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Jackson Pollock
Photographer Hans Namuth extensively documented Pollock's unique painting techniques.
Birth name	Paul Jackson Pollock
Born	January 28, 1912(1912-01-28) Cody, Wyoming, U.S.
Died	August 11, 1956(1956-08-11) (aged 44) Springs, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Field	Painter
Training	Art Students League of New York
Movement	Abstract expressionism
Patrons	Peggy Guggenheim
Influenced by	Thomas Hart Benton, Pablo Picasso [1][2][3]
Influenced	Helen Frankenthaler

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956), known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.^[4]

Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related car accident. In December 1956, he was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, and a larger more comprehensive exhibition there in 1967. More recently, in 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London.^[5]

In 2000, Pollock was the subject of an Academy Award–winning film Pollock directed by and starring Ed Harris.

[edit] Early life

Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912,^[6] the youngest of five sons. His parents, Stella May McClure and Leroy Pollock, grew up in Tingley, Iowa. His father had been born McCoy but took the surname of his neighbors, who adopted him after his own parents had died within a year of each other. Stella and LeRoy Pollock were Presbyterian; the former, Irish; the latter, Scotch-Irish.^[7] LeRoy Pollock was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the government.^[6] Jackson grew up in Arizona and Chico, California. Expelled from one high school in 1928, he enrolled at Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School, from which he was also expelled. During his early life, he experienced Native American culture while on surveying trips with his father.^[6][8] In 1930, following his brother Charles Pollock, he moved to New York City where they both studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League of New York. Benton's rural American subject matter shaped Pollock's work only fleetingly, but his rhythmic use of paint and his fierce independence were more lasting influences.^[6] From 1935 to 1943, Pollock worked for the WPA Federal Art Project.^[9]

In attempts to fight his alcoholism, from 1938 through 1941 Pollock underwent Jungian psychotherapy with Dr. Joseph Henderson and later with Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlo in 1941-1942. Henderson made the decision to engage him through his art and had Pollock make drawings, which led to the appearance of many Jungian concepts in his paintings.^[10][11] Recently it has been hypothesized that Pollock might have had bipolar disorder.^[12]

[edit] The Springs period and the unique technique

No. 5, 1948

In October 1945 Pollock married American painter Lee Krasner, and in November they moved to what is now known as the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio, at 830 Springs Fireplace Road, in Springs on Long Island, NY. Peggy Guggenheim lent them the down payment for the wood-frame house with a nearby barn that Pollock converted into a studio. There he perfected the technique of working with paint with which he became permanently identified.

Pollock was introduced to the use of liquid paint in 1936 at an experimental workshop operated in New York City by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. He later used paint pouring as one of several techniques on canvases of the early 1940s, such as "Male and Female" and "Composition with Pouring I." After his move to Springs, he began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor, and he developed what was later called his "drip" technique, turning to synthetic resin-based paints called alkyd enamels, which, at that time, was a novel medium. Pollock described this use of household paints, instead of artist’s paints, as "a natural growth out of a need."^[13] He used hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes as paint applicators. Pollock's technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term action painting. With this technique, Pollock was able to achieve a more immediate means of creating art, the paint now literally flowing from his chosen tool onto the canvas. By defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension by being able to view and apply paint to his canvases from all directions. One possible influence on Pollock was the work of the Ukrainian American artist Janet Sobel (1894–1968) (born Jennie Lechovsky). Sobel's work is related to the so-called "drip paintings" of Jackson Pollock.^[14] Peggy Guggenheim included Sobel's work in her The Art of This Century Gallery in 1945. The critic Clement Greenberg, with Jackson Pollock, saw Sobel's work there in 1946,^[15] and in his essay " 'American-Type' Painting" cited those works as the first instance of all-over painting he had seen."^[16]

In the process of making paintings in this way, he moved away from figurative representation, and challenged the Western tradition of using easel and brush. He also moved away from the use of only the hand and wrist, since he used his whole body to paint. In 1956, Time magazine dubbed Pollock "Jack the Dripper" as a result of his unique painting style.^[17]

"My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

"I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.

"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 fear of 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.

-- Jackson Pollock, My Painting, 1956

Pollock observed Indian sandpainting demonstrations in the 1940s. Other influences on his dripping technique include the Mexican muralists and Surrealist automatism. Pollock denied "the accident"; he usually had an idea of how he wanted a particular piece to appear. His technique combined the movement of his body, over which he had control, the viscous flow of paint, the force of gravity, and the absorption of paint into the canvas. It was a mixture of controllable and uncontrollable factors. Flinging, dripping, pouring, and spattering, he would move energetically around the canvas, almost as if in a dance, and would not stop until he saw what he wanted to see.

