^
Born on 29 January 1912: Jackson
Pollock, US Abstract
Expressionist painter who died on 11 August 1956.
— Pollock was the commanding figure of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
He began to study painting in 1929 at the Art Students’ League, New York,
under the Regionalist painter Thomas
Hart Benton. During the 1930s he worked in the manner of the Regionalists,
being influenced also by the Mexican muralist painters (Orozco,
Rivera,
Siqueiros)
and by certain aspects of Surrealism.
From 1938 to 1942 he worked for the Federal
Art Project. By the mid 1940s he was painting in a completely abstract manner,
and the ‘drip and splash’ style for which he is best known emerged with
some abruptness in 1947. Instead of using the traditional easel he affixed
his canvas to the floor or the wall and poured and dripped his paint from
a can; instead of using brushes he manipulated it with ‘sticks, trowels
or knives’ (to use his own words), sometimes obtaining a heavy impasto by
an admixture of ‘sand, broken glass or other foreign matter'. This manner
of Action painting (“tachisme” in French) had in common with Surrealist
theories of automatism that it was supposed by artists and critics alike
to result in a direct expression or revelation of the unconscious moods
of the artist.
Pollock's name is also associated with the
introduction of the All-over style of painting which avoids any points of
emphasis or identifiable parts within the whole canvas and therefore abandons
the traditional idea of composition in terms of relations among parts. The
design of his painting had no relation to the shape or size of the canvas
— indeed in the finished work the canvas was sometimes docked or trimmed
to suit the image. All these characteristics were important for the new
US painting which matured in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
During the 1950s Pollock continued to produce
figurative or quasi-figurative black and white works and delicately modulated
paintings in rich impasto as well as the paintings in the new all-over style.
He was strongly supported by advanced critics, but was also subject to much
abuse and sarcasm as the leader of a still little comprehended style; in
1956 Time magazine called him ‘Jack the Dripper’. By
the 1960s, however, he was generally recognized as the most important figure
in the most important movement of this century in American painting, but
a movement from which artists were already in reaction (Post-Painterly Abstraction).
His unhappy personal life (he was an alcoholic) and his premature death
in a car crash contributed to his legendary status. In 1944 Pollock married
Lee Krasner (1911-84), who was an Abstract Expressionist painter of some
distinction, although it was only after her husband's death that she received
serious critical recognition.
— Breaking the ice
It was Jackson Pollock who blazed an astonishing
trail for other Abstract Expressionist painters to follow. De Kooning said,
“He broke the ice”, an enigmatic phrase suggesting that Pollock
showed what art could become with his 1947 drip paintings. It has been suggested
that Pollock was influenced by Native American sand paintings, made by trickling
thin lines of colored sand onto a horizontal surface. It was not until 1947
that Pollock began his “action” paintings, influenced by Surrealist
ideas of “psychic automatism” (direct expression of the unconscious).
Pollock would fix his canvas to the floor and drip paint from a can using
a variety of objects to manipulate the paint. The Moon-Woman Cuts the
Circle (1943; 110x104cm) is an early Pollock, but it shows the passionate
intensity with which he pursued his personal vision. This painting is based
on a North American Indian myth. It connects the moon with the feminine
and shows the creative, slashing power of the female psyche. It is not easy
to say what we are actually looking at: a face rises before us, vibrant
with power, though perhaps the image does not benefit from labored explanations.
If we can respond to this art at a fairly primitive level, then we can also
respond to a great abstract work such as Lavender Mist. If we cannot, at
least we can appreciate the fusion of colors and the Expressionist feeling
of urgency that is communicated. Moon-Woman may be a feathered harridan
or a great abstract pattern; the point is that it works on both levels.
— In 1947, influential art critic Clement Greenberg wrote the following
in the English magazine Horizon: "The most powerful painter in
contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one is
a Gothic, morbid, and extreme disciple of Picasso's Cubism and Miró's post-Cubism,
tinctured also with Kandinsky and surrealist inspiration. His name is Jackson
Pollock." Raised in the American West, Pollock became the most important
of the New York School Abstract Expressionists and is credited with completely
transforming modern art. Prone to heavy drinking and possessing a volatile
personality, the artist developed a reputation (especially among European
artists) as a "cowboy," the kind of rugged individualist found only in the
American West.
