean to call
attention, since it played so great a role in the artistic
metaphysics of the movement and in the perception of Jackson
Pollock as the master of th