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Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an influential American painter and a major force in the abstract expressionist movement.


Contents

Early life

The youngest of five sons, Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, and grew up in Arizona and California, studying at Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School. In 1930, following his brother Charles, he moved to New York City, 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 Benton, and the Mexican Muralists Siqueiros and Orozco. He worked in Siqueiros's experimental workshop in New York City in 1936. After visiting exhibitions of Picasso and Surrealist Art, his work became increasingly symbolic. He worked on the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943. 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. These works were often enigmatic and were not well received at first.

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 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.

   
Jackson Pollock:Jackson Pollock
 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.
   
Jackson Pollock:Jackson Pollock
   
Jackson Pollock:Jackson Pollock
 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.
   
Jackson Pollock:Jackson Pollock

Pollock observed Indian sandpainting demonstrations in the 1940's. Other influences on his "pour" technique include the Mexican muralists 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, 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:

   
Jackson Pollock:Jackson Pollock
 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.'
   
Jackson Pollock:Jackson Pollock

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, his wife Lee Krasner managed his estate and ensured that his reputation remained strong in spite of changing art-world trends.

Critical debate

Pollock's work has always polarised critics and has been the focus of many important critical debates.

Harold Rosenberg spoke of the way Pollock's work had changed painting, '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 supported Pollock's work on formalistic grounds. It fitted well with Greenberg's view of art history as being about the progressive purification in form and elimination of historical content. He therefore saw Pollock's work as the best painting of its day and the culmination of the Western tradition going back via Cubism and Cézanne to Monet.

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[1] [2] In the words of Eva Cockcroft, Pollock became a 'weapon of the Cold War'.[3]

Painter Norman Rockwell's work Connoisseur also appears to make a commentary on the Pollock style. The painting features a what seems to be a rather 'upright' man in a suit standing before a Jackson Pollock splatter painting. The contrast between the man and the Pollock painting, along with the construction of the scene, seems to emphasize the disparity between the comparatively unrecognizable Jackson Pollock style and traditional figure and landscape based art styles, as well as the monumental changes in the cultural sense of aesthetics brought on by the modern art movement.

Feminists criticized the machismo surrounding Abstract Expressionism, seeing Pollock's work in particular 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'

Cultural references

List of major works

Jackson Pollock:Jackson Pollock: Jazz album, put together by MOMA, is a collection of music Pollock used to listen to while painting. The cover comes from a famous documentary showing Pollock's style.
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Jackson Pollock: Jazz album, put together by MOMA, is a collection of music Pollock used to listen to while painting. The cover comes from a famous documentary showing Pollock's style.

References

Categories


Abstract expressionist artists | American painters | East Hampton (town), New York | New York artists | Wyoming artists | Scottish-Americans | People from Chico, California | Road accident victims | Accidental deaths | 1912 births | 1956 deaths

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