possibly nine times before Pollock was 16. This unstable living pattern gave way to multiple factors in Pollock’s life, and may have ultimately led to his rampant alcoholism. There is not as much known about his life after age nine, which is when his father abandoned his family, it was during this that his mother became major figure in his life and pushed her children to love culture. It was during this early age in the rough times that Pollock learned to love nature and the landscape he was in that helped shape his artistic ambition. When Pollock was living in Los Angeles, he was attending the Manual Arts High School. This is where he was exposed to theosophical ideas that led to his later work and interest in Surrealism and psychoanalysis that contributed greatly to his later work. By 1930 he had been expelled from Manual Arts High School and ended up moving to New York, like his brother Charlie Pollock had, and joined the Art Students League of New York where he studied under Thomas Hart Benton with his brother. It was here where Pollock was inspired by Benton’s use of rhythmic painting along with Hart’s very independent style and most likely became a stand in father figure. It was also here that Pollock began his interest in murals with Benton supporting it, ultimately meeting Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, both popular Mexican muralists that gave major influence on Pollock, especially in the field of murals. During the early 1930’s, Pollock began traveling through the United States with his brother Charlie and Benton, getting influence from the areas that created regionalism art like his painting Going West, but ended up going back to New York by 1934 and settling down again. In 1936, Pollock met Lenore (Lee) Krasner for a brief amount of time, which ended up being some of the most calmed moments of Pollock’s life. By 1938, Pollock’s alcoholism was pushing him to the point where he tried Jungian psychotherapy for years, to which the doctors involved had him make drawings and paintings, many Jungian concepts showed up in different and more shaped was in his works. During this time, Pollock was also working with the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project as his source of income. After the project ended in 1943, he had to find other work and ended up becoming a custodian at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, there he met Peggy Guggenheim who eventually had Pollock submit his work to her new gallery, Art of the Century. This led to a contract between the two for Pollock to submit more work, even having his own solo gallery that did well with critics. The impact that the Jungian therapy had seems to be most prominent in his work Male and Female, a heavy distortion of the human form and a great example of Abstract Expressionist art. This work seems to show the influence that other artists such as Pablo Picasso had on Pollock, along with the ideas he had while under the therapy. This work ended up becoming one of his iconic pieces that mixed Surrealism and Cubism to a grand extent.
During the early 1940’s, and after seeing Male and Female, Guggenheim commissioned Pollock to do a work for her apartment, this work ended up becoming the twenty foot long Mural, one of his first major works that garnered major fame and also a transitioning piece to his now well-known drip style despite still showing his earlier style of using strong bold lines and movements of color.
During this time and after Mural, his primary style did a full shift to being increasingly more abstract, and by 1947 he was dripping and splashing paint on the canvas regularly. This was the start of his major rise to fame in the art world. Back in 1945, Krasner and Pollock were now married and were looking for a home and a studio to work in. They moved out of New York and arrived in the town of The Springs, of East Hampton and secured a farmhouse with the help of Guggenheim. During this period he had also supposedly become somewhat …show more content…
sober.
It was here at this studio in The Springs that Pollock began to lay the canvas out on the floor or against a wall to have his paint drip directly on, which he described as putting himself more into the painting because it allowed him to walk on it and work on it from an entirely new perspective. He would then start using more unconventional tools such as knives, trowels, and sticks. Pollock showed that he was beginning to move further away from the usual artist tools and began to incorporate sand, broken glass, and more foreign matter into his work, also letting some things just become a part of it like cigarette ash and insects that would get stuck in the paint.
With his style and production changing, he created one of his first full drip pieces that was laid out on the floor, Full Fathom Five. This work fully encapsulates his notion of being in the painting, as it small bits and pieces of other objects in it that can only be seen up very close as it is disguised by the many layers of dense paint that covers the canvas. The piece conveys almost a web across it that creates a sort of unity with all the black and various other colors. This work would become the most well-known masterpiece of the early life of his drip style.
Various individuals, including Krasner and Guggenheim, saw the brilliance and potential that Pollock’s new style had started to show and they knew that his work would change many ideas about the substance of a painting.
