Jackson Pollock Transformed American Art—and Was Destroyed by His Own Success

Pollock moved with his family from Wyoming to San Diego when he was 10 months old and spent parts of his upbring in Arizona and Los Angeles. He was the youngest of five brothers, three of whom, Charles, Frank, and Sanford, would also become artists. His mother, Stella, encouraged Pollock’s talents, though their relationship was emotionally fraught to the point of negatively affecting his future relationships with women. His father, Leroy, was a struggling rancher who became a land surveyor. An abusive alcoholic, he left the family when Pollock was nine.

Leroy, however, kept in touch through letters, including one telling a 16-year-old Pollock that “the secret of success is concentrating interest in life,” according to a 2012 article in The Atlantic. Then there was the probably apocryphal account of Pollock witnessing his father urinate on a rock, an incident that supposedly inspired his drip paintings. As a teenager, Pollock traveled with his father and Sanford on surveys across the Southwest. Along the way, Pollock was exposed to Native American culture and, more ominously, picked up his drinking habit.

Pollock’s artistic training began as a teenager at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, from which he was eventually expelled for his rebellious temperament. One of is instructors, the painter and illustrator Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, acquainted Pollock with the latest currents in Europe, as well as with the metaphysical and occult tenets of theosophy, which would inform his subsequent interest in Carl Jung’s theories of the subconscious.

In 1930 Pollock, age 18, joined Charles, Frank, and Sanford at the Art Students League in New York. There, at Charles’s urging, he began taking classes with Thomas Hart Benton, an artist whose renown as a mural painter would land him on the cover of Time magazine in 1934. Their pairing would become crucial to Pollock’s lifework even as it seemed counterintuitive, given their divergent views on art.

The scion of a political dynasty from Missouri (his father served in the U.S. House of Representatives, and a great-great-uncle had been one of the state’s first senators), Benton (1889–1975) was a leading light of American Regionalism, a figurative movement that embraced scenes of “heartland” life as a sort of visual analog to the Real American ideology that continues to reverberate with deleterious consequences today. Yet Benton was no white supremacist—unlike his father—and denounced racism throughout his life. Nevertheless, he was a self-declared “enemy” of modern art who went on to ridicule his pupil’s future efforts as “paint-spilling . . . absurdities.” (Pollock’s opinion of Benton—“He had come face-to-face with Michelangelo and lost”—was equally piquant.)

Still, Benton’s practice impacted Pollock’s in both scale and composition. Thanks to Benton, Pollock became familiar with Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros and adopted the large formats that they and Benton used.

Pollock also learned from Benton’s organization of pictorial space. Benton’s figures were attenuated, like El Greco’s, and arranged in groups that swirled dynamically one into the next. While this was intended to propel the narrative behind Benton’s paintings, it created the same energetic flow of forms that would define Pollock’s abstractions.

Pollock left the Art Students League in 1933, and the subsequent decade set the stage for his emergence as a force in postwar American art.

His first couple of years after leaving school were marked by poverty, forcing him to crash with Charles and his family in Greenwich Village. In 1935 Pollock began to receive funding through the WPA, the New Deal agency that commissioned paintings, sculptures, posters, and photographs from a host of American artists, many of whom would become famous. Pollock survived on WPA support for the next five years, producing a number of eclectic and awkward works.

Among them was Going West (c. 1934–1935), a small, syrup-colored canvas of a wagon train struggling up a mountain pass that was very much indebted to Benton. Its dark, moody tone also revealed a connection to the late-19th-century American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917). Ryder’s dense, impastoed landscapes, seascapes, and nocturnes were known for a murky symbolism that Pollock shared in paintings such as Male and Female (c. 1942), which employed obscure numerology, and Guardians of the Secret (1943), which featured indecipherable glyphs. American Indian art factored into both paintings, as did the Jungian psychoanalysis Pollock was undergoing at the time to treat his alcoholism. The convergence of these elements undoubtedly stemmed from a visit he made with his therapist to a 1941 Museum of Modern Art exhibition on Native American art, where Pollock witnessed a demonstration by Navajo sand painters and their manner of working on the ground, which he’d appropriate in due course.

