Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, in full Paul Jackson Pollock, (born January

28, 1912, Cody, Wyoming, U.S.—died August 11, 1956, East
Hampton, New York), American painter who was a leading
exponent of Abstract Expressionism, an art movement
characterized by the free-associative gestures in paint sometimes
referred to as “action painting.” During his lifetime he received
widespread publicity and serious recognition for the radical
poured, or “drip,” technique he used to create his major works.
Among his contemporaries, he was respected for his deeply
personal and totally uncompromising commitment to the art of
painting. His work and example had enormous influence on them
and on many subsequent art movements in the United States. He
is also one of the first American painters to be recognized during
his lifetime and after as a peer of 20th-century European masters
of modern art.

Early life and work

Paul Jackson Pollock was the fifth and youngest son of Stella May
McClure and LeRoy Pollock, who were both of Scotch-Irish
extraction (LeRoy’s original surname was McCoy before his
adoption about 1890 by a family named Pollock) and born and
raised in Iowa. The family left Cody, Wyoming, 11 months after
Jackson’s birth; he would know Cody only through family
photographs. Over the next 16 years his family lived
in California and Arizona, eventually moving nine times. In 1928
they moved to Los Angeles, where Pollock enrolled at Manual Arts
High School. There he came under the influence of Frederick John
de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, a painter and illustrator who was also
a member of the Theosophical Society, a sect that
promoted metaphysical and occult spirituality. Schwankovsky
gave Pollock some rudimentary training in drawing and painting,
introduced him to advanced currents of European modern art, and
encouraged his interest in theosophical literature. At this time
Pollock, who had been raised an agnostic, also attended the camp
meetings of the former messiah of the theosophists, Jiddu
Krishnamurti, a personal friend of Schwankovsky. These spiritual
explorations prepared him to embrace the theories of the Swiss
psychologist Carl Jung and the exploration of unconscious
imagery in his paintings in subsequent years.

In the fall of 1930 Pollock followed his brother Charles, who left
home to study art in 1922, to New York City, where he enrolled at
the Art Students League under his brother’s teacher, the
regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. (Jackson dropped his
first name, Paul, about the time he went to New York in 1930.) He
studied life drawing, painting, and composition with Benton for
the next two and one-half years, leaving the league in the early
months of 1933. For the next two years Pollock lived in poverty,
first with Charles and, by the fall of 1934, with his brother Sanford.
He would share an apartment in Greenwich Village with Sanford
and his wife until 1942.

Pollock was employed by the WPA Federal Art Project in the fall of

1935 as an easel painter. This position gave him economic security
during the remaining years of the Great Depression as well as an
opportunity to develop his art. From his years with Benton
through 1938, Pollock’s work was strongly influenced by the
compositional methods and regionalist subject matter of his
teacher and by the poetically expressionist vision of the American
painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. It consisted mostly of small
landscapes and figurative scenes such as Going West (1934–35), in
which Pollock utilized motifs derived from photographs of his
birthplace at Cody.
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In 1937 Pollock began psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, and he

suffered a nervous breakdown in 1938, which caused him to be
institutionalized for about four months. After these experiences,
his work became semiabstract and showed the assimilation of
motifs from the modern Spanish artists Pablo Picasso and Joan
Miró, as well as the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco.
Jungian symbolism and the Surrealist exploration of the
unconscious also influenced his works of this period; indeed, from

1939 through 1941 he was in treatment with two successive

Jungian psychoanalysts who used Pollock’s own drawings in the
therapy sessions. Characteristic paintings from this period
include Bird (c. 1941), Male and Female (c. 1942), and Guardians
of the Secret (1943).

Coming into maturity

In 1943, after the liquidation of the Federal Art Project, Pollock
was given a contract by Peggy Guggenheim at her Art of This
Century gallery in New York, and his first one-man show was held
there in November. Very late in 1943, possibly in the early weeks
of 1944, Pollock painted his first wall-size work, called Mural (c.
1943–44). This painting represents Pollock’s breakthrough into a
totally personal style in which Benton’s compositional methods
and energetic linear invention are fused with the Surrealist free
association of motifs and unconscious imagery. Pollock’s evolution
from this point throughout the 1940s shows a struggle to find a
process by which he could translate his entire personality into
painting. The figurative character of works such as Totem Lesson
1 (1944) and The Blue Unconscious (1946) contrasts with the
heavily painted, all-over design of Shimmering Substance (1946)
and Eyes in the Heat (1946), indicating the range of imagery and
technique he employed during this period.

