Inaugurated abstract expressionism, the revolutionary “action painting” movement that moved the center of the art world from Paris to New York City
Jackson Pollock
(1912–1956)
Long recognized as a radical innovator in government—the first nation founded on a set of concepts (liberty and equality foremost among them), not race, royal line, creation myth, or nationalist tradition—and a consistent innovator in science, industry, and commerce, the United States nevertheless suffered long from a collective inferiority complex when it came to the arts. In the nineteenth century, American authors such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe began to earn international fame. Early in the twentieth century, the American movie industry quickly dominated world cinema, and American jazz gained listeners around the world. But fine art, especially painting, remained largely the province of the Old World, with Paris as its epicenter.
Beyond question, the United States produced many extraordinary visual artists: John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), James McNeill Whistler (1834–1905), Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), and Georgia O’Keefe (1887–1986) all achieved global recognition before the mid-twentieth century.
And yet, Americans persisted in deferring to Old World traditions and arbiters of taste in matters of “fine art” and “high culture.” But after the Nazi threat sent many European intellectuals and artists fleeing to safer countries like the United States, and World War II left the continent in shambles, the Old World was no longer the sole arbiter of culture. After the war, Europe and the rest of the world increasingly looked to America for direction in the arts.
As it happened, in the postwar years, the art scene in New York City was developing a challenging, exciting school of art that was dramatic and disruptive enough to command the attention of the world. The artists who would come to be known as the “New York School” or, more generally, as abstract expressionists developed an approach to painting that broke dramatically with the artistic traditions of the past, not only in terms of subject and technique, but in the ways in which art was conceived and thought about.
The group was surprisingly diverse, as the works of its most famous exponents—Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, and Jackson Pollock—attest. But the artists were all united by the intensity of their lofty metaphysical ambition. In the middle of a century in which two world wars had already discredited traditions, torn down myths, shattered illusions, and left behind cruel and heartbreaking images of a grim new reality, they intended to find a fresh and redemptive truth in art. Rather than attempt to imitate—to represent—in painting the world beyond the canvas, these artists used the elements of art itself—form, line, and color—to both purely and directly convey emotion, myth, and symbol, ultimately to convey the very act of living. With the shell of life shattered, they sought a return to the varied energies of life itself.
The task, then, was to connect these raw energies without mediation, other than the mind and hand of the artist, with the canvas or the panel. Foremost among the artists of this movement was Jackson Pollock. It was he who first broke through the screen of outworn culture.
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He was far from being a product of New York or of any other part of the long-settled East Coast. Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912, still very much a frontier town at the time. Before Jackson was a year old, his mother, Stella May (McClure) Pollock, left her husband, LeRoy, an itinerant government land surveyor, and moved Jackson and his four brothers to San Diego. Jackson grew up there and in Arizona, where his mother briefly reunited with his father. By the time Jackson was eight, his father lived with his family only very intermittently. When the Pollocks moved to the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, it was without LeRoy. Essentially fatherless, Jackson, restless and ungovernable, was expelled from two high schools.
The young man did remain in touch with his father and, as a teenager, left his mother and brothers to tramp with him on surveying jobs. These were happy excursions for Jackson, and, among other things, introduced him to the art and culture of Native Americans in the Southwest.
Still, he had a vague sense that his future lay elsewhere. In 1930, he followed his older brother Charles to New York City, where they both enrolled at the Art Students League. They studied under the great Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. It was a critical connection for Jackson. Although he had little feeling for Benton’s Midwestern rural subjects, he was intensely attracted to the painter’s brushwork. It was far from conventionally or straightforwardly “realistic,” but, rather, rhythmical, primal, swirling. Benton’s work pulsated with a living energy. What may have impressed Pollock even more strongly was the example Benton presented as an artist: impatient, gruff, and aloof, yet hard working and, most of all, uncompromising in his independence from the ebb and flow of aesthetic fashions around him. With Benton and fellow Art Students League pupil Glen Rounds, Pollock devoted one summer touring the West, both observing and painting.
Benton was crucial to Pollock’s early development, but he was an artist with whom Pollock identified as much in opposition as inspiration. It was in 1936, while participating in an experimental workshop conducted in New York City by the radical Mexican political muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974), that he found the catalyst for the approach that would make him world famous. Siqueiros introduced Pollock to the technique of applying paint not with a brush, but by pouring. What appealed to Pollock about this was the direct linkage of action and the artwork.
