Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock made American painting the centre of the Western art world by abandoning the brush, the easel and the idea of a picture as a window. Born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912 and raised in Arizona and California, he was expelled from two high schools and moved to New York in 1930 to study under the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, whose rhythmic compositions he absorbed and whose subject matter he discarded. He worked on the Federal Art Project during the Depression. He was a severe alcoholic from his twenties, underwent Jungian analysis in the late 1930s, and produced drawings for his analyst full of totemic imagery that fed into his later work. He was also influenced by the Mexican muralists, particularly Siqueiros, and by Navajo sand painting, which is made on the ground. He married the painter Lee Krasner in 1945; she was a considerable artist who subordinated her career to promote his, and moved them to Springs on Long Island, where he worked in a barn. Between 1947 and 1950 he produced the drip paintings. He laid unstretched canvas on the floor and poured, flung and dripped commercial enamel from sticks and hardened brushes, working from all four sides. The result has no focal point and no depth, and the mark records the movement of his whole body — Harold Rosenberg called it action painting. Life magazine asked in 1949 whether he was the greatest living painter in the United States. He stopped in 1951, returned to black-and-white figuration, drank heavily and painted little. He died in August 1956, driving drunk near his home, killing one passenger. He was forty-four.

• Lived: 1912 CE – 1956 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: painter