Jackson Pollock

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s mission is to aid, internationally, those individuals who have worked as artists over a significant period of time. The Foundation’s dual criteria for grants are recognizable artistic merit and financial need, whether professional, personal or both…

His friend and patron, the artist Alfonso Ossorio, described Pollock’s artistic journey this way: "Here I saw a man who had both broken all the traditions of the past and unified them, who had gone beyond cubism, beyond Picasso and surrealism, beyond everything that had happened in art….his work expressed both action and contemplation."

The Guggenheim Museum has long been associated with the work of Jackson Pollock. In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim offered the relatively unknown artist his first solo exhibition at her influential museum/gallery Art of This Century. For the next five years Guggenheim subsidized Pollock with a monthly stipend, which in turn allowed her to amass significant holdings of the artist’s work…

Works in the Tate collection

More than any other single painter, Jackson Pollock demonstrated that American artists had at last equaled if not surpassed their European counterparts. As his peer and rival Willem de Kooning, said: "Jackson broke the ice." Championed by art critics and mocked by the popular press, Pollock achieved an unprecedented degree of celebrity for a modern American painter. Some critics considered his webs of interlacing lines as "mere unorganized explosions of random energy." Others saw his work as a seductive labyrinth or "a luna park full of fireworks, pitfalls, surprises, and delights." The debate has continued ever since.