Jackson Pollock – action painting, drip painting, and abstract expressionism

Jackson Pollock is the American artist who, more than anyone else, changed what a painting could be. When, in 1947, he placed the canvas on the studio floor in Springs on Long Island and began pouring, dripping, and flinging liquid paint across it, he abandoned the easel, the brush, and the entire European pictorial tradition in which he had grown up. The result was an art without a center, without a horizon, and without a subject in the conventional sense - a surface of interwoven paths in which the paint records the body’s movement through space. That is why his works function so unusually well as posters: they lack a single prescribed direction of reading and withstand being viewed again and again.

Pollock lived for only 44 years, from 1912 to 1956, and the period during which he painted his famous drip paintings lasted barely four years. Yet few artistic careers have had such a long afterlife. His works now hang at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the National Gallery of Australia, and one of the paintings - Number 17A from 1948 - changed hands in 2015 for 200 million dollars in a private sale. In Sweden, Moderna Museet has exhibited his work since 1963 and owns one of the few works in which he allowed a figurative detail to remain amid the drips. This page examines his life, the technique behind the paintings, the most important works, and how the visual language of abstract expressionism works as art in a Swedish home.

Contents
↓ What characterizes Jackson Pollock’s art?
↓ Childhood, education, and the road to New York
↓ The most important works
↓ The technique behind drip painting
↓ Lee Krasner and the circle around abstract expressionism
↓ The legacy, market, and Pollock in Sweden
↓ Abstract expressionism as art in the home
↓ Timeline of Jackson Pollock’s life
↓ Related artists and movements
↓ Frequently asked questions about Jackson Pollock

What characterizes Jackson Pollock’s art?

Jackson Pollock’s mature paintings are built on three decisions that may each seem minor but together broke with several hundred years of European art. He moved the canvas from the easel to the floor, replaced the brush with sticks, hardened brushes, and basting syringes, and replaced tube oil paint with liquid industrial and household enamel by Duco. The paint therefore never reaches the canvas through a tool pressed against the surface - it falls through the air. Each line is an imprint of how quickly the hand moved, how high above the canvas it was, and how viscous the paint was at that moment.

Art history calls the result an allover composition: the image has no center, foreground, or background, but an evenly distributed density extending to the edges. The critic Clement Greenberg was already using the term in the mid-1940s about Pollock’s canvases, and it is in this sense that his painting is more radical than the European abstraction of, for example, Wassily Kandinsky, in which the composition is still organized around focal points. The other common label, action painting, was coined by the critic Harold Rosenberg in the essay "The American Action Painters" in the journal ARTnews in December 1952: the canvas is described there not as a surface on which to depict something, but as an arena in which to act.

It is also worth establishing what Pollock’s art is not. It is not random. Physicist Richard Taylor and his colleagues published an analysis in the journal Nature in 1999 showing that the pattern formation in drip paintings has a fractal character, and that the fractal dimension rose steadily from around 1.1 in the early canvases of 1943 to around 1.7 in the works from 1952. In other words: Pollock refined his visual language year by year in a way that can be measured.

Quick facts: Paul Jackson Pollock, born January 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyoming, died August 11, 1956, in Springs, New York, aged 44. Nationality: American. Movement: Abstract Expressionism, often called the New York School. Main period of drip painting: 1947–1950. Materials: household and industrial enamel on untreated canvas. Married in 1945 to the artist Lee Krasner (1908–1984). Most important works: Mural (1943), Number 17A (1948), Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 (1950), One: Number 31 (1950), Blue Poles (1952). Highest recorded price: 200 million dollars for Number 17A in a private sale in 2015.

Upbringing, Education, and the Road to New York

Paul Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five brothers. The family moved repeatedly between Arizona and California during his childhood, and the American West - its vast expanses, ranch life, and the Native American cultures he encountered - became a point of reference he returned to throughout his life. He left Wyoming at the age of one but described himself much later as an artist shaped by the landscape rather than by museums.

Manual Arts High School and the Early Years

Pollock attended Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where the teacher Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky introduced him to theosophy and to Jiddu Krishnamurti’s lectures. His interest in the spiritual and the subconscious would become a constant. He was expelled from the school twice, the second time in 1930, and that same year followed his older brother Charles to New York.

Thomas Hart Benton and the Art Students League

From the autumn of 1930, Pollock studied at the Art Students League of New York under Thomas Hart Benton, the regionalist mural painter who celebrated the workers and myths of the American heartland. Benton taught him to build a composition around rhythmically twisting, spiral-shaped movements across the picture surface – a scheme Benton called "the hollow and the bump". Pollock later rejected Benton’s subject matter, but its underlying rhythm stayed with him. Benton also became a father figure, and they remained in contact long after the student had moved on.

