Topic > Jackson Pollock and his role in the history of contemporary art

Second World War: the time of omnipresent, political and internal crisis. A crisis is a necessary period of the evolutionary process and development of new ideas, both for the whole world and its spheres. In our case it means art and culture. Art needed new forms, techniques, contents and points of view. Western European and American cultures have been fascinated by the work and innovative style of artist Jackson Pollock since they appeared on the New York art scene in the 1940s. He managed to develop perhaps the most radical abstract style in the history of contemporary art. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay “This is the most interesting work of anything I have seen so far with Americans,” Piet Mondrian told Peggy Guggenheim while looking at Pollock's “Figure Shorthand” (1942). There was nothing resembling the infamous “drip painting,” which Pollock would later develop and make his corporate identity. The painting owes much to Picasso, Matisse and Miro, three European artists whom Pollock appreciated above all. Piet's intuition was the reason why Peggy signed a contract with Pollock, which led to the development of her career. Subsequently, the themes of his work began to transform into mythical and archaic motifs inspired by American Indian art. He began to experiment with automatism, spontaneously depicting everything that came to mind, applying paint to the canvas much more freely and expressively. In his work 'No. 5', 1948, everything is an object and nothing is separate. The artist's way offers a completely different approach to reading the work. You have to abandon all the usual ideas about art, get closer and immerse yourself in the painting. The lines turn into color and the color becomes a line. A feeling of a certain “nothingness” arises like an abyss. Jackson Pollock's rise to the Olympus of art was accelerated by the photographer Hans Namuth. He, like many others, did not find Pollock's work too convincing, but his friend, who considered Pollock an American genius, convinced Hans to meet the artist. Namuth asked Pollock for permission to photograph him in action at the laboratory. Pollock agreed (and not just because of the photo but also because Namuth made a film about him). Black and white photographs capture the “drip painting” technique and its instinctive choreography for the first time (becoming the precursor to performance art). Pollock had the greatest influence on Allan Kaprow, a pioneer of conceptualized performance art. Influenced by his action painting, Allan became an advocate of public involvement in Jackson Pollock's creation process by working on the artwork Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), photo by Hans Namuth (1950). Pollock's exhibitions were an inspiration to Kaprow who began producing environmental performances - "happenings". In 1958, in an article “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” in ArtNews, Kaprow wrote that Pollock's dense, “enormous-sized” canvases were so complete that they “ceased becoming paintings and became environments” and blazed the trail for new forms of art. 'art. and the action that dominates the paintings. Kaprow studied the painting technique of abstract expressionism and identified Jackson Pollock as the only artist in this direction, considering him a genius, endowed with an "unsurpassed freshness". When Pollock splashed, dripped, and threw paint directly onto the canvas beneath his feet, everyone called it "action painting." Kaprow argued, stating that Pollock was a performance artist who simply used paint. Kaprow observed that Pollock's "solid" paintings left the,.”