Pollock: The Legacy

Jackson Pollock, The Flame, 1938, Oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard - l20 1/2 x 30" (51.1 x 76.2 cm), MoMA, NY (click photo for larger image)Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was the American painter who was a leading exponent of Abstract Expressionism, an art movement characterized by the free-associative gestures in paint sometimes referred to as “action painting”. His immediate legacy was certainly felt most by other painters. His work brought together elements of Cubism, Surrealism, Impressionism, Native American Art and Muralism and he went on to develop an approach that was wholly new. But getting there was a journey of experimentation.

For example, in the work featured here, we have an image of blazing flames obscuring what appears to be a skeleton in the foreground. It was likely influenced by the scenes of José Clemente Orozco's famous mural at Dartmouth College, The Epic of American Civilization (1932-34), which Pollock had visited in 1936. Pollock greatly admired and came to know Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. This piece of Pollock’s was accomplished enough to be exhibited in a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Alongside Pollock’s ultimate achievement, even greats such as Willem de Kooning, who remained closer to Cubism, and hung on to figurative imagery, seemed to fall short. And the best among subsequent generations of painters would all have to take on Pollock’s achievement, just as Pollock himself had wrestled with Picasso.

As early as 1958, some were beginning to wonder if Pollock might even have opened up possibilities outside of the realm of painting. To borrow critic Harold Rosenberg's words, Pollock had re-imagined the canvas not as "a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object…[but as] an arena in which to act." 

It was a short step from this realization to interpreting Pollock's balletic moves around the canvas as a species of performance art. Since then, Pollock's reputation has only increased. The subject of many biographies, a movie biopic, and major retrospectives, he has become not only one of the most famous symbols of the alienated modern artist, but also an embodiment for critics and historians of American modernism in its finest hour.

Read more about Pollock here on What About Art?