Jackson Pollock 1912-1956
"It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or any other past culture"
Jackson Pollock's deeply personal quest to remove the barriers of traditional technique between inner experience and outward expression would radically reinvent abstraction and create some of the most important works of 20th century art. Born in Wyoming, by the late 1920s Pollock was in Los Angeles, studying at the Manual Arts High School, before he moved to New York to train at the Art Students League. As America slid into the Great Depression the young Pollock managed to find employment as a mural assistant on Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal Federal Art Project, and later studied under the great Mexican muralist, Davis Siqueiros. But in 1938, he was hospitalised for his alcoholism. It proved to be a turning point. His time in Jungian analysis marked a shift away from the influence of the folk-inflected expressionism of the Mexican muralists in his work. His paintings began to lean towards abstraction, as in Male and Female (c.1942), and he became interested in surrealist ideas of automation and the unconscious.
By 1943 - having met his future wife and fellow painter Lee Krasner the year before - he had come to the attention of Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery in New York. His first great Abstract Expressionist works began to appear in 1947 with paintings such as Alchemy (1947). Over the next seven years, working with the canvas laid on the floor and dripping or pouring paint, or using sticks, trowels or paint thickened with sand or crushed glass, Pollock produced some of the greatest Abstract Expressionism works ever made. It was an extraordinary period that created paintings like Blue Poles (1952) and ended with his death in an alcohol-related car accident in 1954 after a period of mounting depression.
Jackson Pollock's mythic reputation rests largely on the artistic breakthrough of his large paintings made from 1947 to 1951, as well as on his dramatic life and death.
The fifth and youngest son in a struggling farming family, Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, and grew up with his four brothers in Arizona and California. Although family resources were limited, his determined mother fostered artistic potential in each of her children (three became artists). Pollock began his art training in Los Angeles at the Manual Arts High School, from which he was ultimately expelled because of his rebellious nature. In 1930, at the age of eighteen, he joined his older brother Charles in New York at the Art Students League. Both brothers studied with Thomas Hart Benton, the leading American Scene painter and, by that time, a staunch opponent of European modernism. Pollock absorbed Benton's technique of focusing his compositions around canted vertical elements. Later this method would lead Pollock in new artistic directions that would redefine the course of modern art.
Pollock's complex imagery derived from diverse sources including Navajo sand painting, Asian calligraphy, Picasso’s more violent imagery, and personal revelations stemming from his Jungian psychotherapy sessions. From the 1930s to the early 1940s, while working for the Federal Arts Project and assisting the revolutionary Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, Pollock's style evolved from a dark, turbulent form of regionalism to a more freely rendered abstract expressionism. By 1943 he had his first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery, an instrumental showcase for artists working in the vanguard. Two years later he married artist Lee Krasner and settled on Long Island. During the next decade Pollock developed his monumentally influential "poured" paintings by dripping and flinging intricate layers of paint all over his canvases, which were hailed by the influential critic Clement Greenberg.
