Stories of Iconic Artworks: How Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles Caused an Uproar in Australia

Artland’s Stories of Iconic Artworks series delves into the stories behind some of the most iconic works of art ever made. In this week’s edition we feature Jackson Pollock’s painting Blue Poles and the bitter controversy that followed its acquisition by the Australian Government for $1.3 million – the highest price ever paid for an American painting at that time. This purchase sparked widespread outrage among Australians, and also contributed to Pollock’s art becoming a symbol of modern Australia.

Jackson Pollock and American Modern Art

Jackson Pollock is one of the greatest pioneers of Post-War American painting. Born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, he studied painting at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, and then moved to New York where he studied under Thomas Hart at the Art Student League. In the 1920s and 1930s in the New York art world, many of the great artists were immigrants from Europe, fleeing the pogroms and struggles of the old world and seeking to establish a new community of artists in the United States. Pollock fought for his place among them in New York, ultimately becoming one of the most famous Abstract Expressionists. Following the Second World War, there was a general feeling among artists that after witnessing such horrors, it was no longer possible to create representational art as before. Moreover, according to art critic Jerry Saltz, “American artists [had] to deal with the supernova named Picasso. How do you get around something so epically huge that’s happened just before you? How do you follow that act? You ape it, and then you have to change it. Willem de Kooning famously said: ‘Pollock broke the ice.’”

Pollock started doing something that no one else at the time was doing: he would place his canvases on the floor, never letting the brush touch the canvas, instead moving around freely, dripping and splashing paint on it – a technique that has come to be known as ‘action painting’. With this extremely physical and dynamic method, reminiscent of ancient, prehistoric practices, Pollock created an absolutely new type of painting. In an interview, Pollock explained: “The modern artist is living in a mechanical age. We have mechanical means of representing objects and nature, such as the camera, the photograph. It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance, or of any past culture. Each age finds its own technique. I happen to find ways that are different from the usual techniques of painting. I am able to be more free and move about the canvas with greater ease.”

Blue Poles

In 1945, Pollock married fellow artist Lee Krasner, and the couple moved to Long Island, where they bought a farmhouse with the financial support of Peggy Guggenheim. Pollock converted the barn into his studio, providing himself with the space he needed to explore and perfect his drip technique. In 1952, four years before his death, Pollock painted Blue Poles, reassessing his drip style, which he had used in his paintings from 1947 to 1950. He applied the first layer of paint while the canvas was stretched out on the floor, after which he tacked the canvas to a beam running along the wall of the studio. He then applied white paint, allowing this to run down the canvas. After this stage, he returned the canvas to the floor and continued with his characteristic pouring and dripping technique. It took nearly a week for each of the layers to dry. Pollock used sticks, brushes and syringes to build up rhythmic splashes, and finally created the vertical blue poles cutting through the wild drips and gestures. This element – to which various figurative connotations have been attributed, from totems to the masts of a ship – differed significantly from his previous works, as the poles created strong vertical focus points in the painting.

In the National Gallery of Australia documentary about the Blue Poles acquisition, Pollock’s friend and collector, the art dealer Ben Heller, remembers the first time he saw Blue Poles, when it was worth $6000: “The first time I saw it at the Whitney Museum when it was on 54^th Street, I was kind of wowed. The oranges, the yellows were terrific, the whites splendid. There was an atmosphere. Gentle and delicate and tough and aggressive. And somehow, they’re all that at the same time. That’s very unusual.” By the time he bought the painting, he paid $32.000 for it; but when, in 1973, Heller agreed to sell his beloved Blue Poles to the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the painting had a price tag of US $2 million, equivalent to A $ 1.3 million.