Jackson Pollock: An American Saga

by Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith

Based on family letters and documents, lengthy interviews with his widow, Lee Krasner, as well as his psychologists and psychoanalysts, this book explodes the myths surrounding his death in 1956. 12 color and 175 black-and-white photos and reproductions.

Genres: Art, Biography, Nonfiction, History, Art History, Biography Memoir, Book Club

Paperback

First published December 12, 1988

Reviews

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best artist biographies I've ever read. What can I say? I love sullen, abusive, self-hating, inarticulate, drunken visionaries who, despite their many personality flaws, changed the course of modern art forever. It just goes to show that good connections and lucky breaks paved the way to creating the illusion that he was a brilliant artist. Makes me wish I knew Peggy Guggenheim.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book as it was so rich and well-researched. I picked it up because I wasn't a huge Pollock fan, and wanted to know more about him. I didn't bargain on what an interesting read this would turn out to be! Not only does the author provide insight into the artistic milieu of Pollock's time, he is also provides contextual depth via contemporary historic and political events. I felt like I was learning all about American history (European emigration to US, the Public Works program, the Depression...) as well as gaining insights into Pollock's personal world.

I left my original copy in Taiwan - at 800 pages, it was a tome! I have been scouring the used bookshops as it is definitely a book I'd read again.

[Tommy Bat-Blog Brookshire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always liked Jackson Pollock's paintings but never really knew that much about him personally. Well, OK, I knew he was an angry drunk & a nice guy when sober. I knew he had major fame after a Life Magazine article about him. I knew most of his work. I even knew he died in a car accident. But this book follows his entire life with heavy detail and it gives you great insight into both his psyche AND art ideas. His work is a lot more than just dripping paint on canvas. I read this book as soon as it came out & have always loved it. It won the Pulitzer Prize & it's very well deserved. I highly recommend it.

[Kristina Coop-a-Loop · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to know everything there is to know about Jackson Pollock, I highly recommend this book. The movie was based on this book. Pollock's life was researched extensively for this book and there is much more detail than I had wanted, but it's over 800 pages, so what did I expect? It's a fascinating, engrossing read of a complex, troubled man. I recently saw one of his large paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and it's amazing. Well-written, incredible book about an amazing American artist.

[R.Friend · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best thing about working at the Smithsonian... getting to read this for about 2 hours a day on the train. The definitive Pollock biography.

[Brian Fagan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've already read Naifeh & Smith's later biography of Vincent Van Gogh. The Pollock work was published in 1989. The Van Gogh biography was incredibly painful to experience - as depressing as one might imagine. And while Jackson Pollock was also a deeply troubled soul, there was enough variety in his life and lively discussions on art movements of the day to counteract a reader's frustration with Jackson's self-destructiveness.

My wife's interest in Jackson Pollock and his work led me to this. We've seen a number of his works across the country and at the Guggenheim in Venice. If you have an interest in his life and / or art, I also recommend the 2000 film Pollock with Ed Harris and Marcia Gay Harden as Lee Krasner. I have no doubt that this book stimulated the film and Harris' portrayal.

If you attribute mental illness to childhood experiences, Jackson had his share of traumas - an alcoholic and down-on-his-luck father who left when Jackson was 9, a mother with the double whammy of being a perfectionist and doting on Jackson as the baby boy of the family, and constant relocations.

Thomas Hart Benton was a surprise figure in this story for me. We have the THB Home and Museum here in Kansas City, and my wife and I recently attended a lecture on him at the library. But I wasn't aware that a young Pollock studied with him. Benton's rough and brash nature strongly appealed to Pollock. He was a desperately needed source of encouragement for Pollock, and struck a key chord when he told Pollock that soul and drive and determination were more important than sheer talent. Pollock later had to move away from Benton's representational format, in part because of his complete inability to draw figures, and sadly decided to disrespect him as an artist and as a person.

A recurring theme in the biography of course is the multifaceted monster of Pollock's terrible lack of confidence and self-loathing. A large part of it stemmed from his lack of classic education and his extreme inability to express himself in serious conversations on art.

As a fan of Gaugin, I was interested to see that a fellow artist once told Pollock what Gaugin said about nonrepresentational art, "one day somebody is going to come along and work with color and tone - and without any image that has any reference point in nature. And the result is going to be like music."

