Jackson Pollock

American painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was the leading figure in abstract expressionism, a style that evolved after World War II and radicalized the history of American painting and modern art in general.

Before World War II modern painting was dominated by European developments. Although American painters were aware of them, they generally did not participate in their origin or contribute significantly to their evolution. With the advent of World War II the mainstream of modern art shifted dramatically. The numerous European artists who sought refuge in the United States exerted a profound influence on younger American painters and sculptors. From this cultural collision emerged a style whose roots lay abroad—for the most part in cubism and surrealism—but whose look and meaning were without precedent. The style became known as abstract expressionism, or "action" painting, because it frequently resulted from a direct and unpremeditated relationship between an artist and his medium.

Among American artists, Jackson Pollock was probably the single most powerful figure in giving shape to this new direction. With his example, moreover, American painting assumed a position of leadership within the international scope of modern art.

Early Work

Pollock was born on Jan. 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyo. His father was a surveyor, and Jackson spent most of his childhood in Arizona and northern California. In 1925 the family settled in southern California. Largely through the influence of his oldest brother, Jackson became interested in art. Between 1925 and 1929 he attended Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, involved first with sculpture and later with painting.

In 1929 Pollock moved to New York City to study with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. He stayed for 2 years. Between 1931 and 1935 he made several trips to California and then decided to settle in New York. He worked on the Federal Arts Project from 1938 to 1942, and in 1940 he enjoyed his first New York exhibition—a group show which also included works by Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner. Here Pollock met Lee Krasner, and they married in 1944.

Pollock's first one-man show took place in 1943 at the Art of This Century Gallery in New York. Owned by the celebrated collector Peggy Guggenheim, the gallery became famous during the 1940s as a showroom for unknown but gifted American artists and for the recent works of established European masters. By offering both European and American styles, the gallery played a primary role in the genesis of abstract expressionism. In 1946 Pollock and his wife moved to Easthampton, L.I., where they remained until his death.

Pollock's art during these years reveals his effort to come to grips with advanced European developments, particularly cubism and surrealism. He seems to have struggled desperately with both styles, as though they were foreign to his sensibility and could not accommodate his ambitions. An outstanding example of the struggle, Male and Female (1942) is dominated by two totemlike figures, symbols of man and woman, that stretch the full length of the canvas. Essentially, the figures are composed of the flat planes of synthetic cubism, with secondary planes linking them to one another and to their surrounding space. But while the figures are cubist in formal terms, their interpretation by the artist is inspired by surrealist thought. This is apparent in the mysterious symbols which are strewn across the canvas—arithmetic notations, suggestions of floating eyes, and so forth—and by the grotesque, nightmarish heads of the figures: the woman looks like a frightening cat, and the man, with gaping mouth, resembles a devouring demon. Such creatures arise from a world beyond conventional reason and visible reality.

That Pollock was struggling with his pictorial means, however, is apparent in the way Male and Female is painted. The paint is thickly and roughly applied. In some places the artist forced or scrubbed it onto the canvas, whereas in others he scribbled it into abstract configurations that seem determined to obscure the principal figures. As a whole the surface appears painfully executed, a torturous expression of Pollock's desire to break free from his inherited stylistic limits.

Classic Period

Between 1947 and 1950 Pollock's art matured with astonishing rapidity. He also began to receive national and international recognition. In 1948 Peggy Guggenheim included his work in an exhibition of her collection presented in Venice, Florence, Milan, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. In 1950 she organized his first European one-man exhibition, which was shown in Venice and Milan. In New York, Pollock showed twice at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1949.

These shows clearly established Pollock as the leading figure of the new American painting. Along with the sheer quality of his work, however, his radical techniques also attracted widespread attention. About 1947 Pollock gave up conventional easel painting in favor of dripping his paint—from sticks, brushes, or syringes—onto lengths of unstretched canvas laid out on the floor of his studio. Instead of maintaining a fixed relationship to his canvas, he would work from all of its sides, frequently walking across it or through it during the creative act. This spontaneous method of working inspired the term "action" painting. Its intensely personal meaning is revealed in Pollock's statement in 1947: "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc. because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well."

