Born in 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, Paul Jackson Pollack is accredited with developing the original style of abstract expressionism contributed to American artists. He worked with house paint, large brushes, and canvas big enough to cover an entire wall.

His movement emphasized the free and spontaneous flow of the brush in a dynamic composition producing intricate webs of paint with rhythmic repetition that are distinctly Pollack. Studying under Thomas Benton at the arts Students League, he also traveled widely throughout the United States and was greatly influenced by the murals of Jose Clemete Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueros. During the early 1940’s Pollack’s works shows the influence of Picasso including, Natural, Insane, Surrealist Art.

Peggy Guggenheim in the Art of This Century gallery in New York, 1943, held Pollack’s first solo. In Paris, 1950, he was the solo artist to open the Studio Paul Facchett.

His work was widely known and exhibited in the United States and aboard. Killed in an automobile accident on August 11, 1956, his career had a lasting impact on the art worls and the meaning of art and freedom of expression as it pertains to art.

After his constant struggle with alcoholism his whole life, his career ended abruptly after an alcohol-related, car crash in 1956 at the age of 44. Another passenger, Edith Metzger, died, and the other passenger in the Oldsmobile convertible, his girlfriend Ruth Kligman, miraculously survived. Sadly, after his death, Pollock's gallery sold off all the works that were left in his studio including many works that he had not intended to release.

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