The sweet smell of success, and the scent of an iconoclast

Success may be the worst thing that can happen to modern art. When a radical work gets taken up by wealthy collectors and big-time museums, it risks becoming a marker of cultural status instead of creative achievement.

That danger came home to me on a recent visit to "The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works," one of the National Gallery's fall exhibitions.

The Meyerhoff show, built around choice modern pictures donated by the Maryland real estate magnate, includes a corner with three radically messy works by master avant-gardist Robert Rauschenberg. One mashes together news photos of military gear and flag-waving parades and bits of Victorian fencing, while another includes pictures of old cars and ads for drinks and a real cardboard box, all apparently assembled without much rhyme or reason, or at least while redefining what rhyme and reason might be.

And the reaction to all this by one high-end visitor, dressed in starched and pressed chinos, gleaming Topsiders and gold-rimmed glasses? "Nice stuff. It's really nice."

Thus can success smother art.

That smothering got me looking for even a single blue-chip Meyerhoff that simply refused to play nice, however much money and prestige it's been draped in. "Ritual" was the work I found, painted in 1953 by a 41-year-old Jackson Pollock, only three years away from a drunken drive and a fatally placed tree.

"Ritual" is gloriously rude and ugly, and has stayed that way despite the passing of time and the canonization of its maker.

The color scheme alone is enough to turn weak stomachs: thick splats of mint-green and candy-floss blue and water-ice pink -- and washes of diarrheic brown laid down over the top. You can imagine a moment before that brown was put on, when the painting still looked almost nursery-sweet. And then Pollock's final decision to mess it up with thin brown paint, like a toddler having a fit and smearing up his bedroom walls.

"Ritual" doesn't reveal the Pollock admired by even his most ardent fans. For the previous six years, the artist had won success by unleashing skeins of paint that glittered and swooped and caressed his canvases. They were far from tame, but they certainly launched a new kind of prettiness. Whereas "Ritual," one of a bare few paintings done in Pollock's final years, pushes back against that successful look. Pollock was resisting his own art's descent into a mannered style, and that resistance is what comes across most strongly, overcoming all the tastefulness that time and fame can impose.

The new work, painted upright with a brush rather than dripped horizontally, is barely abstract. It's easy to make out arms and legs and heads in it. My first glance revealed a stripper with a pole gripped in her thighs, though others may spot different bits of lewdness. The painting has its "feminine" touches: passages that could stand for lipstick-pink kisses or turquoise stilettos or swags of blond hair. But they are more decadent and Marilynish than girlish and demure. (The big media event of 1953? The televised coronation of a 27-year-old Queen Elizabeth II.)

People talk about this painting as a return to the Picasso-inspired works of Pollock's pre-drip years. And there is a sense that it has the same three beats and disjointed body parts as the "Demoiselles d'Avignon," though compressed by Pollock into a harrowingly tight space. Yet to me it seems that Pollock is backing up, even tripping badly as he goes, in hopes of a bigger leap ahead.

A shame that tree got in the way.

The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works Through May 2 at the National Gallery of Art, East Building mezzanine. Visit http://nga.gov.