Although Pollock's radical techniques productively enabled his breakthrough to maturity, they also provoked considerable hostility among the general public. Not unexpectedly, Time led the assault, referring to the artist as "Jack the dripper." Pollock felt such hostility deeply. As Frank O'Hara wrote: " … Pollock was also sustaining frivolous and damaging criticism, aimed mostly at his methods, and he received them with bitterness. He was especially vulnerable because of the personal nature of his work. It is terrible to be great alone, and the public had not yet recognized with its scorn the greatness of his American contemporaries. Where Gorky had suffered from lack of attention, Pollock suffered from attention of the wrong kind."

Pollock's "drip" paintings constitute his masterpieces. Among others, these include Full Fathom Five (1947), Number 1 (1948), and Autumn Rhythm (1950). In these he transcends the tensions and anxieties that characterize his earlier efforts. On a formal level the flat planes of cubism give way to a pictorial space generated exclusively by line. But the quality of Pollock's line is unique: as it accelerates across the surface, changing color, twisting upon itself, and generating an intricate overall web, it is experienced as a purely optical phenomenon. That is, the line is freed from all functional associations, particularly from its traditional function of describing shapes or objects. Thus, Pollock's line is felt to be exclusively pictorial—to reveal the capacity of line within the realm of painting. As O'Hara said, "There has never been enough said about Pollock's draftsmanship, that amazing ability to quicken a line by thinning it, to slow it up by flooding, to elaborate that simplest of elements, the line—to change, reinvigorate, to extend, to build up an embarrassment of riches in the mass by drawing alone."

But the "drip" paintings also embody a new relationship to surrealist thought—that is, in terms of Pollock's freewheeling method of working. Where previously he had sought to tap his unconscious self by painting images of it—mythic creatures, fantasies, and so on—the "drip" technique allowed him simply to "let go, " to release spontaneously the psychic and bodily energies that surrealist theory had encouraged the artist to explore during the creative act. Thus, although the "drip" paintings do not look surrealist, their genesis owes much to that European style.

Last Years

During the 1950s Pollock exhibited regularly at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. But while his reputation continued to grow, he began to suffer intense self-doubt and anxiety. The most pervasive artistic problem in these years concerned figuration: Pollock seems to have wanted to accommodate human or abstract figures within the dripped webs that characterize his masterpieces of 1947-1950. His effort to do so can be seen in the black-and-white paintings of 1951-1952 and in the richly colored Blue Poles (1952). Many of these works have extraordinary power, but they generally lack his earlier lyrical harmony. With their crowded surfaces, they frequently appear desperate, even tragic, in the way they bare their thwarted ambitions.

Pollock never emerged from this crisis. He died in an automobile accident on Aug. 11, 1956, in Southampton, N.Y. That year a memorial exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art honored him.

Further Reading

Excellent monographs on Pollock are Frank O'Hara, Jackson Pollock (1959), and Bryan Robertson, Jackson Pollock (1960). Also useful is the New York Museum of Modern Art publication Jackson Pollock by Sam Hunter (1956).

Additional Sources

Cernuschi, Claude, Jackson Pollock: meaning and significance, New York, NY: IconEditions, 1992.

Frank, Elizabeth, Jackson Pollock, New York: Abbeville Press, 1983.

Friedman, B. H. (Bernard Harper), Jackson Pollock: energy made visible, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995.

Naifeh, Steven W., Jackson Pollock: an American saga, New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1991.

Solomon, Deborah, Jackson Pollock: a biography, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

To a violent grave: an oral biography of Jackson Pollock, New York: G.P. Putnam, 1985. □

Pollock, Jackson (b Cody, Wyo., 28 Jan. 1912; d East Hampton, Long Island, NY, 11 Aug. 1956). American painter, the commanding figure of the Abstract Expressionist movement. In 1929–31 he studied at the Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton and was influenced not only by Benton's restlessly energetic style, but also by his image as a virile, 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 Benton's Regionalist vein, and he was influenced also by the work of the Mexican muralists (he attended an experimental workshop run by Siqueiros 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 (1943, MoMA, New York), 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 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 traditional ideas of composition; 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 New York gallery in 1948. Initially they shocked most observers, 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 impact of the 1948 exhibition when he commented, ‘Jackson's broken the ice.’

