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Design Relationships between Painting and other Visual Arts

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The philosophy and pathos of a particular epoch in painting usually have been reflected in many of its other visual arts. The ideals and aspirations of ancient cultures, of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical periods of Western art and, more recently, of the 19th-century Art Nouveau and Secessionist movements were displayed in a large amount of the architecture, interior design, furniture, textiles, ceramics, costume, and crafts, as well as in the fine arts, of their times. Following the Industrial Revolution, with the reduced requirement of hand-craftmanship and the loss of direct expression between the fine craftsman and larger society, general society, idealistic efforts to unite the arts and crafts in service to the community were made by William Morris in Victorian England and by the Bauhaus in 20th-century Germany. Although their aims were not fully successful, their successors, like those of the short-lived de Stijl and Constructivist movements, have been tremendous, particularly in architectural, furniture, and typographic design.

Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were amazing painters, sculptors, and architects. Although no artists have since excelled in so wide a range of creativity, leading 20th-century painters expressed their thoughts in many other mediums. In graphic design, for example, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Raoul Dufy produced posters and illustrated books; André Derain, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Mikhail Larionov, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney designed for the stage; Joan Miró, Georges Braque, and Chagall worked in ceramics; Braque and Salvador Dalí designed jewelry; and Dalí, Hans Richter, and Andy Warhol made films. Many of these, with other modern painters, have also been sculptors and printmakers and have designed for fabrics, tapestries, mosaics, and stained glass, while there are very few mediums of the visual arts that Pablo Picasso did not work in and revitalize.

Painters have been inspired by the imagery, techniques, and design of other visual arts. One of these earliest influences was quite possibly from the theatre, where ancient Greeks are regarded as the first to employ the illusions of optical perspective. The application or reappraisal of design techniques and imagery in the art-forms and techniques of other cultures has been a wonderful stimulus to the development of more modern styles of Western painting, whether or not their traditional significance have been fully appreciated. The influence of Japanese woodcut prints on Synthetism and the Nabis, for example, and of African sculpture on Cubism, and the German Expressionists helping to create visual vocabularies and syntax with which to express new visions and ideas. The invention of photography and film introduced the creative to new aspects of nature, while eventually causing others to abandon representational painting altogether. Painters of everyday life, such as Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Vuillard, and Bonnard, employed the design innovations of camera cutoffs, close-ups, and unconventional viewpoints in order to provide the sensation of sharing an intimate picture space with the figures and forms in the painting.

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The Life of Artist Jackson Pollock

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An American painter who exponentially led Abstract Expressionism, an art movement signified by the impulsive gestures in paint often referred to as “action painting.” In his lifetime he received widespread commentary and serious recognition for the modern “poured” or “drip” technique he used to create his major artworks. With his contemporaries, he was respected for his deeply personal and completely uncompromising commitment to his art. His work had huge impact on his contemporaries and on many later art movements in the United States. He was also one of the first American painters to be acknowledged in both his living years and after his passing as a peer of 20th-century European fathers of revolutionary art.

Early life and work
Paul Jackson Pollock was the fifth and youngest son of Stella May McClure and LeRoy Pollock, who were both of Scotch-Irish background (LeRoy’s first surname was McCoy before his adoption around 1890 by a family named Pollock) and he was born and lived in Iowa. The family left Cody, Wyoming, eleven months after Jackson’s birth; he would know Cody only in family photographs. During the next sixteen years the Pollock family lived in California and Arizona, while moving nine times. In 1928 they moved to Los Angeles, where the young man enrolled at the Manual Arts High School. In the school he came under the influence of Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, a painter and illustrator who was also a member of the Theosophical Society, a sect promoting metaphysical and occult spirituality. Schwankovsky gave Pollock the rudimentary training in drawing and painting, introduced him to intellectual concepts of European contemporary art, and encouraged his curiosity in theosophical work. At this time, Pollock – raised as an agnostic – attended the camp meetings by the first messiah of the theosophists, Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was a personal friend of Schwankovsky. Such spiritual explorations permitted him to recognise the work of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and the occurrence of unconscious imagery in his paintings in his subsequent years.

In 1930 Pollock followed his brother Charles who in 1922 had decided to study art in NYC, where he enrolled at the Art Students League with his brother’s teacher, the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. (Jackson disassociated with his first name, Paul, around about his arrival in New York in 1930.) He studied life drawing, painting, and composition with Benton for the next two and one-half years, leaving the school in the early part of 1933. For the next two years Pollock lived in poverty, first with Charles and, by the fall of 1934, with his brother Sanford. He shared an apartment in Greenwich Village with Sanford and his wife until 1942.

Pollock was employed by the WPA Federal Art Project in the fall of 1935 as an easel painter. The position allowed him financial security during the last few years of the Great Depression as well as the opportunity to strengthen his art. From his time with Benton through to 1938, Pollock’s technique was heavily shaped by the compositional methods and regionalist subject matter of his teacher and by the lyrically expressionist vision of the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. It portrayed mostly small landscapes and figurative scenes such as Going West (1934–35), in which Pollock used motifs derived from photos of his birthplaceof Cody.

In 1937 Pollock began psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, and he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1938, which caused him to be institutionalized for about four months. After these experiences, his work became semiabstract and showed the assimilation of motifs from the modern Spanish artists Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, as well as the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. Jungian symbolism and the Surrealist exploration of the unconscious also influenced his works of this period; indeed, from 1939 through 1941 he was in treatment with two successive Jungian psychoanalysts who used Pollock’s own drawings in the therapy sessions.

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