May 12th, 2011
The philosophy and spirit of a particular epoch in painting usually have been reflected in many of its other visual arts. The ideas and aspirations of ancient cultures, of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical periods of Western art and, more recently, of the 19th-century Art Nouveau and Secessionist movements were shown in a large amount of the architecture, interior design, furniture, fabrics, ceramics, costume, and crafts, as well as in the fine arts, of their times. After the Industrial Revolution, with the reduced requirement of hand-craftmanship and the absence of direct communication between the fine craftsman and society, idealistic efforts to unite the arts and crafts in service to the community were made by William Morris in Victorian England and by the Bauhaus in 20th-century Germany. Although their aims were not fully successful, their influences, like those of the short-lived de Stijl and Constructivist movements, have been colossal, particularly in architectural, furniture, and typographic design.
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were innovative painters, sculptors, and architects. Although no artists have since excelled in such a wide range of creativity, leading 20th-century painters conceptualized their art in many other mediums. In graphic design, for example, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Raoul Dufy produced posters and illustrated books; André Derain, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Mikhail Larionov, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney designed for the theatre; Joan Miró, Georges Braque, and Chagall worked in ceramics; Braque and Salvador Dalí designed jewelry; and Dalí, Hans Richter, and Andy Warhol made movies. Many of these, with other modern painters, have also been sculptors and printmakers and have designed for textiles, tapestries, mosaics, and stained glass, while there are few mediums of the visual arts that Pablo Picasso did not at some point work in and revitalize.
Painters have been stimulated by the visuals, techniques, and design of other visual mediums. One of these earliest influences was possibly from the theatre, where the ancient Greeks are regarded as the first to apply the illusions of optical perspective. The teaching or reappraisal of design techniques and imagery from art-forms and processes of other cultures has been an important stimulus to the development of more contemporary schools of Western painting, whether or not their traditional significance have been appreciated. The influence of Japanese woodcut prints on Synthetism and the Nabis, for example, and of African sculpture on Cubism, and the German Expressionists helping to create visual vocabularies and syntax with which to express new visions and ideas. The invention of photography and film introduced artists to new aspects of nature, while eventually inspiring others to abandon representational painting altogether. Painters of everyday life, such as Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Vuillard, and Bonnard, used the design innovations of camera cutoffs, close-ups, and unconventional viewpoints to give the spectator the sensation of sharing an intimate picture space with the figures and objects in the painting.
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November 10th, 2010
An American painter who exponentially led Abstract Expressionism, an art movement individualised by the uninhibited gestures in paint generally termed “action painting.” In his lifetime he received global publicity and significant recognition for the unconventional “poured” or “drip” technique he used to create his major artworks. From his contemporaries, he was respected for his highly personal and wholly indestructible martyrdom to his art. His pieces had exceptional influence on them and on numerous subsequent art movements in the US. He was also one of the first American painters to be acknowledged during both his life and after as a peer of 20th-century European leaders of contemporary 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 ancestry (LeRoy’s first surname was McCoy before his adoption in about 1890 by the Pollocks) and he was born and raised in Iowa. The family moved away from Cody, Wyoming, 11 months after Jackson’s birth; he would know Cody only by his family’s photographs. Over the subsequent 16 years the family lived in California and Arizona, eventually relocating nine times. In 1928 his family moved to Los Angeles, where Pollock enrolled at the Manual Arts High School. At the school he was influenced by Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, a painter and illustrator who also belonged to the Theosophical Society, a sect that existed to promote metaphysical and occult spirituality. Schwankovsky passed onto Pollock some rudimentary lessons in drawing and painting, introduced him to highly sophisticated trends of European contemporary art, and encouraged his curiosity in theosophical works. At the time, Pollock – raised an agnostic – went to the camp meetings of the original messiah of the theosophists, Jiddu Krishnamurti, as he was a close friend of Schwankovsky. The spiritual explorations prepared him to embrace the theories of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and the exploration of unconscious imagery in his artworks during following years.
In 1930 Pollock followed his brother Charles who in 1922 had left home to study art in the city of New York, enrolling in the Art Students League under his brother’s teacher, the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. (Jackson dropped his birth name, Paul, at the same time.) He studied life drawing, painting, and composition with Benton for the subsequent 2 and 1/2 years, leaving the Art Students League in the early months of 1933. For the next two years Pollock lived in poverty, originally with Charles and, by fall in 1934, with his brother Sanford. He shared an apartment in Greenwich Village with Sanford and his wife until 1942.
Pollock was employed by the WPA Federal Art Project in the fall of 1935 as an easel painter. This employment showed him monetary security through the last few years of the Great Depression as well as an opportunity to progress his art. From his years of study with Benton until 1938, Pollock’s art was strongly influenced by the compositional methods and regionalist subject matter of his teacher and by the poetic expressionist vision of the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. It consisted mostly small landscapes and figurative scenes for example Going West (1934–35), in which Pollock used motifs borrowed from pictures of his birthplace, 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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