action painting Archives – Daily Art Fixx

Born on January 28, 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, Paul Jackson Pollock was a key figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Pollock grew up in Arizona and California and began his painting studies at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles in 1928. In 1930, he moved to New York where he studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. During this early time in his studies, Pollock was influenced by the murals of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. From 1935 to 1942, Pollock worked on the WPA Federal Art Project as a mural assistant to David Alfaro Siqueiros, and as an easel painter.

Pollock’s paintings during this time were inspired by Navajo sand painting, Asian calligraphy, and personal revelations stemming from four months of Jungian psychotherapy to treat his alcoholism. “This resulted in an obsessive exploration of his unconscious symbolism, mediated through the stylistic influence of Picasso, Orozco, Joan Miró and the theories of John Graham. The works he created parallel to his psychotherapy contain the elements of what became a personal iconography.”

By 1947, Pollock was creating densely layered compositions that brought both praise and criticism. Some critics viewed them as “meaningless and chaotic”, while others saw them as “superbly organized, visually fascinating and psychologically compelling.”

Pollock’s first solo show was held in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York. Guggenheim gave him a contract that lasted through 1947, allowing him to devote all his time to painting. Prior to 1947 Pollock’s work was influenced by Pablo Picasso and Surrealism, and in the early 1940’s, he participated in several Surrealist and Abstract art exhibitions.

In 1945, Pollock married artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy. In the fall of that year, the couple moved to what is now known as the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Long Island, New York.

From 1947 to 1952 Pollock created his most famous “action paintings“. “Pollock’s technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term action painting. With this technique, Pollock was able to achieve a more immediate means of creating art, the paint now literally flowing from his chosen tool onto the canvas. By defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension, literally by being able to view and apply paint to his canvases from all directions.” These works were also larger in scale and were given numbers instead of titles.

A profile in the 8 August 1949 issue of Life magazine introduced Pollock’s art to Americans and secured his growing reputation as one of the foremost modern painters of the time. During this intensely creative time, Pollock was treated by a doctor who substituted his drinking with tranquillizers. In 1951, he began drinking heavily again.

In 1952, Pollock’s first solo show in Paris opened at the Studio Paul Facchetti and his first retrospective was organized by Clement Greenberg at Bennington College in Vermont. His work was shown in many group exhibitions, including the Whitney Annuals, the Museum of American Art, New York, from 1946 and the Venice Biennale in 1950. Although his paintings were widely known and exhibited internationally, Pollock never traveled outside the United States.

By 1955, Pollock’s alcoholism and depression had overtaken his life and he stopped painting altogether. He was also becoming increasingly estranged from his wife and in the summer of 1956 she traveled to Europe to re-evaluate their relationship.

On August 11, 1956, Jackson Pollock died in an automobile accident. Driving drunk, he overturned his convertible, killing himself and an acquaintance, and seriously injuring his other passenger. After Pollock’s death, Krasner, managed his estate and ensured that his reputation remained strong. They are buried together at Green River Cemetery in Springs, Long Island.

Sources: Ciudad de la Pintura (images), Wikipedia, Guggenheim Collection, MoMA, Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center

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Abstract Expressionist painter and sculptor Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. De Kooning worked for a commercial-art and decorating firm and studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts at night. He immigrated to the United States (illegally) in 1926 and worked as a house painter in New Jersey before moving to New York in 1927. De Kooning worked in commercial-art and at the WPA Federal Art Project until 1937. In the late 1930’s, he began painting full-time and his abstract and figurative works were influenced by Cubism, Surrealism, and Arshile Gorky who shared his studio.

In the 1940’s de Kooning participated in group shows with other New York School artists who became known as Abstract Expressionists. From 1950 to 1955, he produced his well-known Women series, “integrating the human form with the aggressive paint application, bold colors, and sweeping strokes of Abstract Expressionism. These female “portraits” provoked not only with their vulgar carnality and garish colors, but also because of their embrace of figural representation, a choice deemed regressive by many of de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, but one to which he consistently returned for many decades.”

Following the Women series, de Kooning painted abstract urban landscapes, parkways, rural landscapes, and, in the 1960s, a new series of Women. In 1975, after working in sculpture for two years, de Kooning began a new series of dense, richly colored abstractions. “His late work consists of calligraphic, predominantly white canvases that demonstrate the artist’s ultimate synthesis of figuration and abstraction, of painting and drawing, of color and line.”

In 1974 the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, organized a show of de Kooning’s drawings and sculpture that traveled throughout the US. In 1978 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, held an exhibition of his work. In 1979, he was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Prize, and an exhibition was held at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.

De Kooning settled in the Springs, East Hampton, Long Island, in 1963. A retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1997.

De Kooning died on March 19, 1997 in Long Island, New York. His works are collected in major museums and galleries all over the world.