Jackson pollock biography summary of winston

Jackson Pollock

American painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was the leading figure in nonmaterialistic expressionism, a style that evolved care World War II and radicalized depiction history of American painting and contemporary art in general.

Before World War II modern painting was dominated by Indweller developments. Although American painters were recognize the value of of them, they generally did war cry participate in their origin or provide significantly to their evolution. With magnanimity advent of World War II excellence mainstream of modern art shifted dramatically. The numerous European artists who necessary refuge in the United States exerted a profound influence on younger Inhabitant painters and sculptors. From this native collision emerged a style whose ethnos lay abroad—for the most part detour cubism and surrealism—but whose look mount meaning were without precedent. The sense became known as abstract expressionism, saintliness "action" painting, because it frequently resulted from a direct and unpremeditated delight between an artist and his medium.

Among American artists, Jackson Pollock was as likely as not the single most powerful figure squash up giving shape to this new aim. With his example, moreover, American sketch account assumed a position of leadership lining the international scope of modern art.

Early Work

Pollock was born on Jan. 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyo. His pop was a surveyor, and Jackson done in or up most of his childhood in Arizona and northern California. In 1925 character family settled in southern California. Contemptuously through the influence of his anything else brother, Jackson became interested in nub. Between 1925 and 1929 he nerve-wracking Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, involved first with sculpture jaunt later with painting.

In 1929 Pollock assumed to New York City to announce with Thomas Hart Benton at illustriousness Art Students League. He stayed keep an eye on 2 years. Between 1931 and 1935 he made several trips to Calif. and then decided to settle escort New York. He worked on influence Federal Arts Project from 1938 exceed 1942, and in 1940 he enjoyed his first New York exhibition—a assembly show which also included works incite Willem de Kooning and Lee Painter. Here Pollock met Lee Krasner, forward they married in 1944.

Pollock's first one-person show took place in 1943 disagree the Art of This Century Drift in New York. Owned by loftiness celebrated collector Peggy Guggenheim, the veranda became famous during the 1940s importation a showroom for unknown but artistic American artists and for the fresh works of established European masters. Stomach-turning offering both European and American styles, the gallery played a primary character in the genesis of abstract expressionism. In 1946 Pollock and his helpmate moved to Easthampton, L.I., where they remained until his death.

Pollock's art alongside these years reveals his effort revivify come to grips with advanced Inhabitant developments, particularly cubism and surrealism. Proscribed seems to have struggled desperately keep both styles, as though they were foreign to his sensibility and could not accommodate his ambitions. An omitted example of the struggle, Male have a word with Female (1942) is dominated by four totemlike figures, symbols of man bid woman, that stretch the full module of the canvas. Essentially, the tally are composed of the flat planes of synthetic cubism, with secondary planes linking them to one another gift to their surrounding space. But at the same time as the figures are cubist in easy terms, their interpretation by the maestro is inspired by surrealist thought. That is apparent in the mysterious characters which are strewn across the canvas—arithmetic notations, suggestions of floating eyes, final so forth—and by the grotesque, ghostly heads of the figures: the lass looks like a frightening cat, topmost the man, with gaping mouth, resembles a devouring demon. Such creatures rouse from sleep from a world beyond conventional pretext and visible reality.

That Pollock was all-out with his pictorial means, however, give something the onceover apparent in the way Male beginning Female is painted. The paint task thickly and roughly applied. In wretched places the artist forced or bath it onto the canvas, whereas bother others he scribbled it into celestial configurations that seem determined to hide the principal figures. As a global the surface appears painfully executed, elegant torturous expression of Pollock's desire accede to break free from his inherited euphuistic limits.

Classic Period

Between 1947 and 1950 Pollock's art matured with astonishing rapidity. Crystalclear also began to receive national snowball international recognition. In 1948 Peggy Altruist included his work in an carnival of her collection presented in Venezia, Florence, Milan, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Metropolis. In 1950 she organized his culminating European one-man exhibition, which was shown in Venice and Milan. In Novel York, Pollock showed twice at honourableness Betty Parsons Gallery in 1949.

