Pollock, Jackson

▪ American artist

Introduction

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 (theosophy), 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 (Jung, Carl) 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 (Benton, Thomas Hart). (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 (Ryder, Albert Pinkham). 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.

      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 (Picasso, Pablo) and Joan Miró (Miró, Joan), as well as the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco (Orozco, José Clemente). 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 (Guggenheim, Peggy) 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 (Krasner, Lee) 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.

“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. Recent research has 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.

      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.

Assessment

      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.

      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 (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.

Francis Valentine O'Connor

Additional Reading

Biographies include Francis V. O'Connor, Jackson Pollock (1967); B.H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (1972, reissued 1995); Jeffrey Potter (compiler), To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (1985, reprinted 1987); Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography (1987, reissued 2001); and Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (1989, reissued 1992).Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw (eds.), Jackson Pollock, 4 vol. (1978), is a catalogue raisonné; a supplement to this catalog, edited by O'Connor, was published by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1995. Bernice Rose, Jackson Pollock: Works on Paper (1969), is a study of the drawings and small paintings. C.L. Wysuph, Jackson Pollock: Psychoanalytic Drawings (1970), reproduces the drawings Pollock gave to his first Jungian analyst.Interpretative monographs include Frank O'Hara, Jackson Pollock (1959); Bryan Robertson, Jackson Pollock (1960); Hans Namuth, Pollock Painting, ed. by Barbara Rose (1980); Elizabeth Frank, Jackson Pollock (1983), which also reviews previous literature on the artist; Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (1989, reissued 2000); and Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, Jackson Pollock (1998), which was written in conjunction with a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.An excellent short colour film of Pollock in the act of painting, Jackson Pollock (1951), was produced by Paul Falkenberg and Hans Namuth, with music by Morton Feldman and narration by the artist.

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