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 In 1947, influential art critic Clement Greenberg wrote the following in the English magazine Horizon: "The most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one is a Gothic, morbid, and extreme disciple of Picasso's Cubism and Miró's post-Cubism, tinctured also with Kandinsky and surrealist inspiration. His name is Jackson Pollock." Raised in the American West, Pollock became the most important of the New York School Abstract Expressionists and is credited with completely transforming modern art. Prone to heavy drinking and possessing a volatile personality, the artist developed a reputation (especially among European artists) as a "cowboy," the kind of rugged individualist found only in the American West.
Jackson Pollock was born on a farm in Cody, Wyoming, on January 28, 1912, and grew up in Wyoming, Arizona, and California. Pollock's first exposure to modern art came in the form of a journal entitled Dial, copies of which he obtained from his brother Charles, who had begun painting a few years earlier. Pollock's first paintings were created emulating those of his brother's. While studying painting at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, Pollock read the writings of Krishnamurti and Rudolf Steiner and was introduced to theosophy. He also saw the work of Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siquieros, both of whom came to have a profound and lasting influence on Pollock's work. When Pollock was 17, he dropped out of high school and moved to New York City. From 1929 to 1931 he received instruction at the Art Students League, where he was mentored by Thomas Hart Benton, who introduced the young painter to both Renaissance art and "American scene" realism. It was around this time that Pollock first became familiar with the work of Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco. Pollock also spent a few years traveling the country by train and car, sketching the American landscape. Of his time with Benton, Pollock later told the New Yorker that his teacher "drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into non-objective painting." From 1938 to 1942 Pollock existed on the money he received from painting murals for the WPA Federal Arts Project, and his work began to be included in exhibitions in New York as well as the middle and far west. Pollock also entered Jungian analysis for treatment of his alcoholism and in 1938 was briefly institutionalized at Bloomingdale Asylum in White Plains, New York. Pollock's early work borrowed imagery from Picasso, the muralists, and Jungian symbolism.
Pollock's first one-man show took place in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century gallery, which subsequently hosted three additional exhibitions. Guggenheim provided Pollock with a monthly advance on the future sale of his paintings, an arrangement that allowed him to paint full-time. Pollock would be the subject of 10 solo exhibitions over the course of the next 11 years. From 1943 to 1947, in pieces such as She Wolf, Guardians of the Secret, and There Were Seven in Eight, Pollock's painting focused on totems and symbols in human animal form that were directly inspired by Jungian analysis. In 1945 Pollock moved into a house at the Springs in East Hampton, Long Island; he and painter Lee Krasner were married on October 25. Krasner's work was also categorized as Abstract Expressionist, but for many years her career was overshadowed by her husband's. A devoted wife and passionate promoter and defender of her husband's work, Krasner introduced Pollock to several important artists, such as Hans Hofmann (Pollock and Hofmann were among those who congregated at the Cedar Bar in New York).
Pollock worked in an upstairs bedroom of the house at the Springs for one year before relocating to the barn, which he moved and transformed into a studio. Between 1947 and 1950 Pollock developed the working method that characterized the style he would be most remembered for: placing unstretched canvas on the floor, he placed a stick or trowel into a can of enamel paint and dripped the paint onto the surface from above. Through the development of extraordinary control in his hands and wrists, Pollock was able to manipulate seemingly endless and intricate webs of curls and splatters. The artist often began with recognizable shapes and figures that he slowly obscured through the application of many layers of abstract patterns. From 1948 to 1950 Pollock was represented by the Betty Parsons gallery, which presented his work on four separate occasions. On August 8, 1949, Life magazine published the sarcastically titled "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The article brought the artist to the attention of mainstream America.
With curator Peter Blake, Pollock designed a museum in which all of the walls would consist of drip paintings. The museum never found a patron, but Pollock did receive a commission to create a wall-size painting for Marcel Breuer's new home. Although Parsons raised the price of Pollock's paintings, it would be several years before they began to sell with any regularity. His only consistent patron was Alfonso Ossorio, who bought two of Pollock's paintings and shared his Manhattan townhouse with Pollock and Krasner.
