Jackson Pollock: An American Saga

Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's biography follows Jackson Pollock from his 1912 birth in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five brothers, through a childhood spent moving between Arizona and California, where surveying trips with his father exposed him to Native American art and where the murals of Mexican painters, especially Jose Clemente Orozco, first shaped his sense of what painting could do. The book follows Pollock to New York in 1930, where he studied under the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, and traces the slow, uncertain years afterward, marked by heavy drinking and Jungian psychotherapy, before Pollock's introduction to liquid enamel paint at an experimental workshop in 1936 began the technical evolution that eventually produced his signature method.

The authors follow Pollock's marriage to fellow painter Lee Krasner in 1945 and their move to Springs, New York, where he converted a barn into a studio and began laying canvases flat on the floor, walking around and into them rather than standing back from an easel, the drip technique that defined his most celebrated work between 1947 and 1950. The book follows the fame that came with a 1949 Life magazine feature asking whether Pollock was the greatest living painter in the United States, fame that intensified rather than eased his drinking, and closes with his death in a single car crash near his home in August 1956, at forty four, a crash that also killed a passenger, Edith Metzger.

Naifeh and Smith write from an unusually exhaustive research base, and reading the book means following both the specific mechanics of how Pollock actually painted and the personal collapse that ran alongside his growing reputation. It suits a reader who wants Pollock's genuine artistic breakthrough held together with his genuine self destruction, rather than one told without the other.