Action painting (Jackson Pollock) - YouTube Action painting (Jackson Pollock) Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Uploaded on May 29, 2009 Paul Jackson Pollock (1912- 1956) American abstract expressionist (Jack the Dripper) Paul Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality and struggled with alcoholism all of his life. (He died at the age of 44 in an alcohol related single- car crash) Pollock painted with his canvases laid out on the studio floor, and developed what was later called his "Drip" technique. He used hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes as paint applicators. Pollock's technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term action painting.

By defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension, literally, by being able to vieuw and apply paint to his canvases from all directions. Quote by Jackson Pollock: Jack The Dripper - The New York Times The New York Times T Magazine |Jack The Dripper Search Continue reading the main story The police report filed after Jackson Pollock’s death in 1956 states that when the artist’s car overturned near his home in East Hampton, N.Y., he was wearing “a black velvet shirt, gray pants, a brown belt, blue shorts, brown socks, no shoes, no jewelry and no ID.” The haphazard outfit offers a window into Pollock’s persona: disheveled, unconcerned about superficialities, powerfully intriguing. Like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Pollock has entered the canon of American icons not just because of his artistic accomplishments, but also thanks to the myth surrounding his tortured life and premature death.

(Many have surmised that even if he had survived the car crash, his severe alcoholism would have killed him.) No wonder fashion designers keep bringing him up: he’s the archetype of the all-American, ruggedly handsome, bottle-swilling man with plenty of talent and a (well-hidden) sensitive side. A year ago, Hedi Slimane borrowed Pollock’s drip artworks for Dior Homme; in the late ’90s, Helmut Lang started a trend for paint-splattered denim, sending enthusiastic imitators to their garages. (As with Pollock’s art, the do-it-yourself versions never quite matched the original.) This season, Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurent refreshed the action-painting look with pants, shorts and shoes smudged with practically every color in the Benjamin Moore catalog; in New York, Adam Kimmel took a complementary approach, focusing not on the Abstract Expressionist’s artwork but on what the artist actually wore. “Pollock famously said that modern art is the expression of the contemporary aims of the age we’re living in,” Kimmel says. “I find that very inspirational, because every generation has to deal with issues in its own way.

His work was the result of a true need to express, and with his jeans, T-shirts and overalls, he embodied the idea of man as creator. He was at the forefront of existential masculinity.” In 1949, Pollock’s fame skyrocketed when Life magazine rhetorically asked, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” Soon after, he became the subject of a well-publicized documentary — but the accolades came at a price. Pollock abandoned his signature drip style; his work turned darker. Seemingly frozen by the pressure to live up to his reputation, he plunged deeper into alcoholism and was hardly painting at all by the time of his death, at age 44. Pollock was one of the first celebrity artists of our time, and, as it turned out, one of the first celebrity casualties. An expression of the age we’re living in, indeed. [?][?][?]Armand Limnander 1. Pollock at work in 1949. 2. A painterly look by Helmut Lang for spring 1998. 3. Dior Homme’s Pollock moment for fall 2007. 4.

Spring 2008 looks from Adam Kimmel (left, modeled by the artist Jack Pierson) and Yves Saint Laurent. A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM68 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: JACK THE DRIPPER. Today's Paper | Subscribe ART ICON JACKSON POLLOCK | AKA “JACK THE DRIPPER” | The Selvedge Yard That’s the thing about art it’s beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder as well as lack there of so I feel you are right too. We all have a view . Susan July 25, 2010 at 1:00 am You’re ignorant…..you’ve no idea what you are talking about. Reminds me very much of my mother, a trait that I’ve always found to be sad and frustrating. Please educate yourself and expand your narrow thinking before spewing uninformed opinions. You have no idea what his sources are or where any of Pollock or his contemporaries are coming from…what came before them, what else was going on in the world at the time? Politics, other art forms, culture, etc… He blew the doors off of the painting world and you have no idea why.

