Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), American painter, who was a leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement. He was born in Cody, Wyoming, and studied at the Art Students League in New York with Thomas Hart Benton. Pollock spent several years travelling around the country and sketching. In the late 1930s and early 1940s he worked in New York on the Work Projects Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project. His early paintings, in the naturalistic style of Benton, depict the American scene realistically. Between 1943 and 1947 Pollock, influenced by Surrealism, adopted a freer and more abstract style, as in The She-Wolf (1943, Museum of Modern Art, New York).

After 1947 Pollock turned to Abstract Expressionism, developing the action-painting technique in which the artist drips paint and commercial enamels from sticks or trowels on to huge canvases stretched on the floor. By this method Pollock produced intricate interlaced patterns of colour, such as Full Fathom Five and Lucifer (both 1947, Museum of Modern Art). After 1950 his style changed again, as he crisscrossed raw white canvas with thin lines of brown and black pigment. Among his paintings of this last period is Ocean Grayness (1953, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York).