Jackson Pollock

Fine Artist

• Born: January 28, 1912
• Birthplace: Cody, Wyoming
• Died: August 11, 1956
• Place of death: East Hampton, Long Island, New York

American painter

A central figure in the New York School of abstract expressionists during the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Pollock, through his “drip” painting, produced some of the most distinctive and unique work in the history of American art.

Area of achievement Art

Early Life

Jackson Pollock (PAWL-lawk) was born on the Watkins Ranch in Cody, Wyoming. Both his mother, née Stella May McClure, and his father, LeRoy Pollock, were of Scotch-Irish ancestry and had been born and reared in Tingley, Iowa. The elder Pollock worked at various jobs during his lifetime (ranch hand, dishwasher, truck farmer, plasterer, and surveyor) but listed his occupation as “stone mason and cement work” on Jackson’s birth certificate. By the time Jackson had reached ten years of age, his family (he had four older brothers) had moved six times and had lived in San Diego, Chico, Janesville, Orland, Riverside (all in California), and Phoenix, Arizona.

Pollock entered Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles in 1928 and came under the influence of an art teacher named Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, who encouraged his growing interest in art and sparked his attachment to Eastern mysticism. Although he already knew by this time that he wanted to be “an artist of some kind,” he had personal difficulties in high school (he was temporarily expelled in early 1929) and eventually left without being graduated in 1930. He then followed his older brothers, Charles and Frank, to New York City in the fall of 1930, where he joined the Art Students League and took classes from Thomas Hart Benton, John Sloan, and Robert Laurent. Benton was strongly impressed with Pollock’s talent, especially his use of color; became his mentor; and continually urged the young man to pursue a career in art. Although they rarely saw each other after 1937, this close relationship between teacher and student would persist, via letters and the telephone, until Pollock’s death in 1956.

During this early New York period, Pollock appeared to be the typical all-American young man: well built (although slightly thin), with a mop of auburn hair, rough-hewn good features, and a vague pugnacious air about him. Only later would the creeping effects of alcoholism and hard living be reflected in his appearance: Photographs from the 1940’s and 1950’s show a paunchy and balding man, his face increasingly lined and depressed. The seeds of these personal and physical problems had already been planted in the 1930’s; Pollock was arrested in July, 1937, for public intoxication and disturbing the peace, and he entered treatment for alcoholism, once in 1937, again in 1938, and again in 1939.

The first public exhibition of Pollock’s work came in February, 1935, when he showed a work entitled Threshers at the Eighth Exhibition of Watercolors, Pastels, and Drawings by American and French Artists, held at the Brooklyn Museum. He also joined the Federal Art Project of the Works Project Administration (WPA) in 1935, earning approximately ninety-five dollars per month in exchange for submitting one painting every eight weeks. He would remain with the Federal Arts Project until early 1943 and produced more than fifty paintings during this time. Only two of them are known to exist today.

In April, 1941, Pollock was classified IV-F (declared unfit for military service) by his local draft board. He also met artist Lee Krasner that year at an exhibition at the McMillen Gallery. He had been introduced to her briefly in 1935, but this time the relationship flowered. They became constant companions and finally married on October 25, 1945, at Marble Collegiate Church in New York City.

Pollock’s career also began to flower during the early 1940’s. He attracted the attention of Peggy Guggenheim, an art collector, patron, and owner of a newly established museum-gallery in New York called Art of this Century. After inviting him to submit a collage for a show in her gallery in 1943, she issued him a one-year contract that guaranteed him $150 a month plus a negotiated bonus if she sold more than twenty-seven hundred dollars’ worth of his paintings during that year. She also gave him a one-man show at her gallery in November, 1943, and commissioned him to paint a mural for the entrance hall of her town house. Guggenheim’s patronage allowed Pollock to give up the custodial job he had obtained after the end of the Federal Arts Project and devote himself full-time to painting. Pollock’s reputation and creativity soared from this point onward.

Life’s Work

With the financial security provided by his connection with Guggenheim, Pollock entered the most creative period of his career. Show followed show as he exhibited his work at such prestigious galleries and museums as the New York Museum of Modern Art (1944-1945), the Cincinnati Art Museum (1944), the David Porter Gallery in Washington, D.C. (1945), the Arts Club of Chicago (1945), the San Francisco Museum of Art (1946), and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1946). He sold his first painting to a museum during this period. In 1944, the Museum of Modern Art, acting on the advice of Alfred Barr, purchased Pollock’s The She-Wolf for its permanent collection. He also received increasingly favorable notices in the art press, which praised his sense of color and surface, his fluent design, and his “exuberance, independence, and native sensibility.”