Picasso weighed heavily on Pollock’s mind in the late 1930s and early ’40s, which coincided with America’s entry into World War II. New York’s art scene was a sleepy, provincial backwater compared with Paris, but unlike the major cities of Europe, it was neither occupied nor bombed into rubble. Moreover, a wave of modernist painters, sculptors, and intellectuals had fled the Continent for New York City, among them André Breton, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, and Yves Tanguy. The Surrealists in their ranks had a particularly huge impact on New York’s nascent avant-garde. By then Picasso had entered his own Surrealist phase, and it was this chapter in his oeuvre that became the windmill Pollock tilted against.

He did so with Male and Female and Guardians as well a third painting, The She-Wolf (1943). Despite the title, its subject was less lupine than bovine, sporting the massive haunches and impressive horns of a bull, an animal that figured prominently in Picasso’s art but also in another Pollock obsession—prehistoric cave painting. Ultimately, as longtime patron Peggy Guggenheim observed in her memoirs, Pollock “overcame [Picasso’s] influence, to become . . . the greatest painter since Picasso,” at least for a while.

Guggenheim was one of several important figures in Pollock’s life, but none were more consequential than Lee Krasner (1908–1984). Though her paintings have since been reassessed as being equal to her husband’s, she stayed in the background, content to be the driving force behind Pollock while he was alive and the keeper of his flame after he died. Yet she never felt subsumed by his needs: “It is a two-way affair,” she once said. “I would give anything to have someone giving me what I was able to give Pollock.” Krasner was there at every point of his development, steering him in the right direction.

One such juncture occurred in 1943 and involved Guggenheim. She’d commissioned a large-scale work from Pollock that year for the foyer of a townhouse on East 61st Street in Manhattan, where she rented an apartment after separating from her husband, the painter Max Ernst. It was Krasner who’d gotten Pollock the job through her acquaintance with Howard Putzel, Guggenheim’s primary art adviser along with Marcel Duchamp. The result, a 23-by-6-foot affair titled Mural, proved to be the most important inflection point of Pollock’s career.

As with many instances in Pollock’s life and art, the creation of Mural is surrounded by legend, including the fireplace incident, which allegedly happened during a party after the painting’s completion (a further embellishment has it that Pollock was nude at the time). Another story—propagated by Guggenheim and Krasner—claims that Pollock limned Mural in a single night, a contention later refuted by image analysis. Similarly, while Duchamp did suggest that Mural be painted on canvas instead of directly on the wall to make it movable, he most certainly didn’t trim it by eight inches in order to make it fit the space. Mural was already on a stretcher frame when it was delivered, a fact easily provable by a photo of Pollock in his studio in front of Mural in progress, leaned against a wall with its edge secured by nails. Done with oil and casein in a palette of black, white, blue, gray, yellow and pink, Mural was Pollock’s most important piece outside of the drip paintings, prefiguring them in some ways. Mural featured splashes, splotches, and dribbles of pigment, though these had turned up in Pollock’s previous works. Its composition evoked elongated figures that were somehow reminiscent of both Picasso and Benton. But more important, these shapes blended into an all-over procession that tipped Mural into pure abstraction.

Heiress to a New York mining fortune, Guggenheim (1898–1979) moved to Paris in 1920, where she was introduced to the city’s avant-garde by Marcel Duchamp. She began collecting with an eye toward Surrealism, and in 1938 she opened a gallery in London. Duchamp helped to organize exhibitions there and remained Guggenheim’s consigliere after she returned to New York in 1941.

In 1942 Guggenheim opened Art of this Century on West 57th Street in Manhattan. It was partially a showcase for her collection and partially devoted to American modernists. A first-of-its kind survey of female artists there presented Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Louise Nevelson, and most surprisingly Gypsy Rose Lee, the famed burlesque star and part-time painter.

Pollock showed there as well and was provided an annual stipend, but his work didn’t sell. He indulged in bouts of heavy drinking, leading Krasner to decide that they should leave the distractions of New York’s art world. In 1945 they moved to Long Island, and over the next several years, Pollock experienced a period of sobriety whose output would write him into art history.

Pollock and Krasner moved to a house at 830 Springs-Fireplace Road in Springs, East Hampton, which they’d purchased with a $2,000 down payment from Guggenheim. Unlike today’s playground for the rich, East Hampton back then was rural, and the property had been a farmstead with a small barn that became Pollock’s studio.

The barn’s interior was barely large enough to accommodate the canvases Pollock rolled out onto the floor, restricting him to working along a shallow perimeter between the walls and the painting. In winter he could work just a couple of hours each day, since the space was unheated.

