Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock was born January 28, 1912, and spent most of his life wrestling with alcohol and isolation. The breakthrough came when he abandoned the easel entirely, pouring and splashing household paint onto horizontal canvases, moving around them in what looked like frenetic dance - a technique critics named "action painting" and "all-over painting" because he used his whole body and covered every inch. Some saw immediacy and raw creation; others saw only randomness. In 1945 he married Lee Krasner, a painter who steadied his career and would later shape how the world remembered him. On August 11, 1956, drunk and driving, Pollock crashed and died at 44. Four months later MoMA gave him a retrospective, and the work that split opinion in his lifetime became canonical after it.