Siqueiros’s workshop in 1936 and the WPA years

Two things determined what was to come. The first was Pollock’s participation in 1936 in the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros’s experimental workshop on 14th Street in New York, where the artists worked with spray guns, enamel paint, sand, and chance in the flow of the paint. There he encountered for the first time the idea that industrial, fluid paint was a fully valid artistic material. The second was that, between 1935 and 1942, he was employed by the Federal Art Project, a subsidiary program of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s employment program, WPA, which provided him with a decent monthly wage and time to paint. During the same period, he underwent Jungian psychotherapy, which led him to begin drawing in order to access visual material from the unconscious – a method related to the Surrealists’ automatism.

The most important works

Pollock’s output is often divided into three phases: the mythologically charged, semi-figurative canvases of 1938–1946, the drip paintings of 1947–1950, and the darker, partially figurative-again works of 1951–1955. Below are the paintings most often highlighted as turning points, each with information on where it is located today.

Mural (1943) – the commission that changed everything

In 1943, art collector Peggy Guggenheim gave Pollock a contract and, that same year, gave him his first solo exhibition at the Art of This Century gallery in New York in November. She also commissioned a painting for the entrance of her Manhattan home: Mural, approximately 2.4 × 6 meters, the largest canvas he had ever painted. The work has neither a focal point nor a subject, but consists of a continuous wave-like movement of yellow, blue, and black forms. Peggy Guggenheim donated it to the University of Iowa in 1948, and it has been part of the Stanley Museum of Art in Iowa City ever since. The painting underwent four years of conservation at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles and was displayed there in 2014.

Number 17A (1948) and the breakthrough in the press

Number 17A from 1948 is the canvas that made Pollock a public figure. It was featured in the four-page article that Life magazine published in August 1949 under the headline "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" – a spread that turned a 37-year-old artist into a national celebrity within a few weeks. The painting was owned by David Geffen for many years and was sold privately in 2015 to investor Kenneth C. Griffin for $200 million, which at the time was the highest price ever paid for a painting of any kind.

Autumn Rhythm, One, and Lavender Mist (1950)

The year 1950 was the high point. Over the course of a few months, Pollock painted three of his largest canvases: Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, One: Number 31, which is part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art, and Lavender Mist: Number 1, which has belonged to the National Gallery of Art in Washington since 1976. It is in these three works that the layering is most highly developed: black enamel forms a basic structure, white and silver-gray are laid on top, and thin thrown lines in brown, green, or pink tie the surface together. The titles with numbers were a deliberate choice – Lee Krasner has said that the couple switched to numbers precisely because a descriptive name would make the viewer look for something representational.

Blue Poles (1952) and the Australian Deal

Blue Poles, approximately 2 × 5 meters and painted in 1952, is the late masterpiece. Eight slanting blue poles cut through a dense weave of orange, yellow, and silver, giving the painting a vertical rhythm that the drip paintings of 1950 lack. In August 1973, the National Gallery of Australia bought the work for $2 million, equivalent to around 1.3 million Australian dollars, which was then the highest amount ever paid for an American painting. The purchase became a political scandal in Australia and was debated in Parliament. In 2022, Blue Poles was valued at around 500 million Australian dollars and is the museum's most valuable work.

"The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess." – Jackson Pollock, statement in the magazine Possibilities, winter 1947–1948

The Technique Behind Drip Painting

The studio was a converted barn behind the house on Fireplace Road in Springs, where Pollock and Lee Krasner moved in November 1945 after borrowing $2,000 from Peggy Guggenheim for the down payment. The barn measured barely 6 × 7 meters, which effectively set the limit on how large canvases he could work on. The floor has been preserved and is today the most visited part of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, operated by Stony Brook University and open to visitors during the summer months.

The canvas on the floor

By rolling out untreated canvas on the floor, Pollock could walk around the work and work from all four sides. He described the advantage himself as feeling closer to the painting, almost as if he were part of it. In practical terms, this meant that gravity became a tool: the paint leaves the stick or can and falls, and the line’s thickness is controlled by distance and speed rather than by the brush’s width. Only when the canvas was finished was it stretched and trimmed, a step in which Krasner often participated and decided where the edge should go.

Enamel paint, sticks, and turkey basters

Pollock did not use artists’ paint but alkyd-based household and automobile enamel, primarily Duco and Devoe & Raynolds products, sometimes thinned so that it flowed freely. His tools were hardened brushes, paint sticks, trowels, and kitchen utensils such as turkey basters. Conservators later found cigarette butts, matches, coins, nails, and keys embedded in the layers of paint - traces of a studio where anything lying on the floor could end up in the painting. The choice of materials is also why the works are challenging to preserve: alkyd enamel ages differently from oil paint and can crack at a different rate from the underlying canvas.

