Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock: The Man Who Walked Into the Painting

In 1949 *Life* magazine put the question in a headline: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The subject was a thirty-seven-year-old from a Wyoming ranch, a chronic alcoholic who worked in a converted barn on Long Island and made his pictures by pouring enamel out of a can onto canvas spread across the floor. The question was posed as provocation. Within a decade it had stopped being funny, and American painting had displaced Paris for the first time in three hundred years.

Watkins Ranch and Six Moves

Jackson Pollock was born on 28 January 1912 at Watkins Ranch outside Cody, Wyoming, to Stella May McClure and LeRoy Pollock, a Scotch-Irish farming family. He was the youngest of five brothers, among them Charles and Frank. By the time he was ten the family had moved six times across Arizona and California, an itinerancy that left him rootless and, by most accounts, chronically unsettled.

In 1928 he entered Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where an art teacher named Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky encouraged him and exposed him to ideas well outside the curriculum. He never lost the Western inflection — the wide horizontals of his mature canvases have been read, plausibly, as landscape memory.

Benton, the Muralists, and a Detour Through Sculpture

In the autumn of 1930 he followed his brother Charles to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton, the great regionalist, studying also with John Sloan and Robert Laurent. Benton's rhythmic, swinging compositional armatures stayed with him long after he had rejected everything else his teacher believed.

He was equally struck by the Mexican muralists, José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, and in 1936 he worked in David Alfaro Siqueiros's experimental workshop in New York — a laboratory for industrial paints, spray guns, and paint applied by accident and gravity. Pollock settled permanently in New York in 1934 and joined the Federal Art Project of the WPA in 1935, producing more than fifty paintings on the government payroll before the programme wound down in the early 1940s.

There was an odd interlude. In 1933 he wrote that he was "devoting all my time to sculpture now" and that "I like it better than painting." Sculpture's concern with objects in real space is not irrelevant to what he did later.

Drink, Jung, and Krasner

He was drinking destructively by his mid-twenties and first entered treatment in 1937; the alcoholism was chronic and lifelong. His years in Jungian analysis pushed him toward myth, archetype and automatism, and his early 1940s canvases are thick with totemic half-figures.

In 1941 he met the painter Lee Krasner. They married on 25 October 1945. Krasner was a formidable artist in her own right and, for the next decade, the organising intelligence of his career.

Peggy Guggenheim's Bet

In 1943 Peggy Guggenheim gave Pollock his first solo exhibition at Art of This Century and put him under contract through 1947 — financial security of a kind almost no American abstract painter then enjoyed. That same year she commissioned *Mural* for the entrance hall of her townhouse, a nearly six-metre canvas that broke him out of easel scale for good.

In 1945 he and Krasner left Manhattan for Springs, in East Hampton on Long Island. The barn behind the house became the studio, and the floor of that barn became the site of everything he is remembered for.

The Floor

By 1947 the method was fully formed. Pollock laid unstretched canvas flat on the studio floor and applied paint without the brush ever touching the surface — pouring, dribbling and flicking commercial enamel straight from the can, steering it with sticks, stiffened brushes, trowels, knives, turkey basters and tubes.

"On the floor, I am more at ease," he explained. "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." And, flatly: "Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement."

*One: Number 31, 1950* is the summit — oil and enamel on canvas, nearly nine feet high and more than seventeen feet wide, a field of densely interlaced threads of paint offset by pools and splashes, some skeins matte and some glossy. It registers force and speed while remaining, in MoMA's reading, graceful and lyrical; critics have reached repeatedly for the vocabulary of dance to describe it, because what the surface actually records is the track of a body moving in a controlled way through space.

Fame and Its Costs

The *Life* feature made him a national curiosity. In 1950 the photographer Hans Namuth spent long sessions photographing and filming him at work, producing the images that fixed Pollock forever in the public mind as the artist-as-performer. Immediately after the filming, Pollock started drinking again after two years of sobriety. Namuth later said only: "I think he had reached a transition point in his work."

He resisted the label he had been given. "I don't care for 'abstract expressionism,'" he said. "I'm very representational some of the time." He described the modern artist as "working and expressing an inner world — in other words expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces." Krasner recalled his ferocious competitiveness with Picasso.

He never travelled outside the United States, even as his reputation spread across Europe. On 11 August 1956 he died in a car crash on Fireplace Road, near his home in Springs. He was forty-four.

Why Jackson Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a physical insight rather than a stylistic one. Pollock changed the relationship between a painter and a painting. By putting the canvas on the floor and working it from all four sides, he abolished the single viewpoint, the horizon line and the composition organised around a centre, and replaced them with an all-over field that has no privileged place to look. Painting stopped being a window and became a record of an event. That is a genuinely new proposition, and everything from action painting to installation and performance art flows out of it.

The insistence that this was not accident matters. He steered the paint, worked in sustained physical passages, and produced surfaces whose speed and force are legible as decisions. "Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement" is the sentence of a man who thought he had something to state.

The counter-case is substantial. *Life* framed its question as a stunt, and the work drew public ridicule that has never entirely faded; the objection that a child could do it survives because the pictures offer no craft the eye can verify. His revolution was also brief — the pouring method was perfected around 1947 and he had largely turned away from it by the black pourings of the early 1950s, leaving a canonical period of roughly four years. The Namuth footage raises the awkward possibility that the myth of the possessed American genius was partly a media construction, and it coincided precisely with his relapse into drinking. And the life itself is not heroic: an alcoholic in and out of treatment from the age of twenty-five, dead in a crash he was driving.

Legacy

Abstract Expressionism became the first American movement to lead world art, and Pollock was its emblem. What endures is less the drip than the permission — the demonstration that a painting could be the residue of an action rather than a picture of a thing.

Achievements

• Notable work: No. 5, 1948
• Notable work: Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
• Notable work: Blue Poles
• Movement: abstract expressionism and action painting