Jackson Pollock, An American Saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

I am such a biography slut that when this book happened across my desk at the day job, I picked it up and brought it home... and I don't even like Jackson Pollock. Actually I wasn't that familiar with the artist's work. I'd seen a few of those drip paintings that catapulted him to notoriety in the late 1940s and I wasn't so keen on them, but the first few pages hooked me in anyway. The story's the thing, and these guys tell a good story. Naifeh and White Smith have collected a tremendous amount of information about Pollock's background, his childhood and family life. They fill out a vivid picture, not just of the artist, but of all five brothers an their unhappily matched parents. Often in biographies, the farther back you go, the fuzzier everything gets, which is a shame for me because the childhood bits are always among my favourites. Going back as far as his parents' childhoods, this book even gives us a brief picture of frontier living - an American Saga is right. The saga continues into the 1920s, 30s and 40s as we see how U.S. artists began to emerge from the shadow of Europen masters of modern art. Good stuff: artistic bickering, back biting, rampant power plays, and uneasy cohabitation with the European refugee artists who began to flood New York during World War II. It was an interesting time to be in New York City, and Pollock was there through it all, drinking, struggling for recognition, painting and (even I will admit it) growing as an artist. Let's just say that this man is testimony to the idea that you can always get what you want, provided you don't expect it to make you happy.

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