What about calligraphy, dance, and Japanese Haiku? All 3 were sources for his work. Action and rhythm and verse as apposed to literal image. It’s not that difficult to understand if you just have some curiosity. One thing I admire about my father is his sense of curiosity. He is a product of the 50’s. A regular, working-class, uneducated Joe. He likes to learn about things that are unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable to him. It hasn’t made him gay or a hippie or “artsy-fartsy” or anything other than himself. The tone of your comment feels threatened and hostile for some reason. Chill out and learn something. It’s not going to bite you. Thanks for listening. Kind Regards, September 10, 2009 at 9:19 pm Wow!!!!!!!!!…the last post was the most closed minded position I have ever heard. I’m pretty sure no one can take him/her seriously……art in its natural definition is what the maker believes it to be.

What comes out…just IS…who cares if it’s what you or me likes…..it is just the ART of ANOTHER….plain and simple….nothing more…in the end who cares….so why judge!!??!!……just look and move on….respect what you will…..but to have an opinion on what is and isn’t art is meaningless….grow up before you share!! October 5, 2009 at 9:29 am Great Article and awesome pictures, and videos you shared. I’m a lover of Pollock, hes action painting style always give me an impression of a childhood play. there for a simple yet profund meaning. Mr. Realist October 23, 2009 at 5:50 pm Organic has the modern view of art as “whatever the artist wants it to be,” a view that has only come into being with the post-modernism. This view certainly has no premodern precendent, and makes “artists” out of those who are merely controversial. I believe it is a view without merit, especially as it actively denigrates talent. Pablo P. has stated thing succinctly, if earthily.

How many modern “artists” have the finely-polished technique of masters like da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, or Rockwell? We moderns have a skewed notion of what art is, due (in part) to the celebration of iconoclasts like Pollock, but mainly due to the disparagement of every aspect of pre-1965 (or so) Western culture and the people who created it (“Dead White Males”). Did Pollock know about fractals and chaos theory? Did the ancient Egyptians know about pi? In both cases, the answer is no; that fractals/chaos appear in Pollock’s work can be attributed to his method and materials, just as the appearance of pi in ancient Egyptian architecture is due to their use of wheels (i.e., circles) in the building process. In both cases, the appearance of an apparent higher-level knowledge is actually an epiphenomenon. While fractals may be beautiful, they are not art. They are not a deliberate work of creation but a mathematical function. In a similar vein, Pollock’s method produced, not by design but as a result of dripping and splashing, fractals.

Some day, abstract “art,” like much of the “art” and “music” of the 20th century, will be reduced to a footnote, while the great works of the masters will still be celebrated. November 24, 2009 at 6:53 am JP, Mr Realist Who decides what is good art and who cares. If you, Mr. Realist, don’t appreciate Pollock, then don’t. There are many reasons why his work became is big as it is and not a lot of them has to do with him, his work or the Beat generation. I agree with Organic that there is no point in discussing what art is or is not – including fractals. To me they become art the minute you say they aren’t, Mr. Realist. Talent, is another element that is not easy to apply to the arts. In the sense that Michael Jordan was outstanding at getting the ball through the hoop and to an extend that he must have had something more than hours practicing to make him so much better than any other player (had it been bicycling we would have all known what).

But art isn’t straight and simple and if art was basket ball kicking the ball out of the arena makes as much sense as putting it through the hoop. It says as much about putting it through the hoop as actually putting it through the hoop does. Just in a different way. And if basket ball was art people who doesn’t like basket ball would play it as well trying to make all the basket ball lovers understand that there hardly is a point in putting the ball through the hoop, if basket ball was life. So when Pablo P. calls out for real portraits – what does that mean? A portrait isn’t real – it is a representation of something real. I would go as far as to say that just as bifurcation patterns is the result of a mathematical equation, in the same way Pollock’s paintings are the result of his process and in the same way a “real” portrait is the result of someone following a set number of rules adding paint to canvas in certain way as to making it resemble a person. Btw. Mr. Realist, I hope you don’t think people in the renaissance looked the way they do in portraits! So when there isn’t a nut shell this is it.

