The Life of Artist Jackson Pollock
An American painter who was a leader in Abstract Expressionism, an art movement signified by the impulsive gestures in paint sometimes referred to as “action painting.” In his lifetime he received widespread criticism and top recognition for the unconventional “poured” or “drip” technique he used to create his unforgettable paintings. From his contemporaries, he was acknowledged for his deeply personal and wholly indestructible martyrdom to the art. His art had exceptional impact on other artists and on various later art movements in the United States. He was also one of the first American painters to be honoured in his life and after his passing as a peer of 20th-century European leaders of revolutionary art.
Early life and work
Paul Jackson Pollock was the fifth and youngest son of Stella May McClure and LeRoy Pollock, who were both of Scotch-Irish ancestry (LeRoy’s original surname was McCoy before his adoption around 1890 by the family Pollock) and he was born and grew up in Iowa. The family moved away from Cody, Wyoming, 11 months after Jackson’s birth; he would know Cody only by his family photographs. In the next sixteen years they lived in California and Arizona, though going on to relocate nine times. In 1928 the Pollocks moved to Los Angeles, where the boy enrolled at the Manual Arts High School. There he was mentored by Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, a painter and illustrator who also belonged to the Theosophical Society, a sect that promoted metaphysical and occult spirituality. Schwankovsky taught Pollock some rudimentary training in drawing and painting, introduced him to highly sophisticated currents of European contemporary art, and encouraged his understanding in theosophical works. At this time, Pollock – who had been raised as an agnostic – went to the camp meetings of the premier messiah of the theosophists, Jiddu Krishnamurti, a close friend of Schwankovsky. The spiritual explorations prepared him to recognise the work of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and the use of unconscious imagery in his pieces of following years.
In 1930 Pollock followed his brother Charles who in 1922 had left home to study art in NYC, and enrolled at the Art Students League under his brother’s teacher, the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. (Jackson left off his Christian name, Paul, at his time in New York.) He studied life drawing, painting, and composition with Benton for the following 2 and 1/2 years, leaving the league in the early quarter of 1933. For the next two years Pollock lived in poverty, at first with Charles and, by the 1934 fall, with his brother Sanford. He shared an apartment in Greenwich Village with Sanford and his wife until 1942.
Pollock was employed by the WPA Federal Art Project in 1935 as an easel painter. This employment granted him economic security throughout the last years of the Great Depression as well as the ability to further his art. From his study with Benton through 1938, Pollock’s art was deeply impacted by the compositional methods and regionalist subject matter of his teacher and by the poetic expressionist vision of the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. It portrayed largely small landscapes and figurative scenes like Going West, in which Pollock used motifs inspired from family photographs of his birthplace at Cody.
In 1937 Pollock began psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, and he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1938, which caused him to be institutionalized for about four months. After these experiences, his work became semiabstract and showed the assimilation of motifs from the modern Spanish artists Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro, as well as the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco. Jungian symbolism and the Surrealist exploration of the unconscious also influenced his works of this period; indeed, from 1939 through 1941 he was in treatment with two successive Jungian psychoanalysts who used Pollock’s own drawings in the therapy sessions.
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