Who is Jackson Pollock?
How many of you have ever seen this painting before?
This painting, titled No. 17 A, is one of the most expensive paintings in the world and painted by Jackson Pollock, the artist that I will talk about today.
Jackson Pollock is an American Painter and a major figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement.
He was born as Paul Jackson Pollock, at Cody, Wyoming, on January 28th, 1912. When he was 10 months old, his family moved to San Diego. As his father worked as a government land surveyor and had to take jobs at different locations, his family moved around, and his childhood was split between California and Arizona. He was expelled as a troublemaker from school twice and did not complete his high school education.
Before exploring Pollock’s art life, let’s first take a look at what the abstract expressionist movement is.
Since modern art emerged in 1870s, artists worldwide have explored new ways of seeing and experimented all kinds of possibilities in art making. Numerous art movements took place one after another in Europe. Abstract Expressionist movement，which started in the 1940s and ended in the middle of 1960s, is the first American art movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of Western art world. Under the influence of surrealism and modern psychology, abstract expressionists turned inward for inspiration, believing that the deepest truth about self and the rest of the world lay far below the constraints of rational experience. Almost every leading artist in the movement has a distinctive art style, but they shared something in common: spontaneous, automatic, and subconscious creation.
In 1949, Jackson Pollock reached the peak of his art career and was questioned by Life magazine if he was the Greatest Living Painter in the United States. Then what had led the high school dropout to become the Master of Modern Art?
Since he was young, Pollock had developed a strong interest in theology and spirituality, which later became the source of his inspiration. At 18, he went to New York to study art under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. The rhythmic use of paint and fierce independence from his study were visible in his works later. But his deep dive into the art world could result from the Jungian psychotherapy to battle his alcoholism. He was advised to draw and paint automatically. The experimental workshop to use the liquid paint had opened the door for him to abandon conventional brushes or easels completely and explore his innovative Dripping Technique. He laid a canvas flat on the floor to enable him to view and paint from all the angles. Before painting, he meditated for a long time to reach the state of the unconscious. Then he started pouring and splashing industrial paints on the canvas freely, where his memories, dreams, and inner world emerged through the linear skeins of dripped and thrown paints.
It’s said that Jackson Pollock would not be Jackson Pollock without his wife, Lee Krasner, who is also a painter. Krasner’s art knowledge and acute sense of modernity had ensured Pollock for his pursuit of dripping technique which he doubted in the beginning. Clement Greenberg, the art critic whose art theory cradled Abstract Expressionism, had also sent Jackson Pollock to the top of the art world.
On August 11th, 1956, Pollock died in a single car accident under the influence of alcohol which he had battled bitterly throughout his adult life. He left 363 paintings behind him and two of them are among the top ten most expensive ones in the world. But during his lifetime, he had struggled to sell his paintings and lived in poverty and depression.
Moving away from the conventionality, Pollock’s revolutionary painting style has opened and expanded the possibilities in art making and liberated artists of his and later generations.
Now I want to end my speech with the words he said one year before his death. Back then he was depressed with his dying creativity, he sighed, “A man’s life is his work; his work is his life.”
Jackson Pollock, like a comet burning across the night sky and disappearing into the dark, leaves behind him the everlasting glow of creativity, passion, and courage.
