Birth Year : 1912
Death Year : 1956
Country : US
Jackson Pollock, who was born in Cody, Wyoming, lived in Arizona and
California until 1929. He took his first lessons in art at the Manual Arts
High School in Los Angeles. Pollock came to New York to study at the Art
Students League and worked under Thomas Hart Benton during the years 1929
to 1931. He began his career as an artist during the depression years and
worked for the Federal Arts Project in New York from 1938 to 1942. He then
moved to Huntington, Long Island. Pollock's early painting was expressionistically
realistic and then surrealistic in style. However, by the early 1940's
his work had become completely abstract expressionist in character with
no figuration at all. This was an expression of the isolation of the painter
in the modern world: painting itself is the subject matter of these works,
a concept that must be accepted by the viewer before he can begin to understand
or appreciate this highly intellectual form of art. In 1951-52 Pollock
reintroduced the semblance of anatomical imagery into his abstract work.
Pollock's art was a violent, romantic revolt in which the artist himself
was irrevocably involved, for he was completely committed to the act of
painting in itself, to the possibilities inherent in paint, and to the
results of the interactions between himself and his medium. When he flung
his paint at the canvas, he energetically directed it, fought with it,
and either won or lost the battle. The result is a painting that moves
dynamically in all directions, from the inner to the outer surface. A freedom
of expression resulted that revolutionized mid-twentieth-century art both
in the United States and in Europe, creating a new expansion and a new
impetus for the solution, through art, of modern man's struggle in the
modern world. Pollock's career was tragically cut short by his death in
an automobile accident.
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Jackson
Pollock
Mural
Jackson
Pollock
Painting
(1948)
Jackson
Pollock
Composition
Jackson
Pollock
Number
8 1949
Jackson
Pollock
Blue
Poles Number II 1952
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