Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock was born in 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, and grew up in California and Arizona. Although he moved to New York in 1930, and later settled in Easthampton, Long Island, he would refer to his childhood in the west - with its open spaces, lack of pretension, and rough-hewn daily life - as having a profound affect on his artistic work. In New York, he studied with the American painter Thomas Hart Benton, and worked for the WPA’s Federal Art Project. Pollock responded not only to Benton’s devotion to painting, but also to his hard-driving and hard-drinking lifestyle. Pollock would battle alcoholism for most of his life. In 1940, Pollock’s work was accepted into a group show that also featured William de Kooning, and Lee Krasner, who would become Pollock’s wife a few years later. His first one-man show took place in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery. Guggenheim, a collector as well as gallery owner, would become Pollock’s most important patron, exhibiting his work in the years to come in Amsterdam, Brussels, Florence, Milan, Venice, and Zurich. In 1947, Pollock placed a canvas on the floor of his studio and began to drip, splatter, and slide paint off his brush in stages of depth and color. This “drip” technique, later to be called “action painting,” gave Pollock a freedom of movement in creating the painted work, even when a cigarette’s ash mixed in with his layers of paint. For Pollock, this direct approach – he never worked with preliminary sketches as painters were trained to do – unleashed his unconscious for an authentic, personal, and immediate expression. Time magazine nicknamed him “Jack the Dripper.” Although he paid a price for these kinds of insults, his “drip” paintings -- including Full Fathom Five (1947), Number One (1948), and Autumn Rhythm (1950) -- are each valued at millions of dollars today. Pollock, whose work led a new movement in art, Abstract Expressionism, and whose life story has become a touchstone of the post-WWII American artist, died in a car crash in Southampton, NY in 1956.
