Carolyn and I have admired the work of American painter Jackson Pollock, who was a leading figure in the abstract expressionism art movement, which was characterized by freely associative painting styles that helped the art world to redefine what a painting could be. Pollock is most well-known for developing the “drip technique,” a painting method that involves dripping, pouring, or splashing paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling the artist to paint his or her canvas from multiple angles. Pollock’s revolutionary work influenced many subsequent art movements that followed abstract expressionism.

Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. His father, who was of Scottish-Irish descent, was a farmer and land surveyor for the government. Pollock’s mother came from an Irish family with a heritage of weavers, and she made and sold dresses. Pollock’s family left Wyoming when he was 11 months old, and he grew up in Arizona and California. Pollock’s childhood wasn’t very stable; his family moved nine times in the next 16 years, and in 1928 Pollock was expelled from two high schools for being a “troublemaker.”

In 1928, Pollock enrolled at the Manuel Arts School in Los Angeles, where he met painter and illustrator Frederick Schwankovsky, who gave him some training in drawing and painting and encouraged his interest in metaphysical and spiritual literature. Schwankovsky was a member of the Theosophical Society and was friends with Jiddu Krishnamurti. These early spiritual explorations may have influenced Pollock, as in subsequent years he embraced the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and the notion of unconscious imagery being expressed in his painting.

In 1930, Pollock moved to New York City, where his older brother was living, and he studied drawing, painting, and composition at the Art Students League. In 1936, Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros introduced Pollock to the use of liquid paint at an experimental workshop, and he later used paint pouring as one of his painting techniques. During this time Pollock’s painting style was part of the regionalism movement that depicted realistic scenes, and his style slowly began to become more abstract.

Around this time, Pollock began drinking too much. In 1937, he began treatment for a problem with alcoholism by undergoing Jungian psychotherapy. In 1938, he suffered a nervous breakdown, which caused him to be institutionalized for about four months, and his treatment involved being engaged with his art. Pollock was encouraged to make drawings and to see Jungian concepts and archetypes expressed in his paintings, as a way of exploring his unconscious mind.

From 1938 to 1942, Pollock found work as an easel painter with the Federal Arts Project, a federal program that helped struggling artists find employment during the Great Depression. In the early 1940s, Pollock moved to Springs, New York, and began developing his “drip” technique, with his canvases laid out on the studio floor. Pollock’s technique typically involved pouring paint straight from a can or along a stick onto a canvas lying horizontally on the floor.

In 1942, Pollock met the artist Lee Krasner at a gallery exhibition. They became romantically involved, influenced one another’s art, and in 1945 the couple was married. Krasner had extensive knowledge and training in modern art, and she introduced Pollock to many collectors, critics, and other artists who would further his career.

In 1943, Pollock signed a gallery contract with Peggy Guggenheim, and he did his first wall-sized work, a huge 8-by-20-foot abstract oil painting titled Mural. The painting was commissioned for the entrance hall of Guggenheim’s townhouse in NYC. In the foreword to the exhibition catalog, a New York Times reviewer described Pollock’s creativity as “…volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is undisciplined. It spills out of itself in a mineral prodigality, not yet crystallized.” Mural represents Pollock’s “breakthrough into a totally personal style in which compositional methods, and energetic linear invention, are fused with the Surrealist free association of motifs and unconscious imagery.”

Between 1947 and 1950 was Pollock’s “drip period,” when he produced some of his most famous abstract paintings. The process involved pouring or dripping paint onto a flat canvas in stages, often alternating weeks of painting with weeks of contemplating, before he finished a canvas. A whole series of famous paintings were created during this period, such as Full Fathom Five, Lucifer, and Summertime. Pollock also created more mural-sized canvases, such as One, Autumn Rhythm, and Lavender Mist.

In 1949, Life magazine did a four-page spread of Pollock’s work, and the accompanying article suggested that he might be the “greatest living painter” in the United States. Then, at the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style of painting. He began attempting to balance abstraction with depictions of figures in his paintings and used darker colors.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Pollock had one-man shows of new paintings nearly every year in New York. His work was handled by Peggy Guggenheim through 1947, then by the Betty Parsons Gallery from 1947 to 1952, and then by the Sidney Janis Gallery from 1952 onward.

After 1953, Pollock’s health began to deteriorate, and his production began to wane, but he still produced a number of important paintings in his final years, such as White Light and Scent. In 1956, Pollock died in a single-car crash while under the influence of alcohol.