Most of our technological advancement since the dawn of the modern age has been pretty brilliant and we are all happy at diseases gotten rid off etc. But we can also agree that the mentality has been all wrong. The world hasn’t become a better place. 150-200 years later we are looking at the crashed space shuttle called western thought and we need to reassess the situation. Along with that the arts. I would argue that all culture produced in the western world is dependent or connected to our failed ideology and so wether calling it post-modern, modern or what not we need to look at our history to see where we started straying – was it the renaissance? Or was it romanticism? When did we decide that we are bigger and better than our planet. Unfortunately I believe that it is geologically coded into our brains. I think that our strand of monkeys developed into humanoids and humans looking at the ocean and the horizon and the stars gradually building the notion of curiosity to what was on the other side. Compared to those of the Himalayas walking into the stars and looking at mountains and slowly becoming introspective in their way of seeing this world and life.

But when does our need to explore the world become a barbaric crusade to rule and control every aspect of the planet? Probably when we discover there is a plant and not a pizza and probably because of simple animal herd mentality and the violence of alpha males. So when yelling at each other in a small strand off a small post on Jackson Pollock I propose to have a purpose with it and maybe even a suggestion as to what to change or how to improve the strand. Beating each other up and claiming righteousness doesn’t leave any one but he who does it looking as the fool we have all been for far to long. Thanks for a great site with great articles Jackson Pollock - 84 paintings and drawings - WikiArt.org Wikipedia: Deemed the “greatest painter alive” during his lifetime, Jackson Pollock was an American painter who was a major artist abstract expressionist art in the 20th century. Pollock was expelled from two high schools during his formative years, the second one being Los Angeles Manual Arts School, where he was encouraged to pursue his interest in art.

In 1930, he moved to New York to study art, and secured a job under the WPA Federal Art Project, a New Deal project, which allowed him to earn a living from his painting. As he was gaining professional and social success, Pollock fought the addiction of alcoholism and recurring bouts of depression. Two of his brothers suggested Jungian psychotherapy, with Dr. Joseph Henderson, who encouraged Pollock in his artistic endeavors as part of his therapy. Although the psychotherapy did not cure his drinking, it did expose him to Jungian concepts, which he expressed in his paintings at the time. In 1945, Pollock moved with his wife and American painter Lee Krasner to Springs, New York, where he would remain the rest of his life. In the barn behind the house, which he converted to his studio, Pollock developed a new and completely novel technique of painting using what he called his “drip” technique. Using hardened brushes, sticks, and turkey basters, and household enamel paints, Pollock squirted, splashed, and dripped his paint onto canvas rolled out over his studio floor.

In 1956, Time magazine gave Pollock the name “Jack the Dripper,” referencing his unique style of action painting. Recent studies by art historians and scientists have determined that some of Pollock’s work display properties of mathematical fractals, asserting that his works became more fractal-like throughout his career. In his later paintings, Pollock reduced the titles of all of his paintings to numbers, in order to reduce the viewers attempt to indentify any representational element in his paintings. Pressured by his growing fame and demand from art collectors, Pollock’s alcoholism worsened. In August of 1956, while driving under the influence of alcohol, he was involved in a single–car accident, killing himself and one of his passengers. Pollock’s legacy was secured by his widow, Lee Krasner, who managed his estate after his death. His legacy includes a number of references in social media, including songs, poems, books, and documentaries, and the feature film biopic Pollock, directed by and starring Ed Harris.

Jack The Dripper, Jackson Pollock - Polyvore All contests > Croquis Guild > Jack The Dripper, Jackson Pollock "Jack The Dripper." Submit sets that make us think of Jackson Pollock, paint splatter, vintage dress, movement, and/or liberation... However, YOU wish! No limit on number of entries. Let's get at least 50 participants! I've uploaded images. Please use them if you wish! "Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an influential American painter and a major force in the abstract expressionist movement. In 1956, Time magazine dubbed Pollock "Jack the Dripper" as a result of his unique painting style. Pollock's work has always polarized critics and has been the focus of many important critical debates. In a famous 1952 article in ARTnews, Harold Rosenberg coined the term action painting, and wrote that what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value — political, aesthetic, moral. Clement Greenberg supported Pollock's work on formalistic grounds.

