Jackson Pollock
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The fundamental concept of esthetic activity is to be sought for in continuous experimentation with the means at the artist's command, and lies above all in the relationship between man and his immediate environment. This should be kept in mind when we read the rare statements made by Pollock which reveal his attitude toward the work of art. Pollock's painting is as direct as painting can be; preliminary sketches were entirely dispensed with. The artist's experience, which often reflects to a remarkable degree the strata of consciousness with their various contents, takes on its active meaning at the very moment when the gesture of painting renders form concrete; its expressive power is heightened by a synthesis of the successive moments in which the creative experience takes place. What the painter never forgets -- and this cannot possibly be determined by an unconscious or instinctive impulse -- is the value of his action; this action is a reality deriving from experimentation and it is the only concrete datum which the artist recognizes. This is why Pollock needed to lay his canvas out flat on the floor, to walk around it, to get into it, and thereby identify the picture as closely as possible with the physical act of painting. Rather than a mere exteriorization, a projection of his personality on to canvas, this method enabled him to achieve something more: the unification of an external entity, material and mechanical, with an intellectual and emotional condition.
Pollock's declared intention was to express his feelings, not to describe them. And because the material means employed to that end were so closely identified with his mental and emotional life, there was no need to assimilate them to any traditional technique; such a technique, in any case, could only have served to express a contemplative outlook wholly foreign to his temperament. But at the same time -- and in this he had no choice -- he had to assume the entire validity of his material means before transforming them into valid forms of expression. From brushwork Pollock moved on to sheer colorwork, as he invented his famous drip technique. For the traditional pigments mixed on the palette, he came to substitute ordinary commercial paints such as Duco. Sometimes he worked on a metal support, scratching and hacking it as if to impress the mark of violence on it -- a temperamental violence identified with that of the material itself.
Immediate sensations were thus translated into terms of immediate experience. Under these conditions, it was only natural at a given moment for Pollock to feel a closer bond of sympathy with Surrealism than with any other modern movement -- but only for a time. And even then he recast and adapted whatever he took over from Surrealism, stripping it of whatever was alien to his purpose, before finally breaking free of it altogether and mastering a style of his own, fashioned by a concrete experience of life approximating to a materialistic ideology. It was a style compounded, in the last analysis, of an intensely personal vehemence, an expressionistic strain typical of a whole aspect of American painting.
Jackson Pollock was born at Cody, Wyoming, in 1912 and was killed in an automobile accident in 1956. He grew up in Arizona and California and attended the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. He then moved to New York City and began his training in earnest at the Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton. Looking back on his schooling there in later years, Pollock recognized how important his classes with Benton had been, because they touched off a violent reaction against his teacher's ideas. Benton had started out from a vaguely avantgarde position, but by the time Pollock came to him in 1929 he had become one of the staunchest representatives of that revolt against modern art which so curiously coincided with the Great Depression; he was one of the painters of the "American Scene." After 1930 that revolt was headed by a "triumvirate" composed of Benton, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood. This movement in the direction of regional realism -- unlike the movement typified by Hopper, which was actuated by social ideals -- was thoroughly reactionary, and not in painting alone. Its guiding aims were predominantly chauvinistic. Thomas Craven, one of the leading spokesmen of American Regionalism, has described it as at last breaking free of the "emasculated tradition of the French modernist movement." According to him, the Triumvirate put an end to "American subservience to foreign cultural fashions."
It was probably through Expressionism that Pollock intuitively grasped the significance of Picasso's painting as it developed after 1937. Guernica taught him to dominate a dramatic urge, while channeling its full force into the picture; it showed him above all the possibilities inherent in the psychological expression of form; it taught him, that is, to make the most of the dramatic repercussions of emotional experience on the consciousness. What he then learned from Picasso became the point of departure of his subsequent work, which owed at the same time an appreciable debt to Surrealism. Something has already been said in an earlier chapter of the probable influence of Masson, but the painter he always admired most, together with Picasso, was Miró; for this we have Pollock's own word. There was another living example, nearer at hand, which he also took to heart; that of Arshile Gorky, who had arrived at an automatic delineation of the image which may have been helpful to him. At the same time, the persistence of an expressionistic type of formal modulation, now evolving in a wholly abstract direction, may well have had an influence on Pollock, through the medium, for example, of Willem de Kooning's work. By now, of course, Pollock's own personality had come into play with the full force of its originality, and these outside influences must not be magnified into anything more than what they actually were: momentary exchanges between several contemporary artists whose cultural background had a good many points in common, but whose later lines of development tended to diverge more and more.
By about 1944 Pollock was showing a lively interest in the density and richness of texture, in pictures like Gothic, where he seemed to be testing it out as a medium of emotional concentration. From 1947 on, his interest in the texture of his materials was unflagging; on those materials, on their textures, he founded the autonomy of his pictorial language. Going beyond Surrealism, which by now was no more to him than a superseded cultural influence, through a masterly intensification of surfaces Pollock succeeded in creating a new kind of painting -painting with a new meaning. After the relatively small-sized pictures of his early maturity (for example Shimmering Substance of 1946), with their essentially pictorial effects of texture, Pollock gradually increased the range and emphasis of his expressive power in really large-scale compositions, whose magnitude gave full scope to the compulsion that drove him to create, within the greatly extended dimensions of the picture surface, something astonishingly new: an autonomous object, constituted not only by the work itself but by the identity established between the artist and the work. And the seemingly informal construction of the surfaces is in reality organized along the strictest lines, determined of course not by a geometric schema or a rigorous distribution of forms, but by an order created by the gesture and movement of the hand, by a technical skill which, though anything but orthodox, is nevertheless accurate and precise. Indeed it is difficult to realize the full extent of Pollock's skill and precision in the handling of his materials until one has taken the trouble to examine his intricate signwork and superimposed coats of paint from close at hand.
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