Unfortunately, especially after alcohol had Pollock in its grip, he deteriorated into the worst extremes of all the tendencies that were already in his personality - meanness, pettiness, egomania, vulgarity and violence. Sadly, he even took to belittling his wife Lee Krasner's art and discouraging her from painting. I decided to look for some redeeming qualities that Pollock had. He had great perseverance. And he adored young children and whenever he was around them spent hours entertaining them.

I found Hans Hofman's c. 1934 advice to his art students about the nature of abstract art to be enlightening:

"In any painting, he argued, various tensions are created from the moment the first dab of paint is applied: tension between the dab and the empty canvas, between the color of the dab and the color of the canvas, between the space covered by the dab and the space outside of it. A second dab affects all those tensions and creates new ones. If the next dab is a different color, a whole new set of tensions is created - between warm color and cool color, between receding color and advancing color, between luminous color and tonal color. Add a line and the combinations multiple geometrically - tensions between inside and outside, solid and void, direction and stability. And so on, dab by dab, color by color, line by line. ('Put a spot on the surface and let the surface answer back!' he would say.). Hofman described each tension as a 'push-pull' of competing forces or elements and urged his students to 'activate the surface' with the energy of these tensions. The ultimate goal, of course, was to control the tensions so they achieved the state that Hofmann considered the goal of all great art: 'equilibrium'. A painting that sustained an equilibrium between push and pull, between force and counterforce, created an alternate reality, one far more profound than any mere academic depiction of the natural world."

To me that sounds like an wonderful affirmation of the possibilities of abstraction, but ironically Hofmann and Pollock argued about that very notion after Pollock's Uber-successful drip paintings:

"Jackson was trying to get across to (him) his concept of the image. ... He said that if you painted out of yourself, you created an image larger than a landscape."

"Hofmann responded by suggesting that Jackson 'work from nature'"

"'I AM nature', Jackson responded defiantly."

One thing that I learned about Pollock's actual technique in creating the drip paintings is that he didn't just wave a brush or stick loaded with paint over the canvas, but he often moved the instrument in a 3-dimensional form and then watched as it's fall onto the canvas was translated into only 2 dimensions.

The only real criticism I have of the biography is the lack of a summation at the end. Wouldn't an appraisal of where an artist stands in the pantheon of art history be in order ?

[Ed Smiley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very good and well-researched biography of an extraordinary man and artist.

Pollock was notorious for reticence in expressing himself in words, other than short cryptic utterances, because they never seemed to say the full truth, although he could talk clearly and simply about art when he was comfortable with doing so. He was a man in a great deal of pain, and experienced the world in ways that cut him off from others; the authors suggest that he saw the world in a flashing ever-changing and somewhat threatening yet beautiful flux that was better suited to express in his use of fluid paint than in more traditional media. He was also a classic artist maudit, alcoholic, trouble maker, given to immense rages, and strangely sweet and charismatic moods, insecure about his masculinity, strangely boyish in his immaturity.

The problem with artist biographies is that there is a tendency to "explain" every aspect of their art in one to one correspondence to specific features of their life, when in a sense you are more interested in the struggle to create the art itself (or at least I am). One is more interested in the food at a fine restaurant that the state of the kitchen (I've been there, you don't want to know.) This is the aspect of Pollock that I most valued in the book; being human the obviously sensational train wreck of his life story was also of great interest, of course. Pollock's development was anything but smooth, and he gave little obvious indications of "talent" in his early work; his teacher, Benton, however, sensed in him, something deeper than facile skill, a hunger that would drive him to do extraordinary and tremendously innovative work

The authors seem to have engaged in a degree of heavy psychological archaeology to reconstruct private portions of his life, that when examining the footnotes seem a bit thin to say the least, and based on hearsay. Admittedly, given that reticence to justify and explain it is an overwhelming temptation--the polar opposite of the problem of their other subject, van Gogh, who was so verbose and eager to justify and explain that they were forced into endless cycles of fact checking. This is probably the chief criticism that I would level against the book.

[Luis Velasco · Rating 5 out of 5]

To put it simply: wow.

If you want to fully dive into the world of a man who completely revolutionized the idea of American Art, and, arguably, modern art, with all the horrific, beautiful, well-researched, flowing, damaging, and all-encompassing details that create it, read this book.