Studies by Taylor, Micolich and Jonas have examined Pollock's technique and have determined that some works display the properties of mathematical fractals.^[18] They assert that the works become more fractal-like chronologically through Pollock's career.^[19] The authors even speculate that Pollock may have had an intuition of the nature of chaotic motion, and attempted to form a representation of mathematical chaos, more than ten years before "Chaos Theory" itself was proposed. Other experts^[20] suggest that Pollock may have merely imitated popular theories of the time in order to give his paintings a depth not previously seen.

Pollock's Studio in Springs, New York.

In 1950, Hans Namuth, a young photographer, wanted to take pictures (both stills and moving) of Pollock at work. Pollock promised to start a new painting especially for the photographic session, but when Namuth arrived, Pollock apologized and told him the painting was finished. Namuth's comment upon entering the studio:

A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor … There was complete silence … Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white, and rust colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee and I were there; he did not seem to hear the click of the camera shutter … My photography session lasted as long as he kept painting, perhaps half an hour. In all that time, Pollock did not stop. How could one keep up this level of activity? Finally, he said 'This is it.'

Pollock’s finest paintings… reveal that his all-over line does not give rise to positive or negative areas: we are not made to feel that one part of the canvas demands to be read as figure, whether abstract or representational, against another part of the canvas read as ground. There is not inside or outside to Pollock’s line or the space through which it moves…. Pollock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas.(Karmel 132)

[edit] The 1950s

Pollock's most famous paintings were made during the "drip period" between 1947 and 1950. He rocketed to popular status following an August 8, 1949 four-page spread in Life magazine that asked, "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style.^[21]

Pollock's work after 1951 was darker in color, including a collection painted in black on unprimed canvases. This was followed by a return to color,^[22] and he reintroduced figurative elements. During this period Pollock had moved to a more commercial gallery and there was great demand from collectors for new paintings. In response to this pressure, along with personal frustration, his alcoholism deepened.^[23]

[edit] From naming to numbering

Pollock wanted an end to the viewer's search for representational elements in his paintings, and so he abandoned titles and started numbering the paintings instead. Of this, Pollock commented: "...look passively and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for." Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, said Pollock "used to give his pictures conventional titles... but now he simply numbers them. Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is - pure painting."^[13]

[edit] Death

Jackson Pollock's grave in the rear with Lee Krasner's grave in front in the Green River Cemetery.

In 1955, Pollock painted Scent and Search which would be his last two paintings.^[24] Pollock did not paint at all in 1956.^[22] After struggling with alcoholism for his entire adult life, Pollock, on August 11, 1956 at 10:15pm, died in a single-car crash in his Oldsmobile convertible while driving under the influence of alcohol. One of the passengers, Edith Metzger, was also killed in the accident, which occurred less than a mile from Pollock's home. The other passenger, Pollock's mistress Ruth Kligman, survived.^[25] After Pollock's demise at age 44, his widow, Lee Krasner, managed his estate and ensured that Pollock's reputation remained strong despite changing art-world trends. They are buried in Green River Cemetery in Springs with a large boulder marking his grave and a smaller one marking hers.

[edit] Legacy

The Pollock-Krasner House and Studio is owned and administered by the Stony Brook Foundation, a non-profit affiliate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Regular tours of the house and studio occur from May through October.

A separate organization, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, was established in 1985. The Foundation functions as the official Estate for both Pollock and his widow Lee Krasner, but also, under the terms of Krasner's will, serves "to assist individual working artists of merit with financial need."^[26] The U.S. copyright representative for the Pollock-Krasner Foundation is the Artists Rights Society (ARS).^[27]

His papers were donated by Lee Krasner in 1983 to the Archives of American Art. They were later included with Lee Krasner's own papers. The Archives of American Art also houses the Charles Pollock Papers which includes correspondence, photographs, and other files relating to his brother, Jackson Pollock.

[edit] Pollock in pop culture & news

In 1960, Ornette Coleman's album Free Jazz featured a Pollock painting as its cover artwork.

In 1973, Blue Poles (Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952), was purchased by the Australian Whitlam Government for the National Gallery of Australia for US $2 million (AU $1.3 million at the time of payment). At the time, this was the highest price ever paid for a modern painting. In the conservative climate of the time, the purchase created a political and media scandal. The painting is now one of the most popular exhibits in the gallery, and is thought to be worth between $100 and $150 million, according to 2006 estimates.^[28] It was a centerpiece of the Museum of Modern Art's 1998 retrospective in New York, the first time the painting had returned to America since its purchase.