He did not immediately exploit the technique, however. From 1938 to 1942, Pollock worked for the Depression-era WPA Federal Art Project, creating work that owed much more to Benton than Siqueiros or anyone else. It was also during this period that Pollock recognized that he was heavily dependent on alcohol, an addiction he endeavored to overcome by consulting two Jungian psychoanalysts. One, Dr. Joseph Henderson, encouraged him to attempt to surface his unconscious mind through drawing and painting. In works of the first two or three years of the 1940s, Jungian “archetypes”—graphic elements of the human collective unconscious—figure prominently in his work. The paintings gained notice from Peggy Guggenheim, the eminent and very forward-looking New York collector and gallerist. In 1943, she signed a gallery contract with Pollock and commissioned him to create Mural (1943), a vast canvas eight feet high by twenty feet long, which she hung in the entryway of her new townhouse.
An extraordinary “early” work, Mural hangs today in the University of Iowa Museum of Art. It is a hybrid of non-representative abstraction and shorthand Jungian-inspired images, but what stands out most clearly are the fluid rhythms, which mark it as a work driven by the action of painting, the artist’s living, breathing engagement with the canvas. Clement Greenberg, the most influential art critic of the period—and a man to whom Pollock would owe much of his breakthrough recognition—declared that he “took one look at it and . . . thought, ‘Now that’s great art.’” He said that, from this first contact, he “knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced.”
Through the 1940s, Jackson turned to paint-pouring. But in 1947, he began using paint brushes and, sometimes, stirring sticks to drip rather than pour paint. This was what Greenberg and others began to call “action painting,” and by the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, Pollock set aside palette, brushes, and easel altogether. Working in a barn on farmland he bought on Long Island, he laid large, raw, unprimed canvases flat on the floor, and dripped and splattered paint on them without ever directly contacting the surface. (“Jack the Dripper,” the newspapers and magazines would call him.) Although this would seem a random method, it was anything but. Instead, it was a graphic record of human action, of movement, emotion, passion, and rhythm, unfettered by externally imposed regulations, including “regulation” by conscious thought and plan.
It was also connected to the venerable American tradition of men and women who challenged the status quo, often at their peril. Pollock was in a long line that had begun with early American religious reformers like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, who elevated individual spiritual freedom over orthodox theology. His challenge to earlier artistic assumptions and rules is part of the same tradition in which Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson challenged concepts of conventional literature, philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce and William James challenged outworn intellectual systems, and architects like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright challenged sacrosanct historical precedents in building.
Pollock and the other members of the New York School—including his brilliant wife, the abstract expressionist painter Lee Krasner—absorbed all that had come before them, but only to interrogate and challenge it the more thoroughly. Neither “abstraction” nor “expressionism” was new. The combination—abstract expressionism—was radical in that it freed expression from abstraction, and what was “expressed” was nothing more or less than the artist’s engagement with the surface of the canvas. It was the equivalent of modern jazz in paint. It was a record of the action of expression. It was the liberation of art from the world of non-art in which it was created.
The work he and the other abstract expressionists created became itself a benchmark that those who followed have embraced, used, transformed, and, in some cases, angrily renounced as a dead end unconnected to the world.
The August 8, 1949, issue of Life Magazine featured a profile of Pollock under the headline “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” For some, the answer was simple and obvious: No. As some found modern music so much noise, some thought Pollock and his colleagues were creators of so much paint. Nevertheless, this maverick painter received a level of popular recognition accorded very few American artists.
For Pollock, his genius and fame came with a heavy cost. He never outran his alcoholic demons. His drinking may have been a symptom of bipolar disease—or, perhaps, a self-medicating attempt to hold the disease at bay. All that is known for certain is that his behavior by the mid-1950s—the height of his commercial success and international acclaim—grew increasingly erratic, even violent. On August 11, 1956, at 10:15 in the evening, he was driving—very drunk—with his mistress, the painter Ruth Kligman, and her friend Edith Metzger. His Oldsmobile convertible veered off a Long Island country road less than a mile from his home. He was killed, along with Metzger; Kligman survived. His estranged wife, Lee Krasner, devoted much of her own life thereafter to administering her husband’s estate and considerable artistic legacy.