Jackson Pollock / Works, Writings, Interviews

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) is without doubt one of the most influential American painters of the twentieth century. Dead at the age of 44, he nonetheless bequeathed a substantial body of pioneering work to countless subsequent artists for whom he stood as a model of fearlessness, courageous improvisation and balletic grace. Throughout his life, Pollock wrote very little about his own art or that of others, but in the few completed writings that do remain, and in a few unpublished, undated notes--all of which are gathered in this volume--the concerns are remarkably consistent. Pollock routinely referred to his interest in the unconscious as the source of modern art, and in abstraction as enabling both the direct expression of an "inner world," of individual feeling, and the urgencies and tensions of modern American life (famously characterized, in his words, by "the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio"). Pollock's most famous statement on his method exemplifies this concern with a creativity arising from an unconscious: "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about." In this introduction to Pollock's art and thought, Nancy Jachec traces these and other themes across 120 color reproductions.