Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock ( January 28, 1912 in Cody, Wyoming; † August 11, 1956 in Springs, East Hampton, New York ) was an American painter of abstract expressionism of the New York School.

Pollock was known to the substantiated by the style of Action Painting. His custom built in Drip -painting process large-format works already brought him during his lifetime the nickname "Jack the Dripper ".

Pollock was married to the painter Lee Krasner, with whom he had shared a studio.

• 5.1 books and exhibition catalogs
• 5.2 Article
• 5.3 musical settings

Life

Jackson Pollock studied 1925-1927 Arts at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles and worked in the years 1927 to 1929 as a land surveyor in California. From 1929 to 1931 he studied at the Art Students League in New York under Thomas Hart Benton, a leading regionalists. Representatives of this successful at the time of the Great Depression anti-modernist direction painted American subjects realistic and popular ( American Scene Painting).

From 1930 to 1935 followed by trips and stays in the Western States, and occasional visits to the Navahoindianern in New Mexico, before moving in 1935 to New York and from 1938 to 1942 worked for the Federal Art Project. He married Lee Krasner in October 1945. For the American people it was established in 1949 by a four-page report in Life magazine for known young painters. They began to sell it in the beginning of the Cold War as an ambassador of the wild, unbridled, democratic- liberal America.

Pollock was in 1950 to the three artists who were sent to the Biennale in Venice. A little later, however, his alcoholism and his mental problems came again to the outbreak, which provoked a permanent blockade work. 1955 Sidney Janis Gallery had the their third Pollock solo exhibition after 1952 and 1954 as a retrospective design, because there were only three new images.

1956 Pollock created under the influence of alcohol in a serious car accident with his convertible, he did not survive. Ruth Kligman (1930-2010), his then girlfriend, who was sitting in the passenger seat next to him, was seriously injured her friend Edith Metzger, who sat in the back, was also killed.

Work

Jackson Pollock is one of the major artists of the 20th century. He influenced not only American, but also European art. Pollock created in the few years 1946-1951 one, as the sources express themselves, " astonishingly self-contained and extremely innovative work". Pollock's early works were clearly influenced by his teacher Benton and the works of the Mexican muralists (popular communist murals ). Pollock's discussion of European modernism, cubism, and surrealism extended the range of influences, without that he found to his own style. The free gradients of the Catalan painter Miró from the 1920s influenced him.

In particular, the experience of the work of Pablo Picasso certain his painting over a prolonged period in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Pollock painted in this period large, expressive images with indigenous motifs. Similar to the Cubism of Braque and Picasso from the " primitive " or original forms of African sculpture cracker, Pollock was referring to Indian and Inuit ( Eskimo ) motifs. Interested him in his dispute with CG Jung primarily the view that the unconscious is the source of art. In the mythological, totemic character of the Indians he saw the Jung -intentioned of connection between the unconscious and artistic expression. A role for the confrontation with the Indian art had apparently the exhibition "Indian Art of the United States " at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941, and edited by the surrealist Wolfgang paals exile in Mexico Art Magazine DYN, especially its Article Totem kind in DYN 4 played -5, 1943. In 1943 the resulting images, the she-wolf ( Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the keeper of the secret ( Museum of Art, San Francisco), Pollock brought individual characters on the screen that appear freely scattered. There are focused images that express the sum of its artistic and subjective experiences of recent years. The turning point towards his abstract magnum opus marked the image of birth (Birth ) of 1941. Although here dominated the subject of an Inuit mask and standing in a formal close to Picasso, but the sometimes thick impasto already took material aspects of his later works anticipate. Especially Pollock succeeded in birth a continuous rhythm that is characteristic of his main work.

Pollock stood since 1942 in contact with the later painters of the " New York School ", including Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. A year later, took the New York gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim Pollock under exclusive contract for a monthly salary of $ 150 and exhibited his works in her gallery Art of This Century in New York. These were clearly surrealistic oriented at that time and was followed by the automatic writing of their intention after detached from the will of automatic painting with which the inner world of the artist should reflect. About this picturesque attitude Pollock eventually succeeded to his own personal style. He turned away from the figurative, even of all the elements that had references to reality.