British indie band the Stone Roses were heavily influenced by Pollock, with their cover artwork being pastiches of his work.^[29]

In 1999 a CD titled Jackson Pollock Jazz was released and only available at the MOMA. The CD had 17 tracks with selections from Pollock's personal collection of jazz records. The CD has been discontinued.

In 2000, the biographical film Pollock was released. Marcia Gay Harden won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Lee Krasner. The movie was the project of Ed Harris who portrayed Pollock and directed it. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.

In 2003, twenty-four Pollock-esque paintings and drawings were found in a Wainscott, New York locker. There is an inconclusive ongoing debate about whether or not these works are Pollock originals. Physicists have argued over whether fractals can be used to authenticate the paintings. This would require an analysis of geometric consistency of the paint splatters in Pollock's work at a microscopic level, and would be measured against the finding that patterns in Pollock's paintings increased in complexity with time.^[30] Analysis of the synthetic pigments shows that some were not patented until the 1980s, and therefore that it is highly improbable that Pollock could have used such paints.^[31][32]

In November 2006, Pollock's No. 5, 1948 became the world's most expensive painting, when it was sold privately to an undisclosed buyer for the sum of $140,000,000. The previous owner was film and music-producer David Geffen. It is rumored that the current owner is a German businessman and art collector.

Also in 2006 a documentary, Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? was made concerning Teri Horton, a truck driver who in 1992 bought an abstract painting for the price of five dollars at a thrift store in California. This work may be a lost Pollock painting. If so it would potentially be worth millions; its authenticity, however, remains debated.

In September 2009, Henry Adams claimed in Smithsonian Magazine that Pollock had written his name in his famous painting "Mural"^[33]

[edit] Relationship to Native American art

Pollock stated: “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk round it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the methods of the Indian sand painters of the West.”^[34]

[edit] Critical debate

Pollock's work has always polarized critics and has been the focus of many important critical debates.

In a famous 1952 article in ARTnews, Harold Rosenberg coined the term "action painting," and wrote that "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The big moment came when it was decided to paint 'just to paint.' The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value — political, aesthetic, moral." Many people assumed that he had modeled his "action painter" paradigm on Pollock.

Clement Greenberg supported Pollock's work on formalistic grounds. It fit well with Greenberg's view of art history as a progressive purification in form and elimination of historical content. He therefore saw Pollock's work as the best painting of its day and the culmination of the Western tradition going back via Cubism and Cézanne to Manet.

The critic Robert Coates once derided a number of Pollock’s works as “mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless.” ^[35]

Some posthumous exhibitions of Pollock's work were sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization to promote American culture and values backed by the CIA. Certain left-wing scholars, most prominently Eva Cockcroft, argue that the U.S. government and wealthy elite embraced Pollock and abstract expressionism in order to place the United States firmly in the forefront of global art and devalue socialist realism.^[36][37] In the words of Cockcroft, Pollock became a "weapon of the Cold War".^[38]

Painter Norman Rockwell's work Connoisseur^[39] also appears to make a commentary on the Pollock style. The painting features what seems to be a rather upright man in a suit standing before a Jackson Pollock-like spatter painting.

Reynold's News in a 1959 headline said, "This is not art — it's a joke in bad taste."^[36]

[edit] List of major works

Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

• (1942) Male and Female Philadelphia Museum of Art^[40]
• (1942) Stenographic Figure Museum of Modern Art^[41]
• (1943) Mural University of Iowa Museum of Art,^[42] currently housed at the Figge Art Museum^[43]
• (1943) Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle^[44]
• (1943) The She-Wolf Museum of Modern Art^[45]
• (1943) Blue (Moby Dick) Ohara Museum of Art^[46]
• (1945) Troubled Queen Museum of Fine Arts, Boston^[47]
• (1946) Eyes in the Heat Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice^[48]
• (1946) The Key Art Institute of Chicago^[49]
• (1946) The Tea Cup Collection Frieder Burda^[50]
• (1946) Shimmering Substance, from The Sounds In The Grass Museum of Modern Art^[51]
• (1947) Portrait of H.M. University of Iowa Museum of Art,^[52] currently housed at the Figge Art Museum^[43]
• (1947) Full Fathom Five Museum of Modern Art^[53]
• (1947) Cathedral Dallas Museum of Art^[54]
• (1947) Enchanted Forest Peggy Guggenheim Collection^[55]
• (1947) Lucifer San Francisco Museum of Modern Art^[56]
• (1948) Painting^[57]
• (1948) Number 5 (4 ft x 8 ft) Private collection
• (1948) Number 8- At Neuburger Museum at the State University of New York at Purchase.
• (1948) Composition (White, Black, Blue and Red on White) New Orleans Museum of Art^[58]
• (1948) Summertime: Number 9A Tate Modern
• (1949) Number 1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles^[59]
• (1949) Number 3
• (1949) Number 10 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston^[60]
• (1950) Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) National Gallery of Art^[61]
• (1950) Mural on indian red ground, 1950 Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art^[62]
• (1950) Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950 Metropolitan Museum of Art^[63]
• (1950) Number 29, 1950 National Gallery of Canada^[64]
• (1950) One: Number 31, 1950 Museum of Modern Art^[65]
• (1950) No. 32^[66]
• (1951) Number 7 National Gallery of Art^[67]
• (1951) Black & White
• (1952) Convergence Albright-Knox Art Gallery^[68]
• (1952) Blue Poles: No. 11, 1952 National Gallery of Australia^[69]
• (1953) Portrait and a Dream Dallas Museum of Art^[70]
• (1953) Easter and the Totem The Museum of Modern Art^[71]
• (1953) Ocean Greyness^[72]
• (1953) The Deep

