Jackson Pollock

?Is Jackson Pollock the greatest living painter in the United States??, Life magazine startled its readers by asking in 1949. Seven years later, ?Jack the Dripper?, as Time magazine had called him, was dead.

In
this compelling, authoritative volume author Ellen Landau locates the
man and the artist in his time, and recreates the social and cultural
milieu of New York in the 1940s and 1950s from which Jackson Pollock?s
work emerged.

With extensive knowledge of Pollock?s habits (much
of it gained through interviews), of his reading, his conversation and
the exhibitions he visited, Landau retraces many of the far-flung
sources of Pollock?s work-from African sculpture to North American
totems, Mexican gods, arcane texts favoured by the Surrealists and
Egyptian necrology.

Pollock?s early years are chronicled from his
birth through his troubled school years, to his arrival in New York and
periods of rewarding study with Thomas Hart Benton, David Alfaro
Siqueiros and Stanley William Hayter. Pollock attracted many other
mentors during this time; perhaps most important of all was Lee Krasner.
A fellow artist (and later his wife), her knowledge of art-world
thinking and conviction of Pollock?s genius were essential to his
development.

More than one hundred of Pollock?s works
are reproduced here in colour, and six gatefolds show his vast
horizontal works without distortion. A wealth of comparative photographs
illustrating paintings by artists whom Pollock admired further explains
the work of this complex, tragic and immeasurably influential figure.

Ellen G. Landau
is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Department of Art
History and Art, Case Western Reserve University. Her previous books
include Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné and Reading Abstract Expressionism.