Jackson Pollock

He was 10 months old when his mother took him out of Cody, Wyoming, and he never returned. LeRoy Pollock, born McCoy and raised under his adoptive parents' name, farmed and then surveyed land for the government, and the family kept moving — Arizona, Chico, then Los Angeles, where Jackson was expelled from Manual Arts High School, having already been thrown out of another two years before. What stayed came from the surveying trips, where he first saw Native American work, and from the Mexican muralists, particularly Orozco, whose Prometheus he later called the greatest painting in North America. In 1930 he followed his brother Charles to New York and studied under Thomas Hart Benton, whose rural subjects meant nothing to him and whose rhythm and stubbornness meant a great deal.

David Alfaro Siqueiros put liquid paint in his hands at a workshop in 1936, and Pollock spent a decade on what it could do, though he later denied the debt. He drew a WPA salary from 1938 to 1942 and was in Jungian analysis, making drawings his analyst asked for. Peggy Guggenheim signed him in 1943 and commissioned Mural, eight feet by twenty, painted on canvas at Duchamp's suggestion so it could be moved. Then came the barn at Springs, the canvas on the floor, and the drip paintings of 1947 to 1950, poured and flung rather than brushed, worked from every side. Life asked in 1949 whether he was the greatest living painter in America. He dropped titles for numbers, which are neutral. Then he quit dripping altogether, painted in black on raw canvas, and sold none of it.

On the evening of August 11, 1956, less than a mile from his own house, Pollock put his Oldsmobile convertible off the road at 10:15, drunk, and was killed. So was Edith Metzger, a passenger. Ruth Kligman, the artist he was involved with and the reason the marriage was ending, survived. Lee Krasner was in Europe visiting friends and came back on the news. Krasner had brought him up to date on what modern painting was, introduced him to the collectors and critics who built his career, and been the one judge he trusted. The dealer John Bernard Myers said there would never have been a Jackson Pollock without a Lee Pollock. The painter Fritz Bultman said it less kindly and called him her creation, her Frankenstein. She spent the next 28 years running his estate.

MoMA gave him a memorial retrospective four months after the crash and has kept giving him rooms since. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded by the CIA, sponsored exhibitions abroad, and the historian Eva Cockcroft called him a weapon of the Cold War, a reading some scholars accept and others reject. The prices ran away. Australia's Whitlam government paid 2 million dollars for Blue Poles in 1973 and took political damage. Kenneth Griffin paid 200 million for Number 17A in 2016. In May 2026 Number 7A went at Christie's for 181.2 million with fees. Because the money is that large, physicists run fractal analysis on disputed canvases. He lies under a boulder at Springs with Krasner in front of him.

Jackson Pollock's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Mural artwork
  Eight feet by twenty, commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim, now at the University of Iowa 1943
• Number 17A artwork
  Sold by David Geffen to Kenneth Griffin in 2016 for 200 million dollars 1948
• No. 5, 1948 artwork
  Briefly the most expensive painting in the world after a private sale in 2006 1948
• One: Number 31, 1950 artwork
  Ranked eighth most influential work of modern art in a 2004 poll of 500 artists and dealers 1950
• Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) artwork 1950
• Blue Poles (Number 11, 1952) artwork
  Bought by the Australian government in 1973 for 2 million US dollars 1952

• November 1912 aged 0 Leaves Cody, Wyoming at 10 months and never returns
• 1930 aged ~18 Follows his brother Charles to New York and enrolls under Thomas Hart Benton
• 1936 aged ~24 Meets liquid paint at David Alfaro Siqueiros's experimental workshop He later disavowed the connection and gave other accounts of where the pouring came from.
• July 1943 aged 31 Signs with Peggy Guggenheim, who commissions Mural
• October 1945 aged 33 Marries Lee Krasner and moves to Springs on Long Island A loan from Guggenheim bought the house and the barn he turned into a studio.
• August 8, 1949 aged 37 Life asks whether he is the greatest living painter in the United States
• 1951 aged ~39 Abandons the drip style for black pourings on raw canvas None of them sold at Betty Parsons. She later let one go to a friend at half price.
• August 11, 1956 aged 44 Dies in a single-car crash that also kills Edith Metzger He was 44 and driving drunk, less than a mile from home.
• December 1956 aged 44 The Museum of Modern Art mounts a memorial retrospective

• Willem de Kooning 1904–1997
  Abstract expressionist whose gestural paintings helped define the New York School. rival
• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. the reply to action painting
• Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960–1988
  Neo-expressionist painter who rose from graffiti artist to one of the most celebrated artists of the 1980s. inherited the myth of the doomed American painter
• Mark Rothko 1903–1970
  Abstract expressionist known for his large color-field paintings that evoke deep emotional responses. shared the Betty Parsons Gallery
• Ken Griffin b. 1968
  Hedge fund manager who founded Citadel and became one of the most successful investors in history. paid 200 million dollars for Number 17A