The Life of Artist Jackson Pollock

An American painter who was a leading exponent of Abstract Expressionism, an art movement made iconic by the free-associative gestures in paint often called “action painting.” During his lifetime he received global criticism and significant recognition for the unconventional “poured” or “drip” technique he used to create his major artworks. From his contemporaries, he was recognised for his exceptionally personal and fully uncompromising martyrdom to art and painting. His pieces had large effect on his contemporaries and on various subsequent art movements in America. He is also one of the first American painters to be honoured in both his life and after his passing as a peer of 20th-century European founders of contemporary art.

Early life and work

Paul Jackson Pollock was the fifth and youngest son of Stella May McClure and LeRoy Pollock, who were both of Scotch-Irish ancestry (LeRoy’s surname was McCoy previous to his adoption around 1890 by the family Pollock) and he was born and lived in Iowa. The family left Cody, Wyoming, eleven months after Jackson’s birth; he would know Cody only through his family photographs. Over the next sixteen years his family lived in California and Arizona, though relocating nine times. In 1928 his family moved to Los Angeles, where Jackson enrolled at the Manual Arts High School. In school he was taught by Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, a painter and illustrator who belonged to the Theosophical Society, a sect that promoted metaphysical and occult spirituality. Schwankovsky taught Pollock the essential training in drawing and painting, introduced him to highly sophisticated concepts of European contemporary art, and encouraged his curiosity in theosophical writings. At the same time, Pollock – who had been raised as an agnostic – also went to the camp meetings of the premier messiah of the theosophists, Jiddu Krishnamurti, a personal friend of Schwankovsky. Such spiritual explorations allowed him to embrace the ideas of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and the expression of unconscious imagery in his works through following years.

In fall, 1930, Pollock followed his brother Charles who in 1922 had left home to study art in NYC, enrolling with the Art Students League with his brother’s teacher, the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. (Jackson left off his birth name, Paul, about his time in New York in 1930.) He studied life drawing, painting, and composition with Benton for the following two and a-half years, leaving the league in the early quarter of 1933. For the next two years Pollock lived in poverty, first with Charles and, by fall in 1934, with his brother Sanford. He went on to share an apartment in Greenwich Village with Sanford and his wife until 1942.

Pollock was employed by the WPA Federal Art Project in the 1935 fall as an easel painter. That employment granted him economic security throughout the last years of the Great Depression as well as the opportunity to strengthen his art. From his study with Benton until 1938, Pollock’s art was heavily influenced by the compositional methods and regionalist subject matter of his teacher and by the lyrically expressionist vision of the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. It depicted mostly small landscapes and figurative scenes including Going West, in which Pollock utilized motifs inspired from photographs of his birthplacein Cody.

In 1937 Pollock began psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, and he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1938, which caused him to be institutionalized for about four months. After these experiences, his work became semiabstract and showed the assimilation of motifs from the modern Spanish artists Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro, as well as the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco. Jungian symbolism and the Surrealist exploration of the unconscious also influenced his works of this period; indeed, from 1939 through 1941 he was in treatment with two successive Jungian psychoanalysts who used Pollock’s own drawings in the therapy sessions.

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