Jackson Pollock: Decoding the Art of the ‘Action Painter’

Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:

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An energetic man strides around a large canvas laid on the floor, a half-burnt cigarette filter stuck to his lips. He wears jeans and a white t-shirt despite the freezing cold in his studio, a large space with neither heating nor electricity. The man drips, flings, splashes, and dollops paint as if enraptured in a dance, taking cues from a melody that only he can hear. The painting taking shape is an abstract pattern that looks both vaguely structured and completely random. Is this an expression of chaos? The painter might reply, “No chaos, damn it!” That painter was Jackson Pollock, a polarizing artist if there ever was one. His paintings can mesmerize art lovers, but they can also incite observers to shout, “My toddler could do that better!”

In today’s biographics, we will decode his troubled life and enigmatic art, a cocktail featuring Jungian psychoanalysis, fractals, and CIA involvement.

Paul Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyoming. The town took its name from its founder, Colonel William Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill. Pollock’s birthplace contributed to his mythologized status as a cowboy painter, which was indeed a myth, but one Pollock never felt the need to correct. His parents were Stella May McClure and Leroy Pollock, or rather Leroy McCoy. Young Leroy had lost both his parents in a few months and was raised by his neighbors, the Pollocks. Jackson was the youngest of five boys, all of whom Stella hoped would become artists of some kind. In her eyes, they were all potential geniuses, suggesting the image of a loving mother proud of her children. However, the family atmosphere may not have been that rosy. A later letter written by one of the Pollock boys to his brother discusses Jackson’s emotional instability and psychological problems, which he believed dated back to his childhood and his relations with his family.

A source of emotional instability may have been tied to a constant sense of displacement. When Jackson was 10 months old, the family relocated near San Diego, and eight months later to Phoenix. Leroy was moving around the states looking for better job opportunities or buying and selling land. In 1917, when Jackson was five, Leroy moved the family back to California, this time to Chico. All in all, during the first 10 years of his life, Jackson Pollock lived in six different houses across three different states.

In 1921, the oldest of the Pollock boys, Charles, moved to Los Angeles to work at the Los Angeles Times and to study at the Otis Art Institute. From LA, he would send back copies of art and literary magazines that greatly influenced his younger brothers. The magazines included reproductions of contemporary European art, especially of the Paris School and Pablo Picasso. This is how Jackson’s lifelong obsession with the Spanish artist may have begun.

In 1923, the Pollocks moved back to Phoenix, marking another key milestone in Jackson’s formative years. In Arizona, he visited Native American reservations and learned about their culture, traditions, and art. In his adult years, he admitted that his gestural or action painting technique owed a debt of gratitude to Native American artists such as the Navajo and the Mojave. Their works included abstract designs painted on a flat area laid on the ground, using paint, sand, and other raw materials.

Jackson did not have much time to learn from these techniques, as Leroy relocated again to California in 1924. Three years later, the young Pollock was a freshman at Riverside High School near Los Angeles, and it was not a pleasant experience. He didn’t fit in with the classes or his classmates. His father wrote to the school concerned about the boy’s difficulties with social communication. Jackson engaged in violent behavior and was eventually expelled for fighting.

In March of 1928, Jackson moved to downtown LA and enrolled in Manual Arts High School, garnering two further expulsions and a reputation as a rebel. This time it wasn’t for fighting but for participating in student protests inspired by his father’s socialist ideals. Jackson took every opportunity to march and protest traditional authority. It was a pity the school had him kicked out, as he thoroughly enjoyed classes in drawing and sculpture. He was forming an identity as an artist.

During those years, the teenage Pollock followed Leroy and his crew on surveys of the Grand Canyon, enjoying the vast landscapes of the West. Unfortunately, he also developed a habit of alcohol at a very young age, which became a lifelong addiction. In later life, as a successful artist, he was known for becoming aggressive after a few drinks and for kicking off arguments at parties, which sometimes escalated into brawls.

