The Essential: Jackson Pollock (Essentials)

For readers who have little time to spare and are averse to art-world jargon, this series aims to provide an entertaining guide to individual artists and pop culture. Each volume presents an account of the artist's life, personal and professional anecdotes, concise definitions of cultural and social movements that shaped the artist's work, and colour reproductions. Jackson Pollock has been described as the most important American painter of the 20th century, and is credited with having invented Abstract Impressionism. Thrust into international celebrity, he died violently. This book considers the question of what is significant about Pollock's "drip" paintings, what caused his mental breakdowns, and what his western upbringing has to do with his art.

This small, square, pocket-sized book gives readers all they need to know in order to stand in front of one of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings and resist the impulse to say, "My kid could do that." It puts the man, the myth, and the paintings in context of both pre- and post-war America. One of the Essentials series (which includes similar little books on Edward Hopper, Salvador Dali, and Vincent Van Gogh), the book presents many bright, colorful reproductions; cutesy, but quick and painless lessons in art talk--"new for this year: gestural automatism (huh?)"; and readymade underlinings with important words and phrases italicized for the hurried reader who only has time to skim the text.

Writer Justin Spring settles into Pollock's biography with narrative ease. By the end of the book he has made good on his promise to show us that it "isn't hard" to understand Pollock. He thoroughly but respectfully describes the artist's fatal alcoholism (he died in a car crash that also killed another passenger), his womanizing, his dependence on his wife, painter Lee Krasner, and his groundbreaking art. The Abstract Expressionists were an earnest bunch, Pollock especially. His unstable psyche and his drinking, intertwined, were his Achilles heel, but he emerges as the brilliant, voraciously curious cowboy-intellectual that he was. As Spring writes, Pollock created "a distinctive identity for American postwar art," for which he "endured poverty, loneliness, ridicule, and immense psychic anguish." --Peggy Moorman