Tatiana Khalife

Jackson Pollock: Symbol of Liberation and Hopefulness

in America mid-20th century

Tatiana Khalife

201904909

Intro to Art History

AHIS 150

American University of Beirut

Department of Fine Art an d Art History

December 13, 2019

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Abstract Expressionism is a historical movement in American Art that emerged in the late

1940s and became dominant in Western Painting in 1950. Jackson Pollock was amongst the most

prominent of the American Abstract Expressionists. The new and striking ways of creating art,

erupting from a society post-world war II, placed them exactly between the romantics and the

moderns.1 With a rising movement that was yet to develop, Abstract Expressionists were already

marking “the ascendancy to cultural pre-eminence of United States art.”; as David Craven states in

an issue of the Oxford Art Journal from 1991, "yet it is also viewed with disfavor or indifference by

the majority of people in the U.S. whose culture this art presumably represents”2 . Everything this

era of Art embodied was frowned up by traditional notions and opposed by art critics and the

popular culture due to deliberate rebellion against foundations of art technicalities. Jackson Pollock

was “the most publicized modern artist of his generation in America” and had become the most

influential.

Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956) was an American painter who arrived at a new technique of

creating art that did not include an easel holding a vertical canvas. At 21, He enrolled in an Art class

in New York and was “still struggling with the rudiments of form”3 , but Pollock had a driving force

from within that always surpassed expectations, including his own. One day, he poses the canvas on

the floor, and starts to paint without touching the surface, or predicting what should come. As a

baton or a brush is dipped into a can of ‘household paint’, synthetic resin-based paints called alkyl

enamels, the artist formed shapes high up from a distance4 and let his impulses drive the process of

creation.5 Pollock needed this particular form of expression to unleash all sorts of emotions,

1Levine, E. ‘Abstract Expressionism: The Mystical Experience’, The Art Journal, Vol. 31, No.1, (1971) page
22.
2Craven, D. ‘Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to 'American' Art’,
Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, (1991) page 44.
3Karmel, P., Pollock: Struggle and Mastery, MoMA, Vol. 1, No. 6, (1998) page 2.
4 Ibid. page 4.
5Sirc, G., The American Action Writers, in English Composition as a Happening (University Press of
Colorado, Utah State University Press: Utah, 2002) page 72.
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experiences and thoughts, but didn’t fit conventional art standards to be typically accepted in for.

Nevertheless, he opened gates to all for accessible opportunities for expression through the making

of art, with emphasis on the making rather than the end-product. Contrary to what it seemed, there

was precision and control in the works of Pollock and his mastery of the abstract technique ‘drip

painting’ [See Figure 1]. A documentary from 1950 titled Namuth by photographer Hans Namuth,

captured Pollock in-the-making to the public, exposing his foreign ways for the very first time. The

result of his creations were revealed as not merely marks of explosions of materials into the air and

thrown at the surface, but rather traced in the air as he drips the fine line of liquid, enacting what

comes to mind in the swift moment of his imagination: “he is not drawing on the canvas so much as

in the air above it. […] This is what is really on the canvas… the sign of the passage of something

fleeting”.6 The term ‘Action Painting’, first coined by art connoisseur and famous critic Harold

Rosenberg7, refers to this exact process. As Rosenberg described in Namuth’s film, Pollock in

action had “the agonized look of a man wrestling with himself in a game of unnamable but high

stakes.”8 Action painting was all about unpredictability. It deviated from technical methods and

boundaries and fundamentally announced a shift in the work of art, emphasizing “the interaction of

artist and materials” beyond the intention of a resulting artwork.9

While some elements are borrowed from Cubism and Surrealism [Figure 2], Picasso and

Míro having had a clear influence on Pollock’s style [Figure 2], the artist maintained through his art

the embodiment of the 3 main concepts of Abstract Expressionism: the Abstract, the Objective and

the Spiritual. These key elements relate with the movements of Romanticism, Existentialism as well

as Modernism. Firstly, the Objective element lies in the fact that the process and end-result were

6 Sirc, Op.Cit., page 72.

7 Ibid., page 72.
8 Ibid., page 71.
9Whiteley, N. ‘Action Painting’, in Art and Pluralism: Lawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism (Liverpool
University Press: Liverpool, 2012) page 112.
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both pure and internal art: “not the form but what lies behind the form”, secondly the Abstract: “he

uses line not to create form but to obviate any experience of form and hence an individualized

entity”10 ; and lastly the Spiritual, conforming to manifestations of the spiritual laws of the

universe.11 According to Levine, for an artist to pertain to abstract expression, there must be work

beyond individuality, an existential challenge, exploring one's personality above the self and in

unification with the universe, “a supra-cosmic self”. Beyond an interchange of artist and materials,

"the creative act results from an interchange between himself and the universe”12 . Levine discusses

further the transcendental viewpoint of the artist in his article Abstract Expressionism: The Mystical

Experience: “A world is thus created in the work of both artists in which the individual loses

himself either to color or movement. This is the experience which is opposed to the transience of

the everyday world that had little meaning […] for the Abstract Expressionists” leading them to a

search of “a more permanent reality through the loss of the self than (what) is achieved through […]

the activity of paint”. The end-result of the method ideally aims to achieve the concept of the