It fit well with Greenberg's view of art history as being about the progressive purification in form and elimination of historical content. He therefore saw Pollock's work as the best painting of its day and the culmination of the Western tradition going back via Cubism and Cézanne to Manet." Created by jill-is-m . Created in Croquis Guild . 131 sets from 67 members. Ended 8 years ago. Winners Jack the Dripper Pollocks new way of painting Action Painting - ARH - 2051 "Jack the Dripper" - Pollock's new way of painting This preview has intentionally blurred sections. Sign up to view the full version. View Full Document Action Painting - With this technique, Pollock was able to achieve a more immediate means of creating art, the paint now flying from his tool onto the canvas. Abstract Expression - School of painting that flourished after World War II until the early 1960s, characterized by the view that art is nonrepresentational and chiefly improvisational Hugo Ball - owner of Cabaret Voltaire where Dada movement began.

New York School - School creates center of art world Assemblages - Louise Nevelson was known for using found objects of discarded things in her "assemblies" Collage - French: coller to glue is a work of art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms Encaustic painting - also known as hot wax painting, involves using heated beeswax to which colored pigments are added. Leo Castelli - One of the most influential art dealers of the twentieth century. Launched the careers of such Pop greats as Jasper Johns. Benday dots - printing process, named after illustrator and printer Benjamin Day, is similar to pointillism.

Postminimalism - anti-form and process art; post-minimalists react to the cold hardness of minimalism; includes sensualism; they reintroduced the human quality to minimalism; gender dialoge-minimalist artists were seen as masculine- focused male artists; post-minimalism is more organic and human (soft) and women artists are focused on the most; accumulations of materials Performance Art - Art as theater Photorealism - painting based on making a painting of a photograph (also called Hyper realism) Truisms - Jenny Holzer short statements, some are common myths while others are just phrases on random subjects in the form of slogans. Postmodernism - Eclectic borrowing from different styles, new, enhanced. Not old idea of form follows function. Earthworks - Use of organic material and environment. Earth art is best seen in Robert Smithson's work of spiral jetty. This preview has intentionally blurred sections. Sign up to view the full version. View Full Document Site-specific - art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically artists take the location into account while planning the work. Guerilla Girls - Founded in 1985, challenges sexist and racist museum practices.

Appropriation Art - refers to the use of borrowed elements in the creation of new work. May include images, forms, or styles from art history or pop culture. Venice Biennale - A major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years (on odd years) in Venice. Kitsch - The art of bad taste, cheap and tacky. Sluter - Outstanding representative of the Burgundian School Sluter - Had an impressive observation of reality (natural, realistic style) Pucelle - Parisian illustrator (revitalizes illusionism) Limbourg brothers - The Book of Hours Campin - Leading 15th c. Flemish painter Campin - Influenced by Sluter seen in his painting of draperies Van Eyck - Stands out among his contemporary Northern realism artists Penaufski and Phillips - Art historians who discuss the painters responsible for certain works (because it is hard to tell which early works really are Van Eyck) This preview has intentionally blurred sections. Sign up to view the full version.

Jackson Pollock | PBS NewsHour Jackson Pollock January 11, 1999 at 12:00 AM EST [Sorry, the video for this story has expired, but you can still read the transcript below. ] JIM LEHRER: Now a painter who changed American art. Senior Producer Jeffrey Brown reports. JEFFREY BROWN: The painting is violent, like a boxing match. KIRK VARNEDOE, Museum of Modern Art: The way that things are flung against the canvas — the splat, the splatter — there’s a sense of aggression in the picture. JEFFREY BROWN: It’s lyrical , like a ballet. (music in background) KIRK VARNEDOE: There’s something extremely fine and delicate about a lot of these lines that is choreographed on some level of ecstasy. JEFFREY BROWN: It’s dense, like a dream –. KIRK VARNEDOE: There’s no foreground, there’s no background, there’s no tree, there’s no dog, there’s no recognizable anything in this picture. And yet there’s a sense of very complex space that’s poised between opposites.

JEFFREY BROWN: That is the view from curator Kirk Varnadoe of “Autumn Rhythm,” dripped, poured, and flung into existence by Jackson Pollock in 1950, and now part of a Pollock retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The music is from a CD put out by the museum, the jazz Pollock listened to for days on end, from his own collection. JACKSON POLLOCK: Sometimes I use a brush but often prefer using a stick. Sometimes I pour the paint straight out of the can. “Jack the Dripper.” JEFFREY BROWN: Pollock, shown in this 1951 film, is the man who poured the paint — “Jack the Dripper” as Time Magazine called him back then. He was at the center of a group, known as abstract expressionists, who changed both the look and the geography of art after World War Two, giving it a distinctly new, American face. But when he died in 1956 in a drunken car wreck, his legacy was uncertain. Pollock’s life was marked by both a burning ambition to be a great artist, and real doubt as to what he had achieved.

