How Did Jackson Pollock Contribute To The Art World

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Overview On August 8th, 1949, Life magazine published an article asking the following question: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" Outside of the art scene in New York City, few had even heard of Jackson Pollock, but just a few years the whole world knew his name. Pollock acted as a leading force of the abstract expressionist movement. Action Painting, as art critic Harold Rosenberg coined the style as, developed during the 1940s up until the early 1960s. In the 1940s, Pollock made very little money from painting. Before achieving commercial success, he had to resort to trading his art for groceries. Pollock showed thirty-two paintings at a solo exhibition at Betty Parson's Gallery in New York City in 1950. The now famous Lavender Mist, which hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is the only one that sold. The newness of the style shocked many and brought hostility. One critic derided Pollock's works as "mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless." It was only after his tragic death in a car accident at the age of 44 that Jackson Pollock was recognized as an important--if not the most important--figure in the art world. ~~~ Life…show more content…
His early art was influenced by Picasso, surrealism and Native American sand drawings, which involved approaching the art from all four sides while it was flat, something that Pollock would later utilize to make his paintings. He was a pioneer in the frontier of American abstract art. He made composition, gesture, line, and texture, the subject of each of his paintings. Robert Goodnough described Pollock's process in a 1951 article as "a method that is unique and that, because of its newness, shocks many." Even today, many are bewildered and unreceptive toward Pollock and other's brand of nonrepresentational
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