History Assignment

JACKSON POLLOCK

Background Info:

Jackson Pollock (1912-56) was the key figure in the postwar development of the Abstract Expressionist movement along with Willem de Kooning (1904-97), Franz Kline (1910-62) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970).  These painters shared more a similar outlook on art rather than any single, agreed-upon art techniques.  They tended to feel ill at ease with conventional subjects and styles, and they often tackled grand, moral subjects with a sweeping lack of style in their experimentations with color, texture and surface.

 

Pollock, born 28 January 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, grew up in California and Arizona.  At the age of eighteen, he moved to New York City where he enrolled at the Art Students League where he studied under the painter Thomas Hart Benton.  In 1935 he started work on the WPA Federal Art Project as a painter, and this provided him the opportunity to develop his techniques.  In 1937 he began psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, and he briefly suffered a nervous breakdown in 1938.  He was subsequently under the care of psychoanalysts who used his own drawings in therapy sessions.  In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim contracted with Pollock to hold his first showing at her Art of This Century Gallery in New York.  In 1945 he married Lee Krasner, a painter, and moved to East Hampton on Long Island.

 

Pollock's first real breakthrough work dates to 1943 with his first wall-size work, called "Mural."  At this point in time, he was already experimenting with numerous techniques, different media and various surfaces.  In 1947 he developed a new process that involved the pouring, or dripping, of enamel or aluminum paint onto a flat canvas in stages, often interrupted by long periods of time.  The results were huge canvases covered with intricate, "splattered" linear patterns.  A whole series of now famous paintings followed:  "Full Fathom Five," "Summertime," "Number Ten, 1949," "One," "Autumn Rhythm," "Lavender Mist" and "Number Thirty-two, "1950."  In 1951 and 1952 he painted almost exclusively in black and white, before returning to color in 1952.  His last series of works dated to 1953 ("Portrait and a Dream," "Easter and the Totem," "Ocean Greyness" and "The Deep").  By the time of his death in a car accident in 1956, Pollock had exerted enormous influence on the art scene in the U.S. and Europe.