Jackson Pollock Facts Did You Know? Many things have been written about Pollock but there are still many things that we don’t know. Here are a few facts about the man behind the myth. Did You Know… • Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock’s wife, changed her name. Her original name is Lenore Krassner. • Pollock’s real first name is Paul. Right around the time that he moved to New York to study with Benton in 1930, he decided to drop his first name and use his middle name of Jackson. • The only person to survive Pollock’s deadly car accident was his lover, Ruth Kligman. • One of his most famous works is Blue Poles, painted in 1952. It was created with enamel and aluminum paint with glass on a canvas. • The most important element in Pollock’s paintings is that of lines. When he first started using the method of pouring and dripping paint onto canvas, it resulted in huge areas covered with complex linear patterns that created image and form. • “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” That was the question on the front cover of Life magazine on August 8, 1949.

• His first experiment with liquid paint was at the Siquieros workshop in New York, 1936. • The French equivalent of action painting, a form of abstract expressionism associated with Pollock, is Tachisme. • Pollock was nicknamed Jack the Dripper because he literally dripped paint onto his canvas to create unique, intricate pieces. • His brother Sanford knew Jackson had a special talent. In 1941, he wrote a letter to their eldest brother Charles about Jackson. He said if Jackson could “hold himself together, his work will become of real significance. His painting is abstract, intense, evocative in quality.” • Pollock’s paintings differed from before he moved to the Hamptons and right after the move. Before moving to The Springs in East Hampton with his wife, his imagery was congested, the colors were somber, and the overall mood of his paintings was anxious and conflicted. • After the move to the country, the colors were brighter, his compositions were more open, and the imagery reflected a new responsiveness to nature. • His work Blue Poles, 1952 was originally inscribed with a ‘3’ and subsequently painted over with a ‘2’.

• In 1949, Pollock decided to number his paintings, including the year they were created, instead of using descriptive titles. This began with his 1949 solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. • Downward arching stretch-marks at the top edge of the canvas are common with Pollock’s works. This is because he would often hang them along a beam in his studio; another step in his creation process. 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 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: 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. Jackson Pollock Drip Painting For Kids Jackson Pollock Drip Painting For Kids Art Explorations , Explorations , Lesson Plans , Pre-school Explorations In our art studies we’ve been looking at Paul Jackson Pollock’s work. Then we made some Jackson Pollock-style drip paintings ourselves. It’s a wonderful project for the whole family because everyone from preschool through adults can do it. Pollock was an American painter who believed very strictly in abstract expressionist art. He believed art was about movement and more about the creating of it than the actual finished piece. He said: “My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. . . On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides, and literally be in the painting. . . I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc.

I prefer sticks, trowels, knives, and dripping fluid. . . ” This is a painting done by a fan in the action painting style of Pollock. Not an actual Jackson Pollock. By Bodoklecksel (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Pollock Style Drip Art Now create some art Pollock-style. First, you must work on the ground. Don’t allow your brushes to touch your paper at all while painting. Just drip blobs and bits of paint on your page. They can fall in blobs or be flicked or blown on. The action of applying the paint was as important to Pollock as the final piece. Now, fold your sheet of paper in half and then open it again. While it’s folded, press the two halves together well enough to create a symmetrical print. Open it up and see the design you’ve created through action painting. Sometimes you’ll find that you’ve formed new colors where the previous colors have mixed together.

Here is “The Tree” by my 8 year-old: Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist: A Masterpiece of Abstract Expressionism Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist: A Masterpiece of Abstract Expressionism Housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Lavender Mist is one of several works produced by Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) when he was at the height of his “action painting” technique. Pollock was the first notable artist to completely break away from the brush-palette-easel approach of traditional painting to become an “all-over” painter. He was known to spread large raw canvases on the floor in order to pour, drip, splatter and flick paint onto its surface, from all sides, using all manner of implements from sticks to knives to basting syringes, creating intricate patterns of color and texture. As with other paintings produced by Pollock during that time, the visual impact of Lavender Mist comes in part from its sheer size, a nearly ten feet wide piece of vibrancy. Standing in front of the painting, viewers are immersed in the remarkable environment it creates.