At the end of the Grand Canyon years, Jackson wrote to his brother Charles that the so-called happy years of youth had been a bit of a “damnable hell.” Charles was a significant influence on Jackson and a trailblazer that led him into the world of art. In 1926, Charles moved to New York to make it as a painter. When Jackson joined him in 1930, the older brother introduced him to one of his teachers, notable artist Thomas Hart Benton.

In 1930, Jackson moved in with Charles and became a student of Benton. This period marked the beginning of Pollock’s formal training, where his disparate influences coalesced, and his style became more distinctive. Benton introduced him to Italian masters of the Renaissance, Mexican muralists, and the movement he championed, American Regionalism. Pollock’s work in the mid-1930s reflects Benton’s influence.

Although he would eventually break away from recognizable figures and explicitly political themes, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jackson Pollock was exposed to another source of profound inspiration. In attempts to fight his alcoholism, anger issues, and bouts of depression, Pollock underwent psychotherapy sessions. His therapists introduced him to the methods of Carl Gustav Jung, particularly the concept of the Jungian unconscious.

According to Jung, the human psyche includes three main interacting systems: the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The ego represents the conscious mind, while the personal unconscious contains forgotten information and repressed memories. The collective unconscious is shared by members of the human species and consists of latent memories from our ancestral and evolutionary past.

When Pollock found it difficult to communicate his feelings to Dr. Henderson, he brought along some of his sketches. A set of 83 drawings from this period is known as the psychoanalytic drawings, capturing a transitional period in Pollock’s career. He was leaving behind his early figurative work and shifting toward what would become his signature style, abstract expressionism.

The drawings display the clear influence of Jung’s theory as Pollock uses symbols belonging to the collective unconscious. Symbols like the snake, which according to Jung, stand in for sex or the baser parts of human nature. In fact, snakes often appear at the bottom of Pollock’s work, while suns, moons, and eyes—symbols of higher psychic states—can be found at the top.

Pollock liked to combine the symbols into larger shapes. According to Professor Michael Layer of Pennsylvania University, this may indicate an attempt at reconciling the artist’s conscious and unconscious states. Pollock’s work started to show another sign of the effects of the unconscious in the early 1940s, when he began to incorporate paint dripping on a horizontal canvas as a preferred technique.

The act of dripping paint using brushes, sticks, or even turkey basters had been influenced by Native American artists, but also by Mexican painters. According to Michael Freed, there is a further collective force at work: the unconscious mind influenced by Jungian studies. Pollock may have given free reign to his unconscious, with the apparently random lines created by paint dripping embodying pure energy generated by repressed memories.

A piece of art that exemplifies the Jungian unconscious at play is “Guardians of the Secret” from 1943. The canvas features a painting within a painting, a rectangular shape filled with abstract markings flanked by two figures, stylized renditions of a man and a woman. The central rectangle may represent the unconscious, with its chaotic expression kept in check by the two human figures, which may symbolize the animus and anima—mirror images of our biological sex.

“Guardians” was the most striking piece in Pollock’s first solo exhibition and got him noticed. In particular, Pollock caught the eye of wealthy art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim. Peggy went to visit Jackson at the flat he shared in New York with his girlfriend, Lee Krasner, who was also a painter. After climbing four long flights of stairs, Peggy found nobody home. Just as she was about to leave, she bumped into a drunken Jackson back from a friend’s wedding party.

Lee and Jackson showed Peggy their respective works. The patron was mildly interested in Pollock’s and totally dismissive of Krasner’s. There may have been some jealousy at work; Guggenheim may have developed an infatuation with Pollock and resented Lee’s presence in his life. Peggy walked away irritated by Pollock’s behavior but impressed by his looks and charisma. Ultimately, it was her advisor, painter Marcel Duchamp, who convinced her to give Jackson a chance.

