Rudi Blesh in Modern Art Usa Man Rebellion Conquest 19001956

Jackson Pollock's Paintings (1940-56)
His Methods of Baste Painting, Gesturalism, Action-Painting

Contents

• Pollock the Existential Painter
• Influences
• Breakthrough
• Pollock's Move towards Gesturalism
• Drip Painting Technique
• Characteristics of Action Painting
• Pollock in the 1950s
• Pollock'due south Legacy

For analysis of works by New York School painters like Jackson Pollock, meet: Analysis of Modernistic Paintings (1800-2000).

Of import Paintings

Lavender Mist (Number 1) (1950)
National Gallery, Washington DC. One
of the greatest 20th-century paintings
of the American School.

Blueish Poles (1952)
By Jackson Pollock.
National Gallery of Commonwealth of australia, Canberra.

Convergence (1952)
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, NY.
A typical example of Pollock'southward allover
gesturalism, which has made him 1
of the greatest modern artists of the
mid-20th century.

The She-Wolf (1943)
Museum of Modern Fine art, New York.
An early Pollock showing signs of
his allover style of action painting.

WORLDS All-time PAINTERS
For pinnacle creative practitioners, see:
All-time Artists of All Fourth dimension.

Pollock the Existential Painter

In 1956 Willem de Kooning pointed out that "every and then often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then in the late 1940s Jackson Pollock did it. He disrepair our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings once more." (Every bit quoted by Rudi Blesh in Modern Art USA: Man, Rebellion, Conquest 1900-1956.) This was Pollock the existentialist, whose unpremeditated method of applying paint conforms to Jean-Paul Sartre's premise that "existence precedes essence." Instead of being painted according to a specific plan, the picture emerges out of the process of painting.

Every bit early on equally 1942, Jackson Pollock was working at the cutting edge of abstruse expressionist painting. The painter Lee Krasner, with whom he lived from 1942 until the cease of his life, stated in an interview that "in front end of a very good painting, he asked, me 'Is this a painting?' Not is this a skilful painting, or a bad one, merely a painting! The degree of doubtfulness was unbelievable at times. And then, over again, at other times, he knew the painter he was."

Pollock'south Male person and Female (1942, Philadelphia Museum of Art) relied on the surrealist device of automatism to yield the irrationally juxtaposed and associated anatomical fragments, numbers, and geometric shapes as well as the loose autographic brushwork. The frontality and the shallowness of the space in the work reveal the influence of Cubism and of the interwar expressionism of Picasso, peculiarly in his masterpiece Guernica (1937, Reina Sofia, Madrid). For the figures, Pollock drew inspiration from African fine art as well as American Indian art and Mexican mural painting.

Yet any Pollock'south indebtedness to preceding styles, the directness with which he permitted his unconscious to decide the course of this painting had no precedent. The picture's "reality" lies not in whatever reference to the phenomenal world but in the truth of the unconscious heed. Offset in 1947 Pollock further refined the language of this radical content with the technical innovation of pouring or dripping his paint. In addition he dissolved the customary compositional focus on a fundamental paradigm and broke downward the illusion of objects in space, arriving at an "allover" composition in which the seemingly limitless intricacy of surface texture creates a vast, pulsating environment of intense free energy, completely engulfing the viewer.

Although many of the writings on Pollock have overplayed the myth of tragic heroism, the artist did affect a tough outside: he was isolated and independent, and he gradually cocky-destructed in a downward spiral of emotional turmoil during his early on forties, afterwards a dozen prolific years of imperial painting. Pollock lived and worked with relentless bulldoze, As Lee Krasner explained: "Whatsoever Jackson felt, he felt more than intensely than anyone I've known. When he was angry, he was angrier; when he was happy, he was happier; when he was placidity, he was quieter." (Energy Made Visible, 1972, past BH Friedman.)

For works by other neat American painters of the 20th century, see: Mark Rothko's Paintings (1938-seventy); Andy Warhol's Pop Art (1959-73).