In 1945 Pollock married the painter Lee Krasner and moved

to East Hampton, on the southern shore of Long Island, New York.
Krasner, whom Pollock respected as an artist, had already proven
her ability to handle his affairs with Guggenheim. She also
provided a stabilizing factor that he sorely needed, given his
drinking and social awkwardness.
Jackson Pollock
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“Poured” works

In 1947 Pollock first used the process of pouring or dripping paint

onto a flat canvas in stages, often alternating weeks
of painting with weeks of contemplating before he finished a
canvas. This process allowed him to record the force and scope of
his physical gesture in trajectories of enamel or aluminum paint.
At the time, he said these abstract trajectories “veiled the image,”
or the traces of figuration, that had often been apparent in his
earlier work. Later research indicated that his
“veiling” constituted a form of free association from which he
began most of his major paintings. The results, in effect, were huge
areas covered with complex linear patterns that fused image and
form; these works engulfed the spectator in their scale and
intricacy. A whole series of paintings—beginning with Full Fathom
Five (1947) and Lucifer (1947) and proceeding
through Summertime (1948), Number Ten, 1949 (1949), the
mural-sized canvases of 1950 such as One, Autumn Rhythm,
and Lavender Mist, and the black and white Number Thirty-two,
1950 (1950)—display the infinite variety of effect and expression
he achieved through the method of “poured” painting.
Jackson Pollock: Number 1A, 1948
Number 1A, 1948, oil and enamel on canvas by Jackson Pollock, 1948; in the Museum of
Modern Art, New York City. 172.7 × 264.2 cm.

Fine Art Images/SuperStock

During the late 1940s and early ’50s, Pollock had one-man shows
of new paintings nearly every year in New York, his work being
handled by Peggy Guggenheim through 1947, the Betty Parsons
Gallery from 1947 to 1952, and finally by the Sidney Janis Gallery.

In 1951 and 1952 Pollock painted almost exclusively in black

enamel on unsized canvas, creating works in which his earlier
imagery is evident. The configuration in Number Twenty-three,
1951/“Frogman” (1951), for example, relates to Bird and also to
drawings Pollock did for his second Jungian analyst. Other
important paintings from this phase are Echo (1951) and Number
Seven, 1952 (1952). In 1952 he returned to colour and mural scale
in Convergence (1952) and Blue Poles (1952). He created his last
series of major works in 1953; Portrait and a Dream, Easter and
the Totem, Ocean Greyness, and The Deep, among other works,
recapitulate many aspects of his former styles and images. Though
his production waned and his health deteriorated after 1953, he
did produce important paintings such as White Light (1954)
and Scent (1955) in his last years. He died in an automobile
accident in the summer of 1956.

Legacy of Jackson Pollock

As a man, Pollock was described by his contemporaries as gentle

and contemplative when sober, violent when drunk. These
extremes found equilibrium in his art. He was highly intelligent,
widely read, and, when he chose, incisively articulate. He believed
that art derived from the unconscious, saw himself as the essential
subject of his painting, and judged his work and that of others on
its inherent authenticity of personal expression.

Jackson Pollock: Reflection of the Big Dipper

Reflection of the Big Dipper, paint on canvas by Jackson Pollock, 1947; in the Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam.

World History Archive/Ann Ronan Collection/age fotostock

During his lifetime, Pollock’s critical reception ranged from the

supportive criticism of Clement Greenberg in The Nation during
the 1940s to Time magazine’s pejorative reference to him as “Jack
the Dripper” a few months before his death in 1956. Despite
occasional attempts in the art press to understand his work
seriously, his name became synonymous with extreme
artistic caprice, since the novelty of his “pouring” technique
overshadowed his obsession with the deeply personal expression
that the technique permitted. Ironically, he did not profit
financially from his fame. He never sold a painting for more than
$10,000 in his lifetime and was often hard-pressed for cash. His
work was more appreciated abroad. It was seen in Europe, for
example, at the Venice Biennales of 1948, 1950, and 1956 and in a
one-man show in Paris in 1952. In 1949 the French abstract
artist Georges Mathieu stated that he considered Pollock the
“greatest living American painter.”

After Pollock’s death, artists active in the American art movements

immediately following Abstract Expressionism—such as
“happenings,” Pop art, Op art, and Colour Field painting—looked
back, with more or less cause, to Pollock’s example as fundamental
to their departures. For these artists, he became the model of a
painter who had successfully fused art and life. For critics,
however, the psychologically oriented iconography in Pollock’s
work, prompted by Jungian psychotherapy and so important to
Pollock and to a balanced understanding of his contribution, has
generally been misunderstood or ignored. Posthumous critical
opinion and biographical scholarship, strongly influenced by
Greenberg and postmodernist theory, has tended largely to
emphasize the formal elements of his work and his affinities with
European art movements and artists; to exploit his drinking
and alleged homosexuality; and to make unwarranted claims
concerning his social identity as a renegade artist or pawn of the
psychoanalytic community. Now considered an “iconic” master of
mid-century Modernism, he has become all things to all
interpreters, often in spite of the actual facts of his art and life.