Jackson Pollock

Based on Wikipedia: Jackson Pollock

The Man Who Threw Paint at Canvas and Changed Everything

In August 1949, Life magazine asked its readers a provocative question: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The artist in question had developed a technique so radical that it made critics either rhapsodic or furious. He didn't stand at an easel like painters had for centuries. He laid enormous canvases flat on the floor of a converted barn in rural Long Island, then walked around them—sometimes on them—flinging, dripping, and pouring household paint in sweeping arcs that engaged his entire body.

His name was Jackson Pollock, and within seven years of that Life feature, he would be dead at forty-four, killed in a drunk driving accident less than a mile from his home.

But in that short window of fame, Pollock fundamentally rewired how the world understood what a painting could be.

Growing Up Rootless in the American West

Paul Jackson Pollock entered the world on January 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyoming—a town named after the legendary showman Buffalo Bill. He was the youngest of five brothers, born to Stella and LeRoy Pollock. His father had been born with the surname McCoy but took the name of his adoptive parents. Both parents came from Tingley, Iowa, descendants of Irish and Scots-Irish immigrants.

Pollock never really knew Cody. When he was just ten months old, his mother packed up her sons and moved to San Diego. He would never return to his birthplace.

What followed was a childhood of constant relocation. LeRoy worked as a farmer, then as a land surveyor for the government, and each new job meant a new home. The family drifted through Arizona and California, eventually settling for a time in the Vermont Square neighborhood of Los Angeles. Stella, proud of her family's heritage as weavers, had made and sold dresses as a teenager. She was practical and resourceful—qualities her youngest son would inherit, though he would apply them in unexpected directions.

Young Jackson proved a difficult student. He was expelled from high school not once but twice—first in 1928, then again from Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. School couldn't contain him. But something else could.

During surveying trips with his father through the Western landscape, Pollock discovered Native American culture. The imagery, the spirituality, the relationship between art and ritual—these would stay with him, surfacing decades later in unexpected ways. He also encountered the Mexican muralists, particularly José Clemente Orozco, whose massive fresco Prometheus Pollock would later call "the greatest painting in North America." This wasn't typical teenage hyperbole. Pollock had found something that spoke to him with an intensity that formal education never had.

New York and the Education That Mattered

In 1930, at eighteen, Pollock followed his older brother Charles to New York City. Both enrolled at the Art Students League to study under Thomas Hart Benton, a painter known for sweeping murals of rural American life—farmers, rolling hills, the mythology of the heartland.

Benton's subject matter didn't stick with Pollock. But two things did: the older artist's rhythmic, almost musical approach to applying paint, and his fierce, uncompromising independence. Benton taught his students that an artist answers to no one but the work itself.

Pollock spent summers touring the Western United States with Benton and fellow student Glen Rounds, absorbing the vast American landscape that would later inform the scale of his ambition. But it was an experimental workshop in 1936, run by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, that would prove most consequential.

Siqueiros introduced Pollock to liquid paint.

Not the thick, buttery oils that artists squeezed from tubes. Liquid enamel—the kind you might use to paint a house. Siqueiros was experimenting with unconventional materials and techniques, pouring and dripping paint in ways that seemed almost industrial. Pollock watched, learned, and filed this knowledge away.

That same summer, he traveled to Dartmouth College to study Orozco's massive mural The Epic of American Civilization, which sprawled across three thousand two hundred square feet of wall space. Something was crystallizing in his mind about scale, about physicality, about the relationship between the painter's body and the painted surface.

The Federal Art Project and the Struggle with Demons

From 1938 to 1942, Pollock worked for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project, part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs that employed artists during the Great Depression. It was steady work. It was also a time of profound personal crisis.

Pollock was an alcoholic.

This wasn't social drinking that occasionally got out of hand. It was a devastating, life-destroying dependency that would pursue him until the night it killed him. From 1938 to 1941, he underwent Jungian psychotherapy with Dr. Joseph Henderson, who encouraged Pollock to make drawings as part of his treatment. The approach proved revealing. Jungian concepts—archetypes, the collective unconscious, primal symbols that recur across human cultures—began surfacing in Pollock's work.

Some psychiatrists have since speculated that Pollock may have had bipolar disorder, though posthumous diagnosis remains speculative. What's clear is that he was a volatile, reclusive personality who self-medicated with alcohol and struggled mightily against forces within himself that he could neither understand nor control.

In 1941, he transferred to a new therapist, Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlo, continuing the Jungian approach through 1942. The drawings from this period reveal a mind grappling with chaos, trying to impose order on internal turmoil. In retrospect, they look like rehearsals for what was coming.

Peggy Guggenheim and the Mural That Announced a Genius

Peggy Guggenheim was an heiress, a collector, a gallery owner, and a woman with an almost supernatural ability to recognize artistic talent before anyone else. In July 1943, she signed Pollock to a gallery contract. Then she gave him a commission that would change his life.