Early Life and Influences

Paul Jackson Pollock, born in Cody, Wyoming, on January 28, 1912, was the youngest of v sons in a working-class family unit. His mother had artistic aspirations and conveyed this sufficiently to her children that all 5 sons wanted to become painters. Pollock's father failed in one truck subcontract subsequently another, causing an economical instability that forced the family to relocate vii times in Jackson's get-go twelve years. In the summer of 1927 Jackson and his 18-year-old brother, Sanford, worked on a survey squad, roughing it on the Due north Rim of the Grand Canyon. Pollock discovered booze at this time and also dropped the name "Paul," which he idea less manly than "Jackson."

Pollock went to loftier school in Los Angeles with Philip Guston, who also became a major member of the New York School of painting. They were both rebellious and intellectual. After being expelled twice in two years for writing broadsides against the schoolhouse'south emphasis on athletics, Pollock gave up in 1930 and headed to New York, where he joined his eldest brother Charles in the classes of Thomas Hart Benton at the Fine art Students League. Pollock met Stuart Davis, who taught there, and Arshile Gorky, who was often to exist found in the school cafeteria. Pollock stayed on at the League until Benton left in January 1933 but Benton'due south influence continued to dominate both the younger artist's bailiwick matter and style until around 1938.

Inspired by Mannerism and Bizarre fine art, the dramatic spatial composition of Benton's The Arts of the West (1932, New United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland Museum of American Art) spills headlong toward the viewer from deep in space. Benton taught and used in his own work a rhythmic system of interlocking curves and countercurves - often disposed around imaginary vertical axes - as the underlying principle for his compositions. This dynamic unfolding of the pictorial space provided an abstract metaphor for the idea of an inevitable unfolding in the evolution of history (an idea inspired by Marxist historical theories). Benton's choice of subject thing also echoed this in the sense that he attempted to show a continuity between nowadays-twenty-four hour period America and its ancient past. Long after his flirtation with Marxism and modernism in the early twenties, Benton retained this compositional characteristic.

Benton attempted to formulate a uniquely "American" style through the exploration of the land's historical subject matter and its contemporary life. His adulation of "American" borderland masculinity must have appealed to Pollock. Benton'due south American Scene painting, reinforced past the case of the Mexican muralists sowed the seeds for the emergence of a yard calibration and an epic quality in Pollock'southward painting of the forties. Just large size also suited Pollock'south m subject thing, which concerned universals in the human psyche, and the powerful instinctual forces that acted on his consciousness.

Similar and so many others at the time, the Mexicans held a Marxist view of historical development, and they hoped to incite their countrymen to social alter by educating them virtually their heritage and almost the relentless progress of history. The visit of David Siqueiros to Los Angeles in 1928 and reproductions of Mexican murals had already captured Pollock'due south interest earlier he left California. Equally a high-school pupil he had seen the piece of work of Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco through some communist meetings he attended. In 1936 Pollock took a job in Siqueiros'due south Union Square workshop, where he experimented with unorthodox materials and novel techniques of application, including the spraying, splattering, and dripping of pigment.

Equally Pollock moved away from Benton's influence and from representation as a whole, he focused increasingly on inner content. He found encouragement for this approach in an article by John Graham in 1937 called "Archaic Fine art and Picasso" (Magazine of Art 30, No four, Apr 1937). In it Graham wrote that primitives, exteriorized their taboos in order to sympathize them better and bargain with them successfully. He said that archaic fine art typically has a highly evocative quality, which allows information technology to bring to our consciousness the clarities of the unconscious heed.

Graham'due south belief that the unconscious mind provided essential cognition and creative powers for the artist and that archaic art offered more direct access to this material impressed Pollock so profoundly that he wrote to Graham request to meet him. The ensuing friendship profoundly emboldened Pollock in his search for universal mythic images in his own unconscious, while at the same fourth dimension enlarging his understanding of recent European art (particularly Belittling Cubism and Surrealism).