Upon close examination, the details of the technique can be fully appreciated - lines that grow wide then dwindle to a mere hair’s breadth, and the varied textures of the paint on the vast expanse of canvas. These variations give the painting a shimmering, 3D quality. The interweaving assortment of lines becomes an intriguing net that extends over the whole piece. Pollock's use of color in Lavender Mist is deceptively subtle. The ever-present hues of black and white seem to dominate, but when one steps away from the painting, a faint pale mauve comes through in the work. It was Pollock’s strongest supporter, art critic Clement Greenberg, who suggested the title of Lavender Mist. It reveals the elusive nature of Pollock’s use of color as the painting is composed primarily of white, blue, yellow, gray, umber, pink and black. The use of black lines is concentrated around the perimeter of the canvas, serving to draw the eye around and then across the entire expanse in chaotic movement.

Because there is no central subject in the form of a person, place or thing, the viewer is compelled to eagerly scan the world created by the painting, continually noticing new patterns and unexpected revelations, such as Pollock's handprints in the upper right part of the canvas, serving as a primitive stamp of ownership. The nonrepresentational, seemingly random nature of abstract expressionism found in Pollock’s action paintings incited some critics to liken his works to a toddler’s creation or the product of a mind in turmoil. Others deemed his paintings to be incredibly complex and representative of the delicate balance between happenstance and deliberation. Their complexity has led many to claim it impossible to forge a Pollock action painting. Jackson Pollock was greatly affected by the harsh opinions of his detractors, one of which maliciously nicknamed him “Jack the Dripper.” The ongoing controversy caused him to experience intense feelings of self-doubt and anxiety, which he tried to appease by binge drinking. His state of depression and ensuing alcoholism eventually prevented him from painting much and ultimately led to his death in a fatal car crash in 1956 at the age of 44.

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: Abstract Expressionist Painter, Action Painting For analysis of works by Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, see: Analysis of Modern Paintings (1800-2000). The She-Wolf (1943) Museum of Modern Art, New York. For other gesturalist works similar, to those produced by Pollock, see: Greatest 20th-Century Paintings .

Introduction An influential member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism , and one of the most influential figures in American art , Jackson Pollock was the founder of the innovative painting technique, known as Action Painting . This method of making abstract art involved dripping and smearing the paint onto the canvas in dramatic sweeping gestures. Pollock would pour and fling the paint, using sticks and knives, onto an unstretched canvas which had been tacked to a hard wall or floor. This enabled him to walk around the painting and become part of the painting process. This avant-garde approach - vividly captured by Hans Namuth in his photos of the artist at work in his studio - both fascinated and appalled the art critics and earned him the nickname "Jack The Dripper." By rejecting the use of an easel and other more traditional painting techniques, he carved out a unique niche for himself in post-war abstract expressionist painting . Fellow artist Lee Krasner (1908-84) (later his wife) was a central influence in Pollock's artistic life. Now fully appreciated for their originality, Jackson Pollock's paintings are seen by some critics as the most revolutionary pictures of the mid-twentieth century.

Lavender Mist (Number 1) (1950) National Gallery, Washington DC. all-over style of gestural painting , which treats all areas of the canvas equally, rejecting all conventional points of reference or focus. Blue Poles (1952) For a guide to geometric and organic abstraction, see: Abstract Paintings: Top 100 . Another key person was Peggy Guggenheim , a wealthy art collector who was to become one of Pollock's early supporters and promoters of his work.

Pollock is best known for masterpieces like: One (Number 31) (1950) Museum of Modern Art, New York; Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Lavender Mist (Number 1) (1950) National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Blue Poles (No.11) (1952) National Gallery of Australia; Out of the Web (Number 7) (1949) Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; Convergence (1952) Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Lucifer (1947) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Eyes in the Heat (1946) Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Orze (1950, MoMA, New York); and Arabesque Number 13 (1948, New York, R.B. Bahr Collection).