Pollock’s work underwent a clear creative evolution during this period. His work during the 1930’s revealed the strong influence of Benton and David Alfaro Siqueiros, both advocates of the social realism school of art that attracted so many young painters during the difficult years of the Depression. Although often heavily stylized in their portrayal of reality, the social realists insisted that art carry a clear social or political message and thus serve a “useful” purpose. Paintings such as Going West (1934-1935) and The Covered Wagon (1934) demonstrate the impact of social realism on Pollock’s early work. However, as he entered the 1940’s, Pollock became more and more interested in the work of such painters as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, and Hans Hofmann, and his work became increasingly abstract and, according to many critics, surrealistic. However, his paintings from this period, such as The She-Wolf, Guardians of the Secret (1943), The Troubled Queen (1945), and Red (1946), show the gradual development of a style that, while reflecting the influence of other abstract painters, was also uniquely his own.

As Pollock evolved into a mature and unique artist, his personal life continued along its rather rocky course. In the fall of 1945, he and Krasner left New York City and purchased (with a loan from Guggenheim) a farmhouse, barn, and five acres of land on Fireplace Road in East Hampton, Long Island. He would live and work there for the remainder of his life. Two years later, in 1946, Guggenheim closed her gallery and planned to return permanently to Europe. Before leaving, she arranged for the art dealer Betty Parsons to take over Pollock’s contract and market his work. Pollock renewed this contract in 1949, but, when it expired in January, 1952, he signed an exclusive agreement with the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City. He would remain with Janis until his death. Pollock also continued to suffer from alcoholism throughout these years and entered treatment with an East Hampton doctor in 1948, to arrest his chronic drinking. Thanks to this doctor’s efforts, Pollock did manage to stay sober until 1950 but then reverted to his old behavior. From this point onward, he would visit a series of doctors and psychiatrists in an effort to cure his problem, but permanent success eluded him.

Beginning in 1946 or 1947, Pollock began experimenting with what would become his most important contribution to modern art, his “drip” or “action” painting. Action painting was a style pioneered by Hans Hofmann, who insisted that a finished painting is only the record of the intense personal feelings that an artist experienced while creating it. Moreover, the painting should also reflect the spontaneous, uncontrolled, and prerational actions that the artist made during the creative process. In this sense, the action of painting became more real and important than the painting itself. Pollock carried this idea to new extremes. He would roll out a large canvas on the floor of his East Hampton studio and drip and splatter paint on its surface as he worked in an energetic frenzy around its border. Pollock argued that the finished product was not accidental, that his actions were guided by internal psychic forces that were unleashed while he worked, and thus the painting represented a manifestation of his inner being on canvas. Examples of work produced during his drip period include Lucifer (1947), Number 5 (1948), Birds of Paradise (1949), Lavender Mist (1950), Autumn Rhythmn (1950), and Number 8 (1950), and all demonstrate a spontaneous freshness of statement and an exciting combination of dynamic composition and color. Many sophisticated art critics recognized the creative genius at work in these paintings and hailed Pollock as the most important American artist of the era. Critics for the popular press, however, generally dismissed him as a fraud and claimed that any three-year-old child could produce a Pollock “dribble” painting. The general public tended to agree with this assessment, and Pollock’s work became the target for numerous jokes, cartoons, and ridicule. As a result, he continued to have difficulty selling his paintings and had to rely on the generosity of his patrons and an occasional grant to make ends meet.

Beginning in 1953, Pollock began to explore other styles of painting, as represented by his Easter and the Totem (1953) and Sleeping Effort (1953), but he still frequently returned to his drip technique in such works as White Light (1954) and Scent (1955). This later work, though, was produced during the all-too-brief creative spurts that punctuated an otherwise protracted period of artistic inactivity. In 1954, for example, Pollock produced only a handful of paintings and, in 1955, he hardly painted anything at all because, as he told a friend, he wondered whether he could say anything with his art anymore. He even contemplated a trip to Europe to renew his creativity but never went beyond obtaining a passport. Although his standing among knowledgeable art critics continued to escalate, his well of inspiration had dried up because of the severity of his alcoholism. His personal behavior had also become increasingly belligerent, as demonstrated by the fights he often provoked at the various taverns he frequented.