The Europeans who arrived in New York effectually 1940 further sharpened Pollock's focus on unconscious imagery. Indeed, he said "I am particularly impressed with their concept of the source of art existence the unconscious." But he was quick to add that the most important Europeans were Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro, who did not come to the United States. It was to Picasso above all that Pollock returned again and once more in his fine art. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York) was bought by MOMA in 1938, while Guernica, which arrived in New York in 1939, was especially significant. This catamenia of Picasso's work inspired the fragmentation of expressionist images in the shallow space of Pollock'southward drawings of the tardily thirties, and information technology too provided Pollock and his contemporaries with a profoundly moving example of painting with a social conscience that was at the aforementioned time at the forefront of formal innovation. The social imperative - already inherent in American fine art and greatly heightened past the two world wars and by the Depression - weighed heavily on Pollock and his contemporaries.

In 1935 Pollock went on to the easel-painting sectionalization of the Federal Art Project, which provided him with a modicum of financial stability. Burgoyne Diller was his supervisor and covered for him when he could not supply his quota of paintings. In addition to its economic benefits the Works Progress Administration (Westward.P.A.) put Pollock into a community of painters, including the nascent New York School, who were all trying to digest the same disparate influences of the Mexican muralists, abstruse cubism, abstract surrealism, and Picasso's expressionist painting of the thirties, especially Guernica.

Pollock's Quantum

Pollock struggled with acute low and alcoholism in the late thirties and in 1939 he entered into Jungian psychoanalysis. In add-on to whatever the treatment did for his emotional crises, it profoundly affected his art by encouraging his search for totemic images with universal, unconscious meaning. Betwixt 1942 and 1948 he gave many of his compositions (including some of the early on drip pictures) mythic titles with overtones of primitive forces: Guardians of the Hush-hush, Male and Female, Moon Woman, Totem Lesson, Night Ceremony, The She-Wolf and Enchanted Forest. Many of the early on action paintings, such as Galaxy and Cathedral, were given titles that evoked a sense of spirituality or the sublime in nature. From 1948 through 1952 Pollock generally numbered, rather than titled, his paintings, just totemic associations still lingered on. Indeed past not naming his pictures, Pollock sought to brand their spiritual content more universal. Even so in 1951 Pollock reintroduced legible totemic figures and in 1953 he resumed the mythic titles.

In November 1941 John Graham selected works by both Krasner and Pollock for a joint show. From this, Krasner discovered that Pollock lived around the corner from her, so she looked him up. The following fall they moved in together and, through Krasner, Pollock profoundly widened his circle of artistic friends; in particular she introduced him to the gesturalists de Kooning and Hans Hofmann, as well every bit critics Harold Rosenberg, and Clement Greenberg. Krasner also appears to have been more successful than the psychotherapists in stabilizing Pollock, who entered the most innovative and productive decade of his life.

In Male person and Female (1942), one of Pollock's first great pictures, the totemic quality and the stabilizing symmetry remained from the works of the previous ii years, just the images poured forth in a freer, more disconnnected way. The eyes at height left, the numbers, the impulsive gestures and spills come together, as if randomly, out of a dumbo chaos of agile elements. The totemic figures superimposed on the 2 black vertical strips reinforce the geometry and stabilize the otherwise free play of gestures and modest images.

In the works of the early forties. Pollock transformed the influence of Benton's dramatic compositions and of the Mexicans' Marxist organized religion in the relentless evolution of history into the idea of a dynamic and inevitable unfolding of the content of the unconscious mind. Over the next four years this idea increasingly dominated not only the content of Pollock's work but the development of his way; every bit the gestures grew more genuinely automatic, information technology became necessary to devise some new means of balancing the limerick. In Male and Female the geometry serves that purpose; later, Pollock developed the "allover" composition to solve this structural problem.