One of the best books I have ever read in my entire life. Yes, it is a lot. Yes, it can be tough to swallow. Yes, it can be technical. But all of it creates a world that you can’t escape—not can’t, will not want to escape.

I will read this again in the future. And I will be jealous of those reading it for the first time.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enormous non fiction work - this book covers the artists story from when his ancestors arrived in Baltimore on a sailing ship.
Absolutely spellbinding tales of the incredible difficulties that his homestead family endured.
The pain is just getting started though for the reader as Jackson’s life is an endless chain of difficulties and mistakes.
His success is almost a miracle in light of the life he had.
A tremendous look at life and art over the last hundred years in America.

[Greta · Rating 4 out of 5]

(SPOILER ALERT)This book has a fascinating wealth of information on both Pollack and American art history in general! Why not five stars....well....
throughout the entire book the authors continue to assume and ascribe things such as thoughts, motivations, and actions to Pollack that are clear assumptions on their parts. Examples of this include: defining what he thinks when there is no record of what he thought, defining "demons" and "issues" that he in fact faces when there is no stated record or evidence to indicate that this is indeed the truth, defining core realizations and insights about what Pollack "faced" when creating art, and sometimes intricately describing actions and details about what occurs when there is no way that they would know the particulars of what actually occured.
A concrete example is:
1) statements such as in a particular painting he IS painting the lace of his childhood outfits and mother's crochet..okay how do you know that is what he is painting? That is an association that the authors make. Pollack never said he was painting childhood lace. If they want to theorize that(fine)...they need to make it clear it is their theory in their writing language. The authors don't do that they say that he IS painting the lace (there is a huge difference)! This kind of writing is prevalent throughout and is distracting and annoying.Too many more examples to share.
2)In general I felt when reading this that accuracy of Pollack's thoughts, feelings, and portrayal where sometimes betrayed/sacraficed by an overindulgence in literary niceties, themes, and/or thesis( I can see that this book won a Pulitzer Prize)... A great example of this is the ending (SPOILER ALERT) . As Jackson dies in an auto mobile accident the authors write a literary reference to "escape velocity"( indeed this is the title of the chapter). His body hurling in space towards his death becomes a metaphor and his speeding in the air takes on the quality of a freebird escaping from burdens. Yes ...it had a nice literary (almost) romantic ring to it. However, as I read it I felt the familiar annoyance mixed with anger . I don't want his body projectiling towards his death to be used as a literary device.(I daresay it even seemed that his projectile body was a veiled metaphor for paint!)To me it cheapened a sad and tragic event and transformed it into a neatly tied literary box for audience consumption.And it also rubbed some reoccuring sore wounds as a reader. Once again I was frustrated with a literary "story". This one spoke of escape and freedom. Well. For all we know his last moments were not associated with escape or freedom, maybe it was about something else alltogether?
3) Pollack( and Krasner)many times felt like a subject under too harsh light of scrunity. Sometimes the biography was painful, painful to read and I felt that he (& Lee sometimes) were laying raw and exposed for reader consumption. I can take that they had very tragic lives. I think the problem for me was that when you mixed things like alcohol, drug addiction, sexuality, and sado machocism with writing (as discussed above) that sometimes packaged experiences and people into neat little literary issues, theories, and/or assumptions that it made me feel as a reader that these peopleand their problems were overly simplified products for consumption.
4) ALL THAT SAID. This a great book. I just think it it so important when reading it to realize its limitations.Pollack I think was more a mystery than the book indicates. He and his problems are entitled to the great void of mystery and (as responsible biographer readers always do) it is important when reading this book to have respect for all the things that we truly do not know about him, his life, his issues, his demons, etc.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The word Saga in this book's title is apropos given that "long" and "detailed" are properties of any narrative so described.

Jackson Pollock was a tragic figure, never really happy in life. He was the youngest of five children, all boys. His oldest brother, Charles, and his next oldest, Sande, both attempted to be professional artists but were never truly successful at it, though Charles made a meager living around the edges of the art world for several years. Jackson did have a fairly close relationship with his family in varying degrees, particularly his mother, who outlived him by two years. (The boys' father died while Jackson was still rather young, but he was around long enough to have some influence.)

