Jackson Pollock
Pioneer of drip painting.
Pollock laid the canvas on the floor and let the movements of his body direct the paint. He became the emblem of Abstract Expressionism in New York.
Jackson Pollock was born in 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, and grew up in California and Arizona. In 1930 he moved to New York and studied at the Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton, who painted scenes of rural America. During the Depression Pollock found work on the government’s art projects. He also took part in a workshop run by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, where the participants experimented with pouring and spraying paint.
Pollock struggled with alcoholism from an early age and underwent psychotherapy, through which he encountered the psychologist Carl Jung’s ideas about the unconscious. In the early 1940s he painted powerful pictures with mythical and symbolic motifs. The collector Peggy Guggenheim gave him a contract and exhibited his work, and in 1945 he married the painter Lee Krasner. The couple moved to Springs on Long Island, where he worked in a barn.
It was there, in 1947, that he developed his famous drip and pour technique. He laid large canvases directly on the floor and let the paint run and spatter from sticks, brushes and cans as he moved around and over the picture. The result was a dense web of lines with no centre. The critic Harold Rosenberg called this kind of painting action painting. Well-known works include Autumn Rhythm of 1950 in the Metropolitan Museum, Lavender Mist of 1950 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington and One: Number 31 of 1950 in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1949 Life magazine asked whether he was the greatest living painter in the United States, and the photographer Hans Namuth’s pictures and film of him at work made him a celebrity. After 1950 he relapsed into alcoholism and painted less. He tried black, partly figurative pictures and then returned to colour. Blue Poles of 1952 is now in the National Gallery of Australia.
In August 1956 he drove drunk and crashed, killing himself and one of his passengers. He was 44. Pollock became the emblem of Abstract Expressionism and of New York taking over from Paris as the centre of the art world. His idea of painting as an event paved the way for performance and happenings.