All language subtitles for [SubtitleTools.com] Jackson Pollock Part One_ The Myth of the Modern Artist

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Jackson Pollock has been called a genius, a fraud,
a misogynist, a drunk, and a revolutionary. In one

extraordinary summer he created a painting that
captured the energy and ambition of a world remade.

It was a world emerging from the chaos of global
conflict, and the balance of power was shifting.

Europe's old cultural dominance was fading as a
new centre, political, economic, and artistic, was

emerging in America, along with the first truly
American art movement - Abstract Expressionism.

In a converted barn in a sleepy fishing town on Long
Island, Pollock stood over a vast canvas laid on

the floor. Dripping, flicking, and splattering paint.
To the untrained eye it looked chaotic - random even.

But it wasn't. He wasn't painting just anything
He was painting 'everything'. His inner turmoil,

the trauma he couldn't put into words, the energy
and the pulse of his time. Pollock would emerge

as the quintessential artist, embodying in every
way the existential uncertainty of the postwar

era, and he would do it through a radical break
from traditional form and technique. In this

film I look at just what abstract expressionism
means, I look at the myths surrounding Pollock and

modern art itself, I look at his influences
including the social realism of the 1930s

and 40s, Native American art with its emphasis on
performance, ritual, and gesture. And the Mexican

muralists whose use of unconventional materials
and experimental techniques shaped his approach.

And I look at how he went from this - to this.
Film: "If a person consistently reads and advocates

the views expressed in a communist publication
he may be a communist". I also look at a lesser

known story, of how art became an unlikely player
in the Cold War and the global contest of ideas,

how abstract expressionism was enlisted as
an unknowing agent in a shadowy propaganda

war bankrolled by the CIA - to tell
the story of freedom and capitalism.

After the Second World War, most of Europe was
in ruins. Cities bombed, infrastructure destroyed,

economies shattered. Partly broken - completely
broke. For decades Paris, had been the beating

heart of the art world. It was after all, where
modernism was born. But now America, largely

untouched by war and rising as a political
and economic power, saw a chance to assert

itself culturally too. New York, already home to
a growing community of artists, intellectuals, and

immigrants fleeing fascism, was buzzing with
energy. Galleries, museums, and collectors were

beginning to take modern art seriously, and
Manhattan emerged out of the ashes of Europe

as the new global cultural capital. Many of the
US artists who helped shape this new movement

were children of the depression. Their formative
years had been shaped by poverty and hardship.

Their suffering grew into determination and
ambition for something better and something new.

The world had changed, and so had
humanity's understanding of itself.

Art needed new forms, new voices, and new ways
of seeing, to reflect that transformation.

This search for a new technique, a new
language of art, gave rise to what we now

call abstract expressionism. But to understand
how radical it was, we need to take a step back.

In the 19th century, artists use powerful
symbols: Storms, shipwrecks, ruined castles,

to express emotion. As photography was used more
and more widely to depict the world as it looked

outwardly, artists took to expressing their inward
responses to the world. In the early 20th century,

the surrealist took things a step further using
dream imagery and automatism to connect with the

unconscious mind. Abstract expressionism took this
trajectory to its logical extreme. It completely

removed recognisable objects. The goal wasn't to
show how an object or place "feels", It was to depict

feeling itself. At the time, it was seen as an
attack on painting - a deliberate deconstruction of

western artistic traditions. The problem is, we want
things to make sense. We want lines to go somewhere.

We want recognisable iconography, and we want art
to say something. Abstract art fights against all

that, making life just a little more difficult.
And what's wrong with that? These paintings more

than any other, need you to stand in front of
them, to be surrounded by their presence, their

energy and their scale, rather than look through an
electronic device. In real life, we can clearly see

the gestures in the application, trace the rhythm
of movements across the canvas, even feel what it

was that inspired the artist. And in that sense, the
artist is present with us in the room. A Pollock

painting isn't a picture of chaos, it's a depiction
of a feeling. This can be hard to grasp. Abstract

painting often meets resistance: It's too open,
too ambiguous. But, we can use a musical analogy.

