Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912–August 11, 1956) was born in Cody, Wyoming, and raised across Arizona and California before making his way to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton. He would go on to become one of the defining figures of the New York School and the most internationally recognized exponent of Abstract Expressionism. The technique for which he is best known — drip painting, developed at his studio in The Springs, Long Island — transformed the act of painting into a physical, gestural event, with the canvas laid flat on the floor and paint poured, flung, and woven across its surface from all sides. Pollock died in an automobile accident in 1956.

His early work, represented by paintings such as The She-Wolf (1943) — acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1944 as its first Pollock purchase — drew on mythic and quasi-Surrealist imagery, combining recognizable form with fractured, charged space. By the mid-1940s, works like The Key (1946), now at the Art Institute of Chicago, signaled his move toward an entirely process-driven approach. The mature drip paintings that followed — among them Full Fathom Five (1947), Number 1A, 1948, and the monumental One: Number 31, 1950 and Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950), the latter two held at MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art respectively — established the all-over composition as a landmark of postwar painting. His final period produced works of concentrated intensity, including White Light (1954), whose dense, compressed surface reflects the complexity of his late practice. Throughout, Peggy Guggenheim was a pivotal early patron: she commissioned Mural in 1943 and presented his work at her New York gallery, Art of This Century, between 1942 and 1947. His first European exhibition took place at the Museo Correr in Venice in 1950.

Pollock's exhibition history has continued to grow posthumously. Major solo presentations have included Staging Jackson Pollock at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2018; Jackson Pollock's Mural. Energy Made Visible at the Museo Picasso Málaga in 2016; and Jackson Pollock: The Early Years (1934–1947) at the Musée national Picasso-Paris in 2024. His work is held in significant institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and the University of Iowa Museum of Art. In 2024, Kasmin, New York, was announced as the primary representative of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation's holdings. Authentication of works relies on the catalogue raisonné compiled by Francis Valentine O'Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, published by Yale University Press in 1978, with a color supplement issued by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1995; the catalogue includes a section titled Problems for Study addressing disputed attributions. The Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board, which operated from 1990, was disbanded in 1996, and the Foundation does not currently authenticate works.