The 5 most important WORKS of Jackson POLLOCK

The American painter Jackson Pollock (Cody, 1912-The Springs, 1956) he was regarded in his time as one of the greatest living painters in the United States. A brilliant painter and maximum representative of the action painting or pictorial technique that tries to express feelings through color and matter. Thus, Pollock is one of the great names of the abstract expressionism, becoming a legend for his innovative and revolutionary way of conceiving art, for his life full of excesses and his death in a car accident just when he had already reached a peak in his career of him.

In this lesson from a TEACHER we offer you a selection of the most important works of Jackson Pollock so that you can appreciate the basic characteristics of his artistic style.

Index

1. Characteristics of Jackson Pollock's works
2. The She-Wolf (1942), one of Jackson Pollock's important works
3. Pollock Mural (1943)
4. Number 1: Lavender Mist
5. Number 5, another of Pollock's important works
6. Convergence, sample of abstract expressionism

We will start by knowing the style of Jackson Pollock and his artistic technique in order to better understand his work.

• The dipping or dripping paints It is a technique that Pollock began to use in the late 1940s. This technique consists of splashing the surface of the canvas with paint. Splashing must be done energetically and spontaneously, without a preconceived idea or a prior scheme. With this technique it was sought to generate in the viewer the sensation of movement, of action, as well as the vital force of nature.
• Both this technique and Pollock's style are influenced by the automatic creations of surrealism, as well as the freudian psychoanalysis, considering that automatism is a way of bringing out the unconscious. The practice that the artist acquired by painting is also notable. large realistic murals throughout the 1930s, as well as the influence of cubism in his understanding of pictorial space.
• To treat his alcoholism, Pollock went to a Jungian psychoanalyst to treat his alcoholism. The analyst encouraged him to draw and make more paintings in which to pour out everything that was on his mind and represent not only his own effusions, but also those of his time: nuclear terror.
• Pollock was one of the more radical abstract painters modern art history by separating the color line.

Between the Jackson Pollock's most outstanding works we find The She-Wolf (1942). Pollock made it prior to the emergence of the drip style, but in it you can already trace where his style was advancing.

In this work he seems to refer to myth of Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome and raised by a she-wolf. However, Pollock himself refused to make an interpretation of the work and pointed out how the work grew out of his need to paint it and how any explanation I gave about it would only be a step towards if destruction.

The She-Wof was part of the Pollock's first solo show in 1943 and was acquired by MoMA, being the first Pollock work to be part of a museum collection.

This mural, commissioned by Peggy guggenheim in 1943, it is one more step towards his iconic dripping technique. The large mural had to be divided so that Pollock could work on it.

Like The She-Wolf, Mural includes references to the mythology and, although he used the brush in much of the composition, he also applied his drip technique letting some small pink drops fall on some areas of the canvas.

The critics considered this work by Pollock as a sample of the skill and the category that the artist had managed to reach within the art scene in North America.

We continue to know the most important works of Jackson Pollock to talk, now, about the number 1 (Lavender Mist) that constitutes the following sample of the development and fullness of the drip technique. An artistic development that took place between 1947 and 1950 with drips, splatters and the spray of paint on the wall-sized canvases. A technique that he applied by laying down the canvases on the floor of his study.

With Lavender mist the level of gestural abstraction reached by Pollock, embodied that painting poured the feeling and thought of the artist. Expressiveness is not only subject to color, but also to the creation of a space from the superposition of layers and drops of opaque paint, resulting in a textured surface.

This work was part of the 32 paintings exhibited in 1950 at the Betty Parson Gallery of New York, being the only one that managed to sell. It is considered one of the most important works of the classic Pollock period.

In 1949 this work was sold for 1500 dollars, being considered by some as a chaotic mix paint, with thick yellow, brown and black splashes.

But, as time went by, Number 5 became not only one of the most iconic and well-known works Pollock, but in one of the most expensive paintings ever. Thus, in 2006, the painting would reach an auction price of 165 million dollars.

And we finish this review of the works of Jackson Pollock to talk about Convergence, one of the Pollock masterpieces, being also one of the most representative paintings of the abstract expressionism. According to the artist, a modern painter could not express the problems of his time with the forms of the Renaissance, being necessary to create an artistic language, a technique, that reflected his own weather.

The drip technique became Pollock's basic mode of expression, showing in this work a black and white painting in which they are thrown drips with primary colors as a way of reflecting the crisis of the Cold War. In 1964 there was a puzzle with this work as its theme, becoming the most difficult in the world.

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• Emmerling, L (2020), Pollock Basisc-Art, Taschen Benedikt
• VVAA (2016), Visible energy. Jackson Pollock. Anthology, Antonio Machado
• Emmerling, L (2003), Pollock: 1912-1956, Taschen Benedikt