Paul Jackson Pollock was an American painter who was major figure in the Abstract Expressionism, an art movement characterized by the free-associative gestures in paint sometimes referred to as “action painting.”
Background
Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, United States, the youngest of five sons of Stella May (McClure) and LeRoy Pollock. 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.
Education
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 there for two years.
Between 1931 and 1935 Pollock made several trips to California and then decided to settle in New York, where he started his carrer as a painter. 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.
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 1940 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, where they remained until his death. Pollock's art during these years revealed 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", painted in 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. Pollock was struggling with his pictorial means, however, is apparent in the way "Male and Female" was painted.
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.
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. His "drip" paintings constitute his masterpieces. Among others, these include "Full Fathom Five", "Number 1", and "Autumn Rhythm." In these he transcended the tensions and anxieties that characterized 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 was unique: as it accelerated across the surface, changing color, twisting upon itself, and generating an intricate overall web, it was experienced as a purely optical phenomenon. Thus, Pollock's line was felt to be exclusively pictorial - to reveal the capacity of line within the realm of painting. But the "drip" paintings also embodied a new relationship to surrealist thought that was, in terms of Pollock's freewheeling method of working. Thus, although the "drip" paintings do not look surrealist, their genesis owes much to that European style.
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." Many of these works had extraordinary power, but they generally lacked his earlier lyrical harmony. With their crowded surfaces, they frequently appeared desperate, even tragic, in the way they bared their thwarted ambitions. Pollock never emerged from this crisis. He painted little in 1954, claiming that he had nothing left to say. He died in an automobile accident on August 11, 1956, in Southampton, New York.
Psychologically oriented iconography in Pollock’s work was prompted by Jungian psychotherapy. It would later feed his paintings, and they shaped Pollock's understanding of his pictures not only as outpourings of his own mind, but expressions that might stand for the terror of all modern humanity living in the shadow of nuclear war.
Quotations:
"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."
Personality
Regarded as reclusive, he had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. As a man, Pollock was described by his contemporaries as gentle and contemplative when sober, violent when drunk. He was highly intelligent, widely read, and, when he chose, incisively articulate.
Quotes from others about the person
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."
"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.
Interests
Artists
Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, Janet Sobel
Connections
In October 1945, Pollock and Lee Krasner were married in a church with two witnesses present for the event.