Jackson became a hard-core alcoholic and a mean, violent, and generally unpleasant drunk, almost schizoid in his behavior. In the end, alcohol killed him—not literally, but alcoholism drove him to his death as surely as the car he was riding in at the time. It was apparent that he no longer wanted to live. Though his death by automobile was not declared a suicide, it seems obvious that he was aware that he'd by then lost everything that was of value to him and was ready to die.

Unfortunately, he was with two other women at the time, and one of them also died in the crash. If his death was suicide (this possibility is never even brought up in this book), it was also murder, or at least manslaughter, of a young woman he'd met only the day before. His alleged mistress survived and later became recognized in the art world and a personal friend of some of the top people in the New York scene, including Willem de Kooning and later, Andy Warhol.

Jackson Pollock never displayed much genuine talent for the traditional skills of an artist, especially for draftsmanship, an attribute he had in common with Vincent van Gogh, with whom he shares a number of other coincidences of circumstance, including a strange and difficult family relationship.

In his youth, he became a student of the famous regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton, whose adherence to realism and imagery eventually made his very mention almost an anathema to the proponents of the abstract expressionist movement centered in New York City, of whom his former student, Jackson Pollock later became the leading exemplar.

Jackson's breakout came in about 1950, when Life magazine published an important article about him. It was a time in US history when everyone read magazines like they also soon watched the same three television networks every evening, and Life was about the biggest one there was. This publicity came during the period that Jackson had developed his technique of dripping paint on canvases rather than applying it with a brush or stick. For a while, he became a celebrity. But his own fame went to his head, as he started to believe the press that had been written about him and tried to act out a role in much the way that Norma Jean Baker became Marilyn Monroe.

Although Jackson Pollock was not ignored like Vincent van Gogh, and he made a few significant sales that kept him from being outright destitute the last several years of his life, his paintings never sold really well during his lifetime.

As the baby in his family, Pollock retained a desperate attachment to his mother, who outlived him by two years. But the one person who was doubtless the single most important person in his life was his wife, Lee Krasner, herself an artist worthy of recognition if not one of the greats. Perhaps she could have done more artistically, but for most of the time she was married to Jackson, she was singularly devoted to caring for him, despite his almost always unreasonable behavior and endless violence and drunkenness. Some critics have not viewed her kindly, but I personally admire her for her willingness not to give up on Jackson until almost the very end, even though many times her very life was threatened.

Jackson Pollock died on August 12, 1956, when Jackson and Lee had finally been talking seriously about divorce. At the time, Jackson had openly taken a mistress, largely to spite his wife. (The girl threw herself at him.) Lee proposed a trip to Europe for a variety of motives. As far as I know, Jackson never left the United States any time during his lifetime, unless there were brief escapes into Mexico or Canada (not mentioned that I recall in this biography).

I happen to like Jackson Pollock's drip paintings enough to have a poster of Convergence (1952) hanging above my fireplace. But I doubt that I could have ever been a friend of Jackson Pollock. Other than his surprising fondness for and gentleness with children (other people's—he and Lee never had any), there was very little to recommend him as a person that one might want to spend time getting to know.

This Naifeh/Smith biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989, so is far from new. There are 796 pages of narrative, a few pages of bibliography, and exactly 100 pages of detailed notes plus a detailed index. The authors had direct access to some of the most important people in Pollock's life from whom they obtained a treasure trove of firsthand data, including Lee Krasner and Jackson's three surviving brothers.

Earlier this year, I also read the same authors' biography of Vincent van Gogh, which is nearly two-thirds again as long as the Pollock bio, regarded by the international Van Gogh community as authentic and the standard to go to, likely for decades to come. I mention it because the authors are the same, they had a lengthy career together in writing notable books between the two volumes, and because there are some important parallels between the lives of Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock, and the similarities and contrasts are quite instructive. The two volumes together did much to provide me with remedial education on the topic of advanced painting from the middle nineteenth to the middle twentieth century, a period of enormous significance and one which I happen to love.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This brilliant biography is about much more than just the life of Jackson Pollock (although that's a sufficiently worthy subject in its own right). It also touches on the complex relationship between art and art criticism, particularly Clement Greenberg and how pushed and prodded Pollock into the art hero he so desperately wanted to write about.