Jackson Pollock was born on a farm in Cody,
Wyoming, and grew up in Wyoming, Arizona, and California. Pollock's first
exposure to modern art came in the form of a journal entitled Dial,
copies of which he obtained from his brother Charles, who had begun painting
a few years earlier. Pollock's first paintings were created emulating those
of his brother's. While studying painting at Manual Arts High School in
Los Angeles, Pollock read the writings of Krishnamurti and Rudolf Steiner
and was introduced to theosophy. He also saw the work of Mexican muralists
Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siquieros, both of whom came to have a profound
and lasting influence on Pollock's work. When Pollock was 17, he dropped
out of high school and moved to New York City. From 1929 to 1931 he received
instruction at the Art Students League, where he was mentored by Thomas
Hart Benton, who introduced the young painter to both Renaissance art and
"American scene" realism. It was around this time that Pollock first became
familiar with the work of Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco. Pollock
also spent a few years traveling the country by train and car, sketching
the American landscape. Of his time with Benton, Pollock later told the
New Yorker that his teacher "drove his kind of realism at me so
hard I bounced right into non-objective painting." From 1938 to 1942 Pollock
existed on the money he received from painting murals for the WPA Federal
Arts Project, and his work began to be included in exhibitions in New York
as well as the middle and far west. Pollock also entered Jungian analysis
for treatment of his alcoholism and in 1938 was briefly institutionalized
at Bloomingdale Asylum in White Plains, New York. Pollock's early work borrowed
imagery from Picasso, the muralists, and Jungian symbolism.
Pollock's first one-man show took place in
1943 at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century gallery, which subsequently
hosted three additional exhibitions. Guggenheim provided Pollock with a
monthly advance on the future sale of his paintings, an arrangement that
allowed him to paint full-time. Pollock would be the subject of 10 solo
exhibitions over the course of the next 11 years. From 1943 to 1947, in
pieces such as She Wolf, Guardians of the Secret, and
There Were Seven in Eight, Pollock's painting focused on totems
and symbols in human animal form that were directly inspired by Jungian
analysis. In 1945 Pollock moved into a house at the Springs in East Hampton,
Long Island; he and painter Lee Krasner were married on 25 October. Krasner's
work was also categorized as Abstract Expressionist, but for many years
her career was overshadowed by her husband's. A devoted wife and passionate
promoter and defender of her husband's work, Krasner introduced Pollock
to several important artists, such as Hans Hofmann (Pollock and Hofmann
were among those who congregated at the Cedar Bar in New York).
Pollock worked in an upstairs bedroom of
the house at the Springs for one year before relocating to the barn, which
he moved and transformed into a studio. Between 1947 and 1950 Pollock developed
the working method that characterized the style he would be most remembered
for: placing unstretched canvas on the floor, he placed a stick or trowel
into a can of enamel paint and dripped the paint onto the surface from above.
Through the development of extraordinary control in his hands and wrists,
Pollock was able to manipulate seemingly endless and intricate webs of curls
and splatters. The artist often began with recognizable shapes and figures
that he slowly obscured through the application of many layers of abstract
patterns. From 1948 to 1950 Pollock was represented by the Betty Parsons
gallery, which presented his work on four separate occasions. On 08 August
1949, Life magazine published the sarcastically titled "Jackson
Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The article
brought the artist to the attention of the mainstream US.
With curator Peter Blake, Pollock designed
a museum in which all of the walls would consist of drip paintings. The
museum never found a patron, but Pollock did receive a commission to create
a wall-size painting for Marcel Breuer's new home. Although Parsons raised
the price of Pollock's paintings, it would be several years before they
began to sell with any regularity. His only consistent patron was Alfonso
Ossorio, who bought two of Pollock's paintings and shared his Manhattan
townhouse with Pollock and Krasner.