With this, they began to show off the work more and more to many other studios and artists and it was catching the eyes of nearly everyone from the strong and provocative message his work was able to convey. Soon after, Life magazine found his work and published the article “JACKSON POLLOCK, Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” and with that article, Pollock became well-known but not always praised as there was still a lot criticism for having such an odd style, he still kept praise from dedicated supporters. This led to a lack of collectors for his art at the time. As word spread of what he was creating, no matter the reviews or what people thought of it, his work was becoming a major icon of the abstract for that
time. The refinement after Full Fathom Five led to his works like Number One, or Lavender Mist, one of his true masterpieces created at the height of his popularity, the year 1950. The overall tone of the piece is very soft; Pollock had only utilized a few colors to create this work, instead allowing the piece to blend its own colors, and in doing so he left leaving no true point to focus on, which became one of his strongest aspects as he has said before that he creates interest across the entirety of his work. The coloring is done where it can achieve the look of energy without any bright vivid colors, and the aluminum paint that he used created an almost glowing or moving effect. With swift but strong movements, Pollock had created an actively simple but complex piece that engages his unique style to its fullest extent. Pollock had continued to produce these works but in late 1950 began to drink again. This slope created a shift in his artistic design, he continued to use his drip technique but began to use more black and white, as evident in his 1953 piece, The Deep. This work shows a balance of black and white by creating a lot of varying levels of gray that came together to display joy and purity but also showed death from the black in the center of the piece that stands out boldly. The year 1953 ended up being the last year that Pollock would have been a productive artist. As time went on, he ended up leaving the gallery he worked with and was having issues finding a new one due to his current reputation. Everything that had been happening in his life was starting to come down on him and in 1954 he had painting very little, to which he had claimed that he had nothing left to say. His relationship with Krasner was also being strained by this time due to the prolonged issues in Pollock's life, and in 1956 Krasner had taken a trip to Europe to be away from Pollock. At this time Pollock had now met a young artist named Ruth Kligman at the bar he would usually go to and they began a relationship together. Then it was on the fateful night of August 11, 1956, just a few months after meeting Kligman, that Pollock was out driving drunk with Kligman and one of her friends, Edith Metzger, where Pollock lost control of the car and crashed. This killed Pollock and Metzger, but seriously injured Kligman to which she did heal from. Kligman ended up only a year later start a relationship with Willem de Kooning, a major artistic rival to Pollock. After Krasner inherited Pollock's estate, she brought it on herself to market Pollock's work and help create the postmortem fame that Pollock garnered and deserved. Pollock's influence became very potent and widespread due to his brilliant work in redefining abstract art, particularly Cubism and Surrealism and having less figurative imagery, having such a hand in showing what an abstract expressionist could do. This influenced many modern artists to come and was a contributor of the minimalist movement during the 1960's due to his expressions of how the paint interacts with the canvas. His effect is still felt in today’s media and advertisement in how information is presented and received. Many artists today still recite Pollock as being a strong inspiration for their work and ideas. The drip style, his most defining style, which has also been called “action painting”, was shown to be controversial but impacting. It changed how someone could view a painting, how they could gather feelings from it. This combined with the large canvas he would use brought a truly unique experience that is hard to capture in pictures. The large paintings he created have an effect on people who see it because of how grand and almost intimidating it appears and people can see exactly how much effort was put in to create so much with no true focal point, which allowed those who gaze upon it respect even more. Pollock and his work was never fully appreciated until after his death in 1956. To this day he is still known as a leader and innovator in the styles he practiced and perfected, and his works became more openly well-known and valued. His life was hard and full of demons, but the way he translated that into his art became why he was so important to the modern world. Pollock has been the subject of many biographies and has even had the award winning movie “Pollock” made in his honor that showed his life and struggles. As time grows on, the respect people garner for his work and contribution to the art world only increases, cementing Jackson Pollock as one of the most iconic American painters of all time, and one of the most iconic abstract artists of all time, bringing true light to the article that Life had once published.