It's also about families, the great depression, socialism, surrealism, the shift of the intellectual and cultural center of gravity from Paris to NYC, Long Island, art gallery owners, Peggy Gugenheim, etc. A phonebook sized tome on the art world viewed through the lens of one artist's life might not be everyone's bag, but it's beautifully written, exhaustively researched, and elegently structured.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got so wrapped up in this book, it was like reading fiction. I had such emotion, anger and sympathy, mostly anger, for Jackson and Lee. Highly recommended if you want to know more about Pollock and/or modern art. I just wish there was a final chapter that recapped his life, commented on his legacy, and maybe even attempted to answer that question: Is he the greatest American painter?

[Randi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Currently about 1/2 way through the book - not sure I am liking the section he wrote on Lee Krasner here - feels very misogynistic to me. Describes her as ugly etc. I do like to insight into his life before he became an artist, very eye-opening.

Finally finished this book - too long I think - although interesting details about his early life, before he became famous.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well-written and thoroughly researched biography of a bewilderingly self-destructive artist. The authors did a great job of putting Pollock in the context of 20th century American painting. It's a door-stopper of a book but worth the effort.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book I learned so much about Pollock, Lee Krasner and his friends and contemporary artist. It is a long book but definitively worth the time. I must say in places it goes into too much detail but it has sparked an interest in art in the first half of the 20th century.

[David Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

At 900 plus pages this is not a casual read. It also has a fair share of critics: "Too much personal background, too little about his art work." Depends on your preference. The book did win the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

[Matteo Cordero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jackson Pollock: An American Saga is one the most complete biography ever written about the most famous Abstract Expressionist painter. Pollock was originally born in Wyoming and lived throughout his life in New York. He was initially recognized as an artist after the Art of this Century exhibition in 1943 organised by the collector Peggy Guggenheim. He was widely noticed for his large mural-dripping paintings. He was notorious in the New York art world for his difficult character as he was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, worsened by alcoholism with dramatic and deep periods of depression. He eventually died in a car accident killing an innocent woman, named Edith Metzger.

This Pulitzer prize winner biography is amazing. It covers the early life of Pollock through the early years in New York ruined by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the failure of the Capitalist economy to the Booming economy in the USA in the 1950s. As an artist, I was particularly interested in why Pollock decided to be an artist. He decides to be an artist to compete with his older brother who, when they were children, was more talented than Jackson. This work includes different interesting anecdotes of Carl Jung's psychoanalytic theory of archetypes that were related to the initial phase of Pollock's work. This big tome (nearly 1000 pages to read) is very fluid and enjoyable to read. It does not include any pointless descriptions of the artworks themself but focuses on the life of the artist, his fellow peers and the historical events that shaped Pollock's career.
It is fascinating to read how the art market was shaped by external and historical events such as the Great Depression and the post–World War II economic expansion of the 1950s. Pollock and his fellow artists were not able to sell any of their works during the 1930s, and they only survived because of the WPA. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was part of Roosevelt's New Deal during the Great Depression, in which he intended to increase employment and the economy and with the WPA to support artists. The WPA hired artists to create collectively paintings, murals and sculptures to be exhibited in public buildings such as hospitals, schools and municipal buildings. Pollock's practice benefited significantly from this program which helped him to produce new works. Nonetheless, in this program, Pollock struggled barely to survive and he did not sell his paintings even after important articles had been written about his work such as in the Times and other art magazines, without mentioning the support of the notorious art critic Clement Greenberg. It was only during the postwar economic boom when consumerism took over that eventually, Pollock started to be financially independent with the sales of his works and later his paintings reached enormous prices.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This aptly named "saga" is a monster with 800 pages and an additional 100 pages of bibliography and index and a small font that gets in 44 lines of text per page. It does require some dedication.

Extensively researched, it begins with the arrival of Pollock's ancestors to America in 1774 and continues to his death in 1956. I had seen the Ed Harris movie and had a general knowledge of Pollock's tragic life as a artist. I learned about the New Deal Federal Art Project, the rise of Abstract Expressionism in America and how gallery owners (e.g., Peggy Guggenheim) gave artists monthly stipends to prevent starvation in exchange for exhibiting their work and taking a percentage of the sales.