In the early 1950s Pollock began painting
much larger pieces and rejected titles in favor of numbers to mark individual
works. One of seven painters representing the U.S. at the 25th Venice Biennale
International Exhibition in June 1950, Pollock also had several exhibits
in locations such as Milan and Paris. That year Hans Namuth began work on
the photographs and films that later became a primary source for Pollock
scholars, providing a rare firsthand account of the painter's creative process.
In order to take advantage of the better lighting conditions, filming took
place outside on weekends. Pollock painted Number 29, 1950 on a
plane of glass; Namuth placed his camera beneath the glass for a most unusual
view of the artist's process. The experience drove Pollock over the edge,
and when filming had completed, he ended two years of sobriety. On the eve
of the most important exhibition of his life, Pollock flew into a drunken
rage and turned over the dinner table. The pressure Namuth's film had placed
on the artist sent Pollock into a rapid descent that eventually led to his
death. Additionally, the staged nature of the film coupled with Pollock's
scripted narration may have led the artist to believe that he had rendered
himself inauthentic.
Disappointed by what he saw as the poor representation
he was receiving from Betty Parsons, Pollock took his work across the street
to the Sidney Janis gallery. In November 1952, the latter gallery hosted
an exhibit that featured Number 10, Number 11, and Number
12, examples of Pollock's larger-scale work. In 1951 and 1952, respectively,
Pollock's work was featured in two shows hosted by the Museum of Modern
Art in New York: "Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America" and "Fifteen
Americans." The works exhibited at the Janis gallery in 1954 included Sleeping
Effort, The Deep, and Portrait of a Dream, paintings
created in 1953 that represented a further advancement in Pollock's style:
the integration of brush strokes and recognizable shapes. Between 1953 and
1956 Pollock finished fewer than 10 paintings, afflicted by jealousy and
finding it harder to paint as his wife came into her own as an artist.
Abstract art was often met with hostility,
as Michigan Congressman George Dondero declared modern art to be Communist
and an affront to American values. Nonetheless, Pollock's reputation benefited
equally from derision as well as from praise. Earlier in his career, Pollock
claimed not to know where his work came from. However, as he developed the
drip painting process some referred to as "action painting," he found himself
defending his skill against attacks from critics who claimed that the paintings
appeared to be randomly constructed. Pollock always claimed that he was
drawing on his unconscious for inspiration, but this admission did not presuppose
that he lacked control over the application of the paint. It was nearly
impossible for critics to ignore the physicality of Pollock's methods, but
the artist saw these techniques as nothing more than the means through which
he arrived at a particular aesthetic statement.
Pollock struggled with alcoholism throughout
his life. He considered himself to be the greatest painter in the world,
but even this knowledge did nothing to allay the deep melancholy that had
haunted him since childhood. Pollock often became violent when drunk and
sometimes sped his car down Long Island's country back roads. His decision
to agree to allow photographer Hans Namuth to film him apparently drove
the artist over the edge, and in November 1950 he ended two years of sobriety
in a drunken rage. After walking away from car crashes in 1951 and 1954,
perhaps it was inevitable that his drunk driving would lead to his demise.
As his relationship with Krasner worsened, Pollock engaged in an affair
with aspiring artist Ruth Kligman. In July 1956 Krasner left for Europe.
On the evening of August 11, 1956, Pollock and Edith Metzger (a friend of
Kligman's) were killed while driving an Oldsmobile he'd acquired by trading
in two paintings. Kligman survived the accident.
Pollock was a force of nature who changed
the face of modern art. The artist's legacy is forever determined by the
documents left behind by Hans Namuth, which provided the public with a sense
of the intense physicality of Pollock's approach to painting. These documents
later inspired the performance art of Yves Klein and Herman Nitsch, and
the work of sculptors including Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, and Bruce Nauman.
Pollock's work was also highly influential on the hand-painted films of
filmmaker Stan Brakhage. The non-representational painting of Pollock and
others of his generation such as Willem de Kooning led to a change in perception
regarding US art, and in the latter half of the twentieth century the United
States replaced Europe as the international center of modern art.