In 2006, according to a report in the New York Times, his painting No 5 (1948) was sold privately by media mogul David Geffen for $140 million, making it the most expensive painting in the history of art. Many of his paintings are now available as prints in the form of poster art . For different styles of abstract expressionism, see the Colour Field Painting of Mark Rothko (1903-70), Clyfford Still (1904-80) and Barnett Newman (1905-70) - see in particular Mark Rothko's paintings - and the gesturalism of Willem de Kooning (1904-97). WORLDS TOP ARTISTS Here is a selected list of the best paintings by Jackson Pollock. The She-Wolf (1943) Museum of Modern Art, NY. Troubled Queen (1945) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Eyes in the Heat (1946) Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. The Key (1946) Art Institute of Chicago.

Shimmering Substance (1946) Museum of Modern Art, NY. Enchanted Forest (1947) Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Lucifer (1947) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Number 5 (1948) Private collection. Composition (White, Black, Blue, Red on White) (1948) New Orleans Museum. Summertime: Number 9A (1948) Tate Modern. Out of the Web (Number 7) (1949) Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. Number 1 (1949) Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Number 10 (1949) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Lavender Mist (Number 1) (1950) National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. One (Number 31) (1950) Museum of Modern Art, New York. Number 29 (1950) National Gallery of Canada. Number 7 (1951) National Gallery of Art.

Convergence (1952) Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Blue Poles (No.11) (1952) National Gallery of Australia. Portrait and a Dream (1953) Dallas Museum of Art. Easter and the Totem (1953) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Article: Jackson Pollock The Artist One of the greatest modern artists , Pollock was one of the prime movers of abstract painting in America. His great contribution lay in "going the full nine yards" in his willingness to expend himself extravagantly and profligately, often at the cost of the harmony and coherence of individual paintings, in order to take possession of the modern abstract picture. Energy, sometimes reduced to an unrelenting rhythmic monotone or mere motor violence, was a hallmark of Pollock's painting. In the beginning these energies were tumultuous, self-fascinated and desperate; in the later phases of his work they were more controlled and impersonal. The superabundance of his pictorial energies - the expression of a power almost grotesque in relation to its situation - link Pollock to the tribal art tradition of romantic exaggeration and hyperbole.

As a distinctly American romantic temperament, Pollock made his own individualism the theme of his art . In an early "dark" style particularly, his paintings functioned as a kind of fever chart of the ecstasies and the torments of his sense of isolation. The very fact that he felt it necessary to express his anguished sensibility in a Herculean dimension was also in the American grain. If Pollock seemed driven to register his own rancors, fancies and impulses, it was not merely as an act of self-indulgence; his was an honest record of the sensitive man's response to contemporary crisis, an effort to come to terms with a world in which traditional order and traditional values were seriously threatened. The violent emotionalism of his first style marks the rise of a new school of romantic sensibility in American art. It is new because it has synthesized indigenous modes of feeling as well as the form and language of European modernism. Pollock's tormented individualism connects him to a whole gallery of American romantics from Melville and Poe through Faulkner. His radical achievement was to make the American romantic sensibility viable in abstract art, and to express it unsentimentally.

That Pollock was able to move into a significant advanced painting style in the late 1930s, along with a number of other American artists, was due to a curious set of circumstances. Most important was the international crisis, which made the prevailing regionalist sentiment and the complacent optimism of American scene painting suddenly appear preposterously provincial. A world in dissolution deserved better of the artist than an uneasy aesthetic isolationism which identified virtue in art with the rural western idyl of Thomas Benton, the backwoods folklore of John Steuart Curry, and the somewhat satirical ancestor worship of Grant Wood . The dramatic crisis in European culture drew American artists closer to the spirit of continental modernism, and migration of European intellectuals and artists to these shores renewed vital artistic contacts that had lain moribund for many years.

There was a sense even by the late thirties, as John Peale Bishop has noted, that the European past had been confided to us, since we alone could "prolong it into the future." The immediate stimulation for the American vanguard came from the group of Surrealist artists who gathered around the dealer, Peggy Guggenheim; in the early years of the war, and from the influential teaching of the German modernist, Hans Hofmann, who had opened an art school in New York. The Federal Art Project of the WPA was another factor in the emergence of an advanced art. As a national experience in self-discovery, it both reinforced and offset the new rapprochement with modern European modes. In their eagerness to find a new way for art, Americans began again to consult continental examples; but a newly awakened sense of their own powers made them do so in a more critical and independent spirit. Of all the artistic influences in the air, the belated discovery of Surrealism was perhaps the most important. Surrealism was one of the major lacunae in our artistic culture, and its absence left the modern American artist without a portion of the romantic patrimony.