I would recommend if: you are VERY interested in EVERY detail about Pollock, you are an insomniac, or you have unlimited library checkouts with nothing else on your "to-read" list. :D

Honestly, I enjoyed this book but admit that I was interested in a detailed perspective on Pollock and I plan to attend a lecture on his work in a couple of months.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very long book. Jackson reaches the age of ten at around page 100. But his upbringing in the west in the early 1900's and his dysfunctional family dynamics are quite interesting. At around the age of 20 he moves to NYC and takes a serious crack at being an artist. He is actually not a very good artist and it takes many years for him to find success with his abstract style. Did I mention that he is a horrible individual? Much of the book is about his spoiled and bad behavior. He was constantly babied by his family (he was the youngest of five sons). One brother would have to mind him in NYC as he would go off on alcoholic benders. The liquor eventually led to his early death. He also abused his wife mentally and physically. And even when he had success with his drip paintings, he would not chip in to support his elderly mother. As I said, he was a pretty terrible guy. The book though long gives a fascinating portrait of Jackson and the rise of American post war art.

[Jay "Jakie" · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an extremely well researched biography of Jackson Pollock. I had read this heavy tome (900+ pages) ten or twenty years ago and had forgotten what a troubled individual Pollock was. It also explores the art world of the post-WWII United States, the Surrealists, European emigres' and the American Expressionists. What a unique and eclectic cast of REAL characters they are! (The fact that they put up with Pollock's extremely violent alcoholic behavior was astounding! Or perhaps it reflects the chaos or turmoil of that time.) I would not claim to understand Jackson Pollock's art, other than I believe it was important in that it instigated a break from the homegrown Realist form and more traditional European art.

[Wendy Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not a fan of his paintings, but this was an interesting book. I wanted to read this to see if I could understand his paintings. Nope. It is something in his mind. There were some parallels with their Van Gogh biography: family problems, belief the family should fund him to paint, psychological problems and the failure to profit from his paintings while he was alive. I liked the Van Gogh bio more. It felt more interesting. I think there was a point where I grew tired of Pollock's alcoholic incidents.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some great turns of phrases in here, and certainly thoroughly researched. Fascinating info about early 1900s America. Very negative about everything ever and the writers’ conservative politics leak in too often. I’m a huge fan of Pollock’s work, and a realist about who he was — this book changed nothing about either of those. Ridiculous how many times (at least in the edition I read) that the titles of paintings were incorrect (‘November’ instead of ‘Number’).

[Eric Sbar · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took a long time for me to rationalize why I fought through this biography. Jackson Pollock’s work still leaves me in awe if for no other reason than its power. Yet, this petulant, self-absorbed man baby does not require a phone book sized biography to go meticulously through his overinflated ego and rampant alcoholism. I finished the book and, now, I need a drink

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

Almost two years later, I finally finished the most comprehensive and detailed biography on any human, let alone artist- even more exhaustive than Walter Isaacson's profiles! While I prefer the author's other work, the research that went into telling the story of Pollack's life and work is impressive.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely thorough and well told biography of Jackson Pollock. Don’t let the 934 page count scare you too much lol - the bio is ‘only’ 796 pages and the remainder is notes and acknowledgments. My only criticism is the photos tend to be quite small and all in black and white (but there are definitely other sources out there for glossy colour images).

[Veronika · Rating 5 out of 5]

A big book both in volume and as a magnitude of the story it tells about modern art, American art in particular and of course, Jackson Pollock. It made me very sad to think that most of the famous abstract painters of the fifties were depressed suicidal drunks. The book gives good insight into how art became what it is today.

[Socrate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Biografia lui Jackson Pollock scrisă în baza scrisorilor și documentelor de familie, a interviurilor îndelungate cu văduva sa, Lee Krasner, precum și cu psihologii și psihanaliștii săi, această carte explorează și clarifică miturile din jurul morții sale în 1956.

[Evan Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. I realized how little I really knew about this man. When I was finished with the book, I had only empathy for Pollock. These biographers are among the best. I also read their biography of Van Gogh--also unputdownable!

[Gregory Klages · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work relies heavily on a Freudian psychoanalytic framework, which requires extensive exploration of Pollock's childhood, attachment to parents, and sexual development. Despite its length, I found its focus on this approach reductive, but a nonetheless interesting read.