In the early 1950s Pollock began painting much larger pieces and rejected titles in favor of numbers to mark individual works. One of seven painters representing the U.S. at the 25th Venice Biennale International Exhibition in June 1950, Pollock also had several exhibits in locations such as Milan and Paris. That year Hans Namuth began work on the photographs and films that later became a primary source for Pollock scholars, providing a rare firsthand account of the painter's creative process. In order to take advantage of the better lighting conditions, filming took place outside on weekends. Pollock painted Number 29, 1950 on a plane of glass; Namuth placed his camera beneath the glass for a most unusual view of the artist's process. The experience drove Pollock over the edge, and when filming had completed, he ended two years of sobriety. On the eve of the most important exhibition of his life, Pollock flew into a drunken rage and turned over the dinner table. The pressure Namuth's film had placed on the artist sent Pollock into a rapid descent that eventually led to his death. Additionally, the staged nature of the film coupled with Pollock's scripted narration may have led the artist to believe that he had rendered himself inauthentic.
Disappointed by what he saw as the poor representation he was receiving from Betty Parsons, Pollock took his work across the street to the Sidney Janis gallery. In November 1952, the latter gallery hosted an exhibit that featured Number 10, Number 11, and Number 12, examples of Pollock's larger-scale work. In 1951 and 1952, respectively, Pollock's work was featured in two shows hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York: "Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America" and "Fifteen Americans." The works exhibited at the Janis gallery in 1954 included Sleeping Effort, The Deep, and Portrait of a Dream, paintings created in 1953 that represented a further advancement in Pollock's style: the integration of brush strokes and recognizable shapes. Between 1953 and 1956 Pollock finished fewer than 10 paintings, afflicted by jealousy and finding it harder to paint as his wife came into her own as an artist.
Abstract art was often met with hostility, as Michigan Congressman George Dondero declared modern art to be Communist and an affront to American values. Nonetheless, Pollock's reputation benefited equally from derision as well as from praise. Earlier in his career, Pollock claimed not to know where his work came from. However, as he developed the drip painting process some referred to as "action painting," he found himself defending his skill against attacks from critics who claimed that the paintings appeared to be randomly constructed. Pollock always claimed that he was drawing on his unconscious for inspiration, but this admission did not presuppose that he lacked control over the application of the paint. It was nearly impossible for critics to ignore the physicality of Pollock's methods, but the artist saw these techniques as nothing more than the means through which he arrived at a particular aesthetic statement.
Pollock struggled with alcoholism throughout his life. He considered himself to be the greatest painter in the world, but even this knowledge did nothing to allay the deep melancholy that had haunted him since childhood. Pollock often became violent when drunk and sometimes sped his car down Long Island's country back roads. His decision to agree to allow photographer Hans Namuth to film him apparently drove the artist over the edge, and in November 1950 he ended two years of sobriety in a drunken rage. After walking away from car crashes in 1951 and 1954, perhaps it was inevitable that his drunk driving would lead to his demise. As his relationship with Krasner worsened, Pollock engaged in an affair with aspiring artist Ruth Kligman. In July 1956 Krasner left for Europe. On the evening of August 11, 1956, Pollock and Edith Metzger (a friend of Kligman's) were killed while driving an Oldsmobile he'd acquired by trading in two paintings. Kligman survived the accident.
Pollock was a force of nature who changed the face of modern art. The artist's legacy is forever determined by the documents left behind by Hans Namuth, which provided the public with a sense of the intense physicality of Pollock's approach to painting. These documents later inspired the performance art of Yves Klein and Herman Nitsch, and the work of sculptors including Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, and Bruce Nauman. Pollock's work was also highly influential on the hand-painted films of filmmaker Stan Brakhage. The non-representational painting of Pollock and others of his generation such as Willem de Kooning led to a change in perception regarding American art, and in the latter half of the twentieth century the United States replaced Europe as the international center of modern art.
Click to buy Pollock posters here!
Click to buy the MOMA's book, Jackson Pollock
Click to buy Hans Namuth's famous photography book, Pollock Painting
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