Jackson Pollock, Lavende r Mist : Number 1, 1950

Speaking of America, Volume II: Since 1865 by Laura A. Belmonte.

In the late 1940s, a group of artists known as Abstract Expressionists made New York City the world’s leading center of modern painting. Their ranks included Willem de Koonig, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Mark Rothko. Although the school encompasses a variety of techniques, Abstract Expressionism is characterized by freedom from conventional forms and dynamic depictions of emotion.

Jackson Pollock was one of the leading exponents of Abstract Expressionism. After growing up in Arizona and California, Pollock moved to New York City in 1930. He enrolled at Arts Students League where he studied with the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. From 1935 to 1943, he worked for the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program. For much of this period, Pollock received psychiatric treatment for alcoholism and a nervous breakdown that he suffered in 1938. In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim contracted him for a one-man show at her Art of This Century Gallery in Manhattan. In 1945, Pollock married Lee Krasner, a highly accomplished artist who became a tireless champion of Pollock’s work. They moved to a farmhouse in East Hampton, Long Island.

In 1947, Pollock perfected the “drip” painting technique that became his artistic hallmark. Abandoning the traditional easel, Pollock placed a canvas on the floor or a wall and then poured or dripped paint directly from the can. He manipulated the paint with knives or sticks instead of brushes. Often applying several layers of paint and occasionally mixing in sand or other foreign objects, Pollock usually took weeks to finish a painting. Rejecting the notion that art should have political or social meaning, Pollock saw painting as a personal expression of one’s unconscious. Art critic Howard Rosenberg called the technique “action painting.” By the time of his death in a car accident in 1956, Pollock had won widespread recognition and publicity. His work had a profound influence on artists in the United States and Western Europe.

Reading Questions:

1. What do you think Pollock was feeling when he painted Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950?

2. Pollock was one of the few painters to earn acclaim during his lifetime. What do you think attracted people to Pollock’s work?

3. Compare Pollock’s Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950 to Grant Wood’s American Gothic. How do the styles of the Regionalists and the Abstract Expressionists differ? Which painting do you prefer and why?

Pollock’s Lavende r Mist: Number 1, 1950

Grant Wood’s American Gothic , 1930