50 Fun Facts About Jackson Pollock

What nickname did Time magazine give Jackson Pollock in 1956, the year he died?

Jack the Dripper was Time's jab at the way he poured and flung paint instead of brushing it on. By then he had stopped painting altogether.

Jackson Pollock's Convergence became which 1964 product, billed as the world's hardest of its kind?

A jigsaw puzzle of 340 pieces, sold by Springbok Editions, turned the swirling canvas into a craze. Hundreds of thousands of Americans bought one in 1965.

Which US agency backed the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a sponsor of Jackson Pollock exhibitions?

The CIA backed the group to promote American culture, and some scholars argue his wild canvases were pushed as a weapon against Soviet socialist realism.

Where did trucker Teri Horton pay $5 for a canvas later argued to be a lost Jackson Pollock?

A thrift shop in California sold it to her as a gift to cheer up a friend. A fingerprint on the canvas was later matched to a paint can in his studio, though experts still dispute it.

Jackson Pollock's No. 5, 1948 reportedly sold in 2006 for which sum, then a record for a painting?

$140 million was the reported price of a picture first sold in 1949 for $1,500. It had been the only work bought from that show.

A legend disproved by conservators says Jackson Pollock painted his 20-foot Mural in how long?

One day of frenzied work, after months facing a blank canvas, was the long-told story. Layers of dried oil paint later showed the job took weeks.

What marks Jackson Pollock's grave in Green River Cemetery, beside a smaller one for his wife?

A large boulder sits on a hill in what had been a plain local burial ground. After he was laid there in 1956 it became famous as the artists' and writers' cemetery.

For Hans Namuth's film of him at work, Jackson Pollock painted on which unusual surface?

A sheet of glass let the camera record paint landing from underneath. After the cold outdoor shoot, Pollock poured himself a bourbon, reportedly ending two years of sobriety.

In which US state was Jackson Pollock born, in a town named for the showman Buffalo Bill?

Wyoming kept him for only ten months before his mother moved the family away from the town of Cody. He never went back.

Instead of artists' oils from a tube, Jackson Pollock poured which everyday liquid onto canvas?

House paint was thinner than tube oils, so it ran off a stick in long unbroken lines. His wife recalled a can or two of enamel standing beside the canvas.

Which painter married Jackson Pollock in 1945 and guarded his reputation for decades after his death?

Lee Krasner is often credited with tutoring him in modern painting, and one dealer said there would never have been a Jackson Pollock without her.

Jackson Pollock was a leading figure of which American art movement of the 1940s and 1950s?

Abstract expressionism was the first American movement to win international influence, and it moved the centre of the Western art world from Paris to New York.

Jackson Pollock died in 1956 at the age of 44 in which way, less than a mile from home?

A car crash killed him and one of his two passengers when he lost control of his convertible after a day of drinking. The other passenger survived.

Where did Jackson Pollock lay his canvases so that he could work from all four sides?

On the floor he could walk right around a canvas and feel, as he put it, part of the painting. He said he needed the resistance of a hard surface.

Where in New York State did Jackson Pollock buy a farmhouse in 1945 and turn its barn into a studio?

Long Island gave him quiet in the hamlet of Springs, where the wood-frame home cost $5,000. A patron lent the $2,000 down payment in exchange for artwork.

Which heiress signed Jackson Pollock to her gallery in 1943 and commissioned a vast canvas for her townhouse?

Peggy Guggenheim paid him a retainer of $150 a month, set against whatever his pictures earned. She closed her New York gallery in 1947 and moved to Venice.

Which magazine asked in 1949 whether Jackson Pollock was the greatest living painter in the United States?

Life posed it as a question in its headline, and that August issue made the painter a celebrity.

Which actor directed and starred in the 2000 biopic Pollock, earning a Best Actor Oscar nomination?

Ed Harris spent almost ten years getting the film made after his father gave him a Pollock biography, and he did all of the on-screen painting himself.

Which New York institution gave Jackson Pollock a memorial retrospective just four months after his death?

The Museum of Modern Art had bought one of his canvases in 1944 for $400, making it the first Pollock to enter any museum collection.

Which Jackson Pollock painting caused a political scandal when Australia's government bought it in 1973?

Blue Poles cost A$1.3 million, above the gallery director's $1 million spending limit, so the prime minister had to approve it. Estimates of its value have since run into the hundreds of millions.

Which Hollywood mogul reportedly sold Jackson Pollock's No. 5, 1948 in a record-setting private sale in 2006?

David Geffen, the record-label founder who co-founded DreamWorks, later sold a second Pollock, Number 17A, to a hedge-fund manager in 2015.

Which Australian prime minister approved the record 1973 purchase of a Jackson Pollock for the national gallery?

Gough Whitlam also decided the price should be made public, and the outcry fed attacks on his Labor government's handling of money.

Which artist advised that Jackson Pollock's huge Mural be painted on canvas, not a wall, so it could be moved?

Marcel Duchamp was advising the collector who commissioned it. The canvas was so big that Pollock is said to have knocked out a wall in his own apartment to make room for it.

Which critic, Jackson Pollock's chief champion, gave Number 1, 1950 its poetic title Lavender Mist?

Clement Greenberg supplied the name even though, as the museum that owns the picture points out, there is no lavender paint anywhere on it.

Which term did critic Harold Rosenberg coin in 1952 that became tied to Jackson Pollock's way of working?