The importance of both Dada and Surrealism arose as much from their mood of romantic protest, their state of mind, as it did from their actual program or artistic devices. Although this spirit had never seized the American imagination, in Europe the Surrealists figured prominently in the continuing art revolution which sought to release the artist from the harsh compulsions of modern life, from what one critic has described as the "regimentation of men and the culture of things." The Surrealists, by their presence in America during the war, were to offer some very crucial hints for a new synthesis of abstract form and a romantic-feeling content. Their "automatism" and rehabilitation of instinct provided a vital alternative to the geometric design and pattern-making of the academicians of Cubism and abstract art. While the rational constructions of the Cubists had given modern art perhaps its most impressive and elevated style, by the late twenties much of the generative power of the movement had been lost or supplanted by an abstract academicism. In America a decade later, a kind of post-Cubist Byzantinism was considered our most advanced style; it was reflected in the competent, doctrinaire, non-objective art of the American Abstract Artists group.

To such currents in art, Surrealism - embodied by its chief theorist Andre Breton (1896-1966) - posed the alternative of the spontaneous, of unpremeditated impulse and gave a new primacy to creative freedom. A number of Americans were quick to seize on this alternative and used it to enlarge the expressive possibilities of their art. Eventually, they subordinated surrealist intuitions completely to their own artistic needs and purposes. The impact of the surrealist liberties - on the American avant-garde was sharp if somewhat oblique. Pollock was undoubtedly affected by the milieu around Peggy Guggenheim, his first dealer, and his own methods were "automatic" to a degree. Later he wrote: "The source of my painting is the Unconscious. I approach painting the same way I approach drawing , that is, directly, with no preliminary studies.

When I am painting, I am not much aware of what is taking place; it is only after that I see what I have done." Arshile Gorky , an elegant, mannered virtuoso in both figurative and abstract modes during the thirties, was in the early years of the next decade deeply influenced by the unstable forms and molten space of Yves Tanguy (1900-55), Joan Miro (1893-1983) and Matta Echaurren. Later Andre Breton claimed Gorky for Surrealism when he suggested that Gorky treated nature "as a cryptogram." The earliest works of painters like Adolph Gottlieb , Mark Rothko, William Baziotes and Clyfford Still were - all in varying degrees - concerned with myth and with the "primitive"; and these artists worked in a form of symbolic, surrealist-tinctured abstraction. Along with Motherwell and Pollock they all relied on "accident," felicitous or disruptive, to give vitality to their creations.

In New York during the early forties there were two private temples of Surrealism, the Julien Levy Gallery and Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century. Most active and significant was Peggy Guggenheim who not only became a transmission point for the painting of international Surrealism but introduced their makers, in the flesh, to the American art scene. She made accessible to the young New York painters whose work she exhibited such artists as Breton, Masson, Ernst, Tanguy, and Matta. For the first time since Duchamp and Picabia had invaded New York in the period of the Armory Show, US artists knew what it actually felt like to live in the midst of an active international art milieu. They were able to keep abreast of the new currents, not by having recourse to the latest issue of Cahiers d'Art as they had in the past, but simply by listening and observing. They must have felt modern art freshly and with a new sense that they were actually living it; contact with many of the impressive reputations of Paris had done something to free them of their provincial diffidence.

More than anything else, it seems now in retrospect, the sudden efflorescence of cosmopolitanism during the war was the inspiration of the new abstract art movements . During the thirties there had been many promising hints of a new synthesis, especially in the painting of Pollock, Gorky and Hofmann, but they were not entirely decisive. The moment of crystallization had to wait until the first years of the forties, and it was only then that the search for abstract idioms assumed the unity of a sustained collective effort. Hans Hofmann had begun to splash pigment around freely on canvas as early as 1938, but his influence was not so immediately decisive as Pollock's. Gorky had in some ways anticipated Pollock, particularly when he began to paraphrase Picasso in the late thirties; but for all his remarkable instincts and painterly gifts, Gorky lacked the primitive force and energy that seem necessary to bring the new in art. His remained an epicurean sensibility until the last years of his life when he suddenly seemed to catch fire from the painting atmosphere he himself had been instrumental in creating, Then his art blazed out in passionate fulfilment of his great promise.