KIRK VARNEDOE: Pollock’s idea of being an artist had a notion in it of making a mark in the world. Pollock had a range of emotional difficulties. He had a dislike of authority. He slugged one instructor in grade school, and slugged another one in high school. He was thrown out of school twice. And the idea of shaping something, of making something, of composing something was almost like a metaphor for him of taking charge of his own life. JEFFREY BROWN: Pollock was born in Wyoming in 1912. His family moved around the southwest, before settling near Los Angeles. At age 18 he dropped out of high school and moved to New York, where he struggled for more than a decade to make it as an artist. KIRK VARNEDOE: People who knew him in the early thirties, in his early years as an artist flat out said he could not draw. And you see from his early paintings and drawings that there’s something about struggle and push in the work; nothing came easy to him.

JEFFREY BROWN: His early work shows him trying out different styles — of an early mentor, the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton — of the Mexican muralist painters, and, by 1941, of Picasso and the European avant garde. It was this work that caught the eye of the hottest art dealer of the day, Peggy Guggenheim. She signed Pollock to a contract for a show in 1943 and commissioned a huge mural — his first large-scale work. KIRK VARNEDOE: It’s a real Paul Bunyan kind of exploit story and you get skeptical just listening to it. JEFFREY BROWN: The story goes that Pollock secretly tore down walls in his rented Greenwich Village apartment to make room for the 18-foot canvas — and then, after procrastinating for months, painted the whole thing in one 15-hour marathon session. KIRK VARNEDOE: When you look at the picture, it’s clear that no matter how long it took him to paint this picture, he never thought twice during the whole time he was painting it.

There is a family of marks, hooks, commas, scythe-like marks, long loops and sinews that set up a rhythm. And that rhythm runs across the length of the canvas like a kind of stampede. It’s clear that he got onto something, it got a hold of him, and he let it rip across the surface of the canvas. Pollock outside the studio. JEFFREY BROWN: Pollock was also letting it rip in the barroom; he was a heavy drinker — a mean drunk by many accounts — and often in the midst of fights. But in 1942 he’d met painter Lee Krasner. Three years later they married and she persuaded him to leave the city for East Hampton, Long Island. The exhibition features a re-creation of Pollock’s Long Island studio. KIRK VARNEDOE: Getting Pollock away from the bars in New York in the mid-forties was a key move and allowed him to concentrate. I mean, East Hampton was really isolated in those days. And it concentrated him on his art in a very special way. JEFFREY BROWN: Now came the radical break — fully abstract works quite new in their look and their craft.

Pollock abandoned traditional painting techniques — laying his canvases on the floor, for example, — and even traditional paint – he often used common enamel house paint which he’d pour out or dribble through a small hole in the can, or fling with a stick. Objects such as nails, coins, even a cigarette butt, made their way into the surface of the painting. JACKSON POLLOCK: And we have mechanical means of representing objects in nature, such as the camera and the photograph. The modern artist is expressing an inner world, expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces. The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating. JEFFREY BROWN: Hans Namuth photographed Pollock in his studio and filmed him in action outside for better light. JACKSON POLLOCK: I don’t work from drawings or colored sketches. My painting is direct. I usually paint on the floor. I enjoy working on a large canvas. I feel more at home, more at ease in a large area. Having the canvas on the floor, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting. This way I can walk around it, work from all four sides, and be in the painting.

KIRK VARNEDOE: You cannot imagine the impact these photographs, as distinct from the paintings, had on artists world-wide when they were first published in the fifties, to see a man making up art like this. To see him standing into his canvas, to see him throwing down paint was so radical that the pictures had a huge impact on the popular imagination of Pollock. JEFFREY BROWN: Like the paintings, with their large scale and bursting energy, the image of Pollock the artist was recognized as distinctly American. In 1949, Life Magazine made him a celebrity — a cultural icon of the post-war years. A cultural icon. KIRK VARNEDOE: The cigarette hanging from his lips, crossed leg, crossed arms, staring you down, tough guy, the sense of a kind of blue collar, macho tough guy as an abstract artist changed the whole definition of what the avant garde was in the United States. I think Pollock created an art into which a lot of people projected a lot of anxieties of the post-war era.

