Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock was one of the leading American critical realist painters of the 20th century, who occupied a pivotal role in the history of American painting in the 20th century, and the Abstract Expressionist school he led brought American painting art to the world stage. His pioneering drip painting subverted the traditional Western way of painting, helping the United States to get rid of European painting standards and become the center of world art.
Abstract Expressionism seems to have combined expressionism and abstractionism. Expressionism is the expression of strong emotions through the treatment of formal elements or figurative elements.
Jackson Pollock was born in Wyoming, USA. Due to the family's poverty, the family had to move frequently in order to survive, and his childhood and adolescence were spent in constant migration, but the relocation was mainly in Alisanna and California. Influenced by his elder brother, he became interested in art.
He came to New York from his hometown in 1930 under the tutelage of The American landscape painter Thomas Hart Benton. Benton had a very great influence on Pollock's early years and introduced him to Renaissance art. In 1945, Jackson Pollock moved from New York City to the suburb of Long Island, changed the traditional painting mode, and painted using spray and dripping paint, and began to create "action painting". In 1947, he created The Whole Five Searches on canvas with oil paint and pencil, the completion of which made Jackson Pollock famous. From 1947 to 1950, it was the heyday of his creation, during which most of his famous paintings were completed.
Jackson Pollock's personality has always been relatively withdrawn, indifferent, debauched, often drunk and drug addicted. He threw all his thoughts into his own action paintings. After becoming famous, he often fell into many contradictions and bitterness, due to public incomprehension and real life differences, Pollock lost his confidence in artistic creation, and his inner entanglement made him almost stop creating. In 1956, Jackson Pollock died of drunk driving.
If Andy Warhol and Pop Art represent the pinnacle of American aesthetics in art, jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism represent the rise of American artistic aesthetics. The rise of American artistic aesthetics began in the 1920s.
Creative background
In the 1920s, although the United States ranked first in the world in GDP and led the world in economic strength, the dominant power in the field of artistic aesthetics was still in Europe, specifically Paris, France. However, with the advent of war, Europe entered the vortex of war, and a large number of artists fled to the United States.
These asylum painters included Duchamp of Dadaism, Hans Hoffmann, a representative of abstraction, Dalí, Miró, Marx Ernst, Alpe, Mata, and André Massson, a representative of Neo-Plasticism, Mondrian, a central figure of the Paris school, Chagall, a representative of abstractism Kandinsky, a representative of the Bauhaus of Gropius, Mohaly Nagy and others.
Some painters, such as Picasso and Matisse, although they did not come to the United States, had a strong influence on New York. Under the influence of various modern artistic ideas, especially Cubism, Neo-Modelivism and Surrealist thought, American art acquired a certain new spirit.
But the Great Depression and war of the 1930s, with slower economic growth, led to increased government control over society.
After the end of World War II, the public thought that good times were coming, but the Cold War followed. The state's control over society has not only not relaxed, but has become more and more intense, and McKinseyism has led the United States to adopt a high-pressure posture in politics, and the control of the field of consciousness has been unprecedentedly strengthened.
The economy slowed down again, unemployment climbed, prices rose, and life became increasingly difficult for the people at the bottom, especially the young people at that time felt that the future was more and more uncertain and could not find a direction. Marriage rates have fallen rapidly, birth rates have reached record lows, and suicide rates have risen. People have lost confidence in the future, face a deep existential crisis, and feel great loneliness, depression and fear.
Jackson Pollock captured the widening divide between rich and poor and the overflow of helplessness at the bottom of society, and he incorporated this anxiety into his artwork. Splashing, splashing, and stamping paint on the canvas alternately under the alternation of consciousness, subconscious, and unconscious, this is the catharsis of people's emotions and the free expression.
After the dripping painting is completed, all the painter and the viewer can see is the "mess" full of pictures, breaking through everywhere, and there is no way out, which is the anger and wailing of Jackson Pollock and the bottom of the society he represents. Rather than saying that Jackson Pollock's paintings are "a mess", it is more a true reflection of the hardships, poverty, and hopelessness of the people at the bottom of the United States at that time. Check out Jackson Pollock's work first.
《1948 No.5》
The painting is 243.8 cm long and 12.9 cm wide. The painting was exhibited in the spring of 1949. It is one of the most expensive paintings in the world. This painting is a work of Jackson Pollock's dripping painting that reached its peak, condensing the essence of Pollock's dripping painting method. There are no specific and recognizable images in the picture, some are just densely intertwined lines of various colors, seemingly disorganized, but the essence is traceable. The lines and colors on the screen mostly appear in the form of entanglement and splashing, and there is a feeling of struggling to break free from the whirlpool. These extremely dynamic lines are produced in Pollock's emotional action paintings.
"Deep Five Ying Search"
This painting is one of the earliest masterpieces by Jackson Pollock using the drip technique. The initial impression of the fluttering sea green is extraordinary, and the combination of rich intensity and chromaticity changes creates a feeling of water and depth. A full and powerful calligraphic black line lingers around a large area of green. A tangled and mottled white is mixed in, and a large number of noises make the green "richer".
The Rhythm of Autumn, No. 30
This painting is the work of Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionist art reaching its peak, highlighting his perfect interpretation of abstract painting. The color lines on the screen are further refined, and the lines of black, light brown, gray, and white are sprinkled on the brown-yellow background, and the hue of these several color lines is not much different, but there is a decreasing trend in the brightness, the color lines crisscross and crisscross the screen, flowing at will, each color line forms an independent space, the layers of space are interlaced and relatively independent, and the rich changes of the lines form the thickness of the space, completely breaking the definition of the traditional painting on the space.
In short, Jackson Pollock pushed the Abstract Expressionist school to the pinnacle of Western modernist art and established the dominance of abstract art in Western modernist art.