Art History
–Janet Sobel
1894 – 1968
I could go on
about Hartigan and Mitchell and de Kooning,
Krasner-in-the-shadow-of-Jackson’s
I am Nature
Elaine in-the-shadow-of-Willem’s
to do the cooking
and cleaning in the loft,
what we two need is a wife
All the red meat from art history.
In 1945, art critic Clement Greenberg
and Jackson Pollack
stood in front of
Milky Way
in a small art exhibit in New York City,
canvas glittering silver and blue and red like the stars
in its name, drips and loops
pouring over the picture plane
that flashed and flowed.
Curious, primitive. They say some housewife?
Strangely pleasing.
This nobody.
In 1947 Jackson Pollack
painted Galaxy
dripping and looping.
Became the “inventor of all-over painting”
in work as large as his barn studio floor.
A spread in Life magazine in 1956—
“Is Jackson Pollack America’s greatest living painter?”
By this time she was in New Jersey
where her husband moved the family
to better his business
in the days when New Jersey
sprawled in weed lots
far from New York City
and closed off connection
to anything larger than itself.
But she knew pogroms in Ukraine,
how to seize stars and set them free,
how for a brief time the Milky Way
danced on a canvas on the floor
of her living room.
• • •
Painter and poet Carmen Germain is the author of a chapbook and three poetry collections, the latest being Life Drawing (MoonPath Press, 2022). Poems and art have been published in various journals. While on sabbatical, she was a visiting artist/scholar at the American Academy in Rome.