Abstract Expressionism was an American art movement that started around the mid-20th century. One of the well-known artists from that period, Jackson Pollock, studied under Thomas Hart Benton. Benton was a painter known for using traditional materials like oil and tempera on canvas, a method going back to the Renaissance. Artists back then would often begin with an underpainting in tempera—a water-based paint made from mineral pigments mixed with egg yolk or egg white—then apply oil paint over it in thin layers.
Benton used that same approach. His style of drawing in these works looked similar to commercial illustration from the 1930s. The figures and the landscape were stylized, with exaggerated features, similar in some ways to Van Gogh’s swirling skies in Starry Night. Benton’s figures sometimes had clunky anatomy and oversized hands or feet, making the storytelling very clear. One painting shows a woman with an emotional expression and a man standing over her holding a knife. In the bottom right, there’s a group of people playing instruments—two playing harmonicas and another with a fiddle—drinking moonshine from coffee cups. The landscape links all the figures together through a kind of wave pattern running across the canvas.
The painting is based on an old folk song called The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley. It tells a dramatic story, like a rural tragedy. This kind of music, which later influenced artists like Bob Dylan, was part of a bigger cultural pattern in the U.S., where stories were passed down through songs. Benton used that tradition as the subject of his painting, showing how these stories were a part of everyday American life and especially rooted in rural culture.
Benton saw himself as a kind of traditionalist. He admired Renaissance art but wanted to create something that focused on American life and ideas. Before World War II, during the Great Depression, the U.S. government funded programs to help people find work. One of these was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which also gave jobs to artists. Benton gained recognition by painting murals for public buildings like post offices and town halls. His themes often lined up with what the government wanted—scenes of American life and labor that showed patriotic values.
He also spent time teaching in New York, including at the Art Students League in Manhattan. Even though he sometimes lived in the city, he had a strong preference for rural American life. He was skeptical of New York’s art scene and felt more connected to the American Midwest. But by the end of World War II, things started shifting in the art world, and Pollock—his former student—would eventually take a different direction entirely.
One of the students Thomas Hart Benton taught was Jackson Pollock. Pollock’s early life had a lot of mixed stories—some he told himself in interviews. He talked about working out West on oil rigs and presenting himself as this rugged, tough guy. When he moved to New York, he ended up in Benton’s class. Pollock had mental health struggles and was likely dealing with alcoholism.
At first, he tried to follow Benton’s lead and copy his style. But Benton’s method required strong drawing skills, which Pollock didn’t really have. He struggled with representing figures accurately and was impatient. He was more focused on emotional expression than detailed technique. While Benton painted with a focus on national themes and American ideals, Pollock wanted to express personal emotion.
In some of his early work, you can still see Pollock using similar shapes and curves that Benton used—like swooping skies and exaggerated landscapes—but with even more distortion. His figures were less anatomically accurate, and objects like wagon wheels were drawn in unusual or irregular ways. He even borrowed the moon-over-hills motif that Benton used, but his version was much looser.
Eventually, Pollock connected with a group of avant-garde artists in New York who were experimenting with new ideas about art. Some of these ideas were influenced by early 20th-century psychology, especially the theories of Carl Jung. Jung introduced concepts like the collective unconscious and archetypes, suggesting that people share a set of basic symbolic images and forms. There was also interest in gestalt, which in this context was tied to the idea that people could tap into deep mental processes through spontaneous drawing or writing—called automatic writing.
Pollock applied this idea to painting. Instead of sketching out a plan, he would paint in a free and continuous way, reacting to what was happening on the canvas. This was similar to automatic writing exercises where you write without stopping for a few minutes without editing or thinking. His painting became more like large-scale doodling, but done thoughtfully and over time. He would build up layers and react to earlier marks as he went along. The looping shapes, broken forms, and zig-zag lines show traces of his early training, but now applied in a different way.
Pollock also got involved with other artists, including Lee Krasner, who later became his partner. They were part of a group trying to invent a new way of making art, moving away from past traditions. Many modern art movements in the late 1800s and 1900s focused on creating something new and reacting to what was happening in society around them.
In America, around and after World War II, there was a shift in how artists expressed themselves. Some, worried about being seen as political or accused of communist sympathies, stopped making work that showed clear messages about social issues. Art historian Griselda Pollock has written about how artists turned inward, focusing more on the mind and emotions instead of public or political themes.
Benton's paintings often showed working-class people and scenes of labor, which some could interpret as having socialist or left-leaning ideas. Because of this, his style became less popular in postwar New York, and he eventually moved back to the Midwest. His career didn’t disappear, and he was financially stable in part because his wife managed their money, but his style was no longer the focus of the American art world.
Pollock, on the other hand, went in the direction of personal symbolism and unconscious imagery. In paintings like Moon Woman, some people have suggested that the shapes represent ideas about gender or reproduction—things like cells, sperm, and eggs. Others have pointed out that his work sometimes echoes patterns found in Native American art, like those on blankets or in sand painting. These influences aren’t exact or structured, though. He didn’t adopt a clear system of geometric shapes the way some Native American art does, like using squares for bodies or circles for heads. Instead, he painted more freely and with changing forms, reflecting what was on his mind at the time.
In one of his paintings called Male and Female, there's a cluster of symbols and objects, including what looks like a math equation in the margin and a bunch of diamond shapes. Some researchers have connected his style to Native American visual traditions, not in a direct or literal way, but more in how both forms might involve spontaneous creation and symbolic meaning. Next, we’ll look more closely at Native American sand painting and how it connects to patterns found in blankets, as a way to understand this connection better.
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