Archive: Jackson Pollock, Aug.11, 1956

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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. 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 [more]. 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.