Jackson Pollock (1912 to 1956) was an American painter, born in Cody, Wyoming, who became the face of Abstract Expressionism by pouring house paint onto canvases laid flat on the floor of a barn on Long Island. In August 1949 Life magazine asked if he was the greatest living painter in the United States. Seven years later he died drunk at the wheel on a country road.
The nickname came before the funeral. In January 1956 Time magazine called him Jack the Dripper, and the joke has outlived the man: anyone could have flung paint at a canvas. Most people who search for Pollock want to know if that is true.
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The story everyone tells starts with Mural. In 1943 the collector Peggy Guggenheim gave Pollock a contract and a huge canvas to paint for the entrance of her townhouse, and the legend says he finished it in one frenzied night, the whole wild thing pouring out of him at once.
It did not happen that way. Conservators at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles spent eighteen months studying the canvas and found that Pollock probably laid down the first layers and the composition in a single session. The rest went on over days, or even weeks. And nowhere on it is there a drip.
The famous method came later, in a barn on Long Island, and it lasted about three years. What Pollock did in those years, and what it cost him, is not the story of a man who threw paint at a wall.
What You'll Discover
Who taught him to paint.
What Mural really took.
What the barn floor allowed.
What Life magazine asked.
Who else wanted him famous.
Who was in the car.