Pollock, Jackson (1912–1956), artist, member of the abstract expressionist movement.Born in Cody, Wyoming, Pollock moved to
New York City in 1930 to study with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Pollock eventually rejected Benton's emphasis on representational subject matter, but he retained Benton's proclivity to articulate compositions based on pictorial dynamics. In New York, Pollock's work was informed by the Mexican muralists' use of large scale, synthetic paints, and experimental techniques, as well as by the work of the European surrealists, whose ideas about myth and the relevance of the unconscious to artistic creativity dovetailed with his own appreciation for non‐Western art. He married Lee Krasner, also an artist, in 1945.
Moving to Long Island, Pollock created his characteristic large‐scale abstractions between 1947 and 1950. In a bigger studio, Pollock began placing the canvas on the floor, approaching it from all directions, pouring pigment directly on the canvas, a technique he compared to that of Indian sand painters. Interested in issues of meaning and interpretation, Pollock described his abstractions as an attempt to evoke the rhythmic and dynamic energy of nature, a point he reinforced by applying paint with a physicality unprecedented in Western art and by achieving an “allover” effect (a term coined by critics to describe paintings without a visual center of attention). In the early
Cold War era,
Life magazine promoted Pollock as evidence of Western artistic freedom and America's cultural coming‐of‐age. Pollock's work proved remarkably influential on later artists, including Morris Louis, Robert Morris, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Smithson.
See also
Abstract Expressionism;
Painting: Since 1945.
Bibliography
B.H. Friedman , Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, 1972.
Claude Cernuschi , Jackson Pollock: Meaning and Significance, 1992.
Claude Cernuschi