In July of 1943, Pollock received a commission to create a mural for Peggy’s new townhouse. He was free to choose the subject but not the size; the work needed to cover an entire wall, 81 feet long and almost 20 feet high. Pollock chose to paint with oil on canvas rather than directly on the wall. However, the size of the frame was huge, and his studio was divided into two rooms, neither of which was large enough. Pollock ended up tearing down the partition wall.

The deadline was November 6, the date on which Guggenheim had offered to stage an exhibition of Pollock’s art. Jackson immediately set to work, but he didn’t. The artist was going through a rough patch, slipping back into depression. Pollock experienced an artistic block and spent weeks staring at the empty canvas. He missed the November deadline, but shortly afterward, he had a vision—a stampede of every animal in the American West, cows, horses, antelopes, and buffalo, everything charging across that surface.

Driven by this rapture, Pollock painted his mural in a single burst of energy. By New Year’s Day, the stampede had morphed into a kinetic tsunami of abstract shapes. The mural was recognized as a turning point for American art and helped put Jackson on the artistic map of New York. He could count on Guggenheim’s patronage, but most importantly, he was championed by influential art critic Clement Greenberg, who declared Pollock the painter this country had produced.

In October 1945, Jackson and Lee tied the knot, and in November, they moved into their new house in Springs, Long Island, New York. Jackson converted a nearby barn into a large studio, large enough to lay enormous canvases on the floor. Free from the constraints of the traditional easel, the painter was able to perfect the technique for which he became famous—drip painting or action painting. By defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, Pollock added a new dimension to his creative process.

He was now able to view and apply paint to his canvases from all directions. Pollock preferred household paints, varnishes, and enamels to drip and fling. In the process of perfecting the style, he moved away from figurative representation, even avoiding vague shadows of recognizable shapes. His work “Lucifer” from 1947 is a good example of this transition.

Pollock had started this painting by applying color to the canvas in a traditional way, but halfway through, he went into full action mode, dripping and spattering pigments onto an underlayer into which he had embedded small pieces of gravel to increase the texture. While completing “Lucifer,” Pollock devised another original technique. Every time he had to dip his brush into varnish, the interruption to his freehand movements frustrated him. He then tried to tilt a can of household paint, allowing it to run down a stick at the right angle.

“Lucifer” and similar works debuted at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1948. You would think that with Greenberg behind him, the exhibition would be a success, but it was a critical disaster. The general public in the U.S. was simply not yet ready for Pollock’s action paintings. Europe was a different story, though. Peggy Guggenheim, constantly moving between New York and Venice, took the occasion to show six of Pollock’s works at the prestigious Venice Biennale. The paintings were greatly appreciated by Italian and European critics.

Shortly after Pollock’s European exhibitions, he made it to the mainstream. On August 8, 1949, readers of Life magazine got to know the painter, who appeared as a brooding, puzzled-looking man standing in front of one of his large murals. The title of the article read, “Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?”

In 1949 and the early 1950s, Pollock was on a roll. This is when he produced “Number One” and “Autumn Rhythm,” arguably two examples in which abstract expressionism and action painting are at their highest power. These large canvases lack a central point of focus; there is no hierarchy or dominance of one element over the other. Every bit of the surface is equally important.

Pollock’s own European tour had no further motive than to advance his art, and apparently, it worked. His paintings had to establish credibility in Europe before being appreciated at home. Despite the wave of success and appreciation, critics were still divided. If Life had Pollock’s back, Time magazine dismissed his art as chaos, hence his famous reply via telegram: “No chaos, damn it!” Pollock firmly stated that he had a clear idea of how he wanted a particular piece to appear.

He affirmed complete control over the movements of his implements, his hands, and his body. Random forces did come into play when the paint fell over the canvas, and Pollock accepted that the viscosity of the material, the absorption factor of the canvas, and even the force of gravity were uncontrollable elements. Wrestling with the controllable ones created a synthesis—a new meaning, perhaps, in Pollock’s mind, similar to how the human psyche and behavior are a result of conscious and unconscious factors.

