The story of Jackson Pollock tells of a passion and energy that burned so brightly, they consumed the very man to whom they belonged. It speaks of a troubled soul that sought freedom but was instead stolen away by the lens of a camera. It is a tale of a revolutionary style of painting that shocked and insulted the sensibilities of the world of art. Ultimately, the story of Jackson Pollock is a tragic one that chronicles a man’s spectacular rise to fame and his equally meteoric fall into darkness.
The 28th of January 1912, witnessed the birth of Paul Jackson Pollock in Cody, Wyoming. The youngest of five children, he was raised first in Arizona and then California. It was in those states that he developed a deep interest in Native American culture and the lifestyle of the American West that would persist for the rest of his life and be apparent in works like “The Moon Woman Cuts A Circle”. In 1930, he travelled to New York to study at the Art Students League where he came under the tutelage of the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. Although Pollock would later disparage Benton’s teachings, he still retained the dynamic patterns and energetic style of the latter.
“Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.”
– Willem de Kooning, artist
Pollock always struggled against the tenets and norms of mainstream art, which he considered to be too restrictive. Instead, he was fascinated by Native American art and their technique of sand painting. In 1936, the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros introduced him to liquid paints and the freedom of painting on a surface larger than artist’s canvas. A deeper, darker struggle that Pollock faced was his sense of detachment from others and emotional emptiness.
By the age of 26, he suffered a breakdown due to creative blocks and excessive alcoholic binges and received psychoanalytical treatment. His works during this period are marked by fiercely distorted images and wild colours that display clear influences from Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, whom Pollack greatly admired. The despair that was reflected in his paintings would surface again towards the end of his life when he began to unravel once more.
However, things took a turn for the better when Peggy Guggenheim, a wealthy heiress, hosted a solo exhibition for his work and granted him a 4 year stipend. He met and married Lee Krasner, herself an artist in her own right, who would become a great source of encouragement to her husband. The couple moved to a farmhouse in rural Long Island, where for a time, everything seemed to go right. It was there that Pollock stopped drinking and produced some of his most famous works.
During this time, Pollock also developed what the art critic Harold Rosenberg termed “Action Painting”. He tacked huge, unstretched canvases on the wall or floor, upon which he dribbled or splattered paint. Pollock threw himself into his work with an astonishing amount vigour and energy. He would move around the canvas, briskly stepping around all four sides – and onto it as well – in an absorbed, almost trance-like state. The act of creation was virtually a performance, with the paint being applied in rhythmic, almost dance-like full body movements that sometimes incorporated sweeping arcs or swift snaps of the wrist.
Dissatisfied with the viscosity of traditional oil paints, he turned to commercial, resin based house paints known as gloss enamel. These he would dilute and thin to his liking to create an undulating surface on the canvas which, in some areas, could be thick enough to cast shadows or so thin that it had hardly any texture at all. The result was a composition of myriad streaks, speckles and swirls of many colours that was overwhelming in its complexity. Sometimes he would even add sand or broken glass into the mix, smearing and scratching them with trowels or knives.
A viewer of one of Pollock’s works is immediately struck by the raw energy and emotions infused into the painting. Then the eyes are drawn to various points and counter-points on the canvas; tantalized by the possibility of patterns and fractals half hidden – or even created – by the threadlike net of layers upon layers of bended enamel lines. At that point in time, his work was a dramatic and jarring departure the tradition of figurative representation in painting.
When Pollock’s artwork was displayed, it scandalized the artistic community and even the public at large. His critics quick to denounce him and were extremely vocal in decrying what they derisively called “baked macaroni” and “decorative wallpaper, essentially brainless…” These detractors only saw chaos, believing that such paintings took very little skill or effort to create. A satirical review from Time Magazine dubbed him “Jack the Dripper”.
“When he was quiet, he was quieter, and when he was angry he was angrier than others”
– Lee Krasner Pollock
The Photographer and the Painter
Pollock himself vehemently denied that his work was chaotic, firmly asserting: “I CAN control the flow of the paint. There is no accident.” This claim was corroborated by the photographer Hans Namuth, who extensively photographed and filmed the former over a course of several months in 1950. His most innovative move was to have Pollock paint on a sheet of glass, which he then filmed from below, capturing for the first time the painter in the throes of creation.
Namuth’s pictorial record revealed the method in Pollock’s so called “madness”. Rather than a frenzied orgy of paint splashing, it was a deliberative process that was the perfect balance of physical action and emotional expression. While each painting session was unique and unrepeatable, it was not entirely spontaneous; he would even touch up the lines of paint – or destroy the entire painting – if he wasn’t satisfied with the way they fell on the canvas.
This behind-the-scenes glimpse provided proof of the talent and skill that went into one of Pollock’s paintings and propelled him to fame. In what appeared to be a perverse, cruel joke of fate, however, it also proved to be his undoing. Tensions rose between the two men during the photography sessions and, following a heated argument that saw a fully laden dinner table overturned, Pollock abandoned his method of dripping paint and went back to a darker, more figurative style of painting.
Pollock’s friends believe his descent into disaster stemmed from having to paint on demand for the camera and according to Namuth’s schedule; instead of doing it for himself as and when the mood took him. Pollock felt that this was all “phoney”, that his means of expressing his sense of self and the world had been captured, clinically sterilized and stifled. He retreated into himself and turned back to alcohol for solace. Six years later, while drunk, he was involved in a one car accident that killed both himself and his friend in the passenger’s seat. He was just 44 years old.
Pollock’s paintings helped launch the abstract expressionist movement, which is typified by intense emotions as well as a strong anti-figurative aesthetic that eliminates both bounded forms and dimensions. In this spirit, he gave his paintings numbers instead of names for a spell as he wanted viewers to experience the paintings as they were instead of having preconceptions planted by titles. As his wife Lee Krasner explained, “numbers are neutral”.
Even after his death, Pollock’s works continued to generate great interest and controversy in death as it did during the course of his life. In 1973, “Blue Poles” was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for US$2 million. “No. 5, 1948” was sold in 2006 for the staggering price of US$140 million, making it the most expensive painting ever purchased.
The writer Werner Haftmann would often liken a painting of Pollock’s to “a seismograph…[that] recorded the energies and states of the man who drew it.” Indeed, the latter’s paintings towards the end can be said to be a frustrated wail for help from a man who is painfully aware of his situation but is powerless to change it. Referring to “Portrait and a Dream”, Pollock indicated that the murky darkness symbolised the “dark side of the moon” and that the tortured, reddened face was “me when I’m not sober”.Jackson Pollock has been branded onto the consciousness of the public not only because of his revolutionary style of painting but also for his vulnerability. This was a person who had lived through the Great Depression during his early years, who shared the vice of alcoholism with countless others and who was, in his own way, the little guy fighting for the individual’s right to express himself the way he wanted. Pollock’s frailty both humanises him and makes the brief magnificence he achieved all that more impressive. Truly, the likes of him will not soon – if at all ever – be seen again.
