Pioneer of abstract expressionism Jackson Pollock had Butte County roots
By Ken Magri
He was an alcoholic, described as “a wild person” by his friend painter Robert Motherwell. He could be warm, cold, volatile and reclusive all at the same time. In 1956, he died in a car crash that would involve alcohol and adultery. At that time, most Americans misunderstood his abstract paintings as some kind of erudite joke, meant to make them feel foolish for not appreciating.
But that’s not why people honor this restless visionary who would call himself Jackson Pollock in adulthood. Chico wants to memorialize him because he revolutionized, for the entirety of art history, the way a painting would be viewed.
And because he lived in Chico as a child.
At its September 17th meeting, the Chico City Council members unanimously voted to ask the Chico Arts Commission to find some appropriate way for the city to memorialize the painter whose career rocketed to fame in the 1950s.
Living in Chico in the 1910s
One of five brothers, Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. His parents, Stella and LeRoy Pollock, were native Iowans. From Wyoming, the family moved to San Diego and Phoenix before coming to Chico in 1917 at the insistence of Stella.
The Pollocks bought a two-story, four-bedroom home at 2604 West Sacramento Avenue. The home was part of an 18 acre citrus orchard that backed up to Big Chico Creek. LeRoy worked before as a rancher, but in Chico he became an orchardist. During that time period the population of Chico was under 10,000.
Young Jackson had no interest in art as a boy. But in Chico his brother Charles took lessons and after several years, a teenage Jackson spoke of his desire to be an artist in some way.
LeRoy Pollock came to hate farming. After two years he left Chico to manage a lodge in Janesville while the boys stayed behind. But after another year LeRoy left Janesville and his family entirely. Jackson left Chico with his mother and brothers, bouncing around from city to city until attending art school in Los Angeles and finally settling in New York as an adult.
A dancing flicker of brilliance
One day in 1946, Pollock began doing something never done in the history of art. He took large canvases off the wall, laid them on the floor and dripped over the untreated fabric with streaming colors of pigment. Using rhythm, gravity and velocity, he made paintings without ever touching a brush to canvas. As Motherwell put it, “Pollock literally danced over the canvas and the paintings are the trails of his dance.”
While most paintings are done in oils or acrylics, Pollock used resin-based industrial paints because he preferred a more “liquid, flowing kind of paint.” He improvised devices that could hold several colors at once. He dropped sand, cigarette butts, broken glass and even carpet tacks down into the coalescing puddles of paint. It seemed crazy to some, but it was never a joke.
Pollock’s dripped paintings displayed a new artistic freedom that earned attention in both physical appearance and symbolism. Just as his grungy paint splatters buckled up and dried on the raw canvas, his busy compositions seemed to epitomize confusion and loneliness that was felt by many after World War II and during the Cold-war years. One doesn’t read a Pollock painting as much as one feels its mood.
To young American painters trying to stay away from the prevailing European styles, Pollock’s breakthrough was big, brash and new, a boisterous shout out to an unknown artistic future. It ushered in the first American style ever considered important in modern art history, called Abstract Expressionism.
Not that people understood his work. Norman Rockwell parodied a Pollock painting, depicting a businessman trying to appreciate one. Time magazine wrote an article about Pollock, captioning him as “Jack the Dripper.” And gallery owner Sydney Janus said in the early 1950s if his gallery could sell one or two Pollocks a year for several hundred dollars, “it was considered a success.”
But urged on by his wife, painter Lee Krasner, and with exposure from gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim and art critic Clement Greenburg, his work became more recognized. Although Pollock only used the drip and splatter technique for a few years, it brought him immense fame.
In 1956, drunk behind the wheel, Pollock died in a single-car accident at the age of 44. Today his works are included in every important modern art museum in the world. In 2015, a Pollock drip painting, “#5,” sold at auction for $140 million. By the end of the 1950s, he was one of the three most recognizable American painters, along with Norman Rockwell and former teacher Thomas Hart Benton. Even today, Jackson Pollock is one of a handful of modern artists that the average American can identify.
A fitting memorial
What would be a fitting memorial for a famous artist who only lived here as a kid? Researchers in the field of children’s art agree that the age bracket considered a child’s most imaginative and confident is between five and eight years, when Pollock was in Chico. Anything a child can visualize in their mind, they will draw or claim to draw, even if the explanation involves magic or invisibility. It is not beyond one’s imagination to think that a young Pollock could look up at the lines and swirls of an orchard canopy, with its even composition and shimmers of light, and see a future painting.
“Mayor Andrew Coolidge proposed this as an agenda item for discussion,” said Chico Arts Commissioner Katie Posey. “I think he knew the history of Pollock’s childhood in regards to Chico and thought the city should do something to honor him.”
Yet, even to this day some folks don’t really get it. At the city council meeting Coolidge read a brief but eloquent biography of Pollock’s life while asking for a motion to move forward. The first response he got was, “I don’t like abstract art,” from City Councilmember Tom Van Overbeek.
“But that’s neither here nor there,” Van Overbeek quickly added. “I think it’s important to honor people who have been noble citizens, so I whole-heartedly support it, even though I don’t like this art very much.” It was an uncommon display of unanimity at the meeting.
Nevertheless, the council members implied that such a memorial will be even better it doesn’t cost the city any money. Aware of that concern, Commissioner Posey spoke at the council meeting, saying, “We’re not going to take money from the pothole funding stream for the Jackson Pollock funding stream.” She also reminded the council that such a project fits very well into the city’s master plan, points 1 and 2, which call for more art opportunities and arts education.
“I’m excited for the arts commission to begin discussing this at one of our future meetings,” said Posey. Do you have any ideas for a Pollock memorial? Contact the Chico Arts Commission.
I believe the museum of Northern California should be the one to initiate a program, and maybe a small permanent display outlining his short but possibly informative life in Chico. it should be noted that it is thought that Pollock was influenced by a Max Ernst canvas titled “young man intrigued by the flight of a non-euclidean fly” that he saw in an exhibit back in New York.