Jackson Pollock

“Is Jackson Pollock the greatest living painter in the United States?” Life magazine asked in 1949. In this compelling, authoritative volume, author Ellen Landau locates the man and the artist in the continuum of his times, 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, 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, the Mexican gods of Siqueiros, arcane texts favoured be the Surrealists and Egyptian necrology. More than 100 are reproduced here in full color to capture the brilliance of his palette, and six gatefolds show his vast horizontal works without distortion.