Pollock's drip period lasted only from 1947 to 1952 (afterwards 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 (1950, Met. Mus., New York) and Lavender Mist (1950, NG, Washington), which Robert Hughes describes as ‘his most ravishingly atmospheric painting’. Pollock's novel methods gave rise to a good deal of mockery (he was nicknamed Jack the Dripper), but he was supported by advanced critics, particularly Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, and as early as 1949 the French painter Georges Mathieu said that he considered him the ‘greatest living American painter’. By 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. His unhappy personal life and his premature death in a car crash contributed to his status as one of the legends of modern art; he was the first American painter to become a ‘star’.

In 1945 Pollock married Lee Krasner (1908–84), who was an Abstract Expressionist painter of some distinction, although it was only after her husband's death that she received serious critical recognition. She was also an important source of encouragement and support to Pollock, whose attitude to his work fluctuated from supreme confidence to dismal uncertainty.

POLLOCK, JACKSON 1912-1956

Abstract expressionist artist

Notorious Celebrity

Jackson Pollock was the art world's most notorious celebrity during the 1950s. Despite a long apprenticeship he came to prominence suddenly late in 1949, largely as a result of the advocacy of Nation art critic Clement Greenberg, who declared Pollock's greatness. In response to what many thought was an outrageous claim, Life magazine published a feature story titled "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?" The article featured photographs of Pollock's huge drip paintings that consist of layers of multicolored paint spatters and quoted the artist as saying that when he painted he had to get "in" his paintings and "When I am in my painting I'm not aware of what I'm doing."

"Jack the Dripper."

Pollock made many enemies, among whom he was known as "Jack the Dripper." During the 1950s the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, New York, was as significant a place in his life as his art studio. Pollock drank heavily and was abusive when he was drunk. He was a Tuesday-night regular at the Cedar, an artists' hangout, and his appearance came to be dreaded because he was so rude and contentious. As his fame as an artist grew, so did his reputation as a nasty drunk, profane, insulting, and slovenly. Artist Larry Rivers, looking back some fifteen years, remembered, "What was obviously gorgeous in his work was becoming infused with a mindlessness impossible to separate from his social personality."

Background

Pollock was born in Los Angeles and moved to New York in 1932 at the age of twenty to study art with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Like many of the abstract expressionists (see entry), Pollock worked for the WPA art program during the war. After he was terminated early in 1943, he decorated ties and lipstick cases at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York City. He made his first drip paintings in the winter of 1946, and that style dominated his work until his death a decade later.

Success

No American artist of the time, abstract or otherwise, attracted the popular attention Pollock did. His studio in East Hamption, Long Island, was repeatedly visited by art-features writers; his work habits were described by critics; his demeanor was commented on by colleagues. By the early 1950s he was the most successful of abstract painters, selling individual drip paintings for twice the price of a new Cadillac. But the personal toll was steep. His wife, artist Lee Krasner, was finally driven away by his violent drinking episodes and his promiscuous sexual behavior. Though she still appreciated and defended his artistic talent, she could no longer abide his destructive behavior.

Death

One Tuesday night in spring 1956 Pollock met Ruth Kligman, an art student who wanted to spend some time with the best American artists. They became friendly, and in August he invited her for a weekend visit to his home in East Hampton, after his wife had moved out. She brought a friend, Edith Metzger, and on Friday, 10 August, the three of them went out to eat and drink, Pollock driving in his Olds mobile convertible. At one point Pollock passed out behind the wheel, and a patrolman stopped to investigate. When Pollock told him he was OK, the patrolman left, and the three went to a bar in East Hampton so that Pollock could steady his nerves with a drink. When he was ready to go, Edith Metzger refused to get into the car because she thought him too drunk to drive. Pollock flew into a rage, and with Kligman's help they forced her into the car. Pollock raced off recklessly. Within minutes he and Edith Metzger were dead, killed when the car veered off the winding road.