They felt that this war was savage, violent, apocalyptic in a way that they felt was attuned to the age of the atom bomb, the age of an intense interest in Freudian matters, and psychological matters. At the same time, his confidence, his macho, his very celebrity and success fed the notion of America’s emerging from the war as a leader on the global cultural stage. JEFFREY BROWN: Three large paintings done in a brief period in 1950 now seem to represent the height of Pollock’s powers — one is spare, black and white — another dense and lush … the third, “Autumn Rhythm.” Yet, along with the growing reputation, there were always those who saw a phony claim to fame. “It’s easy to describe a Pollock” wrote an art critic in 1950 — “chaos — absolute lack of harmony — complete lack of structural organization — total absence of technique.” JEFFREY BROWN: For some people this will always be the quintessential ‘my five year old could do it.’ I have a five year old. Could he paint this painting? KIRK VARNEDOE: No. Your five-year-old could absolutely not do this.

But if the art didn’t push that button, if it didn’t push hard against the notion that it was radically unconventional, that it defied any standard notion of skill, it wouldn’t be the modern art that it is. It wants to push hard against that. It wants to leave behind all of the comfortable anchors that allow you to judge whether the picture is good or bad, or indeed whether it’s legitimately a work of art. JEFFREY BROWN: Even Pollock had his doubts at times. With some disbelief, his wife, Lee Krasner, quoted him once asking, ‘Is this a painting? Is this a painting?’ Ruth Kligman, Pollock’s girlfriend during a split with Krasner, said he would boast that he was the equal of Picasso and Matisse, and then turn around and say, “I’m no good; I’m a phony.” KIRK VARNEDOE: If you’re painting a picture of a dog by a pond, it’s going to be a better dog by a pond or a worse dog by a pond. But if you’re painting these things, it’s either going to be a painting or it’s going to be a mess.

And it’s not guaranteed to pay off, and it’s not guaranteed that everybody wants to follow him out to that edge. JEFFREY BROWN: Pollock himself went over that edge. His focus seemed to drift away. There was more drinking, less work, finally almost no painting at all in his last two years. In August, 1956, driving drunk, he crashed his car into a tree and died. He was 44 years old. Despite all the doubts, his influence grew. After Pollock, artists could not face a canvas in the same way. As for the public, as Kirk Varnadoe says, Pollock challenges by taking attitudes about art and pushing them to the edge. That leaves each viewer to decide whether or not to push back. JIM LEHRER: The Pollock exhibition will be at New York’s Museum of Modern Art until February 2nd. It then moves to the Tate Gallery in London. Jackson Pollock - Biography, Paintings of Jackson Pollock Jackson Pollock of Jackson Pollock Jackson Pollock and his paintings Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter, and the leading force behind the abstract expressionist movement in the art world.

During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. Jackson Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space. Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. His father, LeRoy Pollock was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the government. Jackson Pollock grew up in Arizona and Chico, California. During his early life, Pollock experienced Native American culture while on surveying trips with his father. Although he never admitted an intentional imitation or following of Native American art, Jackson Pollock did concede that any similarities were probably a result of his "early memories and enthusiasms." In 1929, Jackson Pollock studied at the Students' League in New York under regionalist painter, Thomas Hart Benton.

During early 1930s, he worked in the Regionalist style, and was also influenced by Mexican muralist painter such as Digo Rivera , as well as by certain aspects of Surrealism - a 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter. In November 1939, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted an important Picasso exhibition entitled: Picasso: 40 Years of His Art, which contained 344 works of Pablo Picasso and his famous anti-war mural, Guernica . The exhibit led Pollock to recognize the expressive power of European modernism, which he had previously rejected in favor of American art. He began to forge a new style of semi-abstract totemic compositions, refined through obsessive reworking. In the decades following World War II, a new artistic vanguard emerged, particularly in New York, that introduced radical new directions in art. The war and its aftermath were at the underpinnings of the movement that became known as Abstract Expressionism.