Think of a piece of instrumental music. It
doesn't tell a story with words or pictures,

It's just sound - pure abstraction. Technically it's
just vibrations of air. Mathematics made audible.

Yet somehow it stirs memories, moves us to
tears, makes us want to dance, or reminds us

of love. A minor chord can feel sad, a major
chord uplifting. A major 7th makes us feel

anticipation. Abstract expressionism, like
music, speaks in a language beyond words.

The choice of colour, the nature of a mark, the
layering of paint. All these things combined, to

evoke feelings. It's visual music. That's what makes
these artists so exciting. They were attempting to

do something nobody had done before, paint emotion
itself. If we take the music analogy further, we can

look at how Pollock worked. He was a huge jazz fan,
and we could say that he painted in the same way

a jazz musician improvises, spontaneous, physical
and intuitive. Like a John Coltrane solo, his

paintings are full of rhythm, energy, and feeling.
We may not be able to explain why these sounds

or shapes affect us, we simply feel it. And there's
something even more ancient in his approach. Think

of the stencilled handprints on cave walls. Those
early human marks made by blowing pigment through

a hollowed out bone, and flicking paint around a
hand pressed to stone. They're not portraits, or

stories, just raw presence. A declaration
"I was here". Pollock's splatters, echo that same

impulse - direct, physical, urgent. We may not always
understand those gestures, but like music or the

first marks in a cave, we feel their impact in our
bodies. Before we interpret, we experience.

Paul Jackson Pollock, was born
in 1912, in the American West,

the youngest of five brothers in a family
that moved often, and struggled financially. As the

baby of the family, he was pampered and indulged
by his mother. But his early life was also marked

by instability, and the frequent absence of his
alcoholic father. His mother was a strong and

ambitious woman, full of ideas and big plans, and
she encouraged her boys to have an interest in art.

Three of them did indeed go on to become full-time
artists. Jackson was a rebellious child with a

tendency to resist authority and he was expelled
from more than one school. His father, who he

idolised, was a man with strict views about
masculinity, and a strong work ethic. It was

his father who introduced Jackson to alcohol
very early on. And so by the time he was 15,

he was already drinking heavily. Jackson's
struggles with alcoholism intensified in

the 1930s, and continued throughout most of his
adult life. It would eventually lead to his early

death. His father left for good while he was
still a teenager. And Jackson, often described

as sensitive and intense, seems to have spent
much of his life craving his absent father's

approval, and trying to live up to an ideal that
was always just out of reach. Even from a young

age Pollock had struggled to express his feelings.
He was described by his classmates as strange, and

inarticulate, and he began to exhibit signs of
depression and volatility in his teens. Growing

up in the rural American West, a landscape still
shaped by the frontier myth, Pollock came to be

seen as a tough, raw, and unrefined American figure,
a "cowboy painter". Part truth, and part invention,

it was a myth that he encouraged, as it fed into
larger narratives about American identity and

masculinity in the post-war era. Far from being
a cowboy, or a country hick, Pollock was in fact

deeply immersed in art history and theory. Curious
about ideas, he had an extensive arts education.

In 1928, age 16 Pollock, now living with his
mother in Los Angeles, began to study painting at

the Emanuel Arts High School. Then, in the fall of
1930, Pollock followed his brother Charles to New

York City, where he enrolled in the Art Students
League under his brother's teacher, the Regionalist

painter Thomas Hart Benton. It was a difficult time
for the young artist, unsure of his path and his

identity, perhaps reflected in this early
self-portrait? Around this time, Pollock

began engaging more deeply with Native American
art, particularly the sand painting rituals of the

Navajo. He was fascinated by the way materials were
shaped on the ground, and the physicality of making

art using rhythm and gesture. These experiences
offered early glimpses of the energetic, physical

relationship with materials that would later
define his work. His teacher Benton, was best known

to the public as the leader of the regionalist
movement in American art, which opposed European

modernism, and focused on scenes of the American
heartland. NOT someone who at first you would

see as an influence on Pollock, and yet he had a
profound and lasting effect on his young student,

both technically and psychologically. Even though
Pollock would later move far beyond Benton style.

