A 20th Century artist: Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)

In 1928 Paul Jackson began to study painting at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. When Jackson was eighteen, he went to New York. Between 1929 and 1931 he studied at the Art Students League in New York City. Jackson’s brother, Charles, had also studied here and had had the same teacher, Thomas Hart Benton. It was at about this time that Jackson dropped his first name, Paul, and began using his middle name.

Under Benton's guidance, Pollock analysed Old Master paintings and learned the rudiments of drawing and composition. Pollock's early paintings, realistic scenes of life in America, clearly reflect Benton's influence. Rubens, Michelangelo and El Grec

By 1955, however, Pollock's personal demons had triumphed over his artistic drive, and he stopped painting altogether. Ironically, his work had begun to earn a respectable income for him and Krasner, who was becoming increasingly estranged from her troubled, alcoholic husband. In the summer of 1956 she took the opportunity of a trip to Europe to re-evaluate their relationship, while Pollock remained at home with a young mistress to distract him from the agonies of self-doubt and inaction that plagued him. In Paris, on the morning of 12 August, Krasner received a telephone call informing her that Pollock had died the night before in an automobile accident. Driving drunk, he had overturned his convertible, killing himself and an acquaintance and seriously injuring his other passenger. He was 44 years of age.

By 1947 the paintings rendered by Pollock lacked recognisable figures. Painting had evolved into a pure introspective act. i.e. Direct and intuitive expressions of the artists psyche. Furthermore, he moved away from all conventional techniques and devised a ‘drip’ method of applying paint to canvas. A method for which, he is now most famous for.

In the mid 1950s, Pollock experienced a period of crisis and doubt, which lead to major depression, as a result of the success of his drip paintings .He changed his style to return to traditional brush painting. The black-and-white canvases and the paintings that followed his depression suggested a new phase. In 1951 Pollock's representations underwent a alteration in emphasis as he abandoned non-objective imagery in favour of abstracted references to human and animal forms. "When you're working out of your unconscious," he explained, "figures are bound to emerge." For example, in Portrait and a Dream (1953), interlaced streams of black paint on the left side of the canvas are fully abstract, but on the right side these black lines form a woman's head, which Pollock then filled in with patches of red, yellow, pink, and gray. He also gave up colour to create a series of stark black paintings on unprimed canvas. Many of his admirers were ambivalent about his new direction, which may account at least in part for Pollock's inability to remain sober. For the next five years he would struggle unsuccessfully to solve his drinking problem, while his art underwent a series of revisions, some more successful than others. Colour returned, gesture became richer and more various, and Pollock once again veiled his imagery in layers that obscured as much as they revealed.

Pollock's radical breakthrough was accompanied by a period of sobriety lasting two years, during which he created some of his most beautiful masterpieces. In his barn studio, he spread his canvas on the floor and developed his compositions by working from all four sides, allowing the imagery to evolve spontaneously, without preconceptions. Pollock described this technique as "direct" painting and likened it to American Indian sand painting. He maintained, however, that the method was "a natural growth out of a need," and that its only importance was as "a mean

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