The first and most decisive public expression of the new mood came from Pollock. Everything that had been amorphous, contingent on circumstance, and unstable in advanced painting first came into focus in his art with his first New York exhibition in 1943. The unwavering pitch at which he registered his own sensations and even revealed his uncertainties, lent a new confidence and security to the American vanguard. His spirit of monumental intransigence and dynamism helped release energies that had been pent up in American art for twenty years. Pollock's first expression was dark and narrow, haunted by obsessive themes and a self-absorbed romanticism; yet he managed miraculously to preserve a plastic painting rationale derived from the most elevated modern styles. He achieved this even as many fellow-artists, whom we now associate with him, seemed prepared to leave the high road of twentieth-century painting tradition for the byways of myth and symbolism. From the beginning there was a touch of revolution in Pollock's painting; many artists who now seem more drastic or advanced are still elaborating on some phase of that revolution. But surely none would hesitate to name Pollock as the most critical figure in the emergence of the new genre of abstraction.

Pollock was killed in a tragic automobile accident in the summer of 1956 at the age of 44. He grew up in Arizona and Southern California. Geographical impressions may very well have played a significant role in the development of his painting. He has described his delight as a youth at seeing the western landscape, immense, illimitable, unroll before him from freight trains or his old Ford. His early peregrinations filled him even in maturity with some nostalgia, as if the freedom of boyhood and the open road were best. He retained something of the restiveness of his youth and an unformulated, primitive sense of the vastness of things American. A rootless feeling which was as acute as his instinctive distaste for social restraints, real or imagined, persisted throughout his life. The romantic bias of Pollock's individualism and his sense of freedom as expressed in his art stand out in sharper definition when his work is compared with the abstract painting of the new European generation. No painters of the French vanguard, many of whom have felt Pollock's influence, permit themselves the liberties he takes.

Barring some notable exceptions, the foreign abstract article generally still has the look of studio manufacture, and an air of knowing - if shallow - professionalism. Pollock's raw directness and his lack of finish strike most contemporary European critics as being in appallingly bad taste. Those painters who have followed his example in France, under the general banner of art informel or the specifically gestural style of tachisme , and have adopted his formal devices and scale, are unwilling or unable to pursue the more radical implications of his art. A traditional French hedonism, which is being given a more and more decorative elaboration today, pulls them up short on the threshold of discovery. The French for the most part see in artists like Pollock little more than a promise, and are convinced that painting only begins where American abstract art so suggestively but disappointingly ends. Behind Pollock's art is a conviction, equally strong, that the moment painting indulges in a derivative pictorialism, the moment it becomes a conscious artifact, it loses its creative meaning. The European finds audacity, originality and certain intriguing effects in the new American painting, but misses its inner working process.

A fellow painter has said that in the beginning Pollock paraphrased Picasso and then turned against his inspiration and violently eliminated all evidence of his debt. The American vanguard's search for authority has been a troubled one, moving between a Scylla of fashionable modernism and a Charybdis of provincial expressionism. The history of that voyage is the story of Pollock's evolution as a painter. Pollock began his artistic education in 1929 when he came to the Art Students League in New York and studied with Thomas Benton. Benton's homely American scene painting was at the time compelling, and he was a vital personality who exerted a strong influence on his students. Although Pollock studied with him for only two years, he did not begin to shake off Benton's style until the middle thirties. It is significant that the younger artist found his independence not so much in reaction to Benton but through him, by re-creating, amplifying and exaggerating his first teacher's rhythmic distortions under conditions of greater intensity until his forms achieved a different order of life. In a sense, Pollock arrived at abstraction by pushing Expressionism to a point where subject matter was so improbable that there was no need to retain it.