Action Painting

By 1946, Pollock developed the Dripping technique ( it can drip paint on the lying on the floor screen and flowing, pouring, blows and spackles so that structures, rhythms and patterns from color splashes and flows form, he wears the color is often not flow more with a brush, but leaves them out of a hole in the bottom of a paint can ). With these paintings, Jackson Pollock writes in art history and is one of the most important American artists of the modern age. His paintings work on the contrast and therefore want to express the contradictory opposition between body and soul. As with all artists of Action Painting is the manufacturing process of the artwork in the foreground.

The work is completely free, and it is also the act of painting, who has made so famous that style of abstract expressionism. With this technique of action painting Pollock created complex, interwoven color structures, as in the Cathedral (1947, Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas ).

In the documentary Max Ernst: My vagabondage - My restlessness was Max Ernst on record that it was he who brought Pollock on the idea of ​​" dripping paints ".

From 1950 to Pollock's style changed again: He created great compositions in black and white, Plated White canvases crisscross with brown and black color lines. Among the works of this final period belongs The depth ( Museum Springs, Long Iceland ). This year, who emigrated from Germany Photographer Hans Namuth photographed the artist at work in his studio and created in the course of cooperation a movie. The published the following year in an American art magazine photo series was legendary and was involved to justify the myth of Pollock. After 1951 barely works were created and in 1953 Pollock returned to brush work and figurative painting. Towards the end of 1954, Pollock was to painting. He has remained a myth of the new American painting until today.

In the 1960s, the late Miró, who exerted a strong influence on Pollock was in turn influenced by him.

Pollock is one of the most important American abstract expressionists. Of his works can be found in major museums around the U.S. and Europe. He succeeded with his drip - paintings an independent work without a model. His success helped that the North American Modern was her umbilical cord to Europe caps. Works by Pollock were shown at the documenta II in Kassel (1959 ) in a room devoted exclusively to him and at the documenta III (1964).

1964 acquired Werner Schmalenbach the documenta III exhibited exemplary Painting Number 32 of 1950, one of his monumental masterpieces (2.69 x 4.575 m), for the art collection of North Rhine -Westphalia in Dusseldorf at the price of DM 650,000, a price which in former time attention and criticism provoked.

In May 2005, 32 previously unknown painting by Jackson Pollock were discovered in a New York warehouse. The Fund considered a sensation of contemporary art history. Had found the images of the filmmaker Alex Matter, after he had four years previously encountered it in the estate of his father, Herbert Matter. The photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter had been friends for many years with Pollock and Lee Krasner, and Alex Matter Pollock had known from childhood days.

" The finds were wrapped in brown paper and found themselves next to personal documents, photographs and works of Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning in a New York warehouse, Matter reported in New York. 22 the typical Pollock 's drip paintings and ten email pictures and studies slumbered there, since his father had the works stored in the warehouse of a freight forwarding company in East Hampton, Long Iceland in 1958. "

His painting no. 5, 1948 was once the most expensive picture in the world. According to a report in the New York Times on November 2, 2006, the image of its former owner David Geffen was sold in a private transaction for $ 140 million to a Mexican. As a buyer, the entrepreneur David Martinez is suspected.

Works (selection)

Movies

• Pollock: In 2000, actor Ed Harris made ​​his directorial debut with the biopic ' Pollock '. Harris also played the lead role.
• Jackson Pollock. Movie Documentary, 52 min, written and directed by Kim Evans, Arthaus Musik 2008 ( 1987), ISBN 978-3-939873-21-1.
• Who the # $ &% is Jackson Pollock? (2006) is a documentary about Teri Horton, a 73 -year-old long-distance driver who has bought a painting at a flea market for $ 5 in 1992 and later learned that the work could possibly be of Pollock. The film depicts the problems caused by the attempt to legitimize voltages up to Hortons denial of a purchase price of $ 9 million