Four months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Pollock did not profit financially from his fame. During his lifetime, Pollock never sold a painting for more than $10,000 and was often hard-pressed for cash, but in 2016, his painting “umber 17A sold for $200 million. Now considered an “iconic” master of mid-century Modernism, his work influenced the American art movements that immediately followed Abstract Expressionism — such as Happenings, Pop Art, Op Art, and Color Field painting.

One of the things that I’ve found most intriguing about Pollock’s art is how it continues to be controversial, almost seven decades after his death. It’s not uncommon to hear people say“It’s just the flinging of paint!” This leads me to believe that Pollock’s critics, be they of his time or ours, are largely wrong — for it’s hard for me to understand why people would get so worked up over an artist, almost 70 years after his death unless there’s something in his work that truly matters.

Some of the quotes that Jackson Pollock is known for include:

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements… the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.

On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

The secret of success is… to be fully awake to everything about you.

There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a get acquainted period that I see what I’ve been about. I’ve no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

Modern artists unravel inner universes, expressing energy, motion, and latent forces.

by David Jay Brown

Carolyn and I have admired the work of visual artists, film directors, and leading figures in the Pop Art movement Andy Warhol. His work explores the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture, in a variety of media, including painting, silk-screening, photography, film, and sculpture. Warhol’s work embraces and celebrates the banality of American culture, and he is well known for his witty and insightful quotes.

Andrew (Andy) Warhola Jr. was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928. He was the fourth child in a working-class family, whose parents were emigrants from a geographical region that is now located in Slovakia. Warhol’s father worked in a coal mine and died in a car accident when Andy was thirteen.

In 1936, when Warhol was eight years old, he became infected with a nervous system affliction that caused involuntary movements in his extremities, and he was confined to bed for over two months. Warhol described this period as being an important developmental stage in his life, which was largely spent listening to the radio and collecting pictures of movie stars around his bed.

In 1945, Warhol graduated from Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, and he won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. Warhol enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied commercial art. In 1947 and 1948 Warhol’s illustrations appeared on the cover and interior of his student magazine. In 1949, Warhol earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in pictorial design, and his first commissions were to draw shoes for Glamour magazine.

In 1950, Warhol moved to New York City, where he began a career in magazine illustration and advertising, and his first job in the city was designing shoes for a shoe manufacturer. While working in the shoe industry, Warhol developed a “blotted line” printing technique, which involved applying ink to paper and then blotting the ink while still wet. His use of tracing paper and ink allowed him to repeat— and to create endless variations— of a basic image; a process that became important in his later work.

In 1952, Warhol had his first solo show, of his whimsical ink drawings of shoe advertisements, at the Hugo Gallery in New York (although that show was not very well received). In 1956, some of his work was included in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Warhol began creating art by tracing projected photographs, subtly alerting the image, such as his 1956 image of a Young Man Smoking a Cigarette.

It was around this time, in the late 1950s, that Warhol was hired by RCA Records to design record album covers and promotional materials. In 1962, Warhol learned silk screen printmaking techniques, and he began to participate in the Pop Art movement. Pop Art was a British and American art movement that emerged in the mid to late 1950s, and is based on imagery from modern popular culture and the mass media. Pop Art was largely viewed as a critical or ironic comment on traditional fine art values, and often used imagery that had been commonly used in advertising or comic books.

In 1962, Warhol was featured in an article in Time magazine with his painting Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Can Opener (Vegetable), which became his most sustained motif— the Campbell’s soup can. The painting was exhibited at the Wadsworth Museum in Connecticut that year, and a year later Warhol made his West Coast debut with his Campbell’s Soup Cans exhibition at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. That same year, Warhol also had exhibits at the Stable Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, including a silkscreened painting series of iconic American images and objects, such as Marilyn Monroe portraits, Coca Cola bottles, and $100 bills.

In 1963, Warhol rented an old firehouse on East 47th Street in NYC that became his art studio and would turn into a legendary location called The Factory, where Warhol’s workers made silkscreens and lithographs under his direction. The Factory became famous for its exclusive parties in the 1960s, and was a hip hangout for artists, musicians, and celebrities, such as Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Velvet Underground. Warhol created a Pop Art empire, and at exhibits he sold autographed soup cans and “sculptures” of boxes with commercial logos on them.