By the middle thirties Pollock found in the Mexican Jose Orozco a more satisfying drama of violence. His paintings of this period are muddy, crude and inchoate but already stamped with genuine temperament; they still describe, if very freely, figure groups or landscape. In 1936 Pollock began to eliminate recognizable subject matter, and replaced it with angular, non-representational shapes and thick, rhythmic coils of tarry black line, which stood out in assertive texture and relief. His colour combinations of muddy blue-greens, brick reds and yellows were loud and violent; the forms, elementary in their simplicity but full of character. These paintings were still close to Orozco in spirit. Curiously enough the colour schemes and rugged, plastered surfaces were similar to some Gorky still life of the same epoch, paintings which Pollock has said he never saw, however. There is one small crayon and water-colour painting from this period of a rather more representational character that deserves attention for what it reveals of Pollock's inner struggle.

It is an alternately muddy and vivid little landscape, with a black hole in the foreground holding a ladder, and a night sky in the background lit by blood-red flames. The artist always felt a very personal relationship to the painting which stood as a private symbol of frustration and hope and represented a voyage of the soul from darkness into light. The fact that the light in the painting emanated from a conflagration apparently signified that Pollock's crisis would be resolved by violent catharsis. In a sense that is exactly what happened immediately after, first in his bold distortions based on Mexican painting and then in his rapid and aggressive assimilations of Picasso and European modernism. In the late thirties Pollock filled notebooks With abstract anatomical themes that were Picassoid, but with a difference. To Picasso's delimited, contained abstract imagery of the period, Pollock applied his own expansive energies with startling and novel results. His nervous, broken line shredded Picasso's fantastic anatomies, reducing them to a system of expressive accents; more generalized thematic variations.

Carried away perhaps by a random inventiveness in line, Pollock began to create more evenly distributed effects which broke up the unity of Picasso's abstract figuration, and were the first step toward a later free and cursive calligraphy which dispensed with image suggestion altogether. These drawings also revealed a tension between ugliness and elegance, clumsiness and finesse, that has persisted throughout Pollock's work. He often seemed to wish to destroy his great natural gifts as a draftsman by deliberately breaking the rhythm of his line when it had achieved only the most rudimentary signs or configurations. If Pollock pursued the rude and apparently incomplete statement, however, it was with a purpose of freeing himself from the prejudice of geometric design. Even more, he sought to repudiate any commitment as to style or manner; in this early work there was, indeed, almost a fetish of non-style. In 1942 Pollock participated in his first New York group show, organized by John Graham at the MacMillan Gallery. Showing with him were Graham, Lee Krasner (later Mrs.

Pollock) and Willem de Kooning, another unheralded member of the avant-garde who less than ten years later was to share the leadership of progressive American painting. Pollock showed a blue-green, expressionist-flavoured abstract painting. His abstract figuration had a look of phantasmagoria and already resembled those disembodied, astral eyes which later became a key theme in his painting. In these agitated movements and grotesquely suggestive whirlpools of line Pollock found a private totem which has persistently refused to be expelled from his painting. Some time later De Kooning, too, discovered that his abstract paintings were still inhabited by an obsessive reality, the human figure of an earlier phase, or more exactly, "The Woman." A highly charged atmosphere survived in Pollock's freest abstract transpositions from Picasso, and these paintings often ended, as if he were powerless to prevent it, by looking like fantasias of the unconscious. In 1942 Robert Motherwell introduced Pollock to Peggy Guggenheim, and that year he exhibited in a group show at her gallery the painting, Stenographic Figure.

It was a loosely knit arrangement of shapes derived from Picasso with a kind of erratic "automatic" over-writing. The colours were bizarre mauves and blue-greens, set against greys and off-whites, suggesting somewhat the high colour key of Mexican papier-mache decorations or the palette of Northwest American Indian art . This was probably the first painting in which Pollock's vermiform shapes actually broke down into energy areas and a free calligraphy. The next year, at the age of 31, Pollock was given his first one-man show at the Art of This Century gallery and with it began a prolific production that carried him through eleven exhibitions in a period of twelve years. From the years between 1943 and 1947 date the anatomical themes and the compact compositional schemes of such paintings as The She-Wolf, Pasiphae and the more abstract Gothic. Pollock had already begun to unify his pictures by "writing" freely over the surface with an energetic, whiplash line. He had learned to release a confused and opaque bitterness by sheer energy, by the very fury of his attack. The result was that he literally remade the abstract picture, and under new conditions of extraordinary intensity.