Although it was the surrealist artists who helped to legitimize the unconscious equally a field of study for Pollock, equally early as 1942, he already seems to take begun using psychic automatism in a wholly different way. The surrealist maintained an experimental distance, analyzing his or her automatist expressions, discovering their content through complimentary association, so going back into the film to raise these discoveries. Pollock worked impulsively and direct on the canvas to capture the unconscious images equally they tumbled out. In Male and Female person the occasional areas of dripped and splattered paint were not springboards for free clan, equally in surrealism, but an effort to record the spontaneity of his unconscious idea processes. Equally such this technique proved the ideological precursor for Pollock's great stylistic quantum in the "allover" drip pictures of 1947, such every bit Cathedral (1947, Dallas Museum of Fine art).

In add-on, the paramount concern with immediacy amidst Pollock and his friends led them to conclude that sketching was non "modern." This differentiated them from their mentors Picasso and Miro and from their friend Gorky. Since they believed that of import painting, by definition, addressed the issues of its time, you had to exist "modern" and therefore to piece of work spontaneously on the canvas.

In 1942 Robert Motherwell and William Baziotes introduced the 30-year onetime Pollock to Peggy Guggenheim, who asked him to participate in a group show of collage art at her new Art of This Century gallery. Pollock, Motherwell, and Baziotes all fabricated their first collages in preparation for that evidence and wrote automatist poesy together. Then in November 1943 Pollock had a one-man show at the Art of This Century, for which James Johnson Sweeney (an of import curator at the Museum of Mod Art) wrote the itemize. Alfred Barr bought Pollock's The She-Wolf (1943) for the Museum of Mod Art out of the exhibition, and the San Francisco Museum bought Guardians of the Secret (1943). In a review of the bear witness, Clement Greenberg championed Pollock as the greatest painter of his fourth dimension, and shortly afterwards that Peggy Guggenheim put Pollock on a retainer. This provided Pollock with a regular income, just as the Federal Art Project was shutting down. Guggenheim not only gave him a $300 monthly stipend but a link to the recently arrived surrealist artists who showed in her gallery.

In the early on forties Pollock counterbalanced the scattered automatist doodles in his work confronting a persistent totemic imagery. The totemic figures carried over from Pollock's expressionistic work, which had been heavily influenced past Orozco and Picasso. The looser automatist brushwork and the freer issuing forth of minor spontaneous forms and symbols represented the newer influence of surrealism. In these works Pollock began to reconcile the two, using automatism to pause down the formal isolation of the totemic images. The dissolution of these images equally discrete entities enabled them to interact more fluidly with the free associations in a mode of painting that was becoming increasingly oriented toward process.

Some critics have argued that a programmatic Jungian symbolism underlies the images, but no i has succeeded in providing a consistent reading of any such iconography in whatsoever paintings by Pollock. Pollock did believe in the commonage unconscious and in the course of free association he may have called up and used individual images from fabric he read or heard about during his Jungian analysis. In the same way Pollock occasionally referred to specific myths in his titles, as in Pasiphae of 1943, but they were never more than a means of enriching or deepening the associations. Pollock created out of his own unconscious, using automatism to transform his psychic feel into gestures and forms. In some instances he so found affirming similarities in known legends, but he avoided systematic referents from external sources.

Pollock's Move towards Gesturalism

In Mural (1943, Academy of Iowa Museum of Art) the gesture itself carried the expressive content. But even in this work certain specific associations tin can exist traced. In particular, it has been convincingly argued that on one level the dark curving verticals in Mural had a figural reference, influenced by Native American pictographs. Demonstrations of Indian sand painting, which the artist saw in 1941 at the Natural History Museum in New York, also seem to take later encouraged the free gestural pouring technique that Pollock developed at the offset of 1947. In a February 1944 interview, Pollock stated that his paintings independent no intentional references to images from Native American art, although he conceded that when working intuitively images might sally from ane'due south unconscious, but via free association non equally a deliberate iconography. Similarly, the shamanistic intentions of the sand painters, who regarded such piece of work as a healing human activity, may have figured obliquely in Pollock's thinking, even though he does non seem to have explicitly ready out to emulate them.

