Collection Highlights

Jackson POLLOCK

Cody, USA, 1912–　Southampton, USA, 1956

Pollock is the artist, who, fusing New World Art with European avant-garde tradition, established himself as the leader of postwar America’s Abstract Expressionism. He studied art in Los Angeles and New York, and was inspired by works of Picasso, Matisse as well as his friend Masson’s paintings filled with curved lines. Inspired also by an approach to painting rooted in the surrealists’ pictorial elucidation of depth psychology, he was, simultaneously, a devotee of Native American mythology and sand painting and Mexican murals and produced drawings based on Jungian psychoanalysis. Pollock created his “action paintings” by spreading huge canvases on the floor and using brushes and sticks to apply the paint. Alternatively, he punched holes in paint cans from which he poured paint onto the canvases, creating paintings in which freely moving lines freely overlap. Using his “drip technique,” he created structures with no central focus, “all-over” works in which the painting seems to viewers to fill and then overflow the boundaries of the canvas.

POLLOCK, Jackson

《Number 2, 1951》

1951 Oil on canvas

Pollock was influenced by European Modernists, including Picasso and the Surrealists, and by Native American sand painting and the Mexican mural movement. He went on to create Action Painting, his unique technique for freely manipulating the pours of his pigments to bury his canvas in them, and became a standard-bearer of Expressionism. He created this work in a period when he moved away from that style to experiment with painting using black lines; a variety of lines emerge amid tension with the reserved space. That he applied colors, unusually in this period, to the striking spindle shapes suggests his fastidiousness about form.