The year 1956 initially seemed to hold out some promise for Pollock. In May of that year, the New York Museum of Modern Art notified him that it was planning a one-man show of his work to honor him at midcareer. His wife, Krasner, was sufficiently satisfied that he had his drinking under control that she left for a vacation in Europe in July. A month later, on August 11, Pollock, with two female friends, lost control of his car on Fireplace Road and crashed into a clump of trees. One of the passengers survived but Pollock and the other passenger were killed instantly. He was buried at Green River Cemetery in Springs, Long Island, on August 15, 1956.

Significance

As with many artists before him, and undoubtedly many after, appreciation for what Pollock had accomplished during his short career grew after his death. By defying all traditional conventions and taking tremendous artistic and aesthetic risks, especially with his drip paintings, Pollock shattered old barriers and expanded the horizon of modern art into realms that few even dreamed existed. He also freed American art from its dependence on European innovation and at least temporarily pushed it to the forefront of the art world’s avant-garde. In the process, he paved the way for the recognition of American artists within the international art community and helped create a market for their work. Many younger American artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, benefited from his fearless desire to do what no one else had ever done, to push art beyond all previous limits, no matter what the cost.

That cost proved to be extraordinarily high. Public rejection and ridicule, alcoholism, eventual creative burnout, and a tragic death proved to be the price Pollock paid for his artistic courage. In many ways, he epitomized the rootless and innovative artists who were attracted to New York City at the end of World War II, young artists who celebrated absolute freedom and art as an intense personal commitment in their work but who ultimately fell victim to a society that neither understood nor appreciated them during their lifetimes. Pollock and his colleagues tried to stimulate the aesthetic imagination of the America of Disneyland, backyard barbecues, and television game shows. They lost in the short term, but their long-range influence would prove to be both liberating and exciting.

Further Reading

Friedman, B. H. Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Highly opinionated account of Pollock’s life and work by a friend who met the artist late in the latter’s career. Despite a rather confusing and overly dramatic style, the author provides some interesting insight into Pollock’s personal demons.

Harrison, Helen, ed. Such Desperate Joy: Imaging Jackson Pollock. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000. A collection of writings and interviews about Pollock.

Hunter, Sam. Jackson Pollock. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1956. Originally intended to be a catalog to accompany Pollock’s one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956, this book was expanded after the artist’s death to be a retrospective of his entire career.

Jaffee, Barbara. “Jackson Pollock’s Industrial Expressionism.” Art Journal 63, no. 4 (Winter, 2004): 68-79. Examines Pollock’s views on abstract expressionism and compares his work to that of his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton.

Karmel, Pepe, ed. Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1999. Compilation of five decades of critical response to Pollock’s work that originally appeared in newspapers, journals, and catalogs. Includes Pollock’s own statements about his art and an interview with his wife, artist Lee Krasner.

Motherwell, Robert, and Ad Reinhardt, eds. Modern Artists in America: First Series. New York: Wittenburg Schultz, 1951. Includes an excellent analysis of what Pollock was trying to convey in his drip paintings. Motherwell always held Pollock in high regard.

O’Connor, Francis V. Jackson Pollock. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967. This book was published to supplement a major retrospective exhibition of Pollock’s art in 1967. It includes a detailed chronology of Pollock’s life and career, numerous excerpts from his correspondence, and black-and-white reproductions of most of his important work.

O’Hara, Frank. Jackson Pollock. New York: George Braziller, 1959. An appreciation of Pollock’s career by a noted poet who also worked as a staff member at the Museum of Modern Art. This book provides a concise and intelligent survey of Pollock’s place in American art. An excellent starting point.

Potter, Jeffrey. To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985. These reminiscences, gathered from many sources by a friend of Pollock, document his problems with alcoholism, his troubled personal life, and his self-obsession. The book is valuable as a supplement to other studies, but it sheds little light on Pollock’s art.

Rubin, William S. “Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition.” Artforum 5 (February-May, 1967): 14-31, 32-37. A highly esoteric examination of Pollock’s art that attempts to clarify the influences on which he drew and his impact on the development of modern art in the United States.