POLLOCK: He flung
paint—sometimes ordinary house paint
Jan. 5, 1948
The Big Dripper's Opening
By Richard Lacayo
Jackson Pollock couldn't sleep. The next night would see the opening of
the first gallery show devoted to his new drip paintings. For months he
had flung lashing tangles of color onto canvases laid across the
floor—literally slapdash, yet as intricately woven as a Persian
rug, his pictures pointed the way to the future—or would if anyone
noticed. So Pollock sat up late with his sister-in-law. To comfort him,
she read his palm. He was going to be a very famous painter, she
promised him.
That may not have been evident at Betty Parson's
Manhattan gallery, where Pollock watched the guests snort in puzzlement.
Later came the reviews ("monotonous intensity"). The sales? Two
canvases. But within the American avant-garde, a world consumed by
disputes that consumed him too, the show was a loudly argued challenge.
When the mostly skeptical mass media came around, the Abstract
Expressionists, who had been germinating for years, exploded American
art onto the world stage for the first time.
And Pollock? He was
America's first painterpop star, the drunken angel of an emerging
hipster culture in search of new routes to those old American goals, the
instinctive and the transcendent. Though the role unnerved him, it was
secured forever in 1956, when he died, like James Dean, in a car crash.
But by that time the energies he had released were in motion everywhere.
The painter Willem de Kooning said it best: "He broke the ice." True
enough, but it broke him too.
TIME Cover
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