Pollock in search of the unconscious
One of the most representative artists of American art in the 20th century is undoubtedly Jackson Pollock. With his dripping or action painting technique, he completely changed contemporary art history. Influenced by the French surrealists, he belonged to the Abstract Expressionism movement that flourished in New York during the last century.
Jackson Pollock was born in 1912 in the prairies of the American West. During his childhood and adolescence, he lived between Arizona and Wyoming. From an early age, he was linked to the way of life and culture of the Indian Americans and learned about the essential and close union between man and Nature. He began his artistic studies in California but later moved to New York City to study painting at the internationally renowned Art Students League. A change that led him to his true path to fame. During this time, Pollock was under the tutelage of the realist Thomas Hart Benton, the German expressionist Hans Hoffman, and the Russian modernist John Graham.
In the decade of 1930s, many European artists, mostly French surrealists, found in New York a new platform to continue their work. Names like Piet Mondrian, André Breton, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí quickly became the artistic center of the time. And the city became the cradle of the Abstract Expressionist movement, which achieved great reception within the artistic world by 1945.
The political, economic, and cultural situation the world was going through helped this movement gain recognition. After the financial crash of 1929, the Great Depression, and the Second World War, emotions needed a new form of expression. The tensions, the anger, the tears, and the smiles responded to a new world. One where the penetrable shadow of the past that covered the United States incited men to move forward, look into the future and create new ways of making art.
This new art arose from cubist and surrealist abstraction. They adopted the technique of automatism from surrealism, painting from the unconscious and the natural psychic impulses that turned the artistic process into a spontaneous and dynamic one that involved both the mind and the body.
It was also a primarily American movement that sought to understand art from a new perspective. It was the first art school to demonstrate that Americans possessed the creativity and intellect to create trends as much as the Europeans. Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock were the young people who started this coveted artistic circle.
During his artistic training between 1936 and 1940, Pollock was influenced by Mexican muralists, especially José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Also, during these years, he deepened his knowledge of American art, mainly symbolic and mythical forms.
“Painting is discovering yourself”. Jackson Pollock
The image of Jackson Pollock was a watershed in the history of contemporary western art. His works represent a historical and social moment. Pollock introduced intense changes in the conception of art and then took them to the limit. He introduced the concept of painting as a process and not only a finished creation. His paintings were not limited to the edges of the canvas because he believed that art should be a living process in which the viewer needs to enter the work to activate it. This is why when we see a Pollock, it takes hold of us and we feel sublimated before the painting, making us aware of our existence.
Art critics played a vital role in Pollock’s artistic career. Thanks to them, the doors of the exclusive art world opened to him. Galleries, magazines, and newspapers praised his work and soon elevated him to an American Icon position. Culminating in 1949 when Life magazine named him “the greatest living painter in the United States.”
In 1947, Pollock’s career changed completely when he began to use the action painting or dripping technique. The term action painting was first used by the critic Harold Rosenberg in the 1952 article “American Action Painters.” The technique consists in spontaneously and energetically splashing paint on the surface of a canvas without following any kind of sketch. Thus, the artist’s movement was transmitted through the painting, color, and intensity of the strokes.
It is a type of automatism where the physical and psychic state of the artist is captured while creating his work. This dripping technique made Pollock one of the most representative artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Other artists who used this technique were Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife.
Another characteristic technique that Pollock used was transporting the canvas from the wall to the floor. The freedom this change provided was immense. Extending the fabric on the ground allowed him to walk around or over it and produce large-scale works. It was said that Pollock danced with his paintings and became one with them. In this way, the act of painting became a sweeping gesture of the body and not only of the hand. This also caused a change in the viewers, who could no longer observe the paintings with a single glance but had to move along them to visualize the complete work.
Pollock’s artistic evolution followed a stage characterized by a Surrealist influence. Guardians of the Secret (1943) is one of his most famous paintings due to its emotional charge, an air of mystery, and constant search for the inner self. It was exhibited for the first time in Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery as part of his first solo exhibition.
Cathedral (1947), meanwhile, was one of the first paintings where he placed the canvas on the floor. It was followed by equally impressive paintings such as Full Fathom Five (1947), Number 8 (1949), and Lavender Mist (1950).
Towards the end of his career, Pollock abandoned his usual style and returned to his abstract period. The only thing that remained intact was his search for the human unconscious, which only became stronger. Some examples of this period are The Deep (1953), one of my favorites, and Scent (1955), in which mystery and myth trap the viewers and lead them into an epiphany.
Pollock died in a car accident in 1956 after battling a severe alcoholism problem. His untimely death deprived the art world of one of the greatest artistic geniuses of the 20th century. Pollock’s artistic legacy is manifested through works that open the doors to the intellect and move the innermost emotional fibers. Unfortunately, his death also left a great unknown, what would have become of his art with a few more years of experimentation. Nevertheless, by expressing the human unconscious abstractly, Pollock is and will remain one of the greatest artists in history.