On this day 69 years ago, on August 11, 1956 (July 6, 1956), the American painter Jackson Pollock died. Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 - August 11, 1956) was one of the influential founders of abstract painting in 20th-century America and a major force in the abstract expressionist (abstractexpressionism) movement. His art was seen as a symbol of the new American painting after World War II. Pollock was born in Wyoming and attended art school in Los Angeles. He came to New York at the age of 17 and studied painting with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. He moved away from symbolic art and developed a painting technique of spraying and dripping paint on canvas. In the 1930s, he was influenced by Mexican mural art, and the critic Smith said: "Digu Rivera's passion for public art that'belongs to the masses' may have helped Pollock develop a preference for the large." (Edward Lucie Smith, translated by Chen Mai: "Modern Visual Art After 1945", Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House, p. 26.) He admired Cezanne and Picasso, and also had a soft spot for Kandinsky's expressive abstract paintings and Miro's works full of mysterious dreams. From 1938 to 1942, he worked for the Federal Art Project; in the 1950s and 1960s, he was supported by the CIA through the CongressforCulturalFreedom. In his opinion, modern artists should no longer pursue representation like traditional artists, but should focus on the expression of inner spirit and emotion. He said: "Modern artists live in a machine age, and we have the means to depict objective objects such as cameras and photographs realistically. In my opinion, the artist's job is to express the inner world - in other words - to express vitality, movement, and other inner forces.... The modernist artist focuses on time and space, and he expresses emotion, not society." (Edited by Ellen H. Johnson, translated by Yao Hongxiang et al.: "Contemporary American Artists on Art", Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House, p. 8.) However, it was the ideas of surrealist artists from Europe that had the greatest influence on Pollock's art. "What impressed me the most," Pollock once recalled, "was their idea that art came from the unconscious. This idea influenced me more than the creations of these particular painters." (Edited by Ellen H. Johnson, translated by Yao Hongxiang et al.: "Contemporary American Artists on Art," Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House, p. 3.) He began with a passion for the so-called "biological form" graphics. These graphics are "full of archetypal, aggressive, animalistic, erotic, and mysterious characteristics." He added traditional or mythological titles to these surrealist works to express "the immortal human emotion under certain circumstances." In 1947, Pollock's painting made a decisive breakthrough, giving birth to his free-spirited "drippainting." In fact, it was the Surrealist concept that art originated from the unconscious, the so-called "psychological automation" method of creation that had a decisive influence on this style. Pollock once described in detail the creative method of his "drippainting": "My paintings do not come from an easel. I almost never flatten the canvas when painting. I prefer to hang canvases that are not taut on rough walls or on the floor. I need the friction generated by rough surfaces. On the floor I feel more natural. I feel closer, more part of the painting, because this method allows me to walk around, work from all sides, and enter directly into the painting. This is similar to the way Western Indians make sand paintings. "I then give up the tools that painters usually use, like easels, palettes, brushes, etc. I prefer to use short sticks, flattening knives, knives, and dripping paint or heavy paint mixed with sand, broken glass, and other things that have nothing to do with painting." Once I get into painting, I don't realize what I'm painting. It's only when I'm done that I understand what I've done. I don't worry about making changes, destroying images, etc. Because painting has a life of its own. I try to make it natural. It is only when I am separated from painting that the result is chaotic. Instead, everything becomes harmonious, easily smeared and scratched off, and painting is born naturally. " (Edited by Ellen H. Johnson, translated by Yao Hongxiang et al.:" Contemporary American Artists on Art ", Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House, p. 5.) Let's consider Bredon's introduction to the" automated "writing methods of surrealist writers in" The First Surrealist Manifesto ". Compare it with Pollock's above statement to see how similar Pollock's painting method is to that of Surrealists:" Find a quiet place that is as conducive to concentration as possible, and then get what you need to write. Do your best to enter a passive, or receptive, state. Forget your genius, your talent, and the talents of all others. Remember that literature is one of the saddest paths, and there are all kinds of places it leads to. Write quickly without having to have the subject matter of the ancestors; so fast that you can't remember the previous text, and keep yourself from having the idea of rereading the previous text. " (Liu Mingjiu, editor-in-chief:" Futurism, Surrealism, Magic Realism ", China Social Sciences Press, p. 262) Pollock's free-spirited, amorphous abstract painting style became the embodiment of the American spirit that opposed bondage and advocated freedom. This new painting reflects the amazing creativity of the painter. It fully demonstrates novelty and originality in two aspects. The first is the "full-frame" composition style. We know that in the past paintings, there was often a visual center that received much attention. Whether it was the so-called "closed" classicist painting or the "open" baroque painting, the image of the picture had a core image and a foil image. Now, in Pollock's picture, this difference has disappeared without a trace, and the so-called center of the picture has been completely disappeared. The picture is scattered and spread out in an all-round way, without priority. This kind of unfocused and unfolded painting method has actually begun to be seen in the late impressionist painter Monet's masterpiece "Water Lilies". And Pollock developed it to an unprecedented degree of freedom in painting. Due to this, Pollock's painting method "has been praised as the most striking new invention of painting space since Picasso and Blake's Analytical Cubism painting in 1911." (Robert Hughes, translated by Liu Pingjun et al.; "The Shock of New Art", Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House, p. 276.) Second, the painting becomes a direct record of the painter's emotionally dominated behavior. "Each of Pollock's works is not easy to draw... When he paints, he indulges in terrifying frenzy." (Goodnow: "A Painting by Pollock," Art News, No. 5, 1995, pp. 39-40.) And the rhythmic free movement of his painting process left its mark on the huge canvas spread on the floor. He had no idea what the finished work would look like in advance, and then cut a piece as needed and stretched it to the frame. The art critic Rosenberg called this kind of painting "action painting," which means that what the painter presents here is not a painting, but the whole process of his painting action. The canvas becomes the place where the painter acts, the record of the painter's action. Pollock's famous 1947 "The Whole Five Finds" was created on canvas with oil and lead. ( Seeking - a unit of length, equal to 6 feet or 1.829 meters, used to measure water depth), just for the meaning of this title, in addition to referring to the depth of the sea water, it also means the level of dripping color, semantic pun. The whole painting is dominated by blue-green. Pollock first drips a large area on the painting, then adds different shades of green according to the situation of each area, then black paint, and finally uses aluminum paint on the surface. The paint is also mixed with a lot of "additives". At the same time, some striking white and dull colors are poured in some areas where he thinks it is necessary to complement the color. The painter drips along the edge of the canvas, allowing his own movement to coordinate with the dripping action. We can see from "The Whole Five Finds" that the color lines are so dense that they are entangled with each other like a net, some places are not ventilated, and some places suddenly appear honey-yellow. The part of the picture shows two thick honey-yellow blocks, which seem to flow out slowly in the white milky liquid, and are also hooked with a slow purple, thus becoming the highlight of the whole painting. Pollock often lost confidence in his action paintings, and was mentally abnormal in distress. In 1956, he died in a car accident after drinking heavily. Jackson Pollock (Jackson Pollock 1912-1956) Works: