Born Paul Jackson Pollock to Stella May McClure and LeRoy Pollock in the frontier town of Cody. He grew up amid frequent moves across the American West, which shaped his sense of scale and landscape.

The Pollock family settled in Southern California after years of moving through Arizona and elsewhere. The region’s Mexican-influenced visual culture and expansive terrain fed his early interests in art and identity.

Pollock was expelled from school, reinforcing his outsider status and volatile temperament. He focused more intensely on drawing and painting, encouraged by artistic siblings and the cultural energy of Los Angeles.

He moved to New York City and enrolled at the Art Students League, studying with regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. Benton's rhythmic compositions and mural scale left a lasting imprint, even as Pollock later rebelled.

Pollock absorbed influences from Mexican muralists like José Clemente Orozco and from European modernism seen in New York exhibitions. He began searching for a personal language beyond Benton's representational storytelling.

During the Great Depression he worked for the WPA Federal Art Project, gaining steady support as an artist. The program connected him to peers and provided time to experiment with materials, scale, and technique.

He participated in David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Experimental Workshop, where artists tried industrial paints and unconventional tools. The emphasis on pouring, spraying, and physical process foreshadowed Pollock’s later method.

Struggling with alcoholism, Pollock underwent treatment and psychotherapy that introduced Jungian ideas and archetypal symbolism. These sessions encouraged him to mine the unconscious, shaping his shift toward mythic abstraction.

Art patron Peggy Guggenheim signed Pollock to her gallery Art of This Century, giving him rare financial and institutional backing. He created the monumental "Mural" for her townhouse, staking a claim to large-scale modern ambition.

Pollock married painter Lee Krasner, whose discipline and connections helped stabilize his professional life. They bought a modest house in Springs, where a barn studio enabled the floor-based approach central to his mature work.

In the Springs studio he began laying canvases on the floor and dripping enamel paint with sticks and hardened brushes. This method emphasized movement, gravity, and bodily rhythm, redefining painting as an event as much as an image.

A Life magazine story asked, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” thrusting Pollock into mass culture. The attention amplified Abstract Expressionism’s status and intensified pressures on his private life.

Pollock produced major canvases such as "Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)" and "One: Number 31, 1950," expanding his all-over compositions. Their scale and complexity positioned him at the forefront of postwar American painting.

He turned toward stark black enamel works on unprimed canvas, sometimes called the “black pourings,” signaling a stylistic pivot. Critics and friends debated the change, while Pollock wrestled with repetition and expectation.

As his drinking returned, Pollock’s relationship with Lee Krasner grew strained amid isolation in Springs. The widening gap between public fame and private instability affected his productivity and confidence in the studio.

Pollock died in an automobile accident while driving near his home in Springs, ending his career abruptly at 44. The tragedy cemented his mythic status, while Krasner later shaped exhibitions and scholarship on his work.