— LINKS
— Self-Portrait
(1933)
— Untitled
(1944, 30x25cm; 4/5 size)
— Number 1a
(1948) — Black Yellow
— Cathedral
(1947) — Flame
— Male
and Female (1942, 186x124cm) — Moon Woman
(1942, 69x43 in)
— Night Mist
— Pasiphae
— Sleeping 3
— War 2
— Number
13A: Arabesque (1948, 94x297cm) — Harbor
and Lighthouse (1936)
— Shooting
Star (1947, 600x364pix _ ZOOM
to 1400x849pix)
— Guardians
of the Secret (1943, 124x190cm; 613x993pix, 240kb)
— Lavender
Mist: Number 1, 1950 (221x300cm; 384x521pix, 179kb) _ Action painting:
Pollock was the first “all-over” painter, pouring paint rather
than using brushes and a palette, and abandoning all conventions of a central
motif. He danced in semi-ecstasy over canvases spread across the floor,
lost in his patternings, dripping and dribbling with total control. He said:
“The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.”
He painted no image, just “action”, though “action painting”
seems an inadequate term for the finished result of his creative process.
Lavender Mist is 3 m long, a vast expanse on a heroic scale. It is alive
with colored scribble, spattered lines moving this way and that, now thickening,
now trailing off to a slender skein. The eye is kept continually eager,
not allowed to rest on any particular area. Pollock has put his hands into
paint and placed them at the top right-- an instinctive gesture eerily reminiscent
of cave painters who did the same. The overall tone is a pale lavender,
maide airy and active. At the time Pollock was hailed as the greatest American
painter, but there are already those who feel his work is not holding up
in every respect. Lee
Krasner (1908-84), who married Pollock in 1944, was not celebrated at
all during his lifetime (cut short in 1956 by a fatal car crash), but it
was actually she who first started covering the canvas with a passionate
flurry of marks. The originality of her vision, its stiff integrity and
its great sense of internal cohesion, is now beginning to be recognized.
Cobalt Night (1962; 237x401 cm) is even larger than Lavender
Mist and has the same kind of heroic ambition.
_ In 1947 Jackson Pollock introduced a radically innovative method
of painting in which he poured paint directly onto unprimed canvas that
he tacked to the studio floor. Deploying sticks or hardened brushes, Pollock
circled around the canvas, flinging, dripping, and splashing skeins of paint
onto its surface, layer upon layer, until a dense web of color was formed.
Although his process, which was filmed in 1950 by the photographer Hans
Namuth, was spontaneous and intuitive, Pollock exercised remarkable control
over it and insisted, "there is no accident." Number 1 (Lavender Mist),
one of Pollock's most important "drip" paintings, attests to the artist's
pure virtuosity of paint handling. One can trace his rhythmic movements
in the long arcs, staccato dribbles, or coagulated pools of color that accrue
into a rich, shimmering interlace. With only a few hues he achieved a soft
tonal effect, not by the actual use of lavender but with aluminum and salmon-colored
paint. The weave of long black and white strokes implies an inherent linear
structure, but the "allover" composition exhibits an even density throughout,
with no discernible focal points. Pollock, who spoke of being "in" his paintings,
left very literal traces of his presence in the multiple handprints at the
upper edges of the canvas.
|
Gérard was born in the Provençal town of Grasse. Her interest in art was
shaped by her brother-in-law, the popular rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard,
beginning in 1775, when she moved to Paris to live with her sister's family.
As part of the Fragonard household, Gérard had considerable financial freedom,
along with the opportunity to further her artistic training as her brother-in-law's
unofficial apprentice. By her mid-twenties Gérard had developed her signature
style, which featured painstakingly accurate details rendered with subtly
blended brush strokes, both traits borrowed from 17th-century Dutch genre
specialists, notably Gabriel Metsu. Gérard's work is not only technically
impressive but also practical: these relatively small-scale, portable canvases
were designed to appeal to wealthy collectors who preferred to display in
their homes meticulously painted still lifes and genre scenes rather than
large history paintings. The numerous engraved versions of Gérard's paintings
made them accessible to less affluent art lovers and helped increase her
reputation. 