Reputation

With his death, Pollock's reputation was crystallized. He was eulogized as America's greatest artist, answering the question posed in Life seven years earlier. He was buried at Green River Cemetery in East Hampton, a location that subsequently became so popular as an artists' burial ground that the sylvan setting around Pollock's natural-rock gravestone had to be disturbed to make more burial space. Sixteen years after his death the Australian government paid $2 million for Blue Poles, a painting begun in a drunken suicidal fit. It set an alltime-record price for an artwork by an American.

Source:

Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989).

Pollock, Jackson (1912–56). American painter, the commanding figure of the Abstract Expressionist movement. In 1929–31 he studied at the Art Students League of New York under Thomas Hart Benton and was influenced not only by Benton's restlessly energetic style, but also by his image as a virile, 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 Benton's Regionalist vein, and he was influenced also by the work of the Mexican muralists (he attended an experimental workshop run by Siqueiros 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 (1943, MoMA, New York), 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’ type of Action Painting for which he is best known emerged in 1947. Instead of using the traditional easel, he laid his canvas on the floor 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 traditional ideas of composition; 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 New York gallery in 1948. Initially they shocked most observers, but some people were stunned by their energy and passion, which opened up new paths for painting: Willem de Kooning commented, ‘Jackson's broken the ice.’

Pollock's drip period lasted only from 1947 to 1952 (afterwards 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 (1950, Met. Mus., New York) and Lavender Mist (1950, NG, Washington), which Robert Hughes describes as ‘his most ravishingly atmospheric painting’. Pollock's novel methods gave rise to a good deal of mockery (he was nicknamed ‘Jack the Dripper’), but he was supported by advanced critics, particularly Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, and as early as 1949 the French painter Georges Mathieu said that he considered him the ‘greatest living American painter’. By 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. His unhappy personal life and his premature death in a car crash contributed to his status as one of the legends of modern art; he was the first American painter to become a ‘star’.

In 1945 Pollock married Lee Krasner (1908–84), who was an Abstract Expressionist painter of some distinction, although it was only after her husband's death that she received serious critical recognition. She was also an important source of encouragement and support to Pollock, whose attitude to his work fluctuated from supreme confidence to dismal uncertainty.

Jackson Pollock 1912–56, American painter, b. Cody, Wyo. He studied (1929–31) in New York City, mainly under Thomas Hart Benton , but he was more strongly influenced by A. P. Ryder and the Mexican muralists, especially Siqueiros . From 1938 to 1942, Pollock worked on the Federal Art Project in New York City. Affected by surrealism and also by Picasso , he moved toward a highly abstract art in order to express, rather than illustrate, feeling. His experimentations led to the development of his famous "drip" technique, in which he energetically drew or "dripped" complicated linear rhythms onto enormous canvases, which were often placed flat on the floor. He sometimes applied paint directly from the tube, and at times also used aluminum paint to achieve a glittery effect. His vigorous attack on the canvas and intense devotion to the very act of painting led to the term "action painting." Pollock had become a symbol of the new artistic revolt, abstract expressionism , by the time he was killed in an automobile accident. His paintings are in many major collections, including museums in New York City, San Francisco, Dallas, and Chicago. Pollock was married to the painter Lee Krasner .

Bibliography: See H. Harrison, ed., Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock (2001) and P. Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Key Interviews, Articles, and Reviews (2002); catalogue raisonné, 4 vol., ed. by F. V. O'Connor and E. B. Thaw (1978, supplement 1995) and catalog ed. by K. Varnedoe and P. Karmel (1998); B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (1972, repr. 1995); D. Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography (1987); S. Naifeh and G. W. Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Genius (1988); E. G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (1989); C. Ratcliff, The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Post-War American Art (1996).

Pollock, Jackson (1912–56) US painter. A leading figure in abstract expressionism. He began experimenting with abstract art in the 1940s. In 1947 he began pouring paint straight onto the canvas. Instead of brushes, he used sticks or knives to create the surface patterns. This method has been called action painting. His works include The Blue Unconscious (1946) and Lavender Mist (1950).

http://www.tate.org.uk; http://cc.sunysb.edu/CAS/pkhouse.nsf