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Jackson Pollock

Introduction

After WW II, NY usurped Paris as the art capital of the


western world. From Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s
and 1950s and Pop Art of the 1960s, modern art became
synonymous with NY.

When an exhibition of the New York School of abstract


expressionists, including Pollock, de Kooning and Mark
Rothko, first turned Europe in 1958, critics remarked on
the size of the works.

Pollocks frameless , all-over canvases reflected an


american sense of space: big paintings for a big country.

Short biography

Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 August 11, 1956) was an


influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract
expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip
painting.

During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety, a


major artist of his generation. Regarded as reclusive, he had a volatile
personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he
married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on
his career and on his legacy.

Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related, single-car accident;


he was driving. In December 1956, several months after his death,
Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

Synopsis

Early on in his career, he was influenced by Mexican muralist


painter Diego Rivera, and by much of the work in Surrealism.

By the mid 1940s, the art form which Jackson Pollock was
most known for, was the abstract style. By 1947, he was doing
the drip style.

Rather than fixing his canvas to an easel, most of his canvases


were either set on the floor, or laid out against a wall.

Like other members of the New York School, Jackson Pollock


was influenced in his early work by Joan Mir and Pablo
Picasso, and seized on the Surrealists concept of the
unconscious as the source of art.

In the late 1930s Pollock introduced imagery based on totemic


or mythic figures, ideographic signs, and ritualistic events,
which have been interpreted as pertaining to the buried
experiences and cultural memories of the psyche.

The Moon Woman suggests the example of Picasso. The subject of


the moon woman, which Pollock treated in several drawings and
paintings of the early 1940s, could have been available to him from
various sources.

At this time many artists, were influenced by the fugitive, hallucinatory


imagery of Charles Baudelaire and the French Symbolists. In his
prose poem Favors of the Moon Baudelaire addresses the image of
the fearful goddess, the fateful godmother, the poisonous nurse of all
the moonstruck of the world.

The poem, completed in 1942, alludes to ominous flowers that are


like the censers of an unknown rite, a phrase uncannily applicable to
Pollocks bouquet at the upper right. Although it is possible that
Pollock knew the poem, it is likelier that he was affected in a more
general way by the interest in Baudelaire and the Symbolists that was
pervasive during the period.

From there, he 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, known as action 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.

Number 1A - 1948

While the style of "drip"


painting has become
synonymous with the
name Jackson Pollock,
here the artist has
autographed the work
even more directly, with
several handprints found
at the composition's
upper right.

Around this time Pollock stopped giving his paintings evocative titles and began
instead to number them. His wife, artist Lee Krasner, later explained, "Numbers
are neutral. They make people look at a painting for what it ispure painting."

In 1951, Life magazine ran a cover story with the


title: Is JP Americas Greatest Living Painter? It
played on Pollocks working-man image chainsmoking, and steel-toed, with paint-spattered Levis
but glossed over the revolutionary character of
his painting.

Two more dripped


works of art
Alchemy is one of Jackson Pollocks earliest poured paintings,
executed in the technique that constituted his most significant
contribution to twentieth-century art.
Surrealist notions of chance and automatism are given full
expression in Pollocks classic poured paintings, in which line no
longer serves to describe shape or enclose form, but exists as an
autonomous event, charting the movements of the artists body.

Alchemy, 1947

Oil, aluminum, enamel paint, and string on canvas

In Enchanted Forest Pollock opens up


the more dense construction of layered
color found in works such as Alchemy
by allowing large areas of white to
breathe amidst the network of moving,
expanding line.
He also reduces his palette to a
restrained selection of gold, black, red,
and white. Pollock creates a delicate
balance of form and color through
orchestrating syncopated rhythms of
lines that surge, swell, retreat, and
pause only briefly before plunging
anew into continuous, lyrical motion.

Quotations

My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever


stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the
unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the
resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I
feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can
walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the
painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand painters
of the West.

Possibilities Vol. 1, no 1, winter 1947-48, p. 79; as quoted in "Jackson Pollock: is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" Life (8
August 1949), pp. 42-45

When

I am in my painting, I am not aware of what Im doing.


It is only after a short of get acquainted period that I see what I
have been about. I have no fears about making changes,
destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its
own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact
with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is
pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes
out well.

Possibilities, Vol. 1, no 1, winter 1947-48, p. 79; as quoted in Jackson Pollock (1983) by Elizabeth Frank, p. 68

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