Painting After Pollock: A Review 

Ryan Roberts  

Artists today are afforded an incredible amount of creative freedom. There is practically no limit to what can be created in the name of Art, and evidence of this freedom permeates the creative climate of the twenty-first century. Contemporary art is continually pushing boundaries and challenging conventions with an untamable, forward-moving spirit. And over the course of art history many artists with similar gusto have broken the rules and looked beyond the popularized aesthetic of their time in search of a more pure form of self-expression. Jackson Pollock stands as one of the first to completely revolutionize the course of painting in doing so. 

The Museum of Modern Art’s “Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey, 1934-1954” provides a concise but complete retrospective of Pollock’s unique artistic development, highlighting his Native American and Mexican influences and tracking the evolution of his hallmark drip-painting style. Pollock, born in rural Wyoming to a working-class family, was exposed to Native American art and culture as a child while accompanying his father—a land surveyor for the government—on scouting trips61. As a student of Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League62, Pollock’s primitive early style already displayed the highly expressive quality his later works would become known for. One of the earliest pieces in the show—a lithograph entitled Landscape with Steer, c. 1936-37 [Fig. 1]—evokes a distinctly American sentiment that seems to transform over the course of his work from literal depictions of Western scenes63 to the less tangible themes of boundlessness and majesty manifested in many of his large-scale later works. 

After World War II, Pollock’s exploration of abstraction began to take hold of his work, but unlike his Cubist and Surrealist predecessors who dealt mostly with the obfuscation and deconstruction of the subject, Pollock removed the subject completely, delving into a world of absolute abstraction. This bold, personal transition, in combined force with the work of other Abstract Expressionists, changed the course of art history. Pollock’s intrinsic expressivity flourished in transitional works like Untitled, 1945. And Shimmering Substance, 1946., which are characterized by writhing, electric brushstrokes that hint at his famous late drip-paintings. In the context of this particular retrospective, one can’t help but search for signs of life when approaching these transitional paintings: murmurs of “I think that’s an eye!” and “That looks like a guitar!” fill the room. And yet at this point, Pollock does away with descriptive titles altogether, affirming these works’ lack of purposeful representation64. Around the time he painted Untitled, 1945. [Fig. 2], Pollock 4 stated in an interview that, “The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.” It is in this transitional period that Pollock’s paintings begin to appear driven completely by impulse and personal feeling, a creative process that manifested itself as the driving force behind his famed drip-painting technique. 

Pollock’s mastery of drip-painting launched his work into a realm of originality that might have seemed inconceivable in the context of an artistic medium that had already existed for hundreds of years. The final room of Pollock’s late works—his most famous One: Number 31, 1950 spanning the central wall—confronts the viewer with an overwhelming display of fulfilled metamorphosis. Every aspect of his earlier work combines to makeup the powerfully unique style that lifted Pollock to painterly stardom and solidified his role in art history. These gargantuan masterworks are saturated with contradiction, each one simultaneously serene and bustling, primitive and infinitely sophisticated, chaotic and yet perfectly balanced, with an undeniable sense of self. Jackson Pollock’s personality leaps from these canvases in a way that almost dwarfs the impact of the previous work in the exhibition. And yet parting with Pollock’s final works leaves an impression not only of the great artist Pollock became, but of the process by which he discovered one of the most ground-breaking styles of painting the world had ever seen. 

Just across the hallway from the Pollock’s is a curious exhibition of paintings, sculptures, and every medium in between, aptly titled “Take an Object.” This references an entry in Modern artist Jasper John’s notebook—“Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it. [Repeat.]”65—which serves as the cohesive basis for the highly non-traditional artworks in the collection. The first work in the show is a combine by Robert Rauschenberg entitled Bed [Fig. 3] that looks distinctly Pollockian, thought it is not explicit that the two shows are related. Rauschenberg’s dripping paint, as well as his expressive and complex color combinations are undoubtedly in dialogue with Pollock. Rauschenberg’s audacious decision to paint on a bed rather than a canvas could also be in response to Pollock, who had such a momentous impact on the medium of traditional painting that subsequent artists might have felt the  need to abandon the canvas in order to achieve true originality. 

And yet viewing the many eccentric works in this exhibition certainly did not lead to the conclusion that Pollock scared artists away from the canvas. Instead, gazing at a chair covered in stuffed phalluses66 and a sculpture made entirely of automobile metal67, it seems that Pollock gave artists the courage to exploit their wildest ideas to extreme levels, letting nothing censor or inhibit their individual expression. This sense of brazen artistic freedom is responsible for the flourishing of many fearless artists after Pollock, and continues to resound in the output of artists today. 

Works Cited 

"Jackson Pollock and His Paintings." Jackson Pollock. Web. <http://www.jackson-pollock.org/>. 

O'Connor, Francis Valentine. "Jackson Pollock." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica. Web. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jackson-Pollock>. 

Pollock, Jackson. Going West. 1935. Painting. 

"From the Exhibition Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey, 1934–1954." MoMA. The Museum of Modern Art. Web. <http://moma.org/collection/works/groups/jp>. 

"Take an Object." MoMA. The Museum of Modern Art. Web. <http://moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1549?locale=en>. 

Kusama, Yayoi. Accumulation No. 1. 1962. Soft sculpture. 

Chamberlain, John. Tomahawk Nolan. 1965. Welded and painted metal automobile parts.