Jackson Pollock

This extreme form of abstraction divided critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided the random effects. A reclusive and volatile personality, Pollock struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy. Four months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, Pollock's work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and the Tate Gallery in London.

Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, on January 28, 1912, the youngest of five brothers. His parents, Stella May (née McClure) and LeRoy Pollock, were born and grew up in Tingley, Iowa, and were educated at Tingley High School. Stella is interred at Tingley Cemetery, Ringgold County, Iowa. His father had been born with the surname McCoy, but he took the surname of his adoptive parents. Stella and LeRoy Pollock were Presbyterian; they were of Irish and Scots-Irish descent, respectively. LeRoy was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the government, moving for different jobs. Stella, proud of her family's heritage as weavers, made and sold dresses as a teenager. In November 1912, Stella took her sons to San Diego; Jackson was just 10 months old and would never return to Cody. He subsequently grew up in Arizona and Chico, California. While living in the Vermont Square neighborhood of Los Angeles, Pollock enrolled at Manual Arts High School, from which he was expelled. Pollock had already been expelled in 1928 from another high school. During his early life, Pollock explored Native American culture while on surveying trips with his father. Pollock was also heavily influenced by Mexican muralists, particularly José Clemente Orozco, whose fresco Prometheus he would later call "the greatest painting in North America". In 1930, following his older brother Charles, Pollock moved to New York City, where they both studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Benton's rural American subject matter had little influence on Pollock's work, but his rhythmic use of paint and his fierce independence were more lasting. In the early 1930s, Pollock spent a summer touring the Western United States together with Glen Rounds, a fellow art student, and Benton, their teacher.

Pollock was introduced to the use of liquid paint in 1936 at an experimental workshop in New York City by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. That summer, Pollock went to Dartmouth College to study José Clemente Orozco's 3,200 square foot mural, The Epic of American Civilization. He later used paint pouring as one of several techniques on canvases of the early 1940s, such as Male and Female and Composition with Pouring I. After moving to Springs, New York, Pollock began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor and he developed what was later called his "drip" technique. From 1938 to 1942, Pollock worked for the WPA Federal Art Project. During this time, he was trying to deal with his established alcoholism; from 1938 through 1941, Pollock underwent Jungian psychotherapy with Dr. Joseph L. Henderson and later with Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlo from 1941 to 1942. Henderson engaged him through his art, encouraging Pollock to make drawings. Jungian concepts and archetypes were expressed in his paintings. Some psychiatrists have hypothesized that Pollock might have had bipolar disorder. Pollock signed a gallery contract with Peggy Guggenheim in July 1943. He received the commission to create the 8-by-20-foot (2.4 by 6.1 m) Mural (1943) for the entry to her new townhouse. At the suggestion of her friend and advisor Marcel Duchamp, Pollock painted the work on canvas, rather than the wall, so that it would be portable. After seeing the big mural, the art critic Clement Greenberg wrote: "I took one look at it and I thought, 'Now that's great art,' and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced." The catalog introducing his first exhibition described Pollock's talent as "volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is undisciplined. It spills out of itself in a mineral prodigality, not yet crystallized."

Pollock's most famous paintings were made during the "drip period" between 1947 and 1950. However, when investigating the impact that other artists have had on him and his "drip paintings", the time that Pollock spent working and studying in the Experimental Workshop with David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1936 is rarely investigated or acknowledged. According to Robert Storr, "there is no other experience in his professional life that is equal to the decade that he spent learning from and observing the modern Mexican muralists…," especially when comparing this period of informal training to his formal education with Thomas Hart Benton, which, although critical to his beginnings, was short lived. Additionally, when specifically asked about how the "drip" came to be, Pollock disavowed his association with Siqueiros on multiple occasions and made contradictory statements. For example, in 1947, Pollock suggests that he painted his canvases on the floor because he witnessed the Navajo sand artist at the Natural History Museum in New York do it in 1941 (five years after he witnessed Siqueiros do it in 1936), and soon after, he suggested that he painted his canvases on the floor because "the Orientals did it". Eventually, he became famous for his "drip" paintings and was the subject of an article in the 8 August 1949 issue of LIFE titled "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" Thanks to the mediation of Alfonso Ossorio, a close friend of Pollock, and the art historian Michel Tapié, the young gallery owner Paul Facchetti, from March 7, 1952, managed to realize the first exhibition of Pollock's works from 1948 to 1951 in his Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris and in Europe. At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style. Pollock's drip paintings were influenced by the artist Janet Sobel; the art critic Clement Greenberg would later report that Pollock "admitted" to him that Sobel's work "had made an impression on him." Pollock's work after 1951 was darker in color, including a collection painted in black on unprimed canvases. These paintings have been referred to as his "Black pourings" and when he exhibited them at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, none of them sold. Parsons later sold one to a friend at half the price. These works show Pollock attempting to find a balance between abstraction and depictions of the figure. Pollock later returned to using color and continued with figurative elements. During this period, he had moved to the Sidney Janis Gallery, a more commercial gallery; the demand for Pollock's work from collectors was great. In response to this pressure, along with personal frustration, his alcoholism deepened.