[edit] Influence

Pollock's staining into raw canvas was adapted by Color Field painters Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. Frank Stella made allover composition a hallmark of his works of the 1960s. Happenings artist Allan Kaprow, sculptors Richard Serra, Eva Hesse and many contemporary artists have retained Pollock’s emphasis on the process of creation and were influenced by his approach to making art; rather than by the look of his work. ^[73]

[edit] Notes

[edit] See also

• All-over painting

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jackson Pollock

• Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center
• Pollock-Krasner Foundation
• Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art
• Pollock collection at Guggenheim NY site
• Jackson Pollock at The Art Story Foundation
• Pollock on Museum Web Paris
• Pollock and The Law
• National Gallery of Art web feature, includes highlights of Pollock's career, numerous examples of his work, photographs and motion footage of Pollock, plus an in-depth discussion of his 1950 painting Lavender Mist.
• Blue Poles at the NGA
• One. Number 31, 1950 smARThistory
• Jackson Pollock's Number One 1948; How Can We Be Abandoned and Accurate at the Same Time? by Lore Mariano
• Fractal Expressionism – the fractal qualities of Pollock's drip paintings.
• Understanding Abstract Art by Harley Hahn
• Ed Pilkington, Pollock cache may have been painted after artist's death, The Guardian, 30 November 2007
• Jackson Pollock Papers at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art
• Works by Jackson Pollock (public domain in Canada)

[edit] Museums

• Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art
• Pollock collection at Guggenheim NY site
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, California
• Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, California

Gale Encyclopedia of Biography: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.

Who2 Profiles:Jackson Pollock, Artist

• Born: 28 January 1912
• Birthplace: Cody, Wyoming
• Died: 11 August 1956 (automobile crash)
• Best Known As: The abstract painter who splattered his canvasses

Jackson Pollock grew up in California and Arizona, but moved to New York in 1930, where he studied painting under painter Thomas Hart Benton. Pollock suffered from alcoholism and began undergoing psychiatric treatment in the late 1930s; he had a nervous breakdown in 1938 and was hospitalized briefly. He had his first one-man show in 1943, his works becoming more abstract. By the late 1940s he had developed a process for which he became famous, dripping paint onto flat canvasses to form abstract expressions of "unconscious imagery." He died in a car accident near his home on Long Island, New York.

Actor Ed Harris directed and starred in the 2000 movie about the painter, Pollock... In 2006 it was reported that entertainment mogul David Geffen sold Pollock's No. 5, 1948 for a record $140 million.

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:Paul Jackson Pollock

For more information on Paul Jackson Pollock, visit Britannica.com.

Oxford Grove Art:(Paul) Jackson Pollock

(b Cody, WY, 28 Jan 1912; d East Hampton, NY, 11 Aug 1956). American painter.

He was the youngest of five sons and in his first 16 years moved 9 times with his family between California and Arizona. In 1928 he settled in Los Angeles, where he studied at the Manual Arts High School under the painter and illustrator Frederick John de St Vrain Schwankowsky. He learnt the rudiments of art and learnt about European and Mexican modernism. His teacher introduced him to the doctrines of Theosophy and of its former messiah, Jiddu Krishnamurti, which prepared Pollock, who had been brought up as an agnostic, to be open to contemporary spiritual concepts: the unconscious, Carl Gustav Jung's analytical psychology and Surrealist automatism.

Jackson Pollock Art and Photos