Finally, Pollock regained control as the abstract images took shape on the canvas. It was he who decided what colors or lines to add, and he would not stop until he saw what he wanted to see. Contemporary myths depict Jackson Pollock as a bewitched artist high on alcohol who randomly flung paint while ecstatically dancing to the improvisational jazz of masters like Charlie Parker. His wife, Lee Krasner, later denied this. Not only did his studio lack the electricity needed to plug in a record player, but Pollock didn’t really enjoy that style of music; he preferred old-fashioned big band classics of the Dixieland era.

This myth was further dispelled by the analysis of art critics Robert Goodnaught and Pepe Carmel. They studied a documentary of Pollock at work shot by filmmaker Hans Namuth and described Jackson’s working method in four phases.

Phase one: Start your masterpiece by tracing some loosely representational figures.
Phase two: Immediately overpaint and obscure these figures. These two phases should take about two hours and leave you utterly exhausted.
Phase three: Take a can of black or dark enamel, dip a stubby brush, and move your arm rhythmically. The paint will drip, fall, and splash in a variety of movements onto the surface. Within half an hour, the entire surface will be covered in weaving rhythms and patterns.
Phase four: Over the following two weeks, you will get accustomed to the painting, returning to it to apply additional layers of color in a slower and more deliberate fashion.

Goodnaught and Carmel provided a good description of the process. When it came to interpreting the result, we just have to quote them. Much later, studies published in Nature by Richard Taylor, Adam Michelik, and David Jonas analyzed “Autumn Rhythm,” among other works, and realized that Pollock’s paintings presented fractal patterns. Fractals are never-ending, infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar, whether you view them up close or from far away.

The trio found geometric regularity in the apparently irregular surfaces of Pollock’s masterpieces. But what was the meaning behind this? The three main interpretations are that Pollock wanted to replicate fractals observed in nature, such as trees or coastlines, or that he wanted to represent a mathematical model of a fractal, or that the fractals observed on the canvas were simply an unintentional representation of Pollock’s movements. In other words, the painting was merely an object, a trace left behind by the event of the artist working in his studio, and that the event is what counted.

Regardless of interpretations, descriptions, and explanations, Jackson was huge by the 1950s. He was seen as the leader of the new vanguard of abstract expressionists. Peggy Guggenheim and Greenberg had played their part, but Pollock and his peers could count on one more powerful ally: the U.S. government and the CIA. Remember the exhibits and tour organized by the State Department in 1947? It had backfired. It emerged that many abstract expressionists, including Pollock, were socialists or communists. This prompted the political establishment to condemn their art.

Senator George Dondero declared all modern art communistic. Harold Harvey, a Los Angeles councilman, claimed modern art was a means of espionage, suggesting that if you knew how to read them, modern paintings would disclose weak spots in U.S. fortifications.

There’s probably a movie there somewhere, or at least a good conspiracy theory. Circles within the State Department and CIA felt that sponsoring American modern art would be a good plan. The end game was to prevent Soviet realist art from gaining traction in Europe, but they could not do it openly. Conveniently, the president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York was Nelson Rockefeller, whose connections with the CIA and the diplomatic service were deep-rooted.

In 1952, the CIA gave MoMA a five-year grant via the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to fund the international program. The museum was able to organize 33 international exhibitions of abstract expressionist art across four years. With CIA money, European galleries were flooded with works by Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and similar artists.

In the same year, Pollock produced “Convergence,” a collage of colors that created masterful shapes and lines evoking violent emotions—a real assault on the eye. Surely not very accessible, yet it became his best-known work thanks to the promotion granted by the international program and the fact that years later, it was turned into a best-selling jigsaw puzzle.

But as often happens with successful yet troubled artists, the pressures of notoriety contributed to Pollock’s personal deterioration. His bouts of depression worsened, his alcoholism deepened, and his