"Jack the Dripper" is an article about the artist Jackson Pollock first published in Esquire in December 1983 for a fiftieth anniversary issue focusing on fifty native-born Americans who made the biggest difference to the United States since 1932. Vonnegut had originally wanted Eleanor Roosevelt, but Bill Moyer had already chosen her. It would help influence Vonnegut to develop the novel Bluebeard.[1] He later admitted that this article "sounded more enthusiastic about Pollock" than he actually was.[2] It was collected in Fates Worse Than Death in 1991 and reprinted in the fourth volume of the Library of America's Vonnegut set in 2016 under the appendix section "Four Essays on Artists".
Summary[]
Jackson Pollock at work
Pollock, whose most admired period began in 1947, would produce his work by spreading a canvas on the floor and dripping paint from above, sometimes from a step ladder. By his death at 44, he was known as one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism and had done more than anyone else to make the United States, specifically New York City, the center of innovation in modern painting. Like another American creation—jazz music—Pollock included and championed what more formal artists had considered accidents. Three years before his death by driving himself and a young woman he had just met into an embankment, he was using a brush directly on canvas again, which is how he'd begun when studying under "a genius of antimodernism, Thomas Hart Benton". As a civilian during the Second World War, possibly due to his alcoholism, he continued to paint, teach, and study while many of his American contemporaries were serving in the armed forces and European artists were often "used as fodder for cannons and crematoria". Despite his notoriety for innovation, he was one of the few painters able to contemplate art history in peace during the war, as well as what its future might be.
What should be noted even by those uninterested Pollock's painting is his emphasis on his own unconscious in producing his work. This was a period when western culture was developing its enthusiasm for seeking peace and harmony through mediation and other states outside wakefulness and sleep. This emphasis is what distinguished Abstract Expressionism from other art movements—instead of a common look and technique as with French Impressionism or Cubism, the connection of Pollock with Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, James Brooks, and others was this inspiration from the unconscious, with little interest in catching the likeness of things of the physical world. This emphasis may allow Abstract Expression to long outlive many other movements in western art history.
Brooks, now at 77 an elder in the movement, has said that he lays on the first stroke of paint, after which the canvas must "do at least half the work". The canvas in this case is the unconscious, which "tells the painter's hand how to respond to it" continually. This reveals the unconscious mind perhaps better than any other technique, showing that within us is something without ambition or information which nonetheless understands beauty. No other movement has so insisted that the artist ignore life and its physical objects, which is perhaps the only moral response to a century that produced death camps and atomic weapons and a civilization "whose principle industry had become the manufacture of ruins and cripples and corpses".[3]