Jackson Pollock
“The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.”
Pollock began his career in the 1930s, studying under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League in New York. Benton’s emphasis on rhythmic composition and dynamic movement had a lasting influence on Pollock, even as he later rejected Benton’s representational style. During this early period, Pollock worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project, producing murals and easel paintings influenced by Regionalism, Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera, and the psychological imagery of Surrealism. His exposure to Jungian psychoanalysis in the late 1930s and early 1940s also shaped his art, inspiring his exploration of the unconscious through symbolism and abstraction.
Pollock’s classic period emerged in the late 1940s, when he developed the revolutionary “drip technique” that defined his mature style. Laying his canvases on the floor of his Long Island studio, he poured, dripped, and flung enamel paint in a physical, improvisational process that blurred the boundaries between painting and performance. Works such as Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950) and Number 1A, 1948 epitomize this method, in which intricate webs of paint form rhythmic, all-over compositions without a central focal point. During this period, Pollock achieved critical acclaim as the leading figure of Abstract Expressionism, and his work came to embody the postwar American avant-garde’s emphasis on spontaneity, individualism, and psychological depth.
Pollock radically redefined what painting could be. By shifting the canvas from the vertical easel to the floor, and by treating the act of painting as an event rather than a depiction, he broke decisively with traditional notions of composition and subject matter. His innovations opened the door to later developments in performance art, minimalism, and conceptual art, influencing artists from Helen Frankenthaler to Allan Kaprow.
