The modern artist is working with space and time, expressing his feelings rather than illustrating [them].
- Jackson Pollock
With the advent of the camera, the artist was emasculated, robbed of his purpose. A glorious and historic professional alliance was threatening its end: the painter and his patron. Elaborate portraits of the nobility, their estates and possessions where no longer necessary. The artist might have suffered at first, but was suddenly, irrevocably free from the rules that bound them to render life exactly as it appeared.
It is impossible to separate the art of Jackson Pollock from the man in his place and time. In the first half of the 20th century, the world was at war, the markets crashed, psychoanalysis was all the rage: the world had entered the Modern era. Matisse and Picasso reigned over a pantheon of European deities who were breaking every rule and convention in their wake. On the heels of these Fauvists, Cubists and Surrealists, American artists had to go further, paint larger, live wilder. Finding it impossible to catch up and keep up, these artists chose a reckless path of existential abandon, not just breaking the rules but ignoring them completely. Good or bad, lasting or transient—history will write the end of their story from its objective perspective.
This program tells us that Pollock was born in Wyoming and early on visited Native American tribes to study their symbols and techniques. Picasso was already using African imagery; Pollock moved to New York and followed with his own brand of primitive abstracts. Personally, I think this is his best work. But it was an echo of the master, so he moved on. The scale of his paintings was inspired by the famous Mexican muralists—Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros—as was his use of more fluid, industrial-grade paints. How or when he struck upon his idea of "drip" or "pour" painting is not discussed. From a radio interview in 1951, we hear Pollock in his own voice describing his
