Paul Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five brothers in a family that moved frequently across the American West — Arizona, California, and back again — as his father pursued various failed farming and surveying ventures. This restless, wide-open landscape would later echo in the expansive scale of Pollock’s mature paintings. He followed his older brother Charles to New York in 1930 and studied at the Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton, the Regionalist muralist whose rhythmic, swirling compositions influenced Pollock more than is often acknowledged. Through the 1930s and early 1940s, Pollock absorbed a dizzying range of influences: Mexican muralism (he watched David Alfaro Siqueiros experiment with industrial paints and pouring techniques), Picasso’s “Guernica,” Jungian psychoanalysis (he underwent therapy for alcoholism and depression beginning in 1939), and Native American sand painting. His early canvases, such as “The She-Wolf” (1943), were dense, totemic, and still partially figurative, but they already vibrated with a restless energy straining against the boundaries of representation.
The breakthrough came in 1947 when Pollock began laying unstretched canvas on the floor of his barn studio in Springs, Long Island — the property he shared with his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, who had recognized and championed his talent since their meeting in 1942. Abandoning the easel, the brush, and conventional composition, he poured, dripped, and flung house paint, enamel, and aluminum paint from sticks, trowels, and hardened brushes, moving around and over the canvas in a kind of choreographed dance. The resulting “drip paintings” — “Number 1A, 1948,” “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” (1950), “Lavender Mist” (1950) — were vast webs of interlacing lines and skeins of color with no focal point, no hierarchy, and no illusion of depth, yet possessed a rhythmic coherence and visual energy that was unmistakably intentional. The critic Clement Greenberg, Pollock’s most influential champion, argued that these works fulfilled the modernist imperative of flatness, while Harold Rosenberg coined the term “Action Painting” to describe art in which the canvas became “an arena in which to act.”
In August 1949 Life magazine ran a feature asking “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” — complete with photographs by Arnold Newman showing Pollock crouching, cigarette dangling, over a paint-splattered canvas. The article made him the first American art celebrity of the postwar era, but the fame was a poisoned gift. Pollock, who had been sober during his most productive years (1948-1950), returned to heavy drinking, and by 1951 he had largely abandoned the drip technique, producing darker, more figurative works in black enamel that baffled his admirers. Lee Krasner’s steadfast support — both emotional and practical, managing his career while sacrificing visibility for her own formidable work — kept him afloat, but their marriage deteriorated under the weight of his alcoholism and infidelities. “Blue Poles” (1952), a monumental canvas purchased by the Australian National Gallery in 1973 for the then-staggering sum of 1.3 million dollars, was among the last major works of his drip period. On August 11, 1956, driving drunk on a country road near his Springs home, Pollock crashed his car into a tree, killing himself and one of his two passengers. He was forty-four years old. His legacy is immeasurable: he proved that American art could lead rather than follow Europe, demonstrated that the physical act of painting could itself be the subject of a work, and opened the door to performance art, installation, and every subsequent movement that privileged process over product.