essays that will never be written (as usual)

Henry Adams' Tom and Jack is a brilliant, provocative re-reading of the mentor-student relationship between Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, based on the premise that Benton retained more of his modernist beginnings than is generally thought, and communicated the formal lessons of his modernist phase to Pollock in the way he taught figurative painting and representation.

The forgotten school of Synchromism is key to this interpretation, based on theories of color that, strictly speaking, are not true.

But there are moments in which untruths are more central to artmaking than conventional truths.

Looking at a few essays in Roger Shattuck's book from some decades ago The Innocent Eye in conjunction with Michael Taussig's new What Color Is the Sacred? I am left with the feeling that there are provocative juxtapositions to be made.

But I am not likely to be the one who makes them.