He was born on January 28, 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, United States, the son of LeRoy Pollock and Stella May McClure. Never successful, LeRoy Pollock attempted ranching, farming, and surveying. The family lived in Wyoming, Arizona, and California; in 1928 they finally settled in Riverside, sixty miles outside Los Angeles.
From 1923 to 1926 Pollock's eldest brother, Charles, worked in the layout department of the Los Angeles Times, while studying at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Thus Pollock heard serious talk about art. This exposure continued; and in 1926, when Charles registered at the Art Students League in New York, he still shared his experience through letters and publications sent home.
Education
In school - first at Riverside High School, then at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles - Pollock was a rebellious student, primarily interested in art. He became friends with classmates of similar interests, among whom Philip Guston would also distinguish himself as a painter. Probably the most important influence on Pollock was Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, an art teacher who introduced him to European modern art and also to Far Eastern religions and the contemporary teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti, a poet and mystic whose meetings Pollock attended. In October 1929, he was dismissed from school because of a fight with his physical education instructor.
Pollock failed to graduate from Manual Arts, and in September 1930 he moved to New York City. He enrolled at the Art Students League with Charles's teacher Thomas Hart Benton, an academic painter who had abandoned all modern "isms" and returned to the values of High Renaissance and baroque art, superimposed on American regional subject matter. Copying Rubens, late Michelangelo, Tintoretto, and especially El Greco - all favorites of Benton's - was part of Pollock's training.
In 1933 he studied with the painter John Sloan and the sculptor Robert Laurent, but after Benton, Pollock was never again directly influenced by a teacher.
Career
In the summer of 1927 Pollock and Sanford, his closest brother, worked at surveying along the northern rim of the Grand Canyon. At the time, Thomas Hart Benton was working on a mural at the New School for Social Research, where José Clemente Orozco was also at work and where Pollock did some "action posing, " assuming athletic postures. Almost everything Pollock did during the early 1930's was influenced by Benton. Benton left the League temporarily in late 1932 to fulfill another major commission. Pollock stayed on at the League as a visiting member until 1935, but never again took classes with Benton.
He lived with his brother Charles from 1933 to the fall of 1934. During the Great Depression Pollock worked as a school janitor, then as a stone cleaner of public monuments for New York City's Relief Bureau. From 1934 to 1942 Pollock lived with Sanford and his wife in a small Greenwich Village apartment. In August 1935 he joined the easel division of the WPA Federal Art Project and earned an income of about $100 per month until the project ended in 1943. Pollock was required to complete one painting (for allocation to a public building) about every eight weeks. Fortunately his principal supervisor, Burgoyne Diller, a Mondrian-influenced, hard-edge abstractionist, was tolerant of Pollock's expressionistic explorations.
In early 1937 Pollock began psychiatric treatment for alcoholism. The following year he had a nervous breakdown, and was hospitalized for several months; he continued to see various therapists throughout his life. The most influential was Dr. Joseph L. Henderson, a Jungian with whom he worked in 1939 and 1940. Henderson encouraged him to bring in sketches to analyze during the sessions.
Through therapy Pollock was moving toward a more private subject matter and was struggling to find the means of expressing it. That final freeing would occur in the 1940's, through greater psychoanalytic awareness and by contact with many of the most important surrealists, including their leader André Breton, who fled from Europe to New York in 1941.
John Graham organized "American and French Painting" for the McMillen Gallery in New York City in 1941. The exhibition opened in January 1942 and included Pollock's Birth and paintings by other Americans such as Lee Krasner and Willem de Kooning. Because of this exhibition with the established School of Paris painters, Pollock was reviewed for the first time in the art press.
In October 1942 Peggy Guggenheim opened the predominantly surrealist Art of This Century Gallery in New York City. The young American painters William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell introduced Pollock to her and she asked all three and Ad Reinhardt to participate in an April show of collages. This led to Pollock's exhibition of the major painting Stenographic Figure in the "Spring Salon for Young Artists. " By then he had assimilated aspects of Picasso, Matisse, and surrealism.
Peggy Guggenheim commissioned Pollock to do a mural for her apartment, gave him a contract for $150 a month (against sales), and scheduled his first one-man show for November. Pollock's November 1943 show was covered by many major newspapers and magazine art columns. The longest, most serious, though not totally affirmative, review was by Clement Greenberg and appeared in the Nation. By the time of the next show Greenberg had become Pollock's greatest champion.
On March 19, 1945, Pollock had his second one-man show at Art of This Century. In 1946 he had exhibition at Art of This Century and the final one there in January 1947.
In a spirit of confidence and maturity, perhaps influenced by the expansiveness of his new studio and country environment, Pollock began his most innovative paintings - totally abstract, frequently large-scale, freely dripped, overall images that suggest endless, cosmic space. When paintings such as Cathedral and Full Fathom Five were shown at Betty Parsons Gallery in January 1948, Pollock's reputation and the controversy surrounding his work grew, as it did when his paintings were shown at the Venice Biennale that year and in 1950.
In the fall of 1948 he again entered treatment for alcoholism and began a two-year abstinence, at which time he did his greatest work. He produced about sixty paintings, almost all shown in two of Parsons' 1949 exhibitions. Thirty-two of these were at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950, including his masterpieces Lavender Mist, Autumn Rhythm, and One. After the artistic, if not financial, success of his 1948-1950 exhibitions, Pollock had a last show at Parsons in 1951. Although the show was enthusiastically praised by Greenberg in Partisan Review, it was generally considered evidence of Pollock's decline.
In 1952 he began working with color again; and although his productivity waned after 1953, his reputation as an established "modern master" grew. There were shows at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1952, 1954, and 1955, containing such great paintings as Blue Poles, Convergence, and Portrait and a Dream. A retrospective Pollock exhibition was being planned for fall 1956 at the Museum of Modern Art when he was killed in an automobile accident.
Achievements
Paul Jackson Pollock was an American surrealist, major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well-known for his unique style of drip painting. His most famous works: Autumn Rhythm (1950), Convergence (1952), The Deep (1953). 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.
Views
Quotations:
Pollock, himself described his art as "motion made visible memories, arrested in space".
Personality
Trying to be manly, and perhaps also trying to find a balance between his tender and aggressive tendencies, he also discovered alcohol. He not only drank heavily, but his system was allergic to alcohol; he became wild and hostile on comparatively small amounts of wine and beer. Pollock's problem with alcoholism was physiological and psychological.
Quotes from others about the person
Clement Greenberg said Pollock was established "as the strongest painter of his generation and perhaps the greatest one to appear since Miró. "
Connections
In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.