In 1968, there was an assassination attempt on Warhol by a radical feminist writer named Valerie Solanas, who shot Warhol at The Factory, but only minor injuries were sustained. Solanas was subsequently arrested and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

In 1969, Warhol co-founded Interview magazine with a British journalist. The magazine features in-depth, usually unedited interviews with celebrities, artists, musicians, and creative thinkers. It is still in print today.

In 1971, Warhol had a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC. In 1975, he published his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, which is a loosely formed autobiography. Although criticized as being merely a “business artist,” some critics have come to view Warhol’s superficiality and commerciality as “the most brilliant mirror of our times,” contending that “Warhol had captured something irresistible about the zeitgeist of American culture.”

Warhol also directed or produced hundreds of experimental films, and dozens of full-length movies—silent and sound, short and long, scripted and improvised— fifty of which have been preserved by the Museum of Modern Art. The styles range from minimalist avant-garde to more commercial productions. The Andy Warhol Film Project seeks to preserve Warhol’s nearly 650 films.

Warhol once said, “I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?” In 1981, he got his wish when he worked on a project that was to create a traveling stage show— called A No Man Show— with a life-sized animatronic robot in the image of Warhol. The Andy Warhol Robot would then be able to read Warhol’s diaries as a theatrical production. This project was left unfinished when Warhol died, and over $400,000 was spent to create a Warhol robot, which is now in the hands of a private collector.

Warhol died in 1987 in New York City. After he died, Warhol’s body was brought back to Pittsburgh, where an open-coffin wake was held. The solid bronze casket had gold-plated rails and white upholstery. Warhol was dressed in a black cashmere suit, a paisley tie, a platinum wig, and sunglasses. He was laid out holding a small prayer book and a red rose, and the coffin was covered with white roses and asparagus ferns.

Warhol is remembered as one of the founding fathers of the Pop Art movement, and for challenging the very definition of art. Warhol’s artistic risks, and his lifelong experimentation with different subjects and media, made him a pioneer in almost all forms of visual art.

Some of the quotes that Andy Warhol is known for include:

Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.

In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

Art is already advertising. Mona Lisa could have been used to support a brand of chocolate, Coca-Cola, or anything else.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

I am a deeply superficial person.

We seek to last more than we try to live.

When you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions, you get transmutations, and that’s much more interesting in the long run.

by David Jay Brown

Carolyn and I have admired the work of French artist Henri Matisse, who helped revolutionize visual art developments during the first decades of the Twentieth Century with his expressively colored paintings and uniquely crafted sculptures of freestanding figures.

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was born in Northern France in 1869, and he grew up in the Picardy region of France. He was the eldest son of a wealthy grain merchant, who was a strict father. In 1887, Matisse went to Paris to study law. A year later he passed the bar and then worked as a court administrator.

In 1889, Matisse suffered from an attack of appendicitis. While he was recovering in bed, his mother brought him some art supplies. Painting stirred something deep inside Matisse, and he said that he “discovered a kind of paradise” when creating art. “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands,” he said, “I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.”

This experience inspired Matisse to become an artist, which deeply disappointed his father. However, his mother encouraged him and said to not follow the conventional rules of art. She advised him to try out new things and to paint his emotions. Matisse later said, “My mother liked everything I did. It is from my affection for her that I always drew what theory failed to offer me, to finish my paintings.”

In 1891, Matisse began to formally study art at an academy in Paris, where he initially painted still lifes and landscapes in a traditional style. He was influenced by the work of early European masters, as well as contemporary artists and Japanese art. The Eighteenth-Century French painter Jean Simeon Chardin was one of his most important influences.

In 1896, while he was visiting Australian painter John Russell on an island off the coast of Brittany, Matisse was introduced to Impressionism — the Nineteenth Century art movement, emphasized by small, visible brushstrokes that captured the changing qualities of light. Russell was friends with Vincent van Gogh, and he gave Matisse one of van Gogh’s drawings, which made a great impression on him. This experience inspired Matisse to change his painting style, and he started painting with brighter and bolder colors. That year Matisse exhibited five paintings at a salon and two of them were purchased by the state.

In 1897, Matisse painted The Dinner Table, which shows a woman setting a large, elaborate dinner table. Although the painting is now considered to be a masterpiece, it was not well received at the salon where it was first exhibited because people thought that it looked “blurry,” as it is a work done in the style of impressionism, which seeks to capture a feeling more than a realistic depiction. Matisse said, “I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.”