Peggy Guggenheim had deputed Pollock to paint the viii-by-20-foot Mural for her dwelling in July 1943. The grand calibration of the picture, like the large works of Benton and the Mexicans, transforms the canvas into an engulfing environs, a whole wall of paint rather than a small-scale object that one tin can both visually and physically dominate. In this manner information technology set a precedent for the scale of Pollock's historic drip paintings. It also forced the artist to work on the flooring (similar the Navajo sand painters he saw in New York) and so that he could motility around all sides of the moving-picture show and reach every part of information technology.

If the abstract, rhythmic gestures which supplanted the totemic images in Landscape (and in several other paintings of 1943 and 1944) grew out of figural signs, the final effect was nonetheless one of a gestural style. In this respect Pollock non only anticipated his work of 1947 to 1950, but in some canvases or parts of canvases during 1942 and 1943 he too tentatively explored dripping and pouring, every bit we have seen in Male and Female. Despite this, these works remain conceptually linked to the imagistic works in that they were self-consciously "composed"; in the case of Mural, Pollock deliberately organized the composition effectually Benton'due south arrangement of curves and countercurves.

The even distribution of compositional interest across the entire surface of Mural was its virtually revolutionary characteristic. This anticipated the thought of the "allover" composition as a solution to the trouble of how to organize a movie generated by automatist gesturing. As each of Pollock'due south painterly brushstrokes grew increasingly unique and individually formed, they became more than and more adequate as replacements for the totemic images. In 1946 and 1947 Pollock finally abandoned imagery and structural systems for an "allover" composition and a completely gestural style. In this respect he went even further than Piet Mondrian or Joan Miro, who always maintained an underlying compositional structure though both had painted evenly dispersed compositions.

Pollock and Krasner spent the summer of 1944 in Provincetown and in 1945 they went to The Springs in East Hampton, Long Isle, where they bought a farmhouse with 5 acres. Equally unceremoniously as possible Pollock and Krasner married in belatedly October and moved out to The Springs permanently (admitting with frequent trips to New York). "Information technology was hell on Long Island" in the beginning, Krasner later recalled. Pollock'southward studio had no rut or electric light, they had no hot h2o at first, and they couldn't afford heating fuel for the firm, much less an automobile. Notwithstanding Pollock did begin having annual exhibitions at this fourth dimension - at Fine art of This Century, then at the Betty Parsons Gallery - and finally by 1949 he began selling plenty to afford some small-scale comforts.

In 1946, Pollock'south first full year on Long Isle, his work underwent another dramatic change. During the first half of the year a mixture of gestural and totemic images dominated his painting, as in The Fundamental (1946, Art Establish of Chicago). In the latter part of the twelvemonth he abandoned the overt images entirely and embarked on the "Sounds of the Grass" serial, which culminated in such extraordinary canvases as Shimmering Substance (1946, Museum of Modernistic Art, New York). In these works the creative person handled the entire surface as an even field of gestural strokes, sensuously practical, rich in color, and devoid of any overt imagery.

In The Fundamental, even in the 1943 Mural, 1 may read some elements as figures or objects in infinite. Shimmering Substance has only the actual depth of the heavily sculptured paint surface and a subtle illusion of shallow space behind the woven plane of surface texture. The freedom of the gestural painting in Shimmering Substance is made possible past the evenness of the distribution of visual activity (Pollock's "allover" construction), which avoids compositional anarchy. The stress on the physical quality of the activeness on the surface shows Pollock using automatist gesturing in an even more direct mode than in such works as Mural.

Pollock'south Drip Painting Technique

Pollock's dripped and poured canvases, which followed immediately after the "Sounds in the Grass" series at the end of 1946 or early 1947, have all the same more gestural freedom than Shimmering Substance. In creating works like Cathedral and Number 1 1948 (1948, MOMA, New York), Pollock laid his canvas on the floor and used his brushes like sticks, hovering just above the surface but never touching it. This permitted an easier, more spontaneous movement of the arm and body than he could achieve while withal having to press the paint on to the sheet with a brush or pocketknife, as in Shimmering Substance. Pollock likewise by and large made his drip paintings bigger. Thus by working directly on the flooring he was not just able to employ gravity to facilitate his method of application but he was also able to walk around the compositions, reaching every part by literally stepping into them.

