Jackson Pollock

Episode of Series “Phaidon art collection”.
This documentary shows Jackson Pollack, the most famous twentieth century American painter, as the controversial star of the New York art scene in the forties and fifties, who founded the movement ‘Abstract Expressionism’. It is an interesting look at Pollock’s life and death through various interviews with friends, from the cowboy myth, to the drunken, fast driving masculine artist. It is a documentary as revealing and engaging as Pollock’s work itself. There is footage of the artist at work finding his own technique of dripping and splashing fluid paint onto unstretched canvas layed out on the floor. It traces his history as an artist showing his early influences of native American sandpainting to his rise as an abstract expressionist. Edited and presented by Melvyn Bragg.