We can clearly see Benton's influence in Pollock's
1934 painting "Going West". Benton emphasised

rhythmic sweeping lines and structured composition,
and these were skills Pollock carried into his

later abstract work. Benton was a muralist making
public artworks and this large-scale approach

helped prepare Pollock for working on massive
canvases of his own - like "Mural", his first major

commission. When asked about Benton's influence
on his work, Pollock dismissed it as "something

against which to react". But there is a clear
connection in the rhythm and flow, the vigorous

lines, and vibrant colours of their paintings. And
even at the height of Pollock's drip painting era,

you can still see traces of Benton's structural
influence. In 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New

York had a major Picasso exhibition, giving Pollock
the opportunity to really study the man who (like

most young artists at the time), he idolised, but
who he eventually came to resent. Pollock's early

work clearly shows the influence of Picasso in his
use of geometric structures, fragmented figures, and

a focus on the human form. But something rarely
discussed in the Pollock/Picasso debate, is the

influence overall of "Analytic Cubism" on him,
and in particular the interlacing line work

and sense of perpetual motion we find in works
like this. Which, like Pollock's later works, have

a more free form approach, and are liberated from
a rectilinear grid. He and other artists in New

York would however begin to break away from the
dominance of European influences, and look closer

to home. In 1936, Pollock participated in a workshop
run by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose

influence was less stylistic than it was technical.
Siquieros encouraged the participants to experiment

with industrial paint and lacquers, adding
sand, dust, and other materials. Even suggesting

that they sprayed, poured, and dripped paint onto
canvases. Another great Mexican muralist Pollock

admired was José Clemente Orozco, whose large,
raw, and fearless murals, are intensely emotional.

Often filled with violence, human struggle, and
existential themes. Orozco, gave Pollock permission

to be intense, to explore psychological and
mythological depth, and to use gesture and scale

in bold and powerful ways, Possibly, we can look
to Orozco as the dominant aesthetic influence in

this period. But it was above all, the scale and
the sense of immersion that Pollock picked up

from the Mexican muralists. How we as viewers
physically engage with large images. What is

important here, is that all of these influences
marked a shift away from Oceanic or African art

that had fascinated the previous generation of
artists, to art that was closer to home. To Native

American sand-painting and Mexican muralists, to
regionalist works, and towards an American identity.

Film VO: "The Works Progress Administration was
launched late in 1935, as the key agency in the

federal work program, to employ able people from
relief roles - Sensitive fingers of artists are

poorly suited to manual labour. And in finding
suitable work for musicians and other artists

the WPA has contributed greatly to the culture of
America. Some of this work is done on canvas but

much of it is created on the walls of our schools, libraries,
and other public buildings in the form of mural paintings..."

From 1935 to 1942, Pollock was employed by
the Works Progress Administration or the WPA.

To create paintings, murals, and sculptures,
for public buildings - giving him a modest but

steady income. The WPA was a government program
created in 1935 as part of President Franklin D

Roosevelt's "New Deal", with a goal to provide jobs
and economic relief during the Great Depression,

by funding public works projects. It became a
launchpad for a generation of American artists

like Philip Guston, Ashile Gorky and Mark Rothko,
many of whom shaped modern art in the decades

that followed. And it supported a diverse range
of voices across styles, races, and regions, at a

time when few other institutions did. But despite
the structure of the WPA work, Pollock's drinking

worsened, and his bouts of depression deepened.
He was fired more than once from projects, and

his reckless behaviour was causing
problems for everyone around him.

While all these influences are important
in the story of Jackson Pollock, the

theories of Carl Gustav Jung need to take credit
as a motivating force within his development.

