Jackson Pollock

There is a critical consensus that Jackson Pollock was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, but there is surprisingly little agreement about what makes his work important. As a rule, critics find in Pollock whatever it is that interests them about modern art. The two best-known approaches to Pollock’s work are probably those of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg; the former saw Pollock’s pictures as examples of “all-over” composition, the latter as examples of “action painting.” Pollock’s classic “drip” paintings were mostly done within the brief time span of the years 1947–1950. Some critics have looked for a key to these paintings in Pollock’s earlier work, which reflects the influence of his teacher Thomas Hart Benton, the Mexican muralists, and Pablo Picasso. Other critics have vigorously disputed the relevance of these figurative works to his later abstractions. Similarly, the heads and figures that reemerge in his paintings of 1951–1953 have been the subjects of heated dispute. His meteoric rise to fame, his “cowboy” persona, and his self-destructive behavior, leading to his early death in 1956, have also attracted much attention. In recent decades, however, scholarly attention has shifted away from Pollock’s personal biography toward the cultural contexts of his work. His paintings have been interpreted in terms of totemism, Jungian imagery, the cultural context of postwar America, gender roles, and many other topics. Much Pollock criticism focuses on a mere handful of works, principally those in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It is often assumed that the technique is the important thing about Pollock’s work and that the results of that technique are relatively homogenous; therefore, any one Pollock serves to illustrate his work as well as any other. In fact, Pollock’s paintings are strikingly different from one another, and, ideally, the study of his work should begin with a review of as many of his pictures as possible, with attention to the specific characteristics of each one.