Pollock and Lee Krasner met while they both exhibited at the McMillen Gallery in 1942. Krasner was unfamiliar yet intrigued with Pollock's work and went to his apartment, unannounced, to meet him following the gallery exhibition. In October 1945, Pollock and Krasner were married in a church with two witnesses present for the event. In November, they moved out of the city to the Springs area of East Hampton on the south shore of Long Island. With the help of a down-payment loan from Peggy Guggenheim, they bought a wood-frame house and barn at 830 Springs Fireplace Road. Pollock converted the barn into a studio. In that space, he perfected his "drip" technique of working with paint, with which he would become permanently identified. When the couple found themselves free from work, they enjoyed spending their time together cooking and baking, working on the house and garden, and entertaining friends. Krasner's influence on her husband's art was something critics began to reassess by the latter half of the 1960s due to the rise of feminism at the time. Her extensive knowledge and training in modern art and techniques helped her bring Pollock up to date with what contemporary art should be. Krasner is often considered to have tutored her husband in the tenets of modernistic painting. Pollock was then able to change his style to fit a more organized and cosmopolitan genre of modern art, and Krasner became the one judge he could trust. At the beginning of the two artists' marriage, Pollock would trust his peers' opinions on what did or did not work in his pieces. Krasner was also responsible for introducing Pollock to many collectors, critics, and artists, including Herbert Matter, who would help further his career as an emerging artist. Art dealer John Bernard Myers once said "there would never have been a Jackson Pollock without a Lee Pollock", whereas fellow painter Fritz Bultman referred to Pollock as Krasner's "creation, her Frankenstein", both men recognizing the immense influence Krasner had on Pollock's career. Pollock's influence on his wife's artwork is often discussed by art historians. Many people thought Krasner began to reproduce and reinterpret her husband's chaotic paint splatters in her own work. There are several accounts where Krasner intended to use her own intuition as a way to move towards Pollock's I am nature technique in order to reproduce nature in her art.

In 1955, Pollock painted Scent and Search, his last two paintings. He did not paint at all in 1956, but was making sculptures at Tony Smith's home: constructions of wire, gauze, and plaster. Shaped by sand-casting, they have heavily textured surfaces similar to what Pollock often created in his paintings. Pollock and Krasner's relationship began to crumble by 1956, owing to Pollock's continuing alcoholism and infidelity involving another artist, Ruth Kligman. On August 11, 1956, at 10:15 p.m., Pollock died in a single-car crash in his Oldsmobile convertible while driving under the influence of alcohol. At the time, Krasner was visiting friends in Europe; she abruptly returned on hearing the news from a friend. One of the passengers, Edith Metzger, was also killed in the accident, which occurred less than a mile from Pollock's home. The other passenger, Ruth Kligman, survived. In December 1956, four months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London. For the rest of her life, Pollock's widow, Lee Krasner, managed his estate and ensured that Pollock's reputation remained strong despite changing art world trends. The couple are buried in Green River Cemetery in Springs with a large boulder marking his grave and a smaller one marking hers.

Continuing to evade the viewer's search for figurative elements in his paintings, Pollock abandoned titles and started numbering his works. Pollock said about this, "Look passively and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for." Lee Krasner said, "He used to give his pictures conventional titles... but now he simply numbers them. Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is—pure painting."

