Pollock, Jackson (1912-1956)

His aggressive, sometimes violent personality combined with a new painting technique elevated artist Jackson Pollock to legendary status among American painters. His turbulent outbursts and his drip paintings earned him a reputation that would later become the stereotypical idea of the modern artist. Reconciling the unconscious

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with the creative act of painting was the impetus behind the paintings of abstract expressionist artist Pollock. His gestural works and technique of flinging and dripping paint over canvas had its inspiration in an exploration of the painting process and stemmed from his association with surrealist artists. Pollock once referenced the act of painting in itself as a source of magic. The art critic Harold Rosenberg picked up on this thought and termed the work "action painting." Pollock's action paintings became the cornerstone of the abstract expressionist art movement. This technique, an all-over approach that redefined pictorial space by doing away with any differentiation between the foreground and the background, stunned the art world when first presented at the Betty Parsons New York Gallery in 1948.

Paul Jackson Pollock, born in Cody, Wyoming, January 28, 1912, spent his early years in the American Southwest, specifically Arizona and California, where he developed an interest in mysticism and mythology. This fascination resurfaced after studying with American Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League in New York from 1930 to 1932. Pollock's imagery began to contrast sharply with the realism of Benton; Pollock had more of an interest in the intangible expressions of emotions as subject matter. Pollock's brush with the work of Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Clement Orozco during his tenure with the Works Projects Administration Federal Art Project in 1935 reinforced his interest in metaphysical ideas. Pollock also became obsessed with large scale images. In the 1940s some of his canvases grew to sizes over 16 feet long.

Before Pollock began applying the action painting technique, his work in the early 1940s related to the automatic gestural painting practiced by many surrealists and the influence of Wassily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso. Pollock's earliest images contained loose, gestural figurative forms. The gesture of the painting overtook the subjects beginning in 1947. Soon, recognizable imagery became obliterated by tangles of lines and shapes formed by dripping and poured paint. The movement and layers of the paint intermingled, flattening the plane and often seeming to continue beyond the edges of the canvas. Large scale works such as Lavender Mist (1950) and Full Fathom Five (1947) were the culmination of this style and became some of Pollock's best known and most successful pieces. Pollock claimed every drip and line was deliberate; he refuted the idea of chance or accident as part of his creative process. Art critic Clement Greenberg, familiar with Pollock's work, encouraged the artist to continue with his unique technique. Greenberg's favorable reviews and his backing of the New York School, with Pollock at the center, led to an exciting period in art history. The abstract expressionists, including Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline, in addition to Pollock's wife, artist Lee Krasner, helped make New York the art center of the world. There artists produced exciting new works that defined the idea of avant-garde art.

A return to figurative imagery in Pollock's work after 1950, seen in works such as #27 (1951) and Easter and the Totem (1953), still incorporated the philosophy of applying paint purely for its expressive qualities. Yet, Pollock did not have as much success with these later images as he did with his earlier non-figurative paintings. This lack of success fueled a problem with alcoholism that began to consume Pollock. Moreover, his marriage was disintegrating, and Pollock's life rapidly spiraled downward, culminating in a fatal automobile accident in 1956.

During his short life, Pollock was a prolific and original artist. His works of art had a profound impact on an art community that was ready for reinvention. Pollock and the New York School revitalized the American art scene while filling New York City with a raw, artistic excitement—the discovery of a new way of producing and thinking about art. Pollock and his action paintings were pivotal to the art movement abstract expressionism. Often parodied, Pollock is a legendary figure representing modernity in art in the twentieth century.

—Jennifer Jankauskas

Further Reading:

Naifeh, Steven W., and Gregory White Smith. Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. New York, C.N. Potter, 1989.

O'Connor, Francis V. Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works. 4 volumes. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1978.

O'Hara, Frank. Jackson Pollock. New York, G. Braziller, 1959.

Potter, Jeffrey. To a Violent Grave: An Oral History of Jackson Pollock. New York, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985.

Ratcliff, Carter. The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Post-War American Art. New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996.

Robertson, Bryan. Jackson Pollock. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1960.

Solomon, Deborah. Jackson Pollock: A Biography. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1987.