Jackson Pollock is famous for Action Painting. He would make studies for his apparently unpremeditated works, done on continuous lengths of canvas tacked to the floor, and later cut up with selective care.
Pollock grew up in Arizona and California, the youngest in a family of five sons.
He attended Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School before being expelled for fighting and other disruptive behavior. At 18 he moved to New York City. His brother, Charles Pollock, was already there and together they studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League.
In the early 1930s, he travelled across the US before eventually settling in New York in 1934. From 1935-42, he worked on the WPA Federal Art Project. It was not until 1943 that he had his first one-man exhibition, at the Peggy Guggenheim Art of this Century gallery in New York.
Pollock married Lee Krasner in 1944, and the following year they moved to in East Hampton, on Long Island, New York. Once there, his style of painting changed dramatically and by 1947, he had abandoned the use of brushes and poured the paint straight on to the canvas (hence the term Action Painting). Six years later, he began to employ brushes again.
By the late 1940s he was the most famous living American artist. But as his fame grew and the pressure to produce more paintings increased his alcoholism deepened (he had struggled with alcoholism for most of his adult life) and he became susceptible to more and more bouts of depression. At the age of just 44, he died in alcohol-related, car crash in 1956.
He is buried with Lee Krasner in Green River Cemetery in Springs, New York.
//INDEX// //SEARCH THIS SITE//
//TOP OF PAGE//
© 2010 by the appropriate owners of the included material