Sublime, meaning a sense of nature’s limitlessness, cosmic consciousness and mostly, a conflict

around the sense of self.13

In a case like Pollock’s, the artist had achieved just that when starting his series of drip

paintings in 1947, but with the essence of 'action painting’, this wave in the movement allowed each

artist to develop their own distinct style through their personal discovery and spiritual journey. This

idea was particularly destabilizing for the popular culture and the general public of Pollock’s

lifetime. At a time post World War II and the Great Depression in the United States, Pollock’s work

represented the state of the country and the people in it. It was mostly the youth who related to the

feelings and actions of Jackson Pollock, whose intent were to move forward and abandon traditional

10 Levine, Op. Cit., page 24.

11 Ibid., page 24.
12Ibid., page 22.
13 Ibid., page 23.
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ways of being, and conventionalism. Reactions to Jackson Pollock and Action Painting being

introduced in the Art world received controversial criticism, some reducing his works as

“melodramatic” and “problematic”, alluding to Pollock as a child doing random movements with art

supplies, and others embraced or slowly acknowledged the exquisite nature of his methods and

what they symbolized. Lawrence Alloway, for instance, an art critic and curator in America, wrote

in one of his many pieces of criticisms from 1957: “The Existentialism I have in mind is that

obvious part of the philosophy which dramatizes present action with a startling rigor and intensity,

stripped of precedent and custom, oriented towards a problematic future. Painting like this means

Pollock, or like Rothko.”14 In Alloway’s powerful “Background to Action” Art News and Review

articles from 1956–57, he accepts action painting as ‘aestheticism’ but refers to it as “a brute

aestheticism, an aestheticism of energy freed of its nineteenth-century weakness—dandyism.

Instead of fastidiousness there is violence, instead of narrowing refinement, there is audacity and

scope.”15 which could be interpreted as positive, or negative. Either way, Pollock has become an

important symbol for the youth, respected and admired for as he embodied their new sense of

liberation and hopefulness of the time.

In these reviews from 1956-57, Alloway acknowledges the new and emerging artist for his

implication in art history, and his symbolic representation of his time and place, as opposed to

disregarding him by the old times’ boundaries. The influential critic defines the method of action

painting with regard that it is all-encompassing of the purposes of Art; “Action Painting, an

emphasis on the extensive or multiple meanings of the work of art”. As he describes the new ways

of Pollock to the world of Art, he does create possibilities for further controversial reactivity when

describing the artwork, but that is to be expected with any revolutionary advancements. Pollock’s

work had become acknowledged and disputed for, although it was never the purpose, but this was

14 Whiteley, Op. Cit., page 111.

15 Ibid., page 113.
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mainly thanks to Hans Namuth’s documentary archives that were diffused in the raw ‘action’ of it

all. Pollock had become a revered symbol of their new sense of liberation and hopefulness:

“Aggressive in its self-determination and finally distinctly American in temper, it was also deeply

nourished by the radical modern forms of continental painting, and by spiritual attitudes which

recognize no national boundaries”.16

Jackson Pollock, being one of the most prominent of his lifetime, undeniably marks the

Abstract Expressionist movement in American art history through the creation of a whole new pave

way of art. The concept of the sublime and the boundlessness of aesthetic experiences of the

moderns, and the pure sense of surrender to the canvas were all mastered by the artist: as “To

experience a work of Pollock’s, is to literally lose oneself in the rhythms, to forget all sense of

ego.”17 The raw expression of Pollock's art was not of oneself but of a community in desperate cry.

An outlet. Action painting arose as a medium less for therapeutic purposes but more for the search

of a greater self, a community that in the end related to artistic values and obtain a spiritual

connection with just by being exposed to the work, the artist in the journey and the audience in the

portrayal of it and the communicative feelings through it, encouraging expression beyond

boundaries that art necessitated in the earlier decades.

Word Count: 1,553

16 Whiteley, Op. Cit., page 113.

17 Levine, Op. Cit., page 24.
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Bibliography:

- Craven, D. ‘Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to

'American' Art’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, (1991) 44-66.

- Karmel, P. ‘Pollock: Struggle and Mastery’, MoMA, Vol. 1, No. 6, (1998) 2-5.

- Levine, E. ‘Abstract Expressionism: The Mystical Experience’, The Art Journal, Vol. 31, No.1,

(1971) 22-25. (1)

- Levine, E., Pollock, J. ‘Mythic Overtones in the Work of Jackson Pollock’, Art Journal, Vol. 26,

No. 4, (1967), 366-368,374.

- O’Connor, F. Hans Namuth's Photographs of Jackson Pollock as Art Historical Documentation,

Art Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1, (1979), 48-49.

- Whiteley, N. ‘Action Painting’, in Art and Pluralism: Lawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism

(Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2012) 111-114.

- Sirc, G. The American Action Writers, in English Composition as a Happening (University Press

of Colorado, Utah State University Press: Utah, 2002) 69-120.

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Images:

Figure 1

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)

Jackson Pollock (1950)

Enamel on canvas, 266.7 x 525.8 cm

East Hampton, New York

From URL: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/action-painting/

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Figure 2

Mural

Jackson Pollock (1943)

Oil and water-based pain on linen, 242.2 x 606.9 cm

University of Iowa Museum of Art

From URL: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/abstract-exp-nyschool/abstract-

expressionism/a/jackson-pollock-mural

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