In the baste paintings Pollock eliminated all symbols and signs; merely the gesture itself remained every bit a mythic metaphor. This summed up what was radically new about Pollock's application of automatism: he used the technique to limited rather than to excavate; he translated the act of painting itself into an adventure of self-realization. When Pollock told Hofmann in 1942 "I am nature,"" he meant that to him the central subject thing of painting derived from this direct, introspective exploration instead of from the external earth.

Intuitively the viewer tin feel the process by which Pollock made the drip compositions and imagine the sensation of moving freely across the sheet along with the gestures of paint. Indeed, the viewer must re-create the feeling of this procedure in guild to experience the deeper meaning of the piece of work, because the painting is "about" the introspective content recorded in those gestures. Pollock'southward baste paintings need that the viewer surrender intellectual command while freely empathizing with the energetic colour and move. One "should not look for," Pollock explained, "but wait passively - and attempt to receive what the painting has to offer." This state of willing suspension of control is the only possible way of borer into the emotions which the painter was recording.

As compositions, each of Pollock'due south drip pictures simultaneously dissolves into a chaotic jumble of individual lines while also coming together as a structurally uniform, whole field. They accept no "right" viewing position every bit practise examples of High Renaissance painting; indeed the viewer must move across them. They depict their audience in to inspect the details closely, passage by passage, and at the same time overwhelm the viewer with their awe-inspiring size. Their colouristic and textural richness emphasizes the expansive surface, yet the elaborate and totally visible overlay of multiple layers of paint (and sand, cigarette butts, glass, and other materials) creates a very existent depth and space.

The transparency of the process - the way in which the viewer can so readily reconstruct the act of creation - gives the baste paintings an extraordinary immediacy. This highlights the nowadays equally the fixed reference betoken in the painting, and that emphasis is one of the hallmarks of modernism. The brilliance of its fulfillment in these pictures accounts in part for why so many of Pollock's contemporaries saw the baste paintings as an existential watershed in the history of mod art.

The painters of the New York Schoolhouse were uncommonly conscious of wanting to behave on the legacy of modernism. The collapse of fourth dimension into the present is a central issue in modernism; the past exists only in its real bearing on the present. Pollock himself (in the New Yorker, August five, 1950) confirmed the deliberateness of this characteristic in 1950 when he commented on "a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't take whatever beginning or any end. He didn't mean information technology as a compliment, but it was."

In painting, Kandinsky pioneered the disintegration of narrative fourth dimension, and his work must have encouraged Pollock to paint in a mode that seems to eat upward the viewer, physically and temporally. To Pollock's generation, Kandinsky's piece of work stood for spontaneity and spiritual content in abstract art. In May 1943 Pollock worked every bit a janitor in the Museum of Not-Objective Painting, which had the globe's greatest collection of paintings by Kandinsky, and he undoubtedly saw the museum's 1945 Kandinsky memorial exhibition. In improver to displaying some 200 Kandinskys in the show, the museum published translations of his important writings, including the Text Artista (which Pollock owned) and his theoretical treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Fine art. In ane passage of the Text Artista Kandinsky wrote about learning, "not to wait at a picture only from the outside, but to 'enter' it, to move around in it, and mingle with its very life."

Pollock echoed this advice when he spoke about his new painting procedure, in 1947, saying that he could walk around a canvas, see it from all four sides and literally be inside the painting: a method vividly illustrated by the lensman Hans Namuth in his serial of photographs (1950) of Pollock in his Long Isle studio. He said he had moved away from the usual studio tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. Instead he preferred trowels, sticks, knives, and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, bits of drinking glass and other foreign matter added. Revealingly, he admitted that he was non aware of what he was doing. It was but after a sort of "get acquainted" catamenia that I saw what he had been doing. The painting, in other words, had a life of its own.

