Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life

But there was another, morbid, side to his meaningfulness. To "die at the top" for being his kind of artist was to many, I think, implicit in the work before he died. It was this bizarre implication that was so moving. We remembered Van Gogh and Rimbaud. But not it was our time, and a man some of us knew. The ultimate sacrificial aspect of being an artist, while not a new idea, seemed in Pollack terribly modern. and in him the statement and the ritual were so grand, so authoritative and all-encompassing in their scale and daring that, whatever our private convictions, we could not fail to be affected by their spirit.

SOURCE:

University of California Press. 1993.