Pollock's work has been the subject of important critical debates. Critic Robert Coates once derided a number of Pollock's works as "mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless". Reynold's News, in a 1959 headline, said, "This is not art—it's a joke in bad taste." French abstract painter Jean Hélion, on the other hand, remarked on first seeing a Pollock, "It filled out space going on and on because it did not have a start or end to it." Clement Greenberg supported Pollock's work on formalistic grounds. It fit well with Greenberg's view of art history as a progressive purification in form and elimination of historical content. He considered Pollock's work to be the best painting of its day and the culmination of the Western tradition via Cubism and Cézanne to Manet. In a 1952 article in ARTnews, Harold Rosenberg coined the term "action painting" and wrote that "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The big moment came when it was decided to paint 'just to paint'. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value—political, aesthetic, moral." Many people assumed that he had modeled his "action painter" paradigm on Pollock. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization to promote American culture and values, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), sponsored exhibitions of Pollock's work. Some left-wing scholars, including Eva Cockcroft, have argued that the United States government and wealthy elite embraced Pollock and abstract expressionism to place the United States in the forefront of global art and devalue socialist realism. Cockcroft wrote that Pollock became a "weapon of the Cold War". Pollock described his art as "motion made visible memories, arrested in space".

In the early 1990s, three groups of movie makers were developing Pollock biographical projects, each based on a different source. The project that at first seemed most advanced was a joint venture between Barbra Streisand's Barwood Films and Robert De Niro's TriBeCa Productions (De Niro's parents were friends of Krasner and Pollock). The script, by Christopher Cleveland, was to be based on Jeffrey Potter's 1985 oral biography, To a Violent Grave, a collection of reminiscences by Pollock's friends. Streisand was to play the role of Lee Krasner, and De Niro was to portray Pollock. A second was to be based on Love Affair (1974), a memoir by Ruth Kligman, who was Pollock's lover in the six months before his death. This was to be directed by Harold Becker, with Al Pacino playing Pollock. In 2000, the biographical film Pollock, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, directed by and starring Ed Harris, was released. Marcia Gay Harden won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Lee Krasner. The movie was the project of Harris, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Harris himself painted the works seen in the film. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation did not authorize or collaborate with any production. In September 2009, the art historian Henry Adams claimed in Smithsonian magazine that Pollock had written his name in his famous painting Mural (1943). The painting is now insured for US$140 million. In 2011, the Republican Iowa State Representative Scott Raecker introduced a bill to force the sale of the artwork, held by the University of Iowa, to fund scholarships, but his bill created such controversy that it was quickly withdrawn. Pollock's painting Free Form is shown throughout the 2016 movie The Accountant. The movie's main character, played by Ben Affleck, gains the painting through his career. He gifts it to the character played by Anna Kendrick at the end of the film. One of Jackson Pollock's works is featured heavily in the film Ex Machina (2014). A pivotal scene in the film contains a monologue where antagonist Nathan Bateman describes the central challenge of artificial intelligence as engineering a cognitive state that is "not deliberate, not random, but somewhere in between," which he likens to the cognitive state Pollock achieves while painting.

In 1973, Number 11, 1952 (also known as Blue Poles) was purchased by the Australian Gough Whitlam government for the National Gallery of Australia for US$2 million (A$1.3 million at the time of payment). This was the highest price ever paid for a modern painting and the painting is now one of the most popular exhibits. The artwork contains only a fleeting reference to the real world and Blue Poles has become the flagship of autonomous art. Blue Poles was a centerpiece of the Museum of Modern Art's 1998 retrospective in New York, the first time the painting had been shown in America since its purchase. In November 2006, Pollock's No. 5, 1948 became the world's most expensive painting, when it was sold privately to an undisclosed buyer for the sum of US$140 million. Another artist record was established in 2004, when No. 12 (1949), a medium-sized drip painting that had been shown in the United States Pavilion at the 1950 Venice Biennale, fetched US$11.7 million at Christie's, New York. In 2012, Number 28, 1951, one of the artist's combinations of drip and brushwork in shades of silvery gray with red, yellow, and shots of blue and white, also sold at Christie's, New York, for US$20.5 million—US$23 million with fees—within its estimated range of US$20 million to US$30 million. In 2013, Pollock's Number 19 (1948) was sold by Christie's for a reported US$58,363,750 during an auction that ultimately reached US$495 million total sales in one night, which Christie's reports as a record to date as the most expensive auction of contemporary art. In February 2016, Bloomberg News reported that Kenneth C. Griffin had purchased Pollock's 1948 painting Number 17A for US$200 million, from David Geffen. In 2023, an unknown Pollock painting was reportedly discovered in Bulgaria after international police agencies were able to track down a group of international art smugglers. The painting is reportedly worth up to 50 million euros. In 2024, Kasmin announced exclusive global representation of Pollock. Kasmin has been representing Lee Krasner since 2016. On May 18, 2026, Pollock's 1948 drip painting Number 7A was sold at Christie's in New York for $181.2 million, with fees, a new auction record for the artist.

The Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board was created by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1990 to evaluate newly found works for an upcoming supplement to the 1978 catalogue. However, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation has declined to be involved in recent authentication cases. In 2003, 24 Pollockesque paintings and drawings were found in a locker in Wainscott, New York. In 2005, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation requested a computer analysis (see fractal analysis section below) to be used for the first time in an authenticity dispute. Researchers at the University of Oregon used the technique to identify differences between the patterns in the six disputed paintings analyzed and those in 14 established Pollocks. In 2007, a traveling museum exhibition of the paintings was mounted and was accompanied by a comprehensive book, Pollock Matters, written by Ellen G. Landau, one of the four sitting scholars from the former Pollock Krasner Foundation authentication panel from the 1990s, and Claude Cernuschi, a scholar in Abstract Expressionism. In the book, Landau demonstrated the many connections between the family who owns the paintings and Jackson Pollock during his lifetime to place the paintings in what she believes to be their proper historic context. Pigment analysis of the paintings by researchers at Harvard University showed the presence in one painting of a synthetic pigment that was not patented until the 1980s, and materials in two others that were not available in Pollock's lifetime. Landau discussed the forensic findings of Harvard University and presented possible explanations for the forensic inconsistencies that were found in three of the 24 paintings. However, the scientist who invented one of the modern pigments dismissed the possibility that Pollock used this paint as being "unlikely to the point of fantasy". In 2006, a documentary, Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?, was made concerning Teri Horton, a truck driver who bought an abstract painting for five dollars at a thrift store in California in 1992. This work may be a lost Pollock painting, but its authenticity is debated. Thomas Hoving is shown in the documentary and states that the painting is on a primed canvas, which Pollock never used. Untitled 1950, which the New York–based Knoedler Gallery had sold in 2007 for $17 million to Pierre Lagrange, a London hedge-fund multimillionaire, was subject to an authenticity suit before the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Done in the painter's classic drip-and-splash style and signed "J. Pollock", the modest-sized painting (15 by 28+1⁄2 inches (38 cm × 72 cm)) was found to contain yellow paint pigments not commercially available until about 1970. The suit was settled in a confidential agreement in 2012.

In 1999, the physicist and artist Richard Taylor used computer analysis to show similarities between Pollock's painted patterns and fractals (patterns that recur on multiple size scales) found in natural scenery, reflecting Pollock's own words: "I am nature". His research team labelled Pollock's style fractal expressionism. In 2005, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation requested a fractal analysis to be used in the authenticity dispute over the Pollockesque paintings found in the locker in Wainscott, New York in 2003 (see above). Fractal analysis has also been employed by the International Foundation for Art Research. Applied to imitation Pollocks sold by the Knoedler Gallery, the analysis identified significant visual differences when compared to established Pollocks. Subsequently, over 10 scientific groups have performed fractal analysis on over 50 of Pollock's works. A 2015 study that used fractal analysis as one of its techniques achieved a 93% success rate distinguishing real from fake Pollocks. A 2024 study used an artificial intelligence technique based on fractals to achieve a 99% success rate. Current research of Fractal Expressionism focuses on human response to viewing fractals. Cognitive neuroscientists have shown that Pollock's fractals induce the same stress-reduction in observers as computer-generated fractals and naturally occurring fractals.