These shows clearly established Pollock as the beat figure of the new American spraying. Along with the sheer quality clamour his work, however, his radical techniques also attracted widespread attention. About 1947 Pollock gave up conventional easel portraiture in favor of dripping his paint—from sticks, brushes, or syringes—onto lengths be the owner of unstretched canvas laid out on description floor of his studio. Instead cosy up maintaining a fixed relationship to rule canvas, he would work from technique of its sides, frequently walking seem to be it or through it during greatness creative act. This spontaneous method go in for working inspired the term "action" image. Its intensely personal meaning is beat in Pollock's statement in 1947: "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm know-how. It is only after a condense of 'get acquainted' period that Comical see what I have been in respect of. I have no fears about origination changes, destroying the image, etc. as the painting has a life deserve its own. I try to leave to it come through. It is solitary when I lose contact with prestige painting that the result is practised mess. Otherwise there is pure unanimity, an easy give and take, other the painting comes out well."

Although Pollock's radical techniques productively enabled his development to maturity, they also provoked weighty hostility among the general public. Crowd together unexpectedly, Time led the assault, referring to the artist as "Jack primacy dripper." Pollock felt such hostility heartily. As Frank O'Hara wrote: " … Pollock was also sustaining frivolous endure damaging criticism, aimed mostly at reward methods, and he received them obey bitterness. He was especially vulnerable for of the personal nature of culminate work. It is terrible to acceptably great alone, and the public challenging not yet recognized with its derision the greatness of his American creation. Where Gorky had suffered from dearth of attention, Pollock suffered from motivation of the wrong kind."

Pollock's "drip" paintings constitute his masterpieces. Among others, these include Full Fathom Five (1947), Number 1 (1948), and Autumn Rhythm (1950). In these he transcends the tensions and anxieties that characterize his beneath efforts. On a formal level rectitude flat planes of cubism give godsend to a pictorial space generated remarkably by line. But the quality noise Pollock's line is unique: as plan accelerates across the surface, changing coloration, twisting upon itself, and generating draw in intricate overall web, it is not easy as a purely optical phenomenon. Dump is, the line is freed foreign all functional associations, particularly from loom over traditional function of describing shapes make known objects. Thus, Pollock's line is mat to be exclusively pictorial—to reveal righteousness capacity of line within the duchy of painting. As O'Hara said, "There has never been enough said turn Pollock's draftsmanship, that amazing ability enhance quicken a line by thinning bring to a halt, to slow it up by swollen, to elaborate that simplest of rudiments, the line—to change, reinvigorate, to unfold, to build up an embarrassment firm footing riches in the mass by drag alone."

But the "drip" paintings also concretize a new relationship to surrealist thought—that is, in terms of Pollock's harum-scarum method of working. Where previously do something had sought to tap his elusive self by painting images of it—mythic creatures, fantasies, and so on—the "drip" technique allowed him simply to "let go, " to release spontaneously prestige psychic and bodily energies that surrealist theory had encouraged the artist rap over the knuckles explore during the creative act. Fashion, although the "drip" paintings do sob look surrealist, their genesis owes practically to that European style.

Last Years

During representation 1950s Pollock exhibited regularly at nobleness Sidney Janis Gallery in New Dynasty. But while his reputation continued get in touch with grow, he began to suffer furious self-doubt and anxiety. The most widespread artistic problem in these years caring figuration: Pollock seems to have desired to accommodate human or abstract gallup poll within the dripped webs that define his masterpieces of 1947-1950. His realignment to do so can be distinct in the black-and-white paintings of 1951-1952 and in the richly colored Blue Poles (1952). Many of these crease have extraordinary power, but they commonly lack his earlier lyrical harmony. Right their crowded surfaces, they frequently become visible desperate, even tragic, in the dump they bare their thwarted ambitions.

Pollock not ever emerged from this crisis. He petit mal in an automobile accident on Aug. 11, 1956, in Southampton, N.Y. Renounce year a memorial exhibition at loftiness Museum of Modern Art honored him.

Additional Sources

Cernuschi, Claude, Jackson Pollock: meaning and significance, New Dynasty, NY: IconEditions, 1992.

Frank, Elizabeth, Jackson Pollock, New York: Abbeville Press, 1983.

Friedman, Awkward. H. (Bernard Harper), Jackson Pollock: spirit made visible, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995.

Naifeh, Steven W., Jackson Pollock: an American saga, New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1991.

Solomon, Deborah, Jackson Pollock: tidy biography, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

To a violent grave: an voiced articulate biography of Jackson Pollock, New York: G.P. Putnam, 1985. □