Painter, born in Cody, Wyoming, USA. He grew up in Wyoming and California, moved to New York City, and studied intermittently with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League (c.192932). His paintings of the 1930s, such as Birth (1937), anticipate the turbulent impasto and sexual imagery of his later work. His first major exhibition was organized by Peggy Guggenheim (1943) when he was using mythological themes, as seen in The She Wolf (1943). In c.1946 he settled in Easthampton, Long Island, and began his critically acclaimed abstract work exemplified by Full Fathom Five (1947). The spatter-and-drip technique used on his large canvases (194555) established his reputation as a major abstract expressionistic painter, and his work had a major influence on art in the latter half of the 20th-c. He explored figurative studies, but shortly before his death in an automobile accident he reclaimed his interest in action painting. In 2006, his work Number 5, 1948, reportedly sold for $140 million, the highest sum ever known to have been paid for a painting.
Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an influential American painter and a major force in the abstract expressionist movement.
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. 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 Benton, and the Mexican Muralists Siqueiros and Orozco. After visiting exhibitions of Picasso and Surrealist Art, his work became increasingly symbolic. 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 treated by psychiatrists for alcoholism and 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.
The Springs period and the unique technique
In October 1945 Pollock married his long term lover Lee Krasner and in November they moved to Springs, in East Hampton, on Long Island, New York. Their home in Springs was typical of the area, a wood-frame house with a nearby barn that Pollock made into a studio. It was there that he perfected the technique of working spontaneously with liquid paint. He began painting with his 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. 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.
Pollock observed Indian sandpainting demonstrations at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1940's; Pollock denied "the accident"; 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.
A group of these paintings was exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948, and his work began to generate increasingly polarized responses. Pollock was profiled in the August 8, 1949 issue of Life Magazine where the headline asked the question, "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?"
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. Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. In all that time, Pollock did not stop. Finally, he said 'This is it.'
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.
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.
Pollock's White Light is featured on the cover 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 (PBS, 1982) and Jackson Pollock - Love &
Pollock's first retrospective was organized in December, 1952 by Clement Greenberg at Bennington College in 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. A career survey, which was planned before his death but became a posthumous tribute, opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in December 1956. A four-volume catalogue raisonne of Pollock's work was published in 1978 by Yale University Press, with a one-volume supplement published by Ursus Books/The Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1995.
Pollock and many of his contemporaries -- William Baziotes, Franz Kline Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and others -- created a powerful new art movement that rivaled Paris. Some suffered with depression and --like Pollock -- died young.
Pollock's painting "No. 5, 1948" sold for $140 million on 1 November 2006 – the highest price ever paid for a painting. is Jackson Pollock?" Pollock and his work also served as the inspiration behind several songs (Full Fathom Five and Made Of Stone). The song Going Down also features the cryptic line "Yeah, she look like a painting / Jackson Pollock's, Number 5." 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." Pollock is mentioned briefly in the lyrics "Jackson Pollock throwin' multi-colored thoughts at a rapid pace" of the song 'To Bob Ross With Love' by the Gym Class Heroes. 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. He draws his gun and says "You make another move, I'll Jackson Pollock your brains all over the wall." The story goes that it landed on Montmartre, over five miles away, where some pavement artist sold it to a Texan tourist as a genuine Jackson Pollock. Pollock is also referred to in the lyrics to the song "Palace & Pollock (and the abstract expressionism movement) is featured prominently in the Kurt Vonnegut book Bluebeard.
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