The genius of Pollock's baste style is not of class a technical discovery, nor is it reducible to its sources; Siqueiros, Hofmann, and even Pollock himself had experimented with the technique in the early forties or before. The loose, continuous drawing techniques of the surrealists often yielded networks of lines that resembled the complexity of Pollock'south poured and dripped paint surfaces also. Every bit early every bit the middle twenties the surrealists experimented with pouring and spattering paint, and Pollock certainly knew these works. Merely Pollock only started using the technique regularly when it became relevant for exploring the implications of Mural and certain other works of the middle forties.

One of the remarkable aspects of the drip pictures is the unerring control that Pollock maintained over the gestural marks, the colour, and the overall visual evenness of the field using this freer technique of application. It seems that having physically to utilize the paint to the canvas in Pollock'due south earlier piece of work actually obstructed the continuity of the gestures; past contrast, dripping and pouring gave the artist more control, non less. In this sense the new technique offered a greater accuracy of rendering.

Despite the initially anarchic appearance of the drip pictures, Pollock built up the lush, coloured surfaces gradually, giving every line and spot a unique graphic symbol, full of expression. As early as 1943 each of Pollock'due south abstract paintings is remarkably complete in itself and distinct from the others. In view of the technique, particularly subsequently 1946, information technology is striking how unique and unrepetitive each of these compositions is.

Characteristics of Action Painting

The critic Harold Rosenberg, in his 1952 essay "The American Activeness Painters" - a review of American avant-garde art in which he first coined the term "activeness painting" - provided the definitive clarification of Pollock's position. He explained that American painters had recently started to view the canvas every bit an area or arena in which to human action - instead of a space in which to reproduce, display, or limited an object, existent or imagined. What was to become on the canvas was not an image merely an event. In other words, every motion picture created in this "mode" was revelatory if non biographical. Rosenberg was thus comparing Pollock's abstract expressionism with the 19th-century works of Van Gogh, whose emotions and feelings appear in all his canvases.

Also, in this account, Pollock the action painter is portrayed as the artist-existentialist, whose unpremeditated act of painting conforms to Jean-Paul Sartre'southward main premise that "existence precedes essence." There is no precise program for what the artist is going to exercise: rather, the picture emerges out of the process of painting. Thus, when it was put to him that "y'all don't actually accept a preconceived image of a picture in your listen?" Pollock replied No. Although he did have a general notion of what the flick would wait like.

Pollock's work exposes direct, in the procedure of painting, the changing facts of his artistic experience. He transformed the obligation for social relevance, a pervasive current between the wars, into an unrelenting moral commitment to a search for the "self." The multiple impressions of the artist's own mitt in the upper right corner of Number 1 (1948) emphasize the immediacy of the creative person's personal presence and, past dissimilarity, emphasize the vastness of the sail as measured against them. A number of painters of the New York School used handprints in this way.

Co-ordinate to Lee Krasner, Pollock took some cues from jazz. Similar the improvisations of Giddy Gillespie or Charlie Parker, Pollock's drip paintings return grade and content inseparable.

In 1947 Peggy Guggenheim closed her gallery and returned to Europe. Betty Parsons agreed to take on Pollock in her gallery, although she could non afford the monthly stipend that Guggenheim had been paying. The latter connected that herself for a curt time until Pollock's sales became sufficiently buoyant to brand him a meagre living. He premiered his baste pictures in his first Betty Parsons exhibition of January 1948. They were widely ridiculed and continued to be until his death, even though the recognition of his genius within the art earth grew rapidly.

Pollock in the 1950s

With the help of a local dr., Pollock stayed away completely from booze betwixt 1948 and 1950, and the work of these years is calmer and freer. He got national attention in the press after 1948, even if information technology was often unsympathetic; in 1949 Life even ran an commodity entitled, "Is Jackson Pollock the Greatest Living Painter in the Usa?" and in 1950 the lensman Hans Namuth made a short film of Pollock working.

