Jackson Pollock

American, 1912–1956

Jackson Pollock's mythic reputation rests largely on the artistic breakthrough of his large paintings made from 1947 to 1951, as well as on his dramatic life and death.

The fifth and youngest son in a struggling farming family, Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, and grew up with his four brothers in Arizona and California. Although family resources were limited, his determined mother fostered artistic potential in each of her children (three became artists). Pollock began his art training in Los Angeles at the Manual Arts High School, from which he was ultimately expelled because of his rebellious nature. In 1930, at the age of eighteen, he joined his older brother Charles in New York at the Art Students League. Both brothers studied with Thomas Hart Benton, the leading American Scene painter and, by that time, a staunch opponent of European modernism. Pollock absorbed Benton's technique of focusing his compositions around canted vertical elements. Later this method would lead Pollock in new artistic directions that would redefine the course of modern art.

Pollock's complex imagery derived from diverse sources including Navajo sand painting, Asian calligraphy, Picasso’s more violent imagery, and personal revelations stemming from his Jungian psychotherapy sessions. From the 1930s to the early 1940s, while working for the Federal Arts Project and assisting the revolutionary Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, Pollock's style evolved from a dark, turbulent form of regionalism to a more freely rendered abstract expressionism. By 1943 he had his first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery, an instrumental showcase for artists working in the vanguard. Two years later he married artist Lee Krasner and settled on Long Island. During the next decade Pollock developed his monumentally influential "poured" paintings by dripping and flinging intricate layers of paint all over his canvases, which were hailed by the influential critic Clement Greenberg. Despite his fame and some commerical success, Pollock was plagued by psychological instability and alcoholism. He died in a violent single-car crash near his home in 1956.

Courtesy National Gallery of Art

COURTESY OF MARTHA HOLMES/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY.