Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock was an American painter and the most widely recognized figure of Abstract Expressionism, the New York-centered movement that shifted the center of gravity of advanced painting from Paris to the United States after the Second World War. From 1947 Pollock developed his signature drip technique, laying unstretched canvas flat on the floor and dripping, flinging and pouring commercial paint from above rather than applying it with a brush to an upright canvas, producing large-scale all-over compositions such as Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950. Critics remain divided over how to read the Cold War-era promotion of Pollock and his fellow Abstract Expressionists: the mainstream account credits their work's own formal daring for its rise to international prominence, while a documented dissenting account, developed at length by the art historian Serge Guilbaut, holds that the CIA and MoMA-linked cultural diplomacy programs actively promoted American Abstract Expressionism abroad during the 1950s as evidence of Western artistic freedom against Soviet Socialist Realism, a promotional effort that shaped the movement's critical reception more than is acknowledged in the formalist account.