Blue Poles

Blue Poles, mixed media painting on canvas created in 1952 by American Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock. It is one of the best known of the artist’s work and was painted on a canvas stretched on the floor of his studio.

Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five sons. His family moved frequently when he was a child, but when he was in high school he began to study drawing and painting and to engage in spiritual exploration. Plagued by alcoholism and depression for much of his life, Pollock was employed by the WPA Federal Art Project before being given a contract by Peggy Guggenheim. His first solo show was in 1943.

Pollock’s marriage to the artist Lee Krasner in 1945, and their move to a house in the countryside, prompted a new type of painting—his so-called “drip paintings.” These paintings made Pollock’s name, and the commercial value of his works rose. However, as the first drip paintings were shown at the Betty Parsons Gallery, postwar euphoria was replaced by the emerging spectre of the Cold War. With this new mood came a resistance to what was perceived as European-inflected Modernism, and voices in the U.S. Congress claimed there was a link between abstraction and communism. Pollock’s technique was ridiculed by Time magazine, which named him “Jack the Dripper.” At the same time, others perceived that Abstract Expressionism was the polar opposite of the Socialist Realism mandated in the Soviet Union and that it was an essentially American art form.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s Pollock had a one-man show nearly every year, and in 1952 he moved to the Sidney Janis Gallery. The major new work on his first exhibition there was Blue Poles. It marked a new intensity in Pollock’s painting with its range of marks, drips, pours, and splodges of paint in enamel, aluminum paint, and glass. The colours also broke free from Pollock’s more recently restrained palette. This is a painting that is celebratory in its excess.