Chronological Development of Jackson Pollock

As a painter, Jackson Pollock’s chronological development can be divided into six time periods. The first period, from 1930 to 1938, is known as the painter’s Benton period. Pollock started his education at the age of seventeen under Thomas Hart Benton, who taught at the Art Students league in New York from 1929 until 1931. Benton’s influence was powerful; as Pollock (1999, 19) stated in 1950 during an interview with Berton Roueché, “Tom Benton was teaching . . . he drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into non-objective painting.”

Paul Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyo-ming, USA, the youngest of five brothers. He grew up in the West.

In his youth, Jackson’s family moved frequently, residing in Arizona between 1915 and 1918, moving to northern California from 1918 to 1923, back to Arizona in 1923, and leaving in 1925 for southern California, where Jackson lived until 1929, when he studied painting at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. In the beginning of his career, Pollock was not concerned with pictorial values. Rather, his goal was to express emotions (Landau 2000, 56; Namuth 1978; Hunter 1956–57, 4–7). According to Friedman (1972, 14), a reading of Pol-lock’s letters written between 1929 and 1930 showed signs of small rebellious gestures indicating a fight against what he had been taught.

For example, at Manual Arts, Pollock got expelled for publishing the Journal of Liberty, which attacked scholarships that were mostly given for athletics and not for artists (Frank 1983, 12–13). At age

seven-teen one of his influential teachers was Frederick Schwankovsky, who introduced him mysticism (Friedman 1972, 109).

Pollock’s older brother Charles was an art teacher in New York, and Jackson followed him to New York. Pollock’s studies were influ-enced by Renaissance art, Asian and Native American art, and Mexi-can artists José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1973). In an interview with Francine Du Plessix and Cleve Gray (1999, 31), Pollock’s wife Lee Krasner stated that “Jack-son’s mother, in fact all the family, was anti-religious: that’s a fact. . . . Jackson . . . was tending more and more to religion. . . . in his teens he used to listen to Krishnamurti’s lectures.” In 1929 Jackson wrote to his brothers Charles and Frank that: “I have dropped religion for the present. Should I follow the Occult Mysticism...” (Frank 1983, 13).

The second period, from 1938 to 1943, is labeled as his Jungian period, since it covers Pollock’s time under Jungian analysis. Pollock was both confident and full of doubt, a down-to-earth Westerner with mystical leanings (Seiberling 2000, 58). Because Pollock was already familiar with Freud’s writings, the significance of the Jungian influ-ence on the painter’s artistic development is not that obvious. Pol-lock had long owned a copy of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.

It wasn’t until 1949, three years after he had given up his symbolic imagery, that he got Jung’s book The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, which is the only book by Jung in his library (Rubin 1999, 235, 227–28). Elizabeth L. Langhorne (1999, 207, 212) claimed in 1979 in her article “Jackson Pollock’s ‘The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle’” that Pollock had not read Jung. However, Mrs. Cary F. Baynes, the woman who through Helen Marot referred Pollock to his first Jungian analyst, translated The Secret of the Golden Flower into English in 1931, a book about Chinese yoga and mystical alchemy which includes a commentary by Jung. Later, in 1950, she translated The I Ching or Book of Changes. Additionally, Pollock owned F. Yeats-Brown’s Yoga Explained, published in 1937. Langhorne wrote that the Moon-Woman echoed the seven chakras of yoga and is Pollock’s early

step of individuation. Helen Westgeest (1996, 43) also noted that Pol-lock’s interest in Zen art was well known.

It is unknown whether Jungian ideas, Eastern views, or American Indian art had the greatest influence on the art of Jackson Pollock.

Furthermore, the underlying roots of Jungian synchronicity were based on Asian philosophy. Since it is impossible to establish authori-tatively which one of these theories had the most effect on Pollock’s art, it is appropriate to survey them all.