Pollock used household enamel diluted to a syrupy consistency, using stirring sticks as tools along with brushes. Thinned pigments and drips weren’t exactly new: Whistler had used a washy concoction he labeled “sauce,” while Max Ernst had developed a technique called oscillation in which he hung a paint-filled can above a canvas, swinging it back and forth as pigment trickled through a hole punched in the bottom. There was also the little-remembered, self-taught painter Janet Sobel, who in the late 1930s adopted a sort of DIY method of automatism, resulting in all-over compositions of dribbles and whorls that were also painted with enamel. According to the art critic Clement Greenberg, Pollock was familiar with one such work, titled Milky Way (1945).

Pollock, however, took his compositions to heights that were far more intentional, sustained, and expansive than anything by Sobel or anyone else. Still, they weren’t entirely abstract: Pollock applied paint in layers that, as infrared photography would later uncover, contained sketchy images of humans and animals, as well as ideographs of his own invention. Pollock’s abstractions, in other words, were representational sandwiches.

Pollock debuted his drip paintings at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948, and like his earlier canvases, they didn’t sell. They were also mocked in print: One article in the August 8, 1949, issue of Life Magazine was published under the headline “Is Jackson Pollock the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” The question was meant to be negatively rhetorical, but the accompanying color photographs of Pollock and his work by Arnold Newman were so compelling that what was meant to be a takedown vaulted him to fame. This success proved to be too much for Pollock, initiating a period of personal and artistic decline.

Although Arnold Newman’s images for Life minted Pollock’s celebrity, another photographer, Hans Namuth (1915–1990), became nearly as prominent as Pollock himself by capturing the artist in action. In 1950 Namuth contacted Pollock about documenting him while painting in his studio, and once again, Krasner was indispensable to making it happen. The project yielded some 500 photographs as well as two films, including one shot from the underside of a sheet of Plexiglas as Pollock applied paint overhead.

Ironically, Namuth wound up demystifying Pollock’s ostensibly spontaneous execution by showing how deliberate it actually was. Pollock understood how this revelation ran counter to the public image that Krasner and Guggenheim had fostered of him, prompting a fight with Namuth in which each called the other a phony. During the confrontation, Pollock fell off the wagon by pouring himself a drink, thus ending the most productive phase of his career.

Another figure essential to Pollock’s rise was the art critic Clement Greenberg (1909–1994). Greenberg wielded a power over the postwar New York art scene that would be scarcely imaginable today, when art has become a fungible commodity controlled by the global 1 percent. By contrast, Greenberg advocated for Abstract Expressionism as a way of resisting the commercialization of art. That conceit pretty much went out the window with Pollock’s public notoriety, but he’d championed the artist’s work well before Pollock achieved acclaim. One might note that it worked both ways, as Greenberg’s fame grew with Pollock’s. Far from being a steadfast proponent of Pollock, however, Greenberg abandoned him once the latter began to unravel.

During the last six years of his life, Pollock reintroduced figuration into his work; this itself wouldn’t be a problem, except that once again he reached for Picasso, especially in his series of known as the black paintings. These included straight up reinterpretations of Picasso masterpieces like Girl Before a Mirror done in meandering lines. Elsewhere, image fragments would play peek-a-boo out of abstracted fields of brush marks. In Ocean Greyness (1953), for example, eyeballs seemed to float in a turbid soup of the titular color.

Though attempts have been made to critically rehabilitate such works, they simply do not measure up Pollock’s drip—or even pre-drip—efforts. In 1952, however, Pollock did rally to create the last of his drip works, Blue Poles. Distinguished by dark parallel lines arrayed in a syncopated row against slashes of orange and yellow, it looked like a forest on fire.

In 1955 Pollock made his last two paintings, Search and Scent, and in the second, one can almost make out a figure with its mouth open, consumed by a conflagration of thickly applied paint strokes. It’s tempting to see it as a self-portrait of Pollock in the throes of self-immolation, but that’s probably overthinking it. In real life, though, he was in the midst of destroying everything around him, drinking heavily and taking up with another woman, Ruth Klinger, which ended his marriage to Krasner. On August 11, 1956, riding with Klinger and another passenger, Edith Metzger, Pollock ran his Oldsmobile off the road less than a mile from his home. Klinger survived; Metzer and Pollock—remaining emotionally crippled to the end—did not.