What art movement did Jackson Pollock pioneer?

Jackson Pollock pioneered Abstract Expressionism, the postwar movement that made spontaneous gesture, scale, and the physical act of painting central to modern art.

Pollock became especially famous for his drip technique. Instead of working only with a brush against an upright canvas, he placed large canvases on the floor and poured, dripped, splashed, or flung household paint across them. Moving around the surface allowed him to approach the work from every direction, producing dense networks of lines and colors often described as all-over painting.

His method is closely associated with action painting, a branch of Abstract Expressionism that emphasizes the artist’s bodily movement and process. Pollock’s pictures were not random in the simple sense: he controlled paint viscosity, direction, rhythm, and layering while responding to the developing composition.

Pollock’s breakthrough came in the late 1940s, when critics and galleries in New York helped establish Abstract Expressionism as a major international force. A common mistake is to call his work Surrealism or merely “drip painting”; Surrealist ideas influenced him, but his mature style belongs to Abstract Expressionism.