Abstract Action. The splattered oeuvre of a cultural icon

The rebel hero of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock careened through his life like a firework across the American art landscape, with his urgent, splattered drip paintings his most explosive legacy. This essential introduction traces Pollock’s work and his fame to understand his masterpieces in the greater modernist story and explore his making as a cultural icon.

The rebel hero of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) careened through his life like a firework across the American art landscape. Channeling ideas from sources as diverse as Picasso and Mexican surrealism, he rejected convention to develop his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing.

Pollock’s most famous works are his drip paintings, where he dripped and poured household enamel paint over the canvas with a variety of instruments, from sticks to syringes, hardened brushes to broken bits of glass. The splattered results pulsate with energy, replacing the refinement of easel and brush with something altogether more immediate, vivid, and physical. To evade the viewer’s search for figurative elements in his paintings, Pollock abandoned titles and identified each work with a neutral number only.

Notoriously reclusive and volatile, struggling with alcoholism, married to fellow Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner, and killed in a car crash aged just 44, Pollock is as much a compelling celebrity icon as an artistic pioneer. This essential artist introduction explores both his work and his fame to shed light on masterpieces of the modernist story, and the making of a cultural icon.

The author

Leonhard Emmerling received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for a thesis titled “Jean Dubuffet’s Art Theory.” He is the Director of South Asia Programmes at the Goethe-Institute’s office in New Delhi and was previously active as a curator at various art institutions in Germany. His publications include TASCHEN’s Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jackson Pollock.

About the series:

Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:

- a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
- a concise biography
- approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Painting as a concept

A tragic icon of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) took influences from Picasso and Mexican surrealism and developed his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing. Though his name inevitably conjures up images of the drip paintings for which he is most famous, this technique was only developed midway through his career. The progression from his earlier work to his final "action" paintings — a veritable revolution of painting as a concept — reveals the genius of this tortured artist whom many call the greatest modern American painter.

About the Series:
Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art Series features:

- a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
- a concise biography
- approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions

The author:
Leonhard Emmerling received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for a thesis entitled 'Kunsttheorie Jean Dubuffets'. Since 2002 he has been working as an author and contemporary art exhibition curator in Berlin, Kaiserslautern, Krefeld and Ludwigsburg, Germany. His publications include TASCHEN’s Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jackson Pollock.

Джексона Поллока считают одним из лидеров «мифического» направления новой американской школы, он принадлежит к плеяде художников «живописи действия». Художник работал на полотне, расстеленном прямо на полу, он приступал к работе сразу со всех сторон, делая из картины сцену, на которой разворачивалось неистовое действие. В результате получались густые лабиринты краски с потеками, каплями, многоцветные или черно-белые, имеющие структуру или смягченные и словно оплавившиеся. Чтобы достичь этого, Поллок использовал технику «дриппинга», или разбрызгивания.

«Поллок не был прирожденным художником. В шестнадцать лет он собирался стать скульптором, но прежде чем ему исполнилось восемнадцать, его интересы устремились к живописи. Ему пришлось приложить немало усилий, чтобы научиться рисовать и писать красками». Вот так в 1967 году, по случаю посмертной итоговой выставки в Музее современного искусства, Клемент Гринберг вкратце обрисовал начало карьеры Джексона Поллока, погибшего в автокатастрофе в 1956 году, будучи легендарной личностью своего времени.

После занятия скульптурой в Лос-Анджелесе и натуралистической живописью в Нью-Йорке, Поллок объехал Соединенные Штаты и открыл для себя индейскую «песочную живопись», монументальные фрески мексиканцев Ороско и Сикейроса, которые, как и кубизм Пикассо, оказали существенное влияние на раннюю живопись Поллока с ее вибрирующими цветами и геометрическими формами.

Поллок уделил особое внимание своему месту своего происхождения — американскому Дикому Западу, обширному горизонтальному пространству страны, равно как и искусству коренных народов Америки. «Для индейцев характерен правдивый, реалистический художественный подход, проявляющийся в их умении уловить соответствующие образы и в их понимании того, что составляет саму суть изображаемого предмета. Их колорит — в общем и целом, Западный, их видению мира свойственна основная универсальность всего подлинного искусства».

Поллок считал, что источник искусства кроется в бессознательном. В последние годы жизни он много внимания уделял спонтанному творчеству. Процесс создания картины порождал собственную динамику, которая, как и получившееся полотно, являлась прямым непосредственным выражением психики. Поллок был символом некоего неистовства в искусстве.

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement and the most influential American painter of the twentieth century. Although he died at the age of 44, he left an unsurpassed body of work.Throughout his life, Pollock wrote very little about his own art or that of others. Nevertheless, in the few writings we do have, and in a few unpublished, undated notes – all of which are gathered together in this volume – the themes are remarkably similar. After acknowledging his initial debt to the Native American sand painters, who gave him the idea for putting the canvas on the floor and working it “in the round”, Pollock routinely referred to his interest in the unconscious as the source of modern art, as it enabled the direct expression of an “inner world,” of individual feeling and experience of the modern age. Moreover, it is clear from his statements that Pollock himself was open to the possibility of such a subjective approach to painting as an international enterprise. He never suggested that the modern world, characterized, in his words, by “the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio,” and which the modern artist had the responsibility to express, was specifically American, but rather that these were features of modern life in a much broader sense. In her in-depth essay, Nancy Jachec sketches an accurate profile of the artist and takes a closer look at his work, as well as detailing the enormous number of studies on the artist.

A tragic icon of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) took influences from Picasso and Mexican surrealism and developed his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing. Though his name inevitably conjures up images of the drip paintings for which he is most famous, this technique was only developed midway through his career. The progression from his earlier work to his final "action" paintings - a veritable revolution of painting as a concept - reveals the genius of this tortured artist whom many call the greatest modern American painter.

About the Series:
Every book in TASCHEN's Basic Art Series features:
* a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist
* approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions
* a concise biography