Rhythm, control, and fractals

What looks like chaos from the outside is the result of a physical technique that Pollock practiced. Filmmaker and photographer Hans Namuth documented him at work in the autumn of 1950, both in still photographs and on film, and the material shows an artist who moves slowly and pauses just as often as he flings paint. Richard Taylor’s analysis in Nature in 1999 pointed in the same direction: the patterns follow a fractal structure that repeats across multiple scales, something difficult to achieve by chance. The speed of the wrist, the paint’s viscosity, and the distance from the canvas combine to create a line that cannot be imitated with a brush.

Lee Krasner and the circle around abstract expressionism

Pollock did not work in a vacuum. American postwar art was driven by a close-knit circle of artists, gallery owners, and critics in New York, and the turning point represented by Pollock’s drip paintings would neither have emerged nor been recognized without them. The movement as a whole is described in more detail on the page about abstract expressionism.

Lee Krasner – artist, not just wife

Lee Krasner (1908–1984) was an established artist with a solid education from the National Academy of Design when she met Pollock in 1941. She had studied under Hans Hofmann and possessed a knowledge of European modernism that Pollock lacked. After their marriage in 1945, they worked in the same house but in different spaces, and she continued to paint throughout her life – her collage series from the 1950s is now considered among the period's strongest. Krasner also managed Pollock's estate after his death and laid the foundation for the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which has awarded grants to artists since 1985. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting the exhibition "Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous" from October 4, 2026 to January 31, 2027, with more than 120 works from over 80 lenders – the first major New York presentation of either artist in more than twenty years.

Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons

Peggy Guggenheim gave Pollock his first contract in 1943 with a guaranteed monthly payment, effectively freeing him from wage labor. When she moved to Venice in 1947, gallerist Betty Parsons took over, and it was at her gallery that the drip paintings were first shown in January 1948. The exhibition sold poorly but had a decisive critical impact. Clement Greenberg wrote about Pollock as early as 1943 and over the following ten years developed an entire theory of the evolution of modern painting in which Pollock's flatness and allover surface represented the endpoint.

Rothko, de Kooning and the New York School

Around 1950, American postwar modernism brought artists with very different modes of expression together under the same label. Willem de Kooning worked gesturally but retained the figure, while Mark Rothko went in the opposite direction, creating large, floating fields of color without any trace of movement. What unites them is a shared ambition: to make painting a direct experience rather than a depiction. Its roots lie in European Surrealism and its automatism, which took hold in New York when artists such as André Breton, Max Ernst and Roberto Matta fled the war and settled in the city.

The legacy, the market and Pollock in Sweden

Pollock drove off the road and died near his home in Springs on August 11, 1956, while under the influence of alcohol. He was 44. The Museum of Modern Art had already planned a small retrospective and turned it into a memorial exhibition that opened in December of the same year. Posthumously, his standing grew rapidly, partly for cultural-political reasons: American postwar modernism toured Europe as evidence of a free art world, and Pollock became its most frequently cited name.

Hans Namuth and the image of the artist

Hans Namuth’s photographs and films from the autumn of 1950 shaped the image of Pollock as much as the paintings themselves. The sequence in which he paints on glass, filmed from below, became one of the most reproduced depictions of an artist in 20th-century art. The downside was that the attention locked him into a role. After the filming, he broke several years of sobriety, and his output declined sharply: from around fifty paintings in 1950 to a handful per year during his final seasons.

Prices and the collectors’ market

The market for Pollock is extremely thin because almost all major works are held in museum collections. The two highest prices were both private sales: Number 17A for $200 million in 2015 and Number 5, 1948 for around $140 million in 2006. The highest public auction price is considerably lower - Number 19, 1948 sold for $58.4 million at Christie’s in New York in May 2013. The difference says something about how few works actually circulate.

Pollock in Sweden

Sweden was ahead of the curve. Moderna Museet in Stockholm presented a solo exhibition of Pollock’s paintings from February 27 to April 15, 1963, under museum director Pontus Hultén, just seven years after the artist’s death and long before several major European museums did the same. The museum also owns The Wooden Horse: Number 10 A from 1948, an unusual work in which a wooden toy horse’s head is attached in the middle of the dripped surface - one of the few times Pollock allowed a recognizable object to remain in the image. In 2012, four of his paintings from 1947-1949 were shown in the exhibition Explosion! Painting as Action. Details of the works are available in the museum’s open collection database at Moderna Museet, while an overview of the artist’s work in the museum context is provided by the Museum of Modern Art.

