Customer Reviews

Jackson Pollock: A Biography

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Art historian Deborah Solomon (she's having a biography of Norman Rockwell published this year) brought out in 1987 this life of the complicated and extremely creative Jackson Pollock. One thing about Solomon: she's serious. It was she who in 2010 hosted an interview at the 92nd Street Y with the comedian/author Steve Martin, who had just written a novel set in the art world. During the program Solomon received a note (on stage!) from the Y administration informing her that the paying audience was restless: why was she asking Martin questions about art, why wasn't she asking him questions about sitcoms and the Oscars? A couple of days later the Y was castigated by Solomon when it offered refunds to its trivia-obsessed subscribers. Anyone expecting a trivial exposé of Pollock's controversial life should probably avoid "Jackson Pollock". This is an earnest biography of the abstract expressionist from his birth in Wyoming in 1912 to his violent death in 1956 on Long Island. An alcoholic, Pollock could be belligerent and cruelly insulting, even to his wife, the artist Lee Krasner; and it was excessive alcohol that caused his death in a car crash at the age of 44. At other times he could be surprisingly meek. When the portable mural he created for Peggy Guggenheim's East Side apartment proved too long, Marcel Duchamp suggested they simply cut off 8", and Pollock didn't explode but calmly acquiesced. (About that famous mural, which is now at the University of Iowa: a recent theory asserts that the totemic figures marching across the canvas are actually stylized letters spelling out Pollock's name.) Pollock was the protégé of Thomas Hart Benton and some of his early paintings show Benton's influence. Later Benton, who was strictly representational, felt estranged from his former pupil and the "drip" paintings, such as "No. 5, 1948", which evidently is now privately owned. Pollock also flirted briefly with Surrealism, creating beauties like the San Francisco MOMA's "Guardians of the Secret". (It should be pointed out that this book is first and foremost a biography, so none of the plates are in color.) The narrative abounds in stories of the Forties and Fifties art world: Stuart Davis loathed Benton's regionalism, saying it was appropriate only for a Fascist state; and when André Breton came to New York for the duration of World War II he didn't conceal his contempt for America's lack of culture, flatly refusing to learn English. But of primary importance is Pollock himself: " ... he did away with recognizable imagery in favor of direct expression ... He turned to abstraction not to define the limits of art but to escape them." The shallow audiences at the Y may be bored by all this, but art enthusiasts will enjoy its frank depiction not only of Pollock's life but of the world in which he worked.

I had this book overnighted to me for an Art class I am taking. I found this book to be full of wonderful information on Jackson Pollock. This book did a great job of including a lot of information from his childhood as well as his wife, Kasner.

Jackson Pollock is the fascinating and well crafted biography of a truly remarkable and influential American painter who held himself to the most demanding standards. Biographer Deborah Solomon interviewed more than two hundred people to reconstruct Pollock's brilliant yet contrary and sometimes self-destructive life. A most critical and detail-filled look at a very complicated artist and a highly recommended addition to personal, academic, and community library art history and biography collections.

I liked this book. I've read a lot about Pollock, but this book had more info about his family and early years than I've ever seen. It made him a lot more understandable as a person so that I could see him as more than a raging alcoholic. It also refutes some of the Pollock myths such as his peeing in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace at a party. This is a real bio, not just an artist's bio.

I checked this book out at the local library along with a text on how to transfer course units from a business major into psychology. This book made the reference text read like a novel. Truly dreadful. Avoid this even if it's free.