How Did Jackson Pollock Contribute To Art

Jackson Pollock is an artist who is commonly acknowledged as someone who helped pave the path for contemporary artists. Pollock turned life and circumstance into a visual representation, giving way to ultimate expression and subjectivity. Jackson Pollock had many influences in his life: family (or lack thereof), teachers, friends, and other artists who all contributed to his work in some way. These influences of Pollock were a cocktail that helped to produce some of the greatest examples of modern art in the world, recycling inspiration and influence to newer artists then and now. Naturally, to understand Pollock you must come to know his very beginnings. Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming to his parents Stella and Leroy. Not much proof of Leroy’s involvement in Jackson or his siblings’ lives can be found after the first few years of his life. His father battled alcoholism, and the time that he was present in Jackson’s life was full of instabilities. Subsequently he was raised by his mother with some steady guidance from his older brother and he was very awkward and had already battled his own bout of alcoholism by the age of fifteen. By sixteen, he had been sent to Manual Arts School in California where he had been exposed to the Psycho Therapy of Carl Jung. Jackson had two brothers that were artist themselves. Right before the start of
the Great Depression they had moved to New York City to pursue their art (Solomon, 11-13). It wasn’t long after that Jackson decided to join his brothers Charles and Sande. When he got to New York he studied under Thomas Hart Benton, who would be a huge role model to him throughout the next few years of his life. This is where you can start to analyze Pollock’s rising career. Thomas Hart Benton was a Regionalist painter who, like Pollock, was born in the midwest as well. He was born to a military father who didn’t foresee art as a real career and wanted him to be a politician like himself. When Benton moved to New York after going to the Chicago Art Institute, he developed his rural American style of painting. Looking at an early Pollock work entitled Landscape With Steer you can see the influence of Benton in his work. A narrative, rural style work. Benton became a very close friend and father figure of Jackson Pollock which he desperately needed. He was always going back and forth between the light and dark in his life, and he found a family in Benton’s family before having a breakdown and threatening Benton’s wife; after that he was no longer welcome to stay with the family. Thomas Hart Benton left New York for another job, and just as soon as that happened Jackson dropped that style of painting that he had picked up from Benton.
Pollock was invited to an exhibition where he meet Lee Krasner. She wound up being his girlfriend and then wife, and was someone who understood him in ways others couldn’t (Landau 23). They shared an apartment in the city and she was very caring and nurturing of Pollock, something that he hadn’t experienced in most of his life, and she encouraged him and introduced him to other artists. Along with influences from Krasner, he was interested in Jungian
Psychotherapy. Carl Jung was interested in interpreting dreams as such as they were a form of dream fulfillment. According to Jung your unconscious and consciousness were together called your “psyche” and you can break them up as the personal unconscious, the conscious, and the collective unconscious. These are all together filled with perceptions and memories. The consciousness is how we view ourselves, but the unconscious, according to Jung, is more influential to our behavior. The Surrealists like Joan Miro before Jackson Pollock’s New York School of Abstract expressionists inspired him to consider the unconscious and archetypal elements. At the same time Pollock was living with Krasner he was having therapy with Dr. Joseph Henderson. At these therapy sessions there wasn’t much talking, but Pollock would do these psychoanalytic drawings that Henderson would analyze (About Jungian..). During this time period of therapy and new romance he created a painting, Male and Female. Looking at this painting you see two figures, one male and female. The figure on the left being a female and the one on the right male. Another thing that Pollock got from Jungian Theory was that pieces of your personality come together to make pairs of opposites which attract and form complex relationships. You can look at these opposites in examples like good and bad or male and female as well as many others. The figure on the left is the female figure. It shows roundness and that is a symbolism in imagery associated with the female and fertility. The right figure, the male figure is square and rigid and also has letters and numbers inside of it as symbols of the idea that males are more logical than females are. If you look closer to the lower part of the male figure you see a cloud of blue and white paint swirling and that might also hint to ejaculation(Emmerling 40). Many people saw the painting male and female, but perhaps one of the most important people to see it was Peggy Guggenheim. Once she saw this painting she commissioned Jackson Pollock to do something for her apartment. Jackson Pollock thought back to his inspiration from Mexican muralist David Siqueiros and created Mural for Peggy Guggenheim (Emmerling 10). This is the bridge in Pollock’s work that took him from figurative early works to abstraction. In Mural, Jackson mimics the size and movement of a traditional mural as it measures nearly eight feet high by twenty feet wide and is one of his first large scale works. Mixtures of lines of red, yellow, green, and white work across the canvas to make figure like impressions that look like they are swaying and moving across the canvas, a strong visually obvious influence from Siqueiros’s The March of Humanity. Meeting Peggy Guggenheim put Jackson Pollock in the circle of the New York School comprised of artists such as Arshille Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman and others. Not only did he become acquainted with the new New York avant-garde he also was noticed by critics. Pollock would hang out with these artists in bars in the village, it would be there where he destroyed his sobriety he had built, he then moved away from the city to East Hampton where he developed his famous drip and pouring method that would later be coined as just “the drip method”, and this was his major breakthrough. He began to paint with his canvas on the floor and drip paint onto the canvas as he was walking around it, in some cases you can see his foot imprints in the canvas from him stepping onto it or over it. This method led to the creations of paintings such as Autumn Rhythm and Lavender Mist (Emmerling 91). Everyone at this time recognized this is as something that would change art into something that was less about the production of art and more about the act of painting and producing it. Looking closer at Lavender Mist which was created when he was basically at the height of career. He uses a combination of colors that give of a tone of Lavender without actually using purple in on the canvas at all. The usage of industrial paints give off a faint illumination. There’s no traditional perspective, and the whole painting is positive space. Not long after creating that painting and sinking back into his alcoholism, Pollock passed away. The emergence of Pop Art was happening and they were heavily criticizing of the emotional and psychological weight of his art, but took inspiration and influence from the action of his painting as art began to minimalize. Even his fellow artist such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko borrowed things from him such as large scale work and importance of color and texture in paintings (Fineberg, 97-8). Even in contemporary art now his work is emulated by artists, especially graffiti artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat or Johnny “Crash” Matos.