jackson pollock

Early life

The youngest of five sons, Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, and grew up in Arizona and California, attending Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School where he studied. He moved to New York City in 1930, following his brother, Charles Pollock, where they both studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Benton's influence on Pollock's formative work can be seen in his use of curvilinear undulating rhythms and in the use of rural American subject matter.

Early work

Pollock's early representational work was influenced by the Mexican Muralists Siqueiros, Orozco, and Diego Rivera, and even worked in Siqueiros's experimental workshop in 1936. After visiting exhibitions of Picasso and Surrealist Art, his work became increasingly symbolic. He traveled widely throughout the United States during the 1930's, but he settled in New York in 1934 where he worked on the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1942. Pollock's first solo show was held at the Peggy Guggenheim The Art of This Century Gallery in New York in 1943.

Pollock had for several years been in psychotherapy to try to cope with depression and this gave him an interest in Carl Jung's theory of primitive archetypes that formed the basis of his work between 1938 and 1944. These works were often violent and were not well received at first.

The Springs period and the unique technique

In 1944 Pollock married his long term lover Lee Krasner and in 1945 they moved to Springs, in East Hampton, on Long Island, New York. Their home in Springs was typical of the area, a shingle-style wood-frame house with a nearby barn that Pollock eventually made into a studio. Pollock's style changed dramatically in 1947. While looking to paint a mural, the paintbrush dripped paint onto the floor. Pollock loved the design it made, and created the whole painting like that. Thus began the "Pollockian" style of painting. He began painting with his (often very large) canvases on the floor, and developed what was called his "drip" (or his preferred term, "pour") technique. He used his brushes as implements for dripping paint, and the brush never touched the canvas. Pollock's technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term Action Painting. 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, as well as moving away from use only of the hand and wrist — as he used his whole body to paint. In 1956 Time magazine dubbed Pollock "Jack the Dripper" as a result of his painting style.^[1]

My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting. 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.

Pollock observed Indian sandpainting demonstrations at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1940's; he may have also seen Indian Sand painters on his trips to the West, although that is debated. Other influences on his "pour" technique include the Mexican muralists mentioned above, and also Surrealist automatism. Pollock denied "the accident"; he usually had an idea of how he wanted a particular piece to appear. It was about the movement of his body, over which he had control, mixed with the viscous flow of paint, the force of gravity, and the way paint was absorbed into the canvas. The mix of the uncontrollable and the controllable. Flinging, dripping, pouring, spattering, he would energetically move around the canvas, almost as if in a dance, and would not stop until he saw what he wanted to see.

Hans Namuth was a young photography student in 1950, and he was intrigued by what he called the "difficulty" of Pollock's allover abstractions. Namuth wanted to photograph and film Pollock at work, painting. 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.'

When the first set of these paintings was exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948 it was a sensation and a sell out. Pollock was able to take on a larger studio building and there produced the series of 6 paintings of 1950 for which he is most renowned. Pollock was profiled in Life Magazine as possibly 'the greatest living American artist' in 1949.

From 1938 to 1942 he worked for the Federal Art Project; in the 1950s, Pollock was supported by the CIA via the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF).

The 1950s and beyond

Pollock's work after 1951 was darker in colour, often only black, and began to reintroduce figurative elements. Pollock had moved to a more commercial gallery and there was great demand from collectors for new paintings. In response to this pressure his alcoholism deepened.

After struggling with alcoholism his whole life, Pollock's career was cut short when he died in an alcohol-related, single car crash in Springs, New York on August 11, 1956 at the age of 44. One of his passengers, Edith Metzger, died, and the other passenger in the Oldsmobile convertible, his girlfriend Ruth Kligman, survived. After his death, Pollock's gallery sold all the works left in his studio including many works that he had not intended to release.

Pollock's White Light is featured on the inside of Ornette Coleman's innovating album, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation.

His 1952 painting Blue Poles was sold in 1973 for US$2 million to the National Gallery of Australia, at that time the highest price ever paid for a contemporary work of art.

He was the subject of the documentaries Jackson Pollock (1987) and Jackson Pollock - Love & Death on Long Island (1999) as well as a dramatic film entitled Pollock (2000) in which he was played by Ed Harris. An earlier ten-minute documentary Jackson Pollock (1951) was directed by Hans Namuth, with music by Morton Feldman.

His first retrospective was organized in December, 1952 by Clement Greenberg at monaeBennington College, Bennington, Vermont. Titled "A Retrospective Show of the Paintings of Jackson Pollock," it was a seminal early survey of Pollock's work dating from 1943-1951, which opened first at Bennington College and then traveled to Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

As the historian, Serge Guibault explained in "How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art," Pollock and many of his contemporaries -- William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and others -- created a powerful new art movement that rivaled Paris. In the midst of the Cold War, these artists tested the boundaries of their own society yet also put the United States at the center of the art world.

