Chapter Fourteen - Words for the Surface: Boulez, Stockhausen, and “Allover”Painting

Summary

… there are no words for the surface, that is,

No words to say what it really is, that it is not

Superficial but a visible core …

—John Ashbery

“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

It is a commonplace to observe that much of the painting of the twentiethcentury depends on a radically new principle: “that the pictorialillusion takes place on the physical reality of an opaque surface ratherthan behind the illusion of a transparent plane.” One result of suchan approach is “allover” painting, painting the structure ofwhich spreads out with approximately equal weight in all directions acrossthe surface of the picture plane rather than exploiting a framework in depthdependent on perspective. An analogous “allover” structurecharacterizes much of the music of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen:Jackson Pollock’s classic “drip” paintings(1947–50) established the allover, frontal, “singleimage” conception that emerged in American painting in the late 1940sin its most ambitious and thorough-going form, and there are manifestparallels between Pollock’s allover designs and the ambitious worksfor orchestra that Boulez and Stockhausen completed in the late 1950s andearly 1960s, Stockhausen’s Carré andPunkte and Boulez’s Pli selonpli. This essay is an attempt to illuminate the styles ofBoulez and Stockhausen at a crucial point in their evolution by placing themin the context of allover painting.

During his lifetime, Pollock was widely regarded as an“original” who had emerged from nowhere, or at least as auniquely American phenomenon, a notion Pollock himself explicitly rejected.In fact, Pollock’s allover designs were deeply rooted in tradition,not only in André Masson’s surrealist canvases but also in theimpressionist painting of the 1870s and 1880s, the period when theimpressionists were most closely and enthusiastically allied, andPollock’s “drip” paintings coincided with a newinterest in the late work of Monet, an interest that Pollock’spaintings helped to provoke.