Pollock worked on the Work Projects Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project in New York between 1938 and 1942 (Hunter 1956–57, 4). Pollock’s first exhibition was influenced by Surrealist, Navajo Indian, and Asian art and by the individual artists Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso (Lewison 1999, 27, 72–75; Hunter 1956–57, 4–12; Hunter 2000, 118; Cernuschi 1992, 5–6; Namuth 1978). By 1939, Pollock was using a Surrealist tech-nique, automatic drawing, as a release for unconscious imagery. At the same time, psychiatric therapy gave Pollock access to his unconscious images. He became familiar with the notion of images of the collec-tive unconscious and mythology. Surrealism’s practice of automatism was founded on Freudian free association (Rose 1969, 15). The tech-nique of automatism was “a direct extrapolation into image-making of Freud’s ideas of free association, the undirected hand supposedly recording mediumistically the message of the unconscious” (Rubin 1999, 229). Around 1941 Pollock and Krasner were experimenting with writing automatist poetry with their friends Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, and their wives (Frank 1983, 39).

The painter’s third period, from 1943 to 1947, is labeled as his drip-ping technique period, and can be described as an important period of transition for Pollock both visually and personally. In his drawings of 1942, he squeezed gouache directly from the tube onto the paper.

At the same time, he was already linking painting and drawing and exploring how to draw with paint. His pen and ink line became more

“a painterly tangle.” The drip line provided a line that could be freely

drawn and given a painterly surface. In 1946–47, Pollock switched from traditional painting to a dripping and pouring technique. He painted directly onto a horizontal painting surface. His technique was influenced by American Indian sand painting and Mexican muralists.

These influencing factors are noticeable as he mainly painted on the floor (Rose 1969, 9–11). Artistically, the philosophy and history of alchemy were in the cultural air, and alchemy was seen as a cause of Pollock’s change to his drip technique (Rubin 1999, 243). Dora Val-lier (1970, 253) wrote that it is unimportant that Max Ernst was the first artist who used a dripping technique, and unimportant that Miró and Masson had introduced automatic writing into their paintings.

Pollock’s gesture was what made his technique remarkable. From this simple technique he extracted a surprising variety of marks.

William Rubin (1999, 257) stated that “Picasso’s art served as a powerful lever in forcing Pollock’s painting toward its own resolution.”

Pollock’s first public solo exhibition was held in 1943 at Peggy Gug-genheim’s museum Art of This Century. Thereafter, in an interview in the Los Angeles Journal of Art and Architecture, the painter said that

I have always been impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art. . . . The Indians have the true painter’s approach in their capacity to get hold of appropriate images, and in their understanding of what constitutes painterly subject matter. Their color is essentially Western, their vision has the basic universality of all real art. . . . Euro-pean moderns are now here is very important, for they bring with them an understanding of the problems of modern painting. I am particularly impressed with their concept of the source of the unconscious. This idea interests me more than these specific painters do, for two artists I admire most, Picasso and Miró, are still abroad (Pollock 1999, 15–16).

Pollock exhibited in New York every year between 1943 and 1951, in Chicago in 1945 and 1951, and in San Francisco in 1945.

Willem de Kooning explained that Pollock created a new paint-ing style (Frank 1983, 105). Friedman (1972, 245) maintained that

Pollock changed the history of painting by taking aesthetic risks and

“granting aesthetic permissions.” In a 1968 interview with Valliere (2000, 252) Greenberg said that Pollock did not go near old mas-ters like the other artists. He had never seen Mark Tobey’s artwork, even though Greenberg told that it has been claimed that Jackson was influenced by Tobey. Greenberg said that Jackson was one of the first artists who gave up going to museums for inspiration.

Pollock married Lee Krasner in 1944, and in 1946 they moved from New York City to a farm in Springs, East Hampton, Long Island. Pollock lived there until his death.

