Pollock

By flyingmonk on July 19, 2024

Pollock-Krasner Study Center, The Springs, East Hampton, NY

In 1945 Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner left their comfortable life in Manhattan and moved in a house with no water or electricity in the hamlet of Springs in East Hampton. The change in their lifestyle was radical but it brought a major upheaval to their work. In a converted storage barn, Pollock started to experiment with liquid paint creating his drip-covered canvases that were laid on the floor in the style that will be known as abstract expressionism.

The floor of the barn where Jackson Pollock painted

The barn was in very bad shape with see-through walls, leaky ceiling and poor flooring. At one point in later years the couple covered the floor in masonite. In recent years when that masonite was removed the floor looked like one of the abstract expressionist painting of Pollock.

Pollock-Krasner Study Center. The Springs, East Hampton, NY

Pollock died in a car crash in 1956, a result of his acute alcoholism. Following his death Lee Krasner used the barn as her studio till her death in 1984. The house and the barn together with its the large property are now part of a study center that can be visited by appointment only. But surprisingly we found the house open for all visitors, not too many though, on the Saturday when we arrived in the Hamptons. The home has all the original furnishings and personal possessions with a library and a phonograph record collection, having several original paintings and several prints.

Montauk Lighthouse, NY

In the 1940s, East Hampton began to attract artists morphing this remote place at the tip of Long island into an artist community. Both Americans artists (Robert Motherwell, Williem de Kooning, etc.) and Europeans (Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, etc) found refuge in the quietude of Long Island in those times.