Abstract expressionism as art in the home

Pollock's own works are held in museum collections and, for copyright reasons, are not freely available as reproductions, but the visual language he established - the gestural line, the evenly filled surface, colour as substance rather than description - is one of the most useful starting points when choosing art for a home. The reason is simple: an image without a subject does not compete with the room's other contents. It adds colour and movement without telling a story that has to be read every time you walk past. In Bozetto's range of abstract posters, you will find this type of motif in several sizes.

Size determines impact

The most common mistake with gestural abstraction is choosing a format that is too small. There is a reason Pollock's canvases from 1950 are between two and five metres wide: the dense all-over surface needs room for the lines to develop into a rhythm rather than a tangle. At home, this means that an abstract composition intended to hang alone should rarely be smaller than 50 × 70 centimetres, and that 70 × 100 centimetres often has a greater impact above a sofa or bed than three smaller motifs side by side. Aim for the artwork to cover approximately two-thirds of the furniture's width.

Colour temperature and light

The enamel paint Pollock used produced a glossy, partially metallic surface that changes with the light. In a home, the equivalent is that abstract motifs in warm earth tones, brown, ochre and brick work well in rooms with limited daylight, while cooler compositions in blue and grey need more light to avoid feeling heavy. A poster in black and white is the safest choice if the room already has lots of colour in its textiles and furniture. If, instead, you want the art to be the room's strongest colour, a striking colourful composition works best on an otherwise calm surface.

Combine gesture with graphic design

Abstract expressionism is often at its strongest alongside something more restrained. A combination of a gestural motif and two purely graphic posters creates a cohesive gallery wall without becoming monotonous - the same principle museums use when hanging Pollock near geometric abstraction. Practical advice on how to build such a grouping can be found in the guide to creating a gallery wall, with a deeper dive specifically into this type of motif in the guide to abstract posters.

Frames and mounts

Gestural works benefit from a narrow frame that does not compete with the lines. Black oak or whitewashed oak no more than three centimeters wide is sufficient, and a four- to five-centimeter mat gives the image room without scaling it down. Avoid wide gold frames - they create a museum-like presentation that pulls the subject toward an era it does not belong to. More about the balance can be found in the articles on framing art and choosing the right art for your home.

Tip: Hang a gestural abstract work where you pass it at an angle rather than straight on - in a hallway, along a staircase or beside a seating area. Pollock's canvases were made to be viewed in motion, and a composition without a focal point benefits from being encountered in passing. Place the center of the image approximately 145 centimeters above the floor, corresponding to normal eye level for a standing adult.

Timeline of Jackson Pollock's life

1912 – Paul Jackson Pollock is born on January 28 in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five sons.

1930 – Moves to New York and begins studying under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League.

1935 – Is employed by the Federal Art Project, part of the WPA, and receives a regular monthly stipend until 1942.

1936 – Takes part in David Alfaro Siqueiros's experimental workshop in New York and encounters fluid industrial paint.

1943 – Peggy Guggenheim gives him a contract, his first solo exhibition at the Art of This Century in November, and the commission for Mural.

1945 – Marries Lee Krasner in October and moves to Springs on Long Island in November.

1947 – Begins systematically working with canvases on the floor and poured paint; the breakthrough of drip painting.

1949 – Life magazine publishes a four-page feature in August that makes him nationally famous.

1950 – Paints Autumn Rhythm, One: Number 31 and Lavender Mist; Hans Namuth documents the work on film and in photographs.

1952 – Paints Blue Poles; Harold Rosenberg publishes his essay on action painting in ARTnews in December.

1956 – Dies on August 11 in a car accident in Springs, aged 44. MoMA opens a memorial exhibition in December.

1963 – Moderna Museet in Stockholm presents a solo exhibition from February 27 to April 15 under Pontus Hultén.

1973 – The National Gallery of Australia buys Blue Poles for 2 million dollars, then a record for an American painting.

2015 – Number 17A changes hands for 200 million dollars in a private sale.

2026 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens the exhibition "Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous" on October 4.

Related artists and movements

Jackson Pollock stands at the center of a network of artists whose connections can be traced both backward and forward. Looking backward, the links lead to the pioneers of abstract art in the 1910s, when Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint were the first to completely abandon the subject, and to the Surrealists' automatic drawing, which Pollock encountered in New York during the war years. Looking forward, the links lead to Mark Rothko's color fields and to the minimalism of the 1960s, which reacted against precisely this gestural handwriting. Placed in a broader context, he belongs to the modernism that shaped the entire 20th century. A basic biographical overview is also available from Wikipedia. We collect more in-depth material about artists and art movements in Bozetto's knowledge base.

Frequently asked questions about Jackson Pollock

If you want to develop the visual language of abstract expressionism further, you will find gestural and colorful motifs among our abstract posters, as well as deeper insights into individual masters in the collection featuring famous artists. Start with a large motif on the surface you pass most often - that is where a composition without a focal point is most effective.