In 1898, Matisse traveled to London for a year, to study the paintings of English romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, and when he returned to London he went into debt from buying the work of painters that he admired. In his home, he displayed the work of Rodin, Gauguin, Cezanne, and van Gogh.

That same year, Matisse married Amélie Noellie Parayre, and in 1902 her parents become involved in a major financial scandal. The family was menaced by angry mobs and fraud victims. Matisse’s father-in-law was arrested, and this meant that Matisse was financially responsible for an extended family of seven. During that year and the following year, Matisse changed his painting style to make his work more saleable and adopted a more somber approach.

Soon after this, Matisse started devoting time to working in sculpture. Although he did his first attempt at sculpture in 1899, he didn’t start investing much energy in this until 1903, when he produced The Serf, which a number of art experts have suggested might have been based upon himself, as he seemed to have “psychologically identified” with the sculpture. Matisse was experiencing poverty at the time, and it was suggested that he “might have felt a kinship with the weight of problems bearing down on the serf’s shoulders.”

In 1904, Matisse had his first solo exhibition at a gallery in Paris, which wasn’t very successful. After this Matisse’s work began showing brighter and more expressive colors, and he joined an art movement known as Fauvism, which depicted simplified or abstract subject matter, and emphasized strident colors and more extravagant brushwork.

In 1905, Matisse exhibited with a group of artists in the Fauvism movement, and the exhibition received both harsh criticism and favorable attention. One critic said of the exhibit that, “a pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public.” Matisse’s painting at the exhibit, Woman with a Hat, was singled out for condemnation by the critics but was then purchased by American novelist and playwright Gertrude Stein.

In 1906, Matisse met Pablo Picasso at Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon, and the two became lifelong friends, as well as rivals. In 1912 Matisse visited Morocco, and while there he made several changes to his work, such as adding the use of black as a color to his paintings and adding “a new boldness.” Although he was receiving greater notoriety for his work, Matisse’s work continued to encounter some serious criticism. In 1913, an effigy of his painting Nu Bleu, which depicted a reclining nude woman, was burned at a show in Chicago.

In 1917, Matisse relocated to the French Riviera, and his work after this move showed a “relaxation and softening in his approach.” In the 1920s, Matisse engaged in active collaboration with other European and American artists, and after 1930 his work changed again, with “a new vigor and bolder simplification.”

Matisse was visiting Paris in 1940 when the Nazis invaded the city. He fled to the south, but stayed in France, and even had an exhibit in Paris whiles the Nazis occupied the city. However, all of Matisse’s work was purged from French museums and galleries, much of it confiscated by the Nazis, and he had to sign an oath assuring his “Aryan” status. During this time Matisse worked as a graphic artist, producing black-and-white book illustrations and lithographs.

In 1941 Matisse underwent surgery for abdominal cancer that left him reliant on a wheelchair and often bed-bound, so painting and sculpture became physically challenging. Matisse turned to a new medium, where he would cut up sheets of paper, pre-painted with gouache, into shapes of varying colors and sizes, and then arrange them to form creative compositions. Some of these pieces became murals and room-sized works. He called the last fourteen years of his “a second life.”

Between 1948 and 1951, Matisse was commissioned to work on the Chapel of Rosary in Venice, for which he created all the wall decorations, Stations of the Cross, furniture, stained-glass windows, vestments, and altar cloths. This is often considered to be the crowning achievement of his career.

In 1952, Matisse established a museum dedicated to his work, the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau, which today holds the third-largest collection of his work in France.

In 1954 Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of 84. He is buried in a cemetery in the Cimiez neighborhood of Nice.

Today Matisse is considered one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His stylistic innovations fundamentally altered the course of modern art, influenced the art of several generations of younger painters, and his work has been highly valued. In 2002 Matisse’s sculpture Reclining Nude I sold for $9.2 million, and in 2005 his painting The Plum Blossoms was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for $25 million.

Some of the quotes that Henri Matisse is known for include:

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.

I would like to recapture that freshness of vision which is characteristic of extreme youth when all the world is new to it.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

I don’t know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I’m some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

Creativity takes courage.

It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.

Work cures everything.

Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?

Why have I never been bored? For more than fifty years I have never ceased to work.

by David Jay Brown