Jackson Pollock: Phaidon Focus by Helen Harrison (2014-09-01)

JACKSON POLLOCK (1912-1956) led the vanguard of postwar American art with his pioneering method of painting, which broke with tradition in both subject matter and technique, engaging viscerally with emotions, thoughts and other intangibles, and using fluid pigment poured directly onto the canvas. His liquid medium, applied with sweeping gestures, proved the ideal vehicle for the mercurial content that he sought to convey: 'energy and motion made visible - memories arrested in space.'

Charting the course of his career and life, from his early training in figurative painting to his position as the most critically championed proponent of Abstract Expressionism, this book sets Pollock's artistic development in the context of his volatile personal life and his wide-ranging artistic influences that include Mexican murals and Native American art. Pollock's extraordinary impact became evident very early in his career when in 1949 LIFE magazine posed the question, 'Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?', while Peggy Guggenheim described him as 'the greatest painter since Picasso.'

HELEN A. HARRISON, the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, is a former New York Times art critic and National Public Radio commentator. The recipient of the first Scholarship for Publication grant awarded by the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists, she has written numerous exhibition catalogues and articles in popular and scholarly publica-tions, including the Smithsonian Institution's American Art magazine, Prospects, Winterthur Portfolio, ARTnews and Provincetown Arts.

Her books include Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock (2000), Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach (2002), and The Jackson Pollock Box (2010).

Langue : anglais