By Evelyn Toynton
Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) not just positioned American paintings at the map together with his recognized "drip paintings," he additionally served as an concept for the nature of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire—the position that made Marlon Brando recognized. Like Brando, Pollock grew to become an icon of uprising in Nineteen Fifties the USA, and the brooding, defiant character captured in images of the artist contributed to his star nearly up to his infamous work did. within the years considering that his demise in a drunken motor vehicle crash, Pollock's carry at the public mind's eye has merely elevated. He has turn into a permanent image of the tormented artist—our American van Gogh.
In this hugely attractive booklet, Evelyn Toynton examines Pollock's itinerant and poverty-stricken formative years within the West, his encounters with modern artwork in Depression-era big apple, and his years within the run-down manhattan fishing village that, paradoxically, used to be remodeled right into a trendy lodge through his presence. putting the artist within the context of his time, Toynton additionally illuminates the fierce controversies that swirled round his paintings and that proceed to take action. Pollock's work captured the experience of freedom and limitless danger particular to the yankee adventure, and his lifestyles used to be either an American rags-to-riches tale and a darker story of the cost paid for famous person, American sort.
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Extra info for Jackson Pollock
Example text
But it is a bit suspicious that some versions of the story have him walking into the room naked, while others have him clothed and simply unzipping his fly. And though it’s the one story everyone seems to know about Pollock, there is not a single eyewitness account of the 38 Chapter Three incident. Nor has anyone ever said what he did next: Did he pass out in front of the fireplace, did he slug one of the guests, did he proposition the hostess? It would have been a hard act to follow. Whatever the true story behind the creation and hanging of the Guggenheim mural, it remains a seminal work in both Pollock’s oeuvre and the history of art.
One of the immediate effects was the winding down of the Federal Art Project, known by then as the Program, which had come under mounting attack as the exigencies of war increasingly required that resources be allocated elsewhere. After a brief period working under Krasner doing window displays for the Program’s War Services Division, and another stint as a “trainee in aviation sheet metal,” Pollock was let go, along with all the other Program artists, in January 1943. He had already been classified 4F—unfit to serve in the armed forces—due to his alcoholism and depressive illness.
In July, Pollock knocked down a wall between his and Krasner’s studios in their Eighth Street apartment to create a big enough space for a twentyfoot-long painting; he bought the canvas, he bought the paint. But for weeks, then months, according to Krasner, nothing at all happened with the mural. When his show at Art of This Century came down and there was still no sign of it, the story goes, Guggenheim began to complain, to expostulate, to make the sort of imperious threats for which she was notorious.