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An American painter who was a leading exponent of Abstract Expressionism, an art movement made iconic by the spontaneous gestures in paint commonly called “action painting.” During his lifetime he received widespread criticism and serious recognition for the modern "poured" or “drip” technique he used to create his major works. Among his contemporaries, he was acknowledged for his deeply personal and wholly indestructible dedication to his art. His work had significant impact on the other artists of the time and on many later art movements in the US. He is also one of the first American painters to be honoured in both his life and after as a peer of 20th-century European fathers in modern art. Early life and work Paul Jackson Pollock was the fifth and youngest son of Stella May McClure and LeRoy Pollock, who were both of Scotch-Irish extraction (LeRoy's surname was McCoy previous to his adoption about 1890 by the Pollocks) and he was born and lived in Iowa. The family moved away from Cody, Wyoming, eleven months after Jackson's birth; he would know Cody only from photographs. In the subsequent sixteen years his family lived in California and Arizona, ultimately going on to relocate nine times. In 1928 his family moved to Los Angeles, where Jackson Pollock enrolled at the Manual Arts High School. At the school he came under the influence of Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, a painter and illustrator who belonged to the Theosophical Society, a sect promoting metaphysical and occult spirituality. Schwankovsky taught Pollock a essential techniques in drawing and painting, introduced him to sophisticated trends of European contemporary art, and encouraged his curiosity in theosophical pieces. At this time, Pollock - who had been raised as an agnostic - also went to the camp meetings of the first messiah of the theosophists, Jiddu Krishnamurti, also a personal friend of Schwankovsky. These spiritual explorations readied him to take on the theories of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and the presence of unconscious imagery in his works through the following years. In 1930 Pollock followed his brother Charles who in 1922 had left home to study art in the city of New York, where he enrolled with the Art Students League for his brother's teacher, the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. (Jackson left off his Christian name, Paul, around that time.) He studied life drawing, painting, and composition with Benton for the next 2 and 1/2 years, leaving in the early months of 1933. For the next two years Pollock lived in poverty, first off with Charles and, by fall of 1934, with his brother Sanford. He went on to share an apartment in Greenwich Village with Sanford and his wife until 1942. Pollock was employed by the WPA Federal Art Project in 1935 as an easel painter. The role permitted him monetary security throughout the last years of the Great Depression as well as the ability to strengthen his art. From his years with Benton until 1938, Pollock's style was strongly affected by the compositional methods and regionalist subject matter of his teacher and by the lyrical expressionist vision of the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. It involved mostly of small landscapes and figurative scenes like Going West (1934–35), in which Pollock employed motifs taken from photographs of his birthplacein Cody. In 1937 Pollock began psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, and he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1938, which caused him to be institutionalized for about four months. After these experiences, his work became semiabstract and showed the assimilation of motifs from the modern Spanish artists Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, as well as the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. Jungian symbolism and the Surrealist exploration of the unconscious also influenced his works of this period; indeed, from 1939 through 1941 he was in treatment with two successive Jungian psychoanalysts who used Pollock's own drawings in the therapy sessions.
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