Action painting treated the canvas as an arena in which to act, so the finished picture mattered less than the struggle of making it.

Jackson Pollock's 1947 painting Full Fathom Five takes its title from a song in which Shakespeare play?

The Tempest gives the words to the spirit Ariel, who tells a shipwrecked prince that his father lies drowned on the seabed.

Which Regionalist muralist taught Jackson Pollock at the Art Students League in New York?

Thomas Hart Benton painted rural America in a folksy style, and Pollock often said those traditional lessons gave him something to rebel against.

Which Mexican muralist introduced Jackson Pollock to liquid paint at an experimental New York workshop in 1936?

David Siqueiros rarely got the credit, because Pollock disavowed the link more than once when asked how his pouring method began.

Who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Jackson Pollock's wife in the 2000 film Pollock?

Marcia Gay Harden won the film's only Oscar, and scenes were shot at the couple's real farmhouse and barn.

Physicist Richard Taylor found which repeating natural patterns in Jackson Pollock's poured paintings?

Fractals recur at many scales in natural scenery, and the same computer analysis has since been used to tell real Pollocks from imitations.

Jackson Pollock made drawings for therapists who treated his alcoholism using which psychologist's ideas?

Carl Jung's archetypes then surfaced in his early paintings. One analyst reached him through his art, encouraging the drawings as a way in.

Jackson Pollock likened his way of working around a canvas to which Native American art of the West?

Sandpainting demonstrations drew him in the 1940s, and as a boy he had explored Native American culture on surveying trips with his father.

Jackson Pollock was expelled from Manual Arts High School in which California city?

Los Angeles saw his second expulsion: another high school had already thrown him out in 1928.

Jackson Pollock was banned from which Greenwich Village bar after tearing a door off its hinges?

The Cedar Tavern was the New York painters' local in the 1950s, and the story goes that he hurled the bathroom door across the room at fellow artist Franz Kline.

Which Manchester band's 1989 debut album has a Jackson Pollock-style cover painted by guitarist John Squire?

The Stone Roses cover painting, titled Bye Bye Badman, refers to the May 1968 riots in Paris. Squire supplied the artwork for most of the band's releases.

Which science-fiction film has a tech boss explain artificial intelligence using his Jackson Pollock painting?

Ex Machina has its reclusive CEO argue that the painter worked in a state neither deliberate nor random, and that a thinking machine must reach the same place.

In which Ben Affleck thriller does his character give a Jackson Pollock painting to Anna Kendrick's character?

The Accountant hides the gift beneath a framed print of dogs playing poker. The canvas shown on screen is Pollock's Free Form.

Which award did the 1989 biography Jackson Pollock: An American Saga win before it inspired a film?

The Pulitzer Prize went to co-authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, and reading their book set an actor on a ten-year quest to bring the story to the screen.

Which single colour dominates the stark series Jackson Pollock showed in the early 1950s, when none of it sold?

Black poured onto unprimed canvas let figures creep back into his work. His dealer later sold just one of the series, to a friend at half price.

Which painter, Jackson Pollock's lover in his final months, later wrote the memoir Love Affair about him?

Ruth Kligman went on to a relationship of several years with Willem de Kooning, who named a painting after her exclamation on first seeing it.

Which Ukrainian-born grandmother made poured paintings that Jackson Pollock admitted had impressed him?

Janet Sobel took up painting only in her forties, and a leading critic later called her pictures the first all-over painting he had ever seen.

Which New York dealer took on Jackson Pollock after his first patron closed her gallery in 1947?

Betty Parsons was the only dealer willing to represent him at a time when the market for avant-garde American art was minuscule.

Which painter adapted Jackson Pollock's staining of raw canvas into Color Field works such as Mountains and Sea?

Helen Frankenthaler first saw his canvases at a 1950 gallery show, and a fellow painter called her breakthrough picture a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.

At which Ivy League college did Jackson Pollock study José Clemente Orozco's vast mural cycle in 1936?

Dartmouth is home to The Epic of American Civilization, which covers some 3,200 square feet. Pollock called another Orozco fresco the greatest painting in North America.

Which Jackson Pollock canvas, 17 feet wide, did the Metropolitan Museum of Art buy from his estate in 1957?

Autumn Rhythm cost the museum $20,000 plus another Pollock handed over in trade. It had first been exhibited under a plain number, 30.

Which Midwestern school has held Jackson Pollock's largest canvas, Mural, since it was shipped there in 1951?

The University of Iowa received it as a gift from the woman who commissioned it. In 2011 a state lawmaker's bill to force its sale for scholarships was quickly withdrawn.

Besides sticks and hardened brushes, Jackson Pollock applied paint with which kitchen tool?

A basting syringe joined trowels and knives in his kit, because he wanted to get ever further from the usual painter's tools such as palette and brushes.

Art historian Henry Adams claimed in 2009 that Jackson Pollock had hidden what within the swirls of Mural?

His own name was the claim, made in a magazine article. The canvas carries an ordinary signature too, though that was not added until 1947.

Under his widow's will, the foundation bearing Jackson Pollock's name exists mainly to give money to whom?

Artists in financial need have received thousands of grants from it, in dozens of countries, since it was set up in 1985 at her bequest.

Which Surrealist swung a punctured bucket of paint over canvas in 1942, before Jackson Pollock's famous drips?

Max Ernst let the swinging bucket trace looping curves across a horizontal canvas. He was married for a time to the collector who gave Pollock his first contract.