Wrestling with paint and demons

In his centenary year, the status of Jackson Pollock (1912–56) looks assured: a self-created American hero who is now accorded all the reverence due an Old Master. The most famous of the Abstract Expressionists, nicknamed Jack the Dripper because of his trademark style, his emphasis was on paint and process: the surface of the canvas was an arena in which the artist could externalise his feelings through action.

Some have called Pollock the father of Performance Art, but his primary involvement was with pure painting — creating a complex abstract imagery that was intended to engage with Jungian archetypes and thus have access to deep meaning. Of course not everyone was convinced, and for many Abstract Expressionism could not remotely approach the realities of the human condition. As Francis Bacon put it: ‘Jackson Pollock’s paintings might be very pretty but they’re just decoration. They look like old lace…’

After a slow and untalented start, Pollock struck upon a way of working by dripping the paint in long threads and trails on to a large canvas laid flat on the ground, rather than applying it traditionally with a brush. Max Ernst had already experimented with a similar procedure by piercing a hole in a can which was then swung above a canvas on to which the paint was released in a wide or narrow arc. But Pollock was the first to turn a strategy into a technique and exploit it to its full extent. He applied his paint by hand, letting it run off the brush or flicking it in great long spatters, as he moved athletically around the canvas, rhythmically dripping and hurling the paint in a kind of ritualised dance. The term Action Painting was coined to describe this style of work, because of the physical exertion it demanded. After his second solo exhibition in March 1945, the influential critic Clement Greenberg hailed Pollock as ‘the strongest painter of his generation’.