The painter’s fourth period, from 1946 to 1951, is labeled the non-objective period. It is also called his classic period. Pollock’s works during this period are rendered in a purely visual, nonobjective style;

all the painter’s emotions were translated into pictorial sensation. Pol-lock added the use of paintbrushes in his drip paintings. His ambition was a total visual effect that went beyond anything previously achieved (Hunter 1956–67, 9; Rose 1969, 12). Pollock’s key works in 1946 were Shimmering Substance and The Blue Unconscious. Later significant works were Number 4, 1949, Lavender Mist, 1950, and Ocean Greyness, 1953.

This period followed in the form of his mural-sized poured canvases.

His paintings often covered a figure underground. For instance, X-ray photographs of his painting Full Fathom Five, 1947, indicate a figure with a raised arm beneath the surface (Hunter 1956–67, 4, 33;

Lewison 1999, 33, 36, 47, 57). In a 1969 interview with B. H. Fried-man, Lee Krasner described Pollock’s painting style, which either hid or exposed the imagery, in the following terms:

I saw his paintings evolve. Many of them, many of the most abstract, began with more or less recognizable imagery—heads, parts of the body, fantastic creatures. Once I asked Jackson why he didn’t stop the painting when a given image was exposed. He said, “I choose to veil imagery.” Well, that was that painting. With the black-and-whites, he chose mostly to expose the imagery. I can’t say why. . . . Krasner

con-tinued that these paintings were . . . . No, no more naked than some of those early drawings—or paintings like Male and Female or Easter and the Totem. They come out of the same subconscious, the same man’s eroticism, joy, pain . . . . Some of the black-and-whites are very open, ecstatic . . . (Friedman 1999, 36)

Later, in 1979, William Rubin asked Lee Krasner to clarify her state-ment, which he quoted in his article Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological Criticism: “Pollock made the remark about the veiling in reference to There Were Seven in Eight, and it doesn’t apply to other paintings—certainly not to such pictures as Autumn Rhythm, One, etc.” (Rubin 1999, 253). As a conclusion, Rubin (1999, 252) wrote that Pollock’s method of veiling the images should therefore be associated with the transition from late 1944 to mid-1947, during which Pollock moved from metaphoric imagery to full abstraction, and not with the fully developed classic paintings.

The fifth period, from 1951 to 1954, is labeled the black period. In 1951, Pollock returned to a focus on figure paintings. These paintings were followed by his dramatic series of pourings in black, ending with a return to his color paintings in 1952. Pollock exhibited in Venice and Milan in 1950 and in Paris in 1952. In Pollock’s final years, the figure played an increasingly prominent role. In 1953 Pollock turned back to a more conventional use of tube pigments and brush. He con-tinued with semiabstract black and white works (Hunter 1956–57, 11). Michael Fried wrote in his essay in Artforum in 1965 that Pollock

“seems to have been on verge of an entirely new and different kind of painting, combining figuration with opticality in a new pictorial syn-thesis of virtually limitless potential; and it is part of the sadness of his last years that he appears not to have grasped the significance of what are perhaps the most fecund paintings he ever made” (Fried 1999, 103).

The sixth period, from 1953 to 1956, is labeled the final period.

Pollock’s career was brief. It involved an excess of violence, which was always colored by tough laughter and was never tainted by sentimen-tality. Indeed, it was filled with moments of stupendous creative

activ-ity, as if the artist knew how little time he had in which to paint (Hess 2000, 41). Pollock exhibited in Zurich in 1953 and in New York in 1952, 1954, and 1955. In the final four years of his life, Pollock didn’t paint much. Pollock died at age forty-four in a car crash on August 11, 1956 (Hunter 1956–57, 4, 11; Rose 1969, 92). Elizabeth Frank (1983, 102) noted: “Accident may be denied in art, but it cannot always be denied in life.”

Figure 6. Jackson Pollock, The Deep, 1953 oil and enamel on canvas, 220.4 x 150.2 cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre de Création Industrielle, Georges Pompidou, Paris (Frank 1983, 101).