Jackson Pollock

“It’s why outsiders hate the art we love, they haven’t spent time with it. They see it once, ‘It’s a bunch of squiggles that my kid could do.’ I would like to see a kid who could paint a Jackson Pollock. In a half second, any pro could tell the difference. People want to think Pollock isn’t struggling, that he’s kidding. He isn’t kidding. You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say ‘This is art, and you can’t do it.” -Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty

I’ve always loved abstract art, even though many people disregard it. And Jackson Pollock is no exception. Known for the drip paintings that pioneered abstract expressionism, Pollock’s art was actually a long gradual progression from figurative to radical and his inspirations ranged from indigenous folk art and Mexican murals to regionalism and cubism.

Born in 1912 Wyoming before his family moved to California and Arizona, Pollock would live through both world wars and the Great Depression. His mother was a clothes designer and was very much into arts and crafts. His father worked as a land surveyor, often taking the young Pollock with him. Surveying the Grand Canyon, Bryce and other national parks was a great influence. Art historians believe those vast spaces impacted the scale of his work later on. And discovering ancient petroglyphs in the rock formations piqued his interest in indigenous cultures and history.

He often went to LACMA’s ethnographic galleries and for the folk and Egyptian artifacts. He loved Native American sand paintings, which were often ritualistic. This was another important influence on his own art.

At 16, he began to study in the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. His teachers were conventional and he admired them, but Pollock was too curious and unruly. He was expelled several times. In 1930, he followed his older brother to New York. Both enrolled at the Arts Students League under Thomas Hart Benton, a contemporary of Grant Wood and a traditionalist who actually shunned the avant-garde. But he taught Pollock to detect the underlying linear and cubic rhythms in compositions. Pollock fell in love with Picasso and channeled Cézanne in his early paintings.

Deposition, c. 1930-33

His brother also exposed him to the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Orozo. In 1936, he went to Siqueiros’s Modern Technique Art Lab where he experimented with industrial materials and unconventional methods such as airbrushing and pouring paint onto canvas.

It was the middle of the Great Depression and after his studies, Pollock joined the Federal Arts Project, submitting works every month for $92. The artists were allowed to paint any form, any subject. This was when he began to experiment with more stylized figures.

Composition with Horse at Right c. 1934-38

Shy and moody, alcoholism and depression plagued Pollock all his life. He underwent Jungian psychoanalysis which actually helped him delve deeper into his psyche. Jung believed that humanity shared a collective unconscious full of “archetypal” symbolic figures that’s repeated in myths, religions and art throughout history. And Pollock’s belief in theosophy – the search for divine wisdom, a deeper meaning to life – veered him even more from traditional painting. He always explained that his paintings came from his own “unconscious.”

Stenographic Figure, 1942, MoMA NY

In 1942, Pollock was invited to submit a painting for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of the Century Gallery. She was unimpressed by Stenographic Figure, but Piet Mondrian disagreed, feeling the painting was the most powerful work he had seen by an American artist. MoMA’s curator, James Sweeney, convinced Guggenheim to give Pollock a solo exhibition. He wrote the introduction to the catalogue –

“Pollock’s talent is volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is undisciplined. It spills itself out in a mineral prodigality not yet crystallized. It is lavish, explosive, untidy. But young painters, particularly Americans, tend to be too careful of opinion. What we need is more young men who paint from inner impulsion without an ear to what the critic or spectator may feel–painters who will risk spoiling a canvas to say something in their own way. Pollock is one.”

The floor of Pollock’s studio

Afterwards she become his sponsor, giving him a monthly stipend of $150. She chose materials for him and commissioned a mural for the entrance hall of her apartment building. Mural is more abstract than any of his previous work. There was no center, just an imagery of dance and movement. Art historians attribute this to the action photography emerging at the time and coined the term “action painting” for Pollock.

In 2012, the Getty began a 2-year restoration of Mural. It was then exhibited before being returned to Iowa.

In 1945, Pollock moved to East Hampton with Lee Krasner. Though an artist in her own right, she always put Pollock first. It was here, away from the city, that he would flourish. They turned the outside barn into a full studio where he laid canvases on the floor and worked almost solely by the drip style he would become known for. Old videos show him splattering the paint from all sides of the canvas. His legs and arms moved rhythmically like jazz. But they were also frantic, clearly coming from a more restless, tortured soul.

“There was a reviewer who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.”

No 1, 1949. MOCA LA

In 1949 a Life Magazine article asked “Is he the greatest living painter in the U.S.?” Pollock is leaning against the 18-feet canvas of Summertime. It was meant to be sarcastic. By this time, his paintings were completely abstract, unlike the stylized and veiled figures of his other works. The world was captivated and they said yes.

Pasiphaë, 1943. The Met NY

The following year marked his most productive, he made over 50 paintings. And more reviewers, photographers, interviews came. German filmmaker Hans Namuth shot him while painting, using glass as a canvas with the camera underneath. But with much fame came as much criticism and self-doubt. Abstract expressionism was a new, often misunderstood, art form then, and the critics were brutal.

Autumn Rhythm, 1950. The Met NY

He began to suffer bouts of depression and alcohol abuse more frequently. A doctor had to prescribe tranquilizers so he can continue to work calmly. His paintings from 1951 were mute and dark. When he exhibited these “black pourings,” none of them sold. He turned to sculpture, but without much enthusiasm or success.

Untitled, 1952. Black pouring period

In 1956, he and Krasner planned to take a trip to Europe. But when he began an affair with a young art student, she left without him. Just one month later, on August 11, she got the call that he had died just a mile away from their East Hampton home in a 100-mile per hour drunken car crash. It was like something self-inflicted.