51 Facts About Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock died at age 44 in an alcohol-related single-car collision when he was driving.

In December 1956, four months after his death, Jackson Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, on January 28,1912, the youngest of five brothers.

Jackson Pollock's mother is interred at Tingley Cemetery, Ringgold County, Iowa.

Jackson Pollock's father had been born with the surname McCoy, but took the surname of his adoptive parents.

Stella and LeRoy Jackson Pollock were Presbyterian; they were of Irish and Scots-Irish descent, respectively.

LeRoy Jackson Pollock was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the government, moving for different jobs.

In November 1912, Stella took her sons to San Diego; Jackson Pollock was just 10 months old and would never return to Cody.

Jackson Pollock subsequently grew up in Arizona and Chico, California.

Jackson Pollock had already been expelled in 1928 from another high school.

Jackson Pollock was heavily influenced by Mexican muralists, particularly Jose Clemente Orozco, whose fresco Prometheus he would later call "the greatest painting in North America".

In 1930, following his older brother Charles Jackson Pollock, he moved to New York City, where they both studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League.

Jackson Pollock was introduced to the use of liquid paint in 1936 at an experimental workshop in New York City by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Jackson Pollock later used paint pouring as one of several techniques on canvases of the early 1940s, such as Male and Female and Composition with Pouring I After his move to Springs, New York, he began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor and he developed what was later called his "drip" technique.

From 1938 to 1942 Jackson Pollock worked for the WPA Federal Art Project.

Henderson engaged him through his art, encouraging Jackson Pollock to make drawings.

Some psychiatrists have hypothesized that Jackson Pollock might have had bipolar disorder.

Jackson Pollock signed a gallery contract with Peggy Guggenheim in July 1943.

Jackson Pollock received the commission to create the 8-by-20-foot Mural for the entry to her new townhouse.

At the suggestion of her friend and advisor Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock painted the work on canvas, rather than the wall, so that it would be portable.

Additionally, when specifically asked about how the "drip" came to be, Jackson Pollock disavowed his association with Siquieros on multiple occasions and made contradictory statements.

For example, in 1947, Jackson Pollock suggests that he painted his canvases on the floor because he witnessed the Navajo sand artist at the Natural History Museum in New York do it in 1941, and soon after, he suggested that he painted his canvases on the floor because "the Oriental's did it".

At the peak of his fame, Jackson Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style.

Jackson Pollock later returned to using color and continued with figurative elements.

Jackson Pollock was then able to change his style to fit a more organized and cosmopolitan genre of modern art, and Krasner became the one judge he could trust.

In 1955, Jackson Pollock painted Scent and Search, his last two paintings.

Jackson Pollock did not paint at all in 1956, but was making sculptures at Tony Smith's home: constructions of wire, gauze, and plaster.

In December 1956, four months after his death, Jackson Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Jackson Pollock started using synthetic resin-based paints called alkyd enamels, which at that time was a novel medium.

Jackson Pollock described this use of household paints, instead of artist's paints, as "a natural growth out of a need".

Jackson Pollock used hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes as paint applicators.

In 1936, Jackson Pollock participated in an experimental workshop run by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Jackson Pollock and art critic Clement Greenberg saw Sobel's work there in 1946 and later Greenberg noted that Sobel was "a direct influence on Jackson Pollock's drip painting technique".

Jackson Pollock used the force of his whole body to paint, which was expressed on the large canvases.

Jackson Pollock denied reliance on "the accident"; he usually had an idea of how he wanted a particular work to appear.

Jackson Pollock's technique combined the movement of his body, over which he had control, the viscous flow of paint, the force of gravity, and the absorption of paint into the canvas.

Jackson Pollock had seen Paalen's surrealist paintings in an exhibition in 1940.

Jackson Pollock promised to start a new painting especially for the photographic session, but when Namuth arrived, Jackson Pollock apologized and told him the painting was finished.

Jackson Pollock's work has been the subject of important critical debates.

Jackson Pollock considered Pollock's work to be the best painting of its day and the culmination of the Western tradition via Cubism and Cezanne to Manet.

Cockcroft wrote that Jackson Pollock became a "weapon of the Cold War".

Jackson Pollock described his art as "motion made visible memories, arrested in space".

Jackson Pollock's staining into raw canvas was adapted by the Color Field painters Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis.

In September 2009, the art historian Henry Adams claimed in Smithsonian magazine that Jackson Pollock had written his name in his famous painting Mural.

One of Jackson Pollock's works is featured heavily in the film Ex Machina.

In February 2016, Bloomberg News reported that Kenneth C Griffin had purchased Jackson Pollock's 1948 painting Number 17A for US$200 million, from David Geffen.

In 2023, an unknown Jackson Pollock painting was reportedly discovered in Bulgaria after international police agencies were able to track down a group of international art smugglers.

In 1999, the physicist and artist Richard Taylor used computer analysis to show similarities between Jackson Pollock's painted patterns and fractals found in natural scenery, reflecting Jackson Pollock's own words: "I am nature".

In 2007, a traveling museum exhibition of the paintings was mounted and was accompanied by a comprehensive book, Pollock Matters, written by Ellen G Landau, one of the four sitting scholars from the former Pollock Krasner Foundation authentication panel from the 1990s, and Claude Cernuschi, a scholar in Abstract Expressionism.

However, the scientist who invented one of the modern pigments dismissed the possibility that Jackson Pollock used this paint as being "unlikely to the point of fantasy".

Cognitive neuroscientists have shown that Jackson Pollock's fractals induce the same stress-reduction in observers as computer-generated fractals and naturally occurring fractals.