Maker/Artist
Pollock, Jackson
American painter, 1912-1956
Pollock was one of the leading proponents of Abstract Expression in the 1940s and 1950s. His art, lifestyle, and untimely death have been elevated to the status of legend. In 1928, he studied at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, and during this time was exposed to European modernism, analytical psychology, and Surrealist automatism. In 1930, he settled in New York, and studied with the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. During the 1930s he lived in poverty and worked as a mural assistant for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. His work before 1938 shows the influence of Benton, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and the Mexican muralists. In 1938, he was hospitalized for alcoholism during which time he used automatic drawing as therapy. From this, Pollock developed his early style, one of totemic male and female figures and images of eyes or mythic beasts that constituted a personal iconography. A fine example of this period is "Guardians of the Secret," a work of late-Surrealist style and frenetic brushwork that would hint at his later mature style. He met the painter Lee Krasner in 1941, and they married in 1945. Pollock is best known for working methods of pouring or dripping paint onto a large canvas on the floor, moving about it as he worked, the entire art process being a kind of performance. Typically moving from left to right as if "writing" the work, Pollock laid the key vertical and horizontal elements down first, mostly black or white, and then intertwined subsequent colors within it. This method of organizing a space into panels echoes Benton's theories of mural composition. Pollock was one of the first celebrity painters of the Post-War era in the USA, his free-form style and dramatic personality capturing the spirit of the Beat Generation of the early 1950s. He was killed in a car accident in 1956. Comment on works: painter
