Jackson Pollock

Passport photo, 1955

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was an American painter of the abstract expressionist school, known best for the "drip" technique of his later paintings.

Early life and education

Paul Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912 in Cody, Wyoming. LeRoy Pollock and Stella May McClure were his parents, and he was the youngest of five children. his father, a land surveyor, took his son on trips that exposed him to Native American culture. At the Manual Arts High School under the painter and illustrator Frederick John de St Vrain Schwankowsky, he learned the basics of painting. Unfortunately, he was expelled from that high school and another. At age 18 he moved to New York to join his brother Charles, Pollock to study under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. In the mid-1930s he toured the western United States with Benton and another student.

Art career

Many of Pollock's early works are abstractions reminiscent of Picasso's style. Pollock was influenced by Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. He began to experiment with laying out canvases on the floor to apply liquid paint, and developed his "drip" technique." From 1938 to 1942, the WPA Federal Art Project employed him. Prone to alcoholism, Pollock underwent Jungian psychotherapy, and was encouraged to express concepts and archetypes through his art.

Mural (1943)

In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim commissioned the artist to paint a large mural for her townhouse. The 8-by-20-foot (2.4 by 6.1 m) work Mural was painted in oil and casein on canvas, and has been moved at least twice, to the University of Iowa Museum of Art and to the Getty Conservation Institute for study and conservation.

In 1945 he married artist Lee Krasner, and they moved to Springs in East Hampton, Long Island, New York. They had met when both exhibited art in 1942 at McMillen Gallery. With assistance from Peggy Guggenheim, they bought a house and converted a barn in to a studio where Pollock perfected his drip techniques. Lee was a stabilizing factor in his life, and they enjoyed domestic life, cooking and gardening together. She also provided guidance in modern art and techniques that helped his artistic development, and advanced his career through social contacts.

Theosophical influences in his art

Pollock became acquainted with Theosophy as a teenager:

In 1928 they moved to Los Angeles, where Pollock enrolled at Manual Arts High School. There he came under the influence of Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, a painter and illustrator who was also a member of the Theosophical Society that promoted metaphysical and occult spirituality. Schwankovsky gave Pollock some rudimentary training in drawing and painting, introduced him to advanced currents of European modern art, and encouraged his interest in theosophical literature. At this time Pollock, who had been raised an agnostic, also attended the camp meetings of of the theosophist Jiddu Krishnamurti, a personal friend of Schwankovsky. These spiritual explorations prepared him to embrace the theories of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and the exploration of unconscious imagery in his paintings in subsequent years.

As he wrote to Francis V. O’Connor, Schwankovsky “introduced students to the ideas not only of Krishnamurti, who was a personal friend, but also of Hinduism, reincarnation, karma,” and taught them “how to expand their consciousnesses.”

There are no visible allusions to Theosophy or Krishnamurti in the early works of Pollock displayed in Paris [in a 2025 exhibition covering his works from 1934–1947]. However, the “expansion of consciousness” idea probably played a role in making him sensitive to Surrealist automatic writing and Jungian psychology.

In 1940, Pollock became friends with art collector John D. Graham, whose interests included “Theosophy, hatha yoga, tantric yoga, numerology, systems of proportion derived from Pythagorean and Platonic sources, alchemy, and astrology.” He influenced Pollock to study Jungian psychology, and that school of thought was manifest in Pollock's painting Male and Female (1941–42) depicting the male and female aspects present in all people. Pollock went on to use alchemical, spiritualist, and mythological imagery in his paintings. There is no evidence that Pollock was active in any Theosophical Society.

Final years

During 1955 and 1956, Pollock experimented with sculptures of wire and plaster. He died in a single-car crash involving alcohol on August 11, 1956, less than a mile from his home in East Hampton. New York.

Additional resources

Articles

• Jackson Pollock in Wikipedia.
• Mural (1943) in Wikipedia.
• Introvigne, Massimo. The Early Pollock and the Esoteric Pollock posted on Bitterwinter.org on January 18, 2025.
• O’Connor, Francis Valentine. Jackson Pollock as blog post in Theosophy & Arts. Posted March 9, 2018.