NGA: pollock:artist 2

still frame from second Pollock movie by Hans Namuth

In the twenty years between his arrival in New York City to study art and his premature death, Jackson Pollock had emerged as the most original painter in America--famous for his unprecedented physical involvement with the act of painting.

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."