Some of these artists gained notoriety, fame, and fortune. Some suffered with depression and --like Pollock -- died young. In yet another twist, one abstract expressionist who studied with Motherwell and Baziotes was Harold Shapinsky, who missed the take-off of the movement in part because he had been drafted into the Korean War. It was not until the 1980s that Shapinsky would be discovered by the "East" -- notably Salman Rushdie, Tariq Ali, and Akumal Ramachander, a teacher from Bangalore, India. That discovery is described in Shapinsky's Karma by Lawrence Weschler.

Criticism

Pollock's work has always polarised critics. Harold Rosenberg spoke of the transformation of painting into an existential drama in Pollock's work, in which '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.'

Clement Greenberg proclaimed Abstract Expressionism and Pollock in particular as the epitome of aesthetic value. It supported Pollock's work on formalistic grounds as simply the best painting of its day and the culmination of an art tradition going back via Cubism and Cézanne to Monet, in which painting became ever 'purer' and more concentrated in what was 'essential' to it, the making of marks on a flat surface.

Left wing critique located Pollock in his political context and attributed his success not to his formal merits but to his ideological usefulness to US imperialism. It was revealed that posthumous exhibitions of Pollock had been covertly sponsored by the CIA, and the argument was made that the US ruling class threw its weight behind this kind of art out of a nationalistic craving for an US avant garde to supplant Paris and a symbol of freedom to counterpose to Soviet insistence on Socialist Realism^[2]Thus Pollock was promoted as, in the words of Eva Cockcroft, a 'weapon of the Cold War'.^[3]

Feminist revaluation of Pollock looked askance at the machismo of the 'hero in the studio' and tended to see the whole drip and flick performance as the acting out of the phallocentric male fantasy on the symbolically supine canvas.

Other critics, such as Craig Brown, have been astonished that decorative 'wallpaper', essentially brainless, could gain such a position in art history alongside Giotto, Titian and Velazquez.

Reynolds News in a 1959 headline said 'This is not art--it's a joke in bad taste' ^[4].

Cultural references

• Mancunian rock band The Stone Roses adorned their eponymous debut album with a Pollock-style painting by guitarist John Squire, with similar paintings appearing on their instruments and early singles covers. Pollock and his work also served as the inspiration behind several songs (Full Fathom Five and Made Of Stone).

• In an episode of Daria, Daria's Dance Party, Jane Lane (in preparation for a dance) paints the school gymnasium in honor of Pollock's untimely death.

• In an episode of Entourage, Seth Green remarks that he blasted character Eric's girlfriend "in the face like a Jackson Pollock."

• In the 2000 thriller, the Skulls, starring Joshua Jackson and Paul Walker, Jackson's female counterpart (played by Leslie Bibb) refers to her senior thesis, an animatronic device which via the implementation of various projectiles, spraying, and a prearranged canvas creates a totally random 'work-of-art,' as "Action Jackson," named after Jackson Pollock.

• In an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye, Hammer gets into his bed, only to find someone else in it. He draws his gun and says "You make another move, I'll Jackson Pollock your brains all over the wall."

List of major works

• (1942) "Male and Female" Philadelphia Museum of Art [1]
• (1943) "Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle" [2]
• (1942) "Stenographic Figure" The Museum of Modern Art [3]
• (1943) "The She-Wolf" The Museum of Modern Art [4]
• (1943) "Blue (Moby Dick)" Ohara Museum of Art [5]
• (1946) "Eyes in the Heat" Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice [6]
• (1946) "The Key" The Art Institute of Chicago [7]
• (1946) "The Tea Cup" Collection Frieder Burda [8]
• (1946) "Shimmering Substance", from "The Sounds In The Grass" The Museum of Modern Art [9]
• (1947) "Full Fathom Five" The Museum of Modern Art [10]
• (1947) "Cathedral" [11]
• (1947) "Convergence" [12]
• (1947) "Enchanted Forest" Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice [13]
• (1948) "Painting" [14]
• (1948) "Number 8" [15]
• (1948) "Summertime: Number 9A" Tate Modern [16]
• (1950) "Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)" National Gallery of Art [17]
• (1950) "Autumn Rhythm: No.30, 1950" [18]
• (1950) "One: No. 31, 1950" at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
• (1951) "Number 7"
• (1952) "Blue Poles: No. 11, 1952" [19]
• (1953) "Portrait and a Dream" [20]
• (1953) "Easter and the Totem" The Museum of Modern Art [21]
• (1953) "Ocean Greyness" [22]
• (1953) "The Deep"

References

• Jackson Pollock on Museum Web Paris

External links

• National Gallery of Art web feature on Pollock includes highlights of his career, numerous examples of the artist's work, photographs and motion footage of Pollock, plus an in-depth discussion of his 1950 painting Lavender Mist.
• Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
• Pollock collection on the Guggenheim NY Site
• Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center
• Pollock-Krasner Foundation
• "Jackson Pollock — and True and False Ambition: The Urgent Difference" by Dorothy Koppelman
• Blue Poles at the NGA
• Fractal Expressionism Physicist Richard Taylor has written extensively on the fractal qualities of Jackson Pollock's classic drip paintings.
• Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas.
• Jackson Pollock tool
• The Law and Jackson Pollock by Francis G. Pennarola