Jackson Pollock, among other Abstract Expressionists, anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, expressed their concerns in an abstract art that chronicled the ardor and exigencies of modern life. By the mid 1940s, Jackson Pollock introduced his famous 'drip paintings', which represent one of the most original bodies of work of the century, and forever altered the course of American art. At times the new art forms could suggest the life-force in nature itself, at others they could evoke man's entrapment - in the body, in the anxious mind, and in the newly frightening modern world. To produce in Jackson Pollock's 'action painting', most of his canvases were either set on the floor, or laid out against a wall, rather than being fixed to an easel. From there, Jackson Pollock used a style where he would allow the paint to drip from the paint can. Instead of using the traditional paint brush, he would add depth to his images using knives, trowels, or sticks. This form of painting, had similar ties to the Surreal movement, in that it had a direct relation to the artist's emotions, expression, and mood, and showcased their feeling behind the pieces they designed.

There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was." - Jackson Pollock In addition to the 'drip and splash' style, the All-over method of painting, is also one which is tied to Jackson Pollock, and many of the artworks he created. This art form avoids any clear and distinct points of emphasis, or any identifiable parts within the canvas being used to create the piece. The designs and images which were created using this style of painting, really had no relation to the size of the canvas that was worked on; the lack of dimensions, and disregard for size of the drawings, were some unique features which this form of art captured. Many of the pieces which Jackson Pollock created following this style, required him to trim or crop the canvas, in order for the image to fit in, and to work with the overall features of the art. Pollock's radical methods and growing reputation quickly caught the attention of the mass media. In August 1949, Life magazine ran a feature story posing the question: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The text was alternately mocking and respectful.

In 1951, at the height of the artist's career, Vogue magazine published fashion photographs by Cecil Beaton of models posing in front of Pollock's drip paintings. Although this commercial recognition signaled public acceptance - and was symptomatic of mass culture's inevitable expropriation of the avant-garde - Pollock continuously questioned the direction and reception of his art. At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style. Pollock's work after 1951 was darker in color, including a collection painted in black on unprimed canvases. These paintings have been referred to as his 'Black pourings' and when he exhibited them at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, none of them sold. But later Pollock moved to a more commercial gallery by returning to using color and figurative elements. Jackson Pollock at Work In 1960s, Jackson Pollock was viewed as one of the most important figures in the art world, and one of the innovators of the avant-garde styles that were beginning to emerge. Like many other famous figures, the issues which Jackson Pollock suffered from in his personal life, such as his strife with alcoholism, added to his "superstar" status.

And, his premature death, which took place when he was killed in a car crash, also added to the legendary status which he is still known from in the art world today. To this day Jackson Pollock is known as a leader in the most important 20th century American art movements. The risks and the creative approaches he took, led future artists to create with passion, as opposed to trying to follow set boundaries or guidelines. In addition, Pollock's radical paintings and dramatic persona helped draw attention to the broader group of Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning , Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko . The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'" - Jackson Pollock Just like William Shakespeare on play, and Sigmund Freud on psychology, Jackson Pollock's influence on American art is tremendous.

Jackson Pollock made it possible for American painting to compete with European modernism by applying modernism's logic to new problem. He created a new scale, a new definition of surface and touch, a new syntax of relationships among space, pigment, edge, and drawing, displacing hierarchies with an unprecedented and powerful and fabulously intricate self-generating structure. Although actively engaged throughout his life in a serious dialogue with the history of world art which ranged from Paleolithic and Indian art to Renaissance art masters Michelangelo , Leonardo da Vinci ; from Mexican muralists to the Surrealists Salvador Dali , Joan Miro , and Max Ernst - Pollock's aspirations always remained courageously and even chauvinistically of this continent. Pollock's defiant refusal to stay within traditional bounds, violence, exasperation and stridency, all were paradigmatically New World. At a time - and in a guise that absolutely nobody expected - these were the unlikely characteristics that finally came together to produce an American Prometheus. MOST POPULAR PAINTINGS

Question: Which action painter was Jack the Dripper?
Answer: Jackson Pollock