In 1939 during treatment for acute alcoholism
he began undergoing Jungian psychotherapy with

Dr Joseph Henderson, during which he produced 69
drawings now known as the "Psychoanalytic Drawings".

The sessions with Henderson had a powerful effect,
giving him another kind of vocabulary. One he could

use in his paintings in expressing inner emotional
or spiritual states through abstraction. Sigmund

Freud had a profound impact on the surrealist art
movement, but almost all the abstract expressionist

artists were devotees of Jung, a student of Freud
who broke away by proposing a broader view of the

unconscious, that included a collective unconscious.
A shared reservoir of archetypes and myths, common

to all humanity, that appear in folklore,
dreams, art, and religion, across all cultures.

Jung saw the artist as someone who brings
"unconscious material into consciousness

for the collective". Pollock - often described
as a modern shaman - channels deep, collective

energies through his body and movements, tapping
into a shared human ancestry. His iconic drip

technique served as a physical manifestation of
this process, allowing instinct and gestures to

guide the creation of art rather than deliberate
design. The collective unconscious made visual.

Jungian therapy, gave Pollock a language and
method for integrating his inner turmoil into

his creative process, but it didn't teach him how
to truly care about the women who anchored his

life throughout his chaos. Re-examining these
relationships, deconstructs the heroic male

narrative, and offers a richer more accurate view
of how art movements evolve. In 1942, he was still

an up-and-coming artist, who was sadly becoming known
in New York as a volatile, abusive drunk. When into

his chaotic life came the person who more than
any other made Jackson Pollock the icon that he is.

Lee Krasner, was already an established artist on
the New York scene, when in late 1941, she noticed a

name on a gallery list
that she didn't recognise.

They quickly became a couple,
and within a few months

they were living together. Krasner
introduced Pollock to art theory, and

to the New York avant-garde, helping him connect with
influential figures in the art world. It wasn't an

easy partnership. Pollock was a difficult man. Over
time Krasner reduced her own artistic ambitions to

prop up Pollock's career. She believed he
had something extraordinary, that he would

be an important part of art history, and so made a
decision to put his work first. And anyway, managing

the fallout from his reckless conduct and heavy
drinking became a full-time job. It was Krasner

who arranged for a meeting with the important
and influential art collector Peggy Guggenheim

at their apartment. And despite Jackson nearly not
making it, after passing out drunk earlier in the

day, Krasner dragged him back to meet Guggenheim. Her
persistent paid off, and in 1943 Jackson Pollock

became the first modern American artist to get
a solo show at Guggenheim's prestigious gallery,

"Art of This Century". That same year, Guggenheim
commissioned him to paint a huge mural for the

entryway of her New York apartment. This was to be
a turning point, both for him and in terms of art

history. The romantic legend says that initially
Pollock was paralysed with fear of the enormous

blank canvas, but then suddenly painted the whole
thing in a single night! This is not true, as

restorers discovered layers of work that proved
Pollock worked on the piece for weeks, or even

months. Another legend, is that when he delivered it
it was too big for Guggenheim's hallway and Marcel

Duchamp cut it down to fit. Also not true. Whatever
the truth is, Pollock took every influence on him

up until this point, and really poured himself
into this painting. It is a stupendous, unending,

vast mass of colour, shapes, and abstract patterns,
that pull you right into the canvas. It's a triumph.

A few years later, Pollock told a friend that
when he was painting the mural, he was inspired

by the movement of stampeding horses, possibly a
memory from his childhood in the American West?

And we can definitely make out some horse-like
figures throughout the painting. Pollock also

visited an exhibition of action photography that
same year in the Museum of Modern Art in New York,

which has also been cited as a possible reference
for the mural. There certainly is a resemblance to

the time-lapse photographs of that exhibition,
and both his work in this period, and the act of

painting itself, was deeply tied to motion, rhythm,
and gesture. All concepts shared with photography

and film. Mural was energetic and experimental
but still semi-figurative. That was about to change...

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