Pollock (Francesca) : Mon Pollock de père
A great American painter, but also a professor of calligraphy and typography, Charles Pollock, Jackson Pollock’s eldest brother, left behind few echoes of his work before he died, in Paris. His daughter, Francesca, and his wife, Sylvia, then spent twenty years gathering, cataloguing, and finally introducing to the world his work and his life, both of them veiled in silence and privacy. But why and for whose sake did Charles Pollock erase himself ? What meaning are we to give to his oeuvre, and to his silence ?
2022 / 16x20 cm / 176 p. / ISBN : 978-2-85035-072-6
Through this narrative, it is not so much her father’s story that Francesca Pollock wishes to understand and to tell, but her own story and her own life, both so closely linked to the life of Charles Pollock, whom she knew only in old age, and then in death. And yet it was the absence of words and of transmission––forms of symbolic death––that enshrouded her father throughout his life : “What was most familiar to me was his silence,” writes the author.
Words, which were so rare between them, are thus given free rein in a book in several voices : the author’s ; Charles Pollock’s, which emerges from letters, writings, and interviews ; but also that of the painter’s work and of its viewers, whose words mean more than any others. Rising above her doubts and the magnitude of the task, the author gives form and meaning to the work and life story of Charles Pollock, in a luminous homage that is only made possible by means of a true inner resolution.
Francesca Pollock, daughter of the painter Charles Pollock, was born in 1967 in Michigan, and was raised and educated in Paris. A psychoanalyst, she co-wrote with Jean-Benoît Patricot À la rencontre de Ferdinand (HD Éditions). She has also translated several books on cinema : Shadow Conversation, by Michael Cimino, Kazan on Directing, by Elia Kazan, and Robert Altman : The Oral Biography, by Mitchell Zuckoff. She also contributed to the collection and translation of American Letters : 1927-1947 (Polity), a work that brings together the correspondence of the Pollock family. Together with her mother Sylvia Winter Pollock, she has spent more than twenty years archiving and bringing to light the work of Charles Pollock. A Pollock of My Own is the first of her writings to be published by L’Atelier Contemporain.
