Jackson Pollock

“Is Jackson Pollock the greatest living painter in the United States?”,

Life magazine startled its readers by asking in 1949. Seven years later, ‘Jack the Dripper’, as Time magazine had called him, was dead. Today, Life’s question no longer seems surprising, and Time’s sarcastic phrase has lost its bite. But we may still wonder why the mass-circulation magazines singled Pollock out from his fellow Abstract Expressionists,

In this compelling, authoritative volume, Ellen Landau locates the man and the artist in the continuum of his times, and recreates the social and cultural milieu of New York in the 1940s and 1950s from which Pollock’s work emerged. The artist’s early years are chronicled from his birth in the Wild West town of Cody, Wyoming, through his troubled school years, to his arrival in New York and periods of rewarding study with Thomas Hart Benton, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Stanley William Hayter. Though he became withdrawn and abrasive, and was often drunk, Pollock nonetheless attracted many other mentors during this time, most importantly of all, Lee Krasner. A fellow artist (and later his wife), her knowledge of art-world thinking and conviction of Pollock’s genius were essential to his development.

With extensive knowledge of Pollock’s habits (much of it gained through interviews), of his reading, his conversation and the exhibitions he visited, Landau retraces many of the far-flung sources of Pollock’s work, from African sculpture and North American totems to the Mexican gods of Siqueiros, arcane texts and Egyptian necrology. More than one hundred of Pollock’s works are reproduced in full colour, and six magnificent gatefolds show his vast horizontal works without distortion. A wealth of comparative photographs illustrating paintings by artists whom Pollock admired further explains the work of this complex, tragic and immeasurably influential figure.