Jackson Pollock: No.5, 1948Paul Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912, in the small town of Cody, Wyoming. He was youngest of five sons, and the domestic circumstances of the Pollock family were anything but simple.
The boy’s personality was decisively shaped by a series of moves, his father’s increasingly long absences and his mother’s dominant character.
In 1928, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Jackson attended Manual Arts High School.
The same period saw Pollock’s incipient interest in the world of the Mexican muralist. Joe Clemente Orozco (1883 -1949), Diego Rivera (1886 – 1957) and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896 - 1974), all of whom emphasized the importance of the political function of art.
At Manual Arts the following years, Pollock took instruction in drawing and sculpture from Schwankovsky and the sculpture Harold Lehmann – but apparently without the lightest success.
Pollock's name is also associated with the introduction of the All-over style of painting which avoids any points of emphasis or identifiable parts within the whole canvas and therefore abandons the traditional idea of composition in terms of relations among parts.
The design of his painting had no relation to the shape or size of the canvas -- indeed in the finished work the canvas was sometimes docked or trimmed to suit the image. All these characteristics were important for the new American painting which matured in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
His painting no.5 1948 was sold with the price 140 million dollar in 2006.
That price would be the highest sum ever known to have been paid for a painting, exceeding the $135 million for Gustav Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I.”
Jackson Pollock: No.5, 1948
