Jackson Pollock revisited

I recently posted about an exhibit for Jackson Pollock at the Guggenheim museum.

I thought it would be appropriate to provide some more images of his work and some more about one of the best artists in the past 50 years.

Jackson Pollock in his studio. 1950. Courtesy Hans Namuth Studio 

Paul Jackson Pollock was born January 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyoming. He grew up in Arizona and California and in 1928 began to study painting at the Manual Arts High School, Los Angeles. In the fall of 1930, Pollock moved to New York and studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Benton encouraged him throughout the succeeding decade. By the early 1930s, Pollock knew and admired the murals of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. Although he traveled widely throughout the United States during the 1930s, much of Pollock’s time was spent in New York, where he settled permanently in 1934 and worked on the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1942. In 1936, he worked in David Alfaro Siqueiros’s experimental workshop in New York.

Pollock’s first solo show was held at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, New York, in 1943. Guggenheim gave him a contract that lasted through 1947, permitting him to devote all his time to painting. Prior to 1947, Pollock’s work reflected the influence of Pablo Picasso and Surrealism [more]. During the early 1940s, he contributed paintings to several exhibitions of Surrealist and abstract art, including Natural, Insane, Surrealist Art at Art of This Century in 1943, and Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, organized by Sidney Janis at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery, New York, in 1944.

Blue (Moby Dick) 1943

From the fall of 1945, when artist Lee Krasner and Pollock were married, they lived in the Springs, East Hampton, New York. In 1952, Pollock’s first solo show in Paris opened at the Studio Paul Facchetti and his first retrospective was organized by Clement Greenberg at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont. He was included in many group exhibitions, including the Annuals at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from 1946 and the Venice Biennale in 1950. Although his work was widely known and exhibited internationally, the artist never traveled outside the United States. He was killed in an automobile accident on August 11, 1956, in the Springs.

Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950

Pollock was the first ``all-over'' painter, pouring paint rather than using brushes and a palette, and abandoning all conventions of a central motif. He danced in semi-ecstasy over canvases spread across the floor, lost in his patterning, dripping and dribbling with total control. He said: ``The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.'' He painted no image, just ``action'', though ``action painting'' seems an inadequate term for the finished result of his creative process. Lavender Mist is 3 m long (nearly 10 ft), a vast expanse on a heroic scale. It is alive with colored scribble, spattered lines moving this way and that, now thickening, now trailing off to a slender skein. The eye is kept continually eager, not allowed to rest on any particular area. Pollock has put his hands into paint and placed them at the top right-- an instinctive gesture eerily reminiscent of cave painters who did the same. The overall tone is a pale lavender, maide airy and active. At the time Pollock was heiled as the greatest American painter, but there are already those who feel his work is not holding up in every respect.

Jackson Pollock.
Foto by: Wilfred Zuobaum. Courtesy Jackson Pollock Papers

Lee Krasner (1908-84), who married Pollock in 1944, was not celebrated at all during his lifetime (cut short in 1956 by a fatal car crash), but it was actually she who first started covering the canvas with a passionate flurry of marks. The originality of her vision, its stiff integrity and its great sense of internal cohesion, is now beginning to be recognized. Cobalt Night (1962; 237 x 401 cm (7 ft 9 1/3 x 13 ft 2 in)) at 4 m (over 13 ft) is even larger than Lavender Mist and has the same kind of heroic ambition.