She wanted a mural for the entry to her new townhouse. Not a modest piece. Something eight feet tall and twenty feet wide.

At the suggestion of Marcel Duchamp—himself one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century—Pollock painted on canvas rather than directly on the wall, making the work portable. The resulting Mural exploded with energy, a churning mass of forms that seemed to dance across the massive surface.

The art critic Clement Greenberg saw it and felt the ground shift beneath his feet. "I took one look at it and I thought, 'Now that's great art,'" he later recalled, "and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced."

The catalog for Pollock's first exhibition captured something essential about what made his work different: "His talent is volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is undisciplined. It spills out of itself in a mineral prodigality, not yet crystallized."

Volcanic. That was the word. Pollock's paintings didn't sit politely on the wall. They erupted.

Lee Krasner: The Woman Behind the Legend

In 1942, Pollock and a painter named Lee Krasner both exhibited at the McMillen Gallery in New York. Krasner didn't know Pollock's work, but something about it intrigued her enough that she showed up at his apartment unannounced to introduce herself.

It was not love at first sight. But it was something equally powerful: artistic recognition. Krasner had extensive training in modern art. She understood what Pollock was attempting in ways that few others could. And she became determined to help him succeed.

They married in October 1945 in a church ceremony with only two witnesses present. The following month, they left New York City entirely, moving to Springs, a hamlet in the town of East Hampton on Long Island's south shore. With a down-payment loan from Peggy Guggenheim, they bought a wood-frame house with a barn at 830 Springs Fireplace Road.

Pollock converted the barn into a studio. And in that converted barn, he would create the paintings that redefined American art.

Krasner's influence on her husband's career was enormous—so enormous that it took decades for critics to fully appreciate it. She tutored him in the tenets of modernist painting, bringing him up to speed on contemporary developments he had missed. She introduced him to collectors, critics, and artists who could advance his career, including the photographer and designer Herbert Matter. She became, in Pollock's own estimation, the only judge he could truly trust.

Art dealer John Bernard Myers once said that "there would never have been a Jackson Pollock without a Lee Pollock." Fellow painter Fritz Bultman went further, calling Pollock "her creation, her Frankenstein."

This was perhaps unfair to Pollock's genuine talent. But it captured something true about the symbiotic nature of their relationship. Krasner was an accomplished artist in her own right, yet she subordinated her career to nurture his. Whether this was a sacrifice, a choice, or something more complicated, only she knew.

The Drip Paintings: Four Years That Shook the Art World

Between 1947 and 1950, Pollock created the body of work for which he is most famous. He had developed what would become known as his "drip technique," though this label somewhat undersells what he was actually doing.

He laid unstretched canvas on the floor of his barn studio. Then he moved around it—and sometimes over it—applying paint not with brushes but with sticks, hardened brushes, trowels, and even basting syringes. He used household enamel paints, the kind sold in hardware stores for painting furniture or walls. He dripped, poured, flung, and splattered.

The results were unlike anything the art world had seen.

Pollock himself described his process in terms that reveal how physically and psychologically immersive it was:

My painting does not come from the easel. 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 part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

He continued:

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of "get acquainted" period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Critics would later call this "action painting"—the idea that the physical act of painting was as important as the finished product. Others called it "all-over painting" because Pollock treated the entire canvas as a unified field rather than arranging elements in a traditional composition.

In 1956, Time magazine gave him a nickname that captured both his technique and his frenetic energy: "Jack the Dripper."

Where Did the Drip Come From?

The origins of Pollock's technique have been debated extensively. When asked directly, Pollock gave contradictory and sometimes evasive answers.

In 1947, he suggested that he painted on the floor because he had seen Navajo sand painters working that way at the Natural History Museum in New York in 1941. On other occasions, he attributed the practice to "the Orientals." He rarely mentioned David Alfaro Siqueiros, in whose experimental workshop he had first encountered poured and dripped liquid paints back in 1936—five years before his trip to the Natural History Museum.

Art historian Robert Storr has argued that "there is no other experience in his professional life that is equal to the decade that he spent learning from and observing the modern Mexican muralists." The influence was there, whether Pollock acknowledged it or not.

There was also Janet Sobel, a Ukrainian-American artist born Jennie Lechovsky in 1894. Sobel had experimented with dripped and poured paint, and her work was exhibited in Peggy Guggenheim's gallery in 1945. Pollock and Clement Greenberg saw Sobel's paintings there in 1946. Greenberg later wrote that Sobel was "a direct influence on Jackson Pollock's drip painting technique," noting that Pollock himself "admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him."

No artist works in a vacuum. Pollock synthesized influences from Mexican muralists, Navajo sand painters, Jungian psychology, Native American culture, and contemporary artists like Sobel into something distinctly his own. The drip paintings were not conjured from nothing. But they were also not derivative. They were an original vision executed with unprecedented intensity.

