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Jackson
Pollock/Works and
biography
Untitled
1944
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Direction
October 1945
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Croaking
Movement
1946
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Bird
Effort
1946
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Untitled
ca. 1946 |
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Paul Jackson Pollock was born January 28, 1912, in Cody,
Wyoming. He grew up in Arizona and California and in
1928 began to study painting at the Manual Arts High
School, Los Angeles. In the fall of 1930, Pollock moved
to New York and studied under Thomas Hart Benton at
the Art Students League. Benton encouraged him throughout
the succeeding decade. By the early 1930s, Pollock knew
and admired the murals of José Clemente Orozco
and Diego Rivera. Although he traveled widely throughout
the United States during the 1930s, much of Pollock’s
time was spent in New York, where he settled permanently
in 1934 and worked on the WPA Federal Art Project from
1935 to 1942. In 1936, he worked in David Alfaro Siqueiros’s
experimental workshop in New York.
Pollock’s first solo show was held at Peggy Guggenheim’s
Art of This Century gallery, New York, in 1943. Peggy
Guggenheim gave him a contract that lasted through 1947,
permitting him to devote all his time to painting. Prior
to 1947, Pollock’s work reflected the influence
of Pablo Picasso and Surrealism. During the early 1940s,
he contributed paintings to several exhibitions of Surrealist
and abstract art, including Natural, Insane, Surrealist
Art at Art of This Century in 1943, and Abstract and
Surrealist Art in America, organized by Sidney Janis
at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery, New York, in 1944.
From the fall of 1945, when artist Lee Krasner and Pollock
were married, they lived in The Springs, East Hampton,
New York. 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, Bennington, Vermont. He was included
in many group exhibitions, including the Annuals at
the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from 1946
and the Venice Biennale in 1950. Although his work was
widely known and exhibited internationally, the artist
never traveled outside the United States. He was killed
in an automobile accident on August 11, 1956, in the
Springs.
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