Pollock'south drip pictures of 1950, similar Number 27 (1950, Whitney Museum of American Art), are larger, less probative, and more contemplative. They tend to accept a more than open up weave of lines and seem more independent within themselves as they reach the outer edges of the canvass. By contrast, the denser works of 1949 continue at the aforementioned level of intensity border to edge. The well-nigh monumental works of 1950 also take a soft, diffuse light, like the belatedly Impressionist paintings of lilies by Claude Monet. These big compositions stand for at once a summation of this stage of Pollock'south development and a creative dead stop.

In belatedly 1950 Pollock started drinking over again, and his creativity took a sharp turn toward purely black-and-white pictures, many with figures or totemic images, as in Repeat (Number 25, 1951, Museum of Modern Art, NY). He did a few drip pictures, too, but his productivity trailed off and he seemed to take lost confidence in the management of his development. Several of the paintings from 1951 to 1953 are still of a loftier quality, similar Echo and Blue Poles Number 11 (1952, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), but they too have a more than broken-hearted and groping feel; some works of these years seem faltering.

In Bluish Poles Pollock introduced the cadency of potent blue diagonals (painted against the edge of a two-by-four) equally if he were seeking some stability. It may also imply a yearning to return to the security of his roots, since the idea of the poles resembles the compositional device that Benton taught Pollock in the early 1930s and that Pollock used in 1943 for Mural (though Benton meant for such poles to be hypothetical, not visible).

Soon subsequently Blue Poles Pollock fabricated the extremely different Portrait and a Dream (1953, Dallas Museum of Art), which returned in spirit to his betoken of departure in the early forties - himself (the "portrait," painted in colour) and images from the unconscious (the "dream," in black and white). But rather than having the space brimming over with a myriad of unconscious images, the head is a solitary class and the freer automatist forms at the left seem as though contained within a frame. Next Pollock did a few dense, intricately tangled paintings similar Grayed Rainbow (1953, Fine art Institute of Chicago), and White Light (1954, MOMA, NY), and Scent (1955, Individual Collection), which relate more closely to his mode of 1946, although they take a brooding darkness that is new.

In 1954 and 1955 Pollock'due south painting nearly ground to a halt as his drinking got heavier and his depression deeper. The public nevertheless joked near his piece of work: In 1956 Time magazine flippantly christened him "Jack the Dripper." By this time he had stopped painting entirely and, on the nighttime of Baronial 10th, he drove his motorcar off the route near his domicile in The Springs, killing himself and one of the two young women he had with him.

Pollock's Legacy

Pollock's legacy to subsequent abstract painters is profound simply often non readily visible. His drip style did not inspire imitators precisely because it was so strikingly unique; whereas the gestural painters of the fifties could try out the autographic brushwork of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline, or Philip Guston without necessarily producing a baldly derivative work, no i could pigment a drip limerick that did not look like a weak Pollock. Nevertheless Pollock's radical reorientation of time in painting - his concentration on the instant at which the paint hit the canvas, purging references to past time or previous painting - was the primal inspiration for the immediacy in the gestural painting of the fifties as well every bit in the "happenings" that began at the end of the decade. The directness with which the materials are expressed in the process art and the minimalism of the sixties is also indebted to Pollock, as is the disengagement from historical time in the work of Jasper Johns and of the Pop Art movement in general, even though Pop artists rejected Pollock's vehement assertion of romantic individuality. In whatsoever issue, what makes Pollock ane of the greatest of 20th-century painters is the verdict of art collectors, 1 of whom (David Martinez), paid $140 million for Pollock's No 5 (1948) in a private sale in 2006.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The in a higher place article includes textile from the volume Art Since 1940 (Laurence King Publishing, 2000): a wonderful report of modern painting and sculpture, and an indispensible work for all students of 20th century visual art. We gratefully admit the use of this material.

• For biographies of other modern artists, see: Famous Painters.
• For more than details of not-objective art, see: Homepage.

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