In Pasiphae and The She-Wolf Pollock's baroque energies took him to a new form of expression that relieved the dense, impacted surfaces of Picasso's late Cubism with the fluent, abstract imagery of Miro and such other Surrealists as Masson. To the Surrealists he owed not so much the form of his own distinctive ''writing,'' but the notion that the painting was to be ejected as a "stream," in one seeming burst. The wiggly line and agitated movements of these two paintings recall Miro of his 1924-1926 period. Miro, however, floated his shapes on a ground, giving his pictorial incident a setting and hinting at representational illusion. His shapes kept their integrity as individualized forms despite the metamorphic transformations to which they submitted. Out of Miro's ingenious and inventive mind streamed an anarchic abundance of new life and pictorial incident, with an effect of multiplicity and particularity. Rooted in modern tradition, he could afford to play and pun, to sport with his own fears, as one critic has put it, and to make an enchantingly witty game of them.

For Pollock, on the other hand, abstract painting was an altogether more solemn matter. Pollock's early style culminated in his predominantly black, vehemently pigmented canvases of 1945 such as Night Mist and Totem Lesson Number ll. The latter is a large, vertical painting where he played with a grotesque abstract figuration within his own powerful system of chiaroscuro. To achieve intimations of terror within disorder and chaos seemed to be the message of this forbidding and claustrophobic work. Other paintings of the period carried Pollock's anxiety to an unrelieved extreme. After 1947, however, his gloomy and morbid intuitions were spread over a broader surface, and he surrendered most of his inner compulsions to a calm and measured lyricism. The vaguely imagistic references to his own fears and fantasies stopped crowding him and gave way to more sweeping and grandiloquent rhythms and a new clarity. His work no longer suggested presences, fearful or otherwise, or a mood of exasperation, but only a generous and impersonal flow of pictorial energy. He had won a new breadth of feeling as he learned to master larger surfaces.

Pollock's ambition carried him far beyond the traditional unity of easel painting in search of a more monumental space and a total pictorial experience. In 1948 and the early months of 1949 he painted most often on narrow horizontal canvases with irregular patches of cobalt, cadmium red and white against a, dull reddish-brown ground. Even such an assertion of a Mondrian scheme of simple primary colours reflected a new objectivity. These long, narrow "scroll" paintings still retain something of the particularization, texture and sensuality of his earlier work despite their freedom, and have a balance and poise unique in Pollock's productions. White Cockatoo and Summertime are typical of this high moment; their lyricism and purity of movements' remind one of the abstract yet deeply expressive gestures of the modern dance. From 1947, the year he began to paint with aluminum and commercial paints, and to "drip" as well as brush his pigment on canvas, Pollock strained against the limits of oil painting . He began to contrive a more radical space and invented altogether more remarkable painting effects, working on an ever more monumental scale in a grandiose personal pointillism.

As Hans Namuth's dramatic series of photographs and the film of Pollock at work demonstrated, he painted by standing over a canvas and letting paint drip on it from above until he had achieved the rhythmic movements, varied densities and textures desired. The results were probably the most original series of paintings of the immediate postwar period in American art. Yet they were a logical, if unexpectedly ambitious, extension of Pollock's early style. He had merely given his "stream" painting a larger theatre; an aerated web of silver and black line, of spattered paint, against a background of delicate colour diffusions and stains, replaced the old opaque, resistant pigment. Despite the lyrical sublimation of his more turgid style, something of the original tension of Pollock's feeling remained. In Cathedral of 1947 and in the beautiful Lavender Mist of 1950, there are congealed puddles of colour and blotches of dark tone swimming ominously amid all the elegant rhythmic phrasing like disembodied ghosts of the artist's earlier black moods. Pollock's predominantly silver monoliths took painting ever closer to a kind of fragile, open-form, continuous-space sculpture.

