Pollock, Jackson

Pollock, Jackson (1912–1956). American painter, the commanding figure of the Abstract Expressionist movement. He was born on a sheep ranch at Cody, Wyoming, and grew up in Arizona and California, moving homes several times in childhood because of his father's lack of success as a farmer. In 1929 he moved to New York and studied at the Art Students League under the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. He was influenced not only by Benton's vigorous style, but also by his image as a virile, truculent, hard-drinking macho-man ( Pollock began treatment for alcoholism in 1937 and in 1939 he started therapy with Jungian psychoanalysts, using his drawings in sessions with them). During the 1930s he painted in the manner of the Regionalists, and was influenced also by the Mexican muralists (he attended Siqueiros's experimental workshop in New York in 1936) and by certain aspects of Surrealism, particularly the use of mythical or totemic figures as archetypes of the unconscious. From 1935 to 1942 he worked for the Federal Art Project, and in 1943 he was given a contract by Peggy Guggenheim; his first one-man show was held at her Art of This Century gallery in that year. A characteristic work of this time is The She-Wolf (MOMA, New York, 1943), a semi-abstract picture with vehemently handled paint and ominous imagery recalling the monstrous creatures of Picasso's Guernica period.

By the mid-1940s Pollock's work had become completely abstract, and the ‘drip and splash’ style of Action Painting for which he is best known emerged with some suddenness in 1947. Instead of using the traditional easel, he laid his canvas on the floor (he worked in a large, barn-like studio on Long Island, where he settled in 1945 with his wife Lee Krasner) and poured and dripped his paint from a can (using commercial enamels and metallic paint because their texture was better suited to the technique); instead of using brushes, he manipulated the paint with ‘sticks, trowels or knives’ (to use his own words), sometimes obtaining textured effects by the admixture of ‘sand, broken glass or other foreign matter'. As he worked, Pollock moved around (and sometimes through) his paintings, creating a novel all-over style that avoided any points of emphasis and abandoned the traditional idea of composition in terms of relation among parts. The design of the painting had no relation to the size or shape of the canvas—indeed in the finished work the canvas was sometimes docked or trimmed to suit the image. The drip paintings were first publicly shown at Betty Parsons's gallery in 1948. Initially they shocked most people, but Irving Sandler (Abstract Expressionism, 1970) writes that ‘a small number of artists and critics were stunned by the originality and dynamism of his painting … he opened the way to a kind of painting that was more direct, improvisational, abstract, and larger in size than that of the Abstract Surrealists of the time or of such earlier pioneers of improvisation as Kandinsky. Pollock revitalized American abstraction, giving other artists the confidence to risk basing their own painting on the spontaneous gesture, knowing that it could yield a unified picture full of energy, drama, and passion … it was Pollock who unleashed the creative energies of the Abstract Expressionists.’ Willem de Kooning summed up the importance of the 1948 exhibition when he commented ‘ Jackson's broken the ice'.

Pollock's drip period lasted only from 1947 to 1952 (in the 1950s he went back to quasi-figurative work), but it is on the paintings of these five years that his enormous reputation rests. Among the most celebrated are Autumn Rhythm (Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1950) and Lavender Mist (NG, Washington, 1950), which Robert Hughes describes as ‘his most ravishingly atmospheric painting … In it one sees the delicacy—at a scale that reproduction cannot suggest—with which Pollock used the patterns caused by the separation and marbling of one enamel wet in another, the tiny black striations in the dusty pink, to produce an infinity of tones. It is what his imitators could never do, and why there are no successful Pollock forgeries; they always end up looking like vomit, or onyx, or spaghetti, whereas Pollock—at his best at any rate—had an almost preternatural control over the total effect of those skeins and receding depths of paint … So one is obliged to speak of Pollock in terms of perfected visual taste, analogous to natural pitch in music—a far cry, indeed, from the familiar image of him as a violent expressionist.’ Irving Sandler, too, stresses the subtlety of Pollock's work, writing that far from being ‘a kind of solitary, super-primitive, free of culture', as conceived by the popular imagination, he ‘was, in fact, an artist of sophistication and erudition, alive to most every tradition in Western art'.

Pollock's drip paintings were subjected to a good deal of critical abuse (he was nicknamed ‘Jack the Dripper'), but he had the support of influential writers, particularly Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, and in 1949 the French painter Georges Mathieu said that he considered him the ‘greatest living American painter'. By this time he was becoming well known to the public and in August 1949 Life magazine discussed Mathieu's claim in an article entitled ‘Jackson Pollock: Is he the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?’ The article pointed out that he was ‘virtually unknown in 1944', but that ‘Now his paintings hang in five US museums and 40 private collections'. After his death in a car crash at the age of 44, a flood of articles appeared on him, discussing his alcoholism and larger-than-life personality as much as his art. By about 1960 he was generally recognized as the most important figure in the most important movement in the history of American painting, but a movement from which artists were already in reaction (see POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION). His unhappy personal life and his untimely death contributed to his status as one of the legends of modern art; he was the first American painter to become a ‘star'. Francis V. O'Connor, author of a standard biography of Pollock (1967), has written of him: ‘As a man Pollock was described by his contemporaries as gentle and contemplative when sober, violent when drunk. These extremes found equilibrium in his art. He was highly intelligent, widely read and, when he chose, incisively articulate. He believed that art derived from the unconscious, saw himself as the essential subject of his painting, and judged his work and that of others on its inherent authenticity of personal expression.’