Overview
American artist Jackson Pollock was one of the main exponents of Abstract Expressionism. This art movement developed in two main directions. The first was known as ‘colour-field painting’ and the artist Marc Rothko was its leading exponent. The second school, with which Jackson Pollock was particularly associated, was ‘action painting’ or gesturalism.
(Paul) Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. At the age of seventeen, he moved to New York and studied painting. During the 1930s he painted in the manner of the Regionalists, a group that focused on paintings of American life.
Like many Americans, Pollock spent most of the thirties living in poverty. He got work in a government employment scheme – the Federal Arts Project first as a murals assistant, then later as an easel painter. The project employed artists to decorate public buildings with murals dealing with American subject matter. During this time he came into contact with Mexican mural painters, one of whom was David Sequeiros, whose Experiment Workshop he joined in 1936, and their work was an influence on his.
Pollock had his first exhibition in 1940, when he exhibited with other artists, such as the Abstract Expressionist Willem De Kooning. His first one-man show followed in 1943 at the Art of the Century Gallery, owned by the famous New York patron of the arts, Peggy Guggenheim.
By 1946 Pollock was painting in two distinct styles. The first was characterised by an elegant linear technique, the second by the use of rich impasto painting. Impasto is the process by which paint is applied in thick layers to the surface of the canvas. However, the style for which Jackson Pollock is best known is the ‘drip and splash’ style. This revolutionary technique emerged suddenly in 1947 and involved freely applied paint ‘dripped’ and ‘splashed’ as the central element of the work.
The largest of these ‘drip and splash’ works were painted on the floor of Pollock’s upstairs studio, which was too small to accommodate an easel. However, when he moved to a larger barn to paint, he continued to place his canvases on the floor and work on his knees over and around them.
According to Pollock, working on the floor put him more at ease, ‘I can ... literally be in the painting .... When I am in the painting I am not aware of what I am doing....[T]here is pure harmony.’ (1) Pollock seemed to enjoy this technique – being fully absorbed in the action eliminated any self-consciousness.
Pollock would drip paint onto his canvases with sticks and brushes, using a variety of fluid arm and wrist movements. While the pouring of the paint may appear to have been random, in fact Pollock carefully controlled his ‘dripping’.
After ‘dripping’, Pollock carefully manipulated the paint with sticks, trowels, knives, and even turkey-basters. He sometimes mixed sand, broken glass, and other materials into his paintings. Pollock named these ‘drip and splash’ paintings with numbers rather than titles in order to avoid distracting the viewer with associations that were not relevant to the work.
Pollock married in 1945, and from 1946-50 lived in a small rural community on Long Island, New York, where he produced a series of abstract paintings. These works showed a new freedom, and demonstrated his continuing interest in nature, as the title of such works as Autumn Rhythm suggests. In paintings such as these, Pollock ‘seems to have felt that in the free, unselfconscious act of painting he was giving vent to primal, natural forces.’ (2)
Pollock’s style resulted from the direct expression of his unconscious moods, and as a result was called gestural painting, though in the United States the term ‘action painting’ was used. ‘At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act–rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse, or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.’ (3)
In these paintings Pollock abandoned the traditional idea of composition avoiding any points of emphasis or identifiable areas within the canvas. This was called ‘all-over’ painting. Nevertheless, it is possible to note that the design elements flow from left to right, as if ‘written’ out.
During the 1950s, Pollock produced black and white works as well as paintings in the ‘all-over’ style. However, by late 1952 he was searching for a new breakthrough, and began re-introducing earlier styles and motifs into his work, but with a new power and vigour.
Pollock suffered problems with alcohol throughout his life, though treatment with tranquillisers had controlled this in the 1940s. He started drinking heavily again in 1951, however, and in the following years his health began to fail. Although he produced a few strong paintings and drawings, his mental and physical health declined. During the summer of 1956 he was killed in a car accident. He was aged forty-four.
Though he was severely criticised throughout his lifetime, at the time of his death Pollock was considered one of the leading exponents of Abstract Expressionism. His influence on artists around the world was immense. In 1958, New Zealand artist Colin McCahon visited the United States and saw Autumn Rhythm (Number 30). McCahon painted the Northland Panels later that year.
The Northland Panels were a large work, similar in scale to Pollock’s, and like many of Pollock’s works, were painted with house paint. Pollock’s concept of walking past a work and engaging the viewer influenced McCahon’s treatment of space in the Northland Panels.
References
(1) Stokstad, Marilyn; Grayson, Marion Spears and Addiss, Stephen. (1995). Art History. p 1117.
(2) Stokstad, Grayson and Addiss. (1995). p 1117.
(3) Stokstad, Grayson and Addiss. (1995). p 1116.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database.