Fame, Fortune, and the Weight of Expectation

The Life magazine feature in August 1949 made Pollock a celebrity, which is a dangerous thing for someone struggling with alcoholism and psychological instability.

In March 1952, thanks to the efforts of his friend Alfonso Ossorio and the art historian Michel Tapié, Pollock's work was exhibited in Paris—his first European show, at Paul Facchetti's Studio Paul Facchetti. International recognition followed.

Then, at the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly stopped making drip paintings.

His work after 1951 grew darker. Literally darker—he created a series of paintings in black on unprimed canvas, later referred to as his "Black pourings." When he exhibited these at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, not a single one sold. Parsons eventually sold one to a friend at half price.

These paintings represented Pollock's attempt to find balance between pure abstraction and recognizable imagery. He was restless, searching for something he couldn't quite articulate. He returned to using color and incorporating figurative elements. He moved to the Sidney Janis Gallery, a more commercial operation where collector demand for his work was high.

The pressure was immense. His alcoholism deepened.

The End

By 1956, Pollock and Krasner's marriage was crumbling. His drinking had become uncontrollable. He had begun an affair with another artist, Ruth Kligman.

He painted only two works in 1955—Scent and Search—and nothing at all in 1956. Instead, he spent time at the home of Tony Smith, making sculptures from wire, gauze, and plaster, shaped by sand-casting into heavily textured forms that echoed the surfaces of his paintings. Perhaps he was searching for a new direction. Perhaps he was simply unable to paint.

On the night of August 11, 1956, at 10:15 p.m., Pollock was driving his Oldsmobile convertible less than a mile from his home. He was drunk. Ruth Kligman was in the car, as was another woman, Edith Metzger.

The car crashed.

Pollock died. So did Metzger. Kligman survived.

Lee Krasner was in Europe when she received the news. She returned immediately.

Legacy and the Keeper of the Flame

Four months after Pollock's death, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him a memorial retrospective exhibition. A larger, more comprehensive show followed in 1967. Major retrospectives at MoMA and the Tate Gallery in London in 1998 and 1999 confirmed his place in the canon of twentieth-century art.

For the rest of her life, Lee Krasner managed her late husband's estate with fierce devotion, ensuring that his reputation remained strong even as art world trends shifted away from Abstract Expressionism. She outlived him by nearly three decades.

They are buried together in Green River Cemetery in Springs. His grave is marked by a large boulder. Hers, by a smaller one beside it.

What Made Pollock Different

To understand what Pollock achieved, you need to understand what he rejected.

For centuries, Western painting had followed certain conventions. You stood at an easel. You held a brush. You looked at the canvas from one fixed perspective. You created an image that represented something—a person, a landscape, a story.

Pollock broke every one of these conventions.

By laying the canvas on the floor, he could approach it from all four sides. He could walk around it, work from any angle, "literally be in the painting," as he said. He wasn't representing something external. He was recording the physical movements of his own body—the gestures, the rhythms, the energy of creation itself.

By using liquid house paint instead of traditional artist's oils, he could achieve effects impossible with conventional materials. The paint could be flung in thin arcs, dripped in delicate threads, splattered in explosive bursts. "I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes," he explained. "I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added."

Sand. Broken glass. Foreign matter. These weren't traditional art materials. But Pollock wasn't making traditional art.

Critics were divided. Some saw in his work a revolutionary breakthrough—the liberation of painting from representation, the transformation of the canvas into a record of pure creative energy. Clement Greenberg championed him as the culmination of modernist painting. Others saw chaos, randomness, a fraud perpetrated on a gullible public.

Both camps missed something essential. The drip paintings aren't random. Spend time with them and you'll see intricate structures, carefully controlled rhythms, harmonies of color and line that could only be achieved by an artist with complete command of his technique. "It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess," Pollock said. "Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well."

He knew exactly what he was doing. The appearance of chaos was the result of extraordinary control.

The Tragedy and the Art

Pollock died at forty-four. He was productive for perhaps fifteen years, with only about four of those years devoted to the drip technique that made him famous. He struggled with alcoholism throughout his adult life. He could be violent, destructive, impossible.

It's tempting to romanticize this—to see his art as the product of tormented genius, his self-destruction as the price of creativity. But this narrative does a disservice to both the man and the work. Pollock wasn't great because he was troubled. He was great despite being troubled. The alcoholism didn't fuel his art; it cut short his career and killed him.

What remains are the paintings themselves: vast fields of interlacing lines and colors, records of a body in motion, maps of a mind grappling with chaos and finding, against all odds, moments of pure harmony.

Walk around one. Get close enough to see the individual threads of paint, then step back to take in the whole. Notice how your eye moves across the surface, finding no place to rest, drawn into an endless dance of form and color. This is what Pollock meant when he said the painting has a life of its own.

He let it come through. And then he was gone.