Jackson Pollock: The Complete Story
Jackson Pollock was the American painter who put the canvas on the floor and poured, flung and dripped paint across it. He became the face of Abstract Expressionism, the first American movement to lead world art, and the first art star the mass media truly made.
The press nicknamed him Jack the Dripper. Behind the headline was a shy, troubled man from the rural West who drank heavily and died young, and whose work still splits rooms into believers and scoffers.
Born: Cody, Wyoming, 1912
Known for: drip painting and Abstract Expressionism
Died: car crash, Long Island, 1956, aged 44
From Wyoming to the studio floor
Pollock grew up out West and studied in New York under the muralist Thomas Hart Benton. For years he painted dense, troubled, figurative work and struggled with alcohol and depression.
The breakthrough came around 1947 when he laid raw canvas on the floor of a barn and stopped using the easel. He moved around all four sides, dripping household paint with sticks and dried brushes, letting line and rhythm build up in layers.
Why the drip mattered
Critics called it action painting. The picture was a record of the artist's movement, the whole body in motion, not a window onto a scene. There is no top or bottom, no focal point, just an even field of energy.
Done badly it looks like a mess. Done by Pollock, at his best, it holds together as balance and control. That tension, chaos that is somehow ordered, is the whole argument of his work.
The wife who made it possible
The painter Lee Krasner was his partner and fiercest advocate. She introduced him to the right people, managed his career, and after his death protected and grew his legacy. Without her his rise, and his afterlife in the market, would look very different.
Fame, the crash, and the Cold War twist
Life magazine asked in 1949 whether he was the greatest living painter in the United States. The fame did not steady him. He drank more, painted less, and in August 1956 died driving drunk near his home on Long Island. He was 44.
There is also a strange political coda. During the Cold War, the CIA quietly promoted Abstract Expressionism abroad as proof of American freedom. More on that in Jackson Pollock and the CIA.
What people ask about the drips
What is Jackson Pollock famous for?
Drip painting and leading Abstract Expressionism. See what is abstract art.
How did Jackson Pollock die?
In a drunk driving crash in 1956. More in how did Jackson Pollock die.
Why are his paintings worth so much?
One sold privately for around 140 million dollars, among the highest prices ever paid for a painting.
The American who moved the center of art
Pollock proved an American could change the direction of world art, and he made the act of painting itself the subject. Love it or laugh at it, every conversation about what counts as art still passes through his barn floor.
One last fact. He almost never used an easel after 1947, and rarely signed the front of these works. The motion was the signature.