Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming on 28th January 1912. His parents were LeRoy Pollock and Stella McClure Pollock. Jackson was the youngest of five boys.
His mother made a strong impression on her children when they were young to work in the field of arts; later all five boys did grow up to work within the arts field.
In 1928, Jackson constantly fought with teachers and pupils in his schools. In March 1928 Jackson was expelled from his first school in California for arguing with a teacher.
At the age of fifteen, Jackson and his older brother Sanford spent their summer months with a party of land surveyors in the Grand Canyon. During this time, two older men introduced Jackson to drinking. This along with Jackson's rebellious personality, began a series of problems that started the beginning of his alcoholism and later be the cause of his passing.
A few months later, the Pollock’s moved from Riverside to Los Angeles. At this time Jackson attended Manual Arts High School. Jackson was expelled subsequently later when he and some of his friends handed out a flyer that criticised other students.
He was given a final chance to go back to Manual Arts High school in September; beginning to take art classes, he was expelled again for punching a teacher. (10-11, Mattern 2005)
Giving up on high school, Pollock decided to emulate his older brother Charles by moving to New York to become an artist.
In 1930, after Jackson Pollock arrived in New York, the new urban environment gradually transformed the life within his paintings. Studying at the Art Students League with Tomas Hart Benton, Pollock eventually gave into abstract works that were more light and fluid, and were mobile and unpredictable. (45, Lanchner 2009)
Later In 1936, Jackson Pollock studied under David Siqueiros, the Mexican Stalinist muralist who later tried to assassinate Leon Trotsky. During the time in the workshop, Pollock experimented with non-traditional materials, pouring and dripping paint and helped build floats for the 1936 General Strike for Peace and May Day parade. (45 Lanchner, 2009)
In 1940. Jackson showed his work in New York for the first time. Manhattan's McMillan Gallery was putting on a show of Picasso, Matisse and Braque, and proposed to have three unknown Americans exhibited with them, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner. (95, Robertson, 1960)
In 1943, Male and Female was one of the famous paintings in Jackson Pollock's first solo exhibition, held in New York in 1943. It was a shocking painting in a show that critics described as "volcanic" and "explosive.” While the painting reveals Pollock's interest in contemporary European art, it introduces an unprecedented freedom within his paintings.
On October 25, 1945, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock were married in New York, in a church on Fifth Avenue. (54, Emmerling, 2003)
A year later in 1946, Abstract Expressionism was an art movement that began post World War II. This unique style of art, with Pollock at the forefront, was so influential that it put New York as the centre of the western art world. (715, Duiker, 2004)
In 1947, Pollock painted Full Fathom Five, one of his most famous works.
At the end of the year, Robert Motherwell asked Pollock to contribute a statement to the magazine ‘Possibilities’, asking about the manner in which Pollock makes his paintings, Pollock said, “My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and driping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass and other foreign matter added” (25, Lanchner, 2009)
In January 1948, Betty Parsons presented a new exhibit of Jackson Pollock's art, a grouping that contained some of the artist's first drip paintings. (58, Karmel, 2001)
In 1949, Life magazine photographed Jackson Pollock posed in front of his massive Number Twelve and proclaimed him "the nation's greatest painter" Pollock wore a rebel's cloak as he stared, tight- lipped, at the camera. (289, Scott, 2001)
On the 8th August 1949, Life magazine published the sarcastically titled "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The article brought the artist to the attention of the mainstream. (42, LIFE, 1949)
In 1950, William Wright interviewed Pollock during the same year of his most successful show at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Numerous quotes have been taken from the transcript of this interview, one notable quote, dealing with Pollock’s method of painting, that “new needs new techniques. And the Modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements. It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds his own technique.” (584-585, Harrison, 2002)
In 1954 Pollock was suffering deeper and deeper into alcoholism “As Pollock’s work was gaining promise, he was struggling with his inner demons of alcoholism and depression. His brothers Charles and Sanford encouraged him to seek treatment, including psychoanalysis in 1937. But in 1938, he suffered a setback in the form of a nervous breakdown.” (jackson-pollock.com, 2011)
In 1956, Jackson Pollock was involved in a one-car crash; He was driving drunk and overturned his Oldsmobile in the woods off Fireplace Road not far from the cemetery. Killing himself and seriously injuring one other passenger.
Bibliography Websites:
http://www.jackson-pollock.com/downfall.html
Accessed (30th March 2011)
Books:
Jackson Pollock
11th January 2005
Author: Joanne Mattern
Jackson Pollock
June 1960
Author: Bryan Robertson
The Essential World History
2nd March 2004
Author: William J. Duiker
Jackson Pollock (MoMA Artist Series)
7th September 2009
Author: Carolyn Lanchner
Jackson Pollock: interviews, articles, and reviews
31 January 2000
Author: Pepe Karmel
Jackson Pollock: 1912-1956
31th October 2003
Author: Leonhard Emmerling
LIFE
8 Aug 1949
Author: Time Inc.
New York Modern: The Arts and the City
14 August 2001
Author: William B Scott
Art in theory, 1900 - 2000: an anthology of changing ideas
23 Sep 2002
Author: Charles Harrison
