No modern artist is more controversial than Jackson Pollock, whose life is the subject of a new feature film starring Ed Harris. With an intense, troubled personality that many see reflected in his radical "drip" paintings, Pollock was the first American painter to be hailed internationally as an innovator. Even before his death in a drunken car crash in 1956, he was mythologized as Abstract Expressionism's quintessential bad boy. But he was also respected for his sincerity, loved for his sweet nature, and envied for his brilliance. Today Pollock's legend looms larger than ever, inspiring poets, playwrights, composers, and choreographers, as well as visual artists. The film Pollock starring Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock, Marcia Gay Harden, Val Kilmer, and Jennifer Connelly is set to be released late Fall 2000. His art, never popular in the conventional sense, has a growing cadre of dedicated enthusiasts. Why is Pollock such an enduring touchstone of American culture? This collection of writings, interviews, creative responses, and personal revelations - many never before published or long out of print - examines the multiple dimensions of his impact and influence, and proves that the real Pollock is even more fascinating than the myth. The book includes never before published art, photos, letters and interviews from the Pollock-Krasner House archives, new contributions by actor/director Ed Harris and musician Patti Smith, and interviews with Patsy Southgate and Willem de Kooning, as well as Clement Greenberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Hans Namuth, Frank O'Hara, Jeffrey Potter, Norman Rockwell, and Barney Rossett.
Helen A. Harrison is an art historian, museum director and journalist who specializes in modern American art. A native of New York City, she received an A.B in studio art from Adelphi University, and studied sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art and Hornsey College of Art in London. She also holds an M.A. in art history from Case Western Reserve University, where her research focused on the New Deal federal art patronage programs.
In 1990, after serving as Curator of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, Director of the Public Art Preservation Committee in Manhattan, and Curator of Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York, Harrison became Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, a National Historic Landmark and research collection in East Hampton that is administered by the Stony Brook Foundation, a non-profit affiliate of Stony Brook University. She has also been a Guest Curator at the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing, New York, has taught at the School of Visual Arts, and currently holds an adjunct faculty position in Stony Brook's Department of Art, Art History and Art Criticism.
From 1978-2006, Harrison wrote art reviews and feature articles for the Long Island section of The New York Times. She was the visual arts commentator for WLIU 88.3 FM, Long Island University's NPR-affiliated radio station, from 2004-2009. Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous scholarly and popular publications, including the Journal of American Studies (U.K.), Prospects, the Archives of American Art Journal, American Art, Provincetown Arts, and Winterthur Portfolio. She writes a monthly column, "Eye on Art," for the Sag Harbor Express.
Harrison is the author of many exhibition catalogues and chapters in several multi-author publications, including Abstract Expressionism: The International Context (Rutgers University Press, 2007), Remembering the Future (Rizzoli, 1989), and The American Art Book (Phaidon, 1999), for which she wrote 110 entries. Her books include Dawn of a New Day: The New York World's Fair 1939/40 (New York University Press, 1980), a monograph on the artist Larry Rivers (Harper & Row, 1984), an anthology, Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000), Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach with co-author Constance Ayres Denne (Chronicle Books, 2002), and The Jackson Pollock Box (Cider Mill Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010). She is currently at work on a Jackson Pollock monograph that will be published by Phaidon in 2011. She lives with her husband, the artist Roy Nicholson, in Sag Harbor, New York.