He made paintings that approached solid relief in texture, and he also simultaneously pulverized the flat, two-dimensional effect that he had in the past been at pains to emphasize, and which was perhaps his strongest link with Cubist tradition. But Pollock's modernity, his mistrust of anything but the immediately given sensation, always asserted itself in the end. Even in his freest inventions he restored the flat, physical reality of the surface by letting his pigment clot or by slapping the unsized edges of the canvas with his paint-dipped palms. Sometimes the synthetic, industrial textures, the moraine of sheer pigment matter, seemed to choke his instinctive grace and lyricism, and a kind of gummy, displeasing effect resulted. At their finest, however, the great silver paintings from 1948 to 1951 breathe an easy, natural grandeur that has few parallels in contemporary American art. For the author they arouse primitive feelings associated with such sonorous phrases as "the deep" or "the starry firmament," identifying a universe beyond the human.

However, any intelligible, identifiable feeling-content reveals itself fitfully in the midst of a nameless chaos, for Pollock's fine lyricism must repeatedly be wrested free from the anonymous seething of brute pigment matter. It was one of Pollock's signal accomplishments to give such magnitude and impressiveness to the act of painting as to make us think of the mysteries of natural creation, of that "first division of chaos" at the origin of our world. One cannot live with such an exalted aspiration for long. Seeking the relief of a more classical dryness, Pollock in 1951 and 1952 reduced his palette to black and white and returned to the firmer unities of his first style, emphasizing draftsmanship and making his blacks bite vehemently into the unsized canvas like an engraver's line. A periodic denial of colour had been a persistent element in Pollock's art from the beginning. Manet, Lautrec and especially Matisse in his Cubist phase, gave magisterial blacks and greys a primary role as if to dramatize the drastic, two-dimensional character of modern painting; by its very nature monochrome painting is more abstract than colour.

The repudiation of colour is one way of returning to the fundamentals of structure, as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline have most recently demonstrated. Pollock's "black" paintings were also curiously enough part of a new search for order and restraint within a vigorous contemporary style. The paintings of 1952 had a sobriety and decorum, even though some of the abstract anatomical imagery of his earlier period was revived. Among the most impressive, though least ingratiating, of Pollock's paintings, they left no doubt as to his power to control large spaces even with the most radically reduced pictorial means. In the last four years of his life Pollock alternated in modes, sometimes drawing in black paint, at other times creating dramatic displays of refulgent colour. He returned to the "stream" painting of 1948-1951, exploiting a new device of flooding his canvas with white pigment until only narrow, ragged edges and trickles of dark tone could be discerned, somewhat in the manner of Clyfford Still.

He reached no radically new conclusions after 1952 but was intent rather to explore and amplify the many new roads he himself opened in his first ten years of painting. His paintings had begun in a fierce mood of nihilism; indeed, one has to go back to the late Chaim Soutine to find work as raw, direct and careless of the traditional integrity of medium as the early Pollocks. He later also established his connection with Dada's mood of iconoclasm and disgust with society first by his violent imagery, and then by his handling of tarry blacks, his non-aesthetic, industrial textures, and by embedding cigarette ends, broken glass and bits of string in his pigment. In the end he subordinated his rancors and romantic individualism to a mood of impersonal idealism, creating finally a new abstract art form of transcendent beauty. The bold outlines of a vital new idiom were present in Pollock's first show. His energies encompassed forms and methods derived from many sources. The outcome was a body of painting with a radical new physiognomy, and stamped with powerfully original feeling.

Compared to its more felicitous French counterpart - in the works of Pierre Soulages , Nicolas de Stael or Georges Mathieu - Pollock's Abstract Expressionism was even at its most refined, incomplete, violent, full of astringencies, with a tone harsh and primitive. Yet it helped significantly to create painting modes larger than any Europe had been able to supply for more than two decades. To give personal freedom new and distinctly native artistic outlines was Pollock's great contribution. In the face of the experimental variety of previous twentieth-century European art, it has taken on the character of a major accomplishment.  For more biographies of great painters, see: Famous Painters .  For more about action painting, see: Visual Arts Encyclopedia . ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VISUAL ARTISTS

Question: Which action painter was nicknamed 'Jack the Dripper'?
Answer: JACKSON POLLOCK