Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five sons of LeRoy Pollock, a farmer and government land surveyor, and Stella May McClure Pollock ^[1]. The family never stayed anywhere long. Before Jackson turned ten they had moved repeatedly through Arizona and California, working small farms that rarely prospered, and the boy grew up watching a father who was often absent and a mother whose ambitions for her sons outran the family's means ^[1].

The American West left marks on him that critics would later trace in his mature work: open land, Native American sand painting he encountered on surveying trips with his father, and a suspicion of polish and refinement. In Los Angeles he enrolled at Manual Arts High School, where a sympathetic teacher introduced him to modern European art and to theosophical ideas about spirit and abstraction ^[2]. He was expelled more than once for rebelliousness, and he was already drinking heavily as a teenager, a habit that would shadow the rest of his life ^[1].

His older brother Charles, who had gone east to study painting, urged Jackson to follow. In 1930, at eighteen, Pollock moved to New York City. Anyone asking who was Jackson Pollock at that moment would have found an awkward, inarticulate westerner with little formal skill and a stubborn conviction that he could become an artist ^[1].

In New York, Pollock studied at the Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton, the muralist and champion of American regional subjects ^[2]. Benton taught rhythmic composition built from swelling, muscular curves, and although Pollock later abandoned Benton's cornfields and folk scenes entirely, the older man's insistence on energy moving through a picture stayed with him. Pollock also absorbed the Mexican muralists, particularly David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose experimental workshop in 1936 exposed him to industrial paints, spraying, and dripping as legitimate techniques ^[3].

The Depression nearly broke him. From 1935 to 1943 he survived on the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, which paid struggling artists a modest wage to produce work for public buildings ^[2]. During these years his drinking worsened, and in 1938 he was hospitalized for treatment. He entered Jungian psychoanalysis, and his therapists encouraged him to draw as part of the process; the resulting sheets, dense with totemic figures and buried symbols, fed directly into his painting ^[1].

His breakthrough came through the collector and dealer Peggy Guggenheim. In 1943 she gave him a contract and a solo exhibition at her Art of This Century gallery in New York, and she commissioned Mural, a canvas roughly twenty feet wide, for the entrance hall of her townhouse ^[3]. Pollock filled it with looping, allover rhythms that no longer described any recognizable subject. The critic Clement Greenberg began arguing in print that Pollock was the strongest painter of his generation, an endorsement that carried real weight in the small but ambitious New York art world of the 1940s ^[2].

The central chapter of any Jackson Pollock biography begins in a barn. In 1945 Pollock and the painter Lee Krasner bought a modest farmhouse in Springs, near East Hampton on Long Island, and Pollock converted the outbuilding into a studio ^[4]. There, in 1947, he began laying unstretched canvas on the floor and dripping, pouring, and flinging commercial enamel paint onto it from above, using sticks, hardened brushes, and basting syringes instead of conventional tools ^[2]. He worked from all four sides, stepping around and sometimes onto the canvas, so that the finished painting recorded the movements of his whole body.

The results were unlike anything in Western painting. Skeins of black, white, silver, and color wove across the entire surface without a center, an edge of emphasis, or a background. Among the celebrated canvases of 1948 to 1950 are Number 1A, 1948, now at the Museum of Modern Art, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington ^[3][5]. Critics coined the term action painting to describe the method, and the phrase allover composition entered the vocabulary of art history largely because of these works ^[5].

Fame arrived abruptly. In August 1949 Life magazine ran a feature asking whether Pollock was the greatest living painter in the United States, complete with photographs of the scowling artist in paint-spattered denim ^[1]. A year later the photographer Hans Namuth documented him at work in stills and film, images that fixed the public picture of Pollock in motion above his canvas ^[4]. Among the most frequently cited Jackson Pollock achievements is this larger shift: his success, alongside that of Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and others, established New York as the postwar capital of ambitious painting ^[2].

Pollock married Lee Krasner in October 1945, shortly before the move to Springs ^[4]. Krasner was an accomplished abstract painter in her own right, trained under Hans Hofmann, and her role in Pollock's career was substantial. She organized his professional life, introduced him to critics and collectors, and offered a rigorous editorial eye he trusted more than any other. Their marriage was also strained by his alcoholism and depression, and by the imbalance of attention their two careers received ^[1].

The man behind the paintings was famously difficult to read. Friends described long silences broken by bursts of warmth or hostility, depending largely on whether he was drinking. For roughly two years, from 1948 to 1950, he stayed sober under the care of a local doctor, and this period coincides almost exactly with his most productive and most admired work ^[1]. When the doctor died in 1950, Pollock's sobriety collapsed.

He left no children. His household in Springs, with its vegetable garden, dogs, and view across the marshes, gave him a stability he had never known growing up, and neighbors knew him less as a celebrity than as a quiet man who baked bread and repaired his own car ^[4].

After 1950 Pollock turned away from the dense color of the drip years. In 1951 he produced a series of black paintings, pouring thinned black enamel into raw canvas so that figures, faces, and bodies surfaced again from the abstraction ^[3]. Critics were divided, and sales slowed. Blue Poles, painted in 1952 and later purchased by the National Gallery of Australia in 1973 for a price reported at about two million United States dollars, was among the last of his large-scale statements ^[2].

His final years were marked by decline. He painted very little after 1953, drank heavily, and struggled with the burden of a reputation he felt he could no longer live up to. By 1956 his marriage had reached a breaking point, and Krasner traveled to Europe that summer while Pollock remained in Springs with Ruth Kligman, a young painter with whom he had begun an affair ^[1].

On the night of August 11, 1956, Pollock crashed his convertible on a road near his home while driving drunk. He was killed instantly at the age of forty-four, along with Edith Metzger, a friend of Kligman's; Kligman survived with serious injuries ^[6]. Four months later the Museum of Modern Art mounted a memorial retrospective, an honor that confirmed his standing even as it closed his story ^[3].

Pollock's influence spread far beyond painting. By treating the canvas as an arena for action rather than a window onto a subject, he opened paths that later artists followed into performance, process art, and installation ^[5]. The basic Jackson Pollock facts, a floor-bound canvas, poured household enamel, the body as instrument, became a shorthand for artistic freedom itself, taught in classrooms and parodied in popular culture in nearly equal measure.

Lee Krasner managed his estate with great care until her death in 1984, placing major works in public collections, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation she endowed now gives grants to working artists worldwide ^[4]. The couple's house and studio in Springs, its floor still layered with paint from the great canvases, operates as a study center open to visitors ^[4]. Scholarly attention has never slackened: the catalogue of his work, questions of attribution, and even scientific analysis of the physics of his poured lines continue to generate research ^[5].

At auction and in museums his standing remains exceptional. Works such as One: Number 31, 1950 anchor the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and his paintings rank among the most valuable ever sold privately ^[3]. Nearly seventy years after his death, Pollock is still the figure through whom many people first encounter the claim that abstraction can carry the full weight of human feeling ^[2].