On the front of my camper van, instead of a license plate, there’s a miniature version of Jackson Pollock’s famous drip painting Convergence. It’s the only hint that the van is not on a family camping trip or making Amazon deliveries. 

Instead, the van is the rolling home of the Pollock Project, my drive across the United States to visit every available work by Jackson Pollock. This travel is my years-long field research for a book about Pollock’s artwork, exploring both the provenance and the personal stories behind his creative output, from his iconic abstract drip paintings to realist rural scenes and other early figurative works. I plan to see all of Pollock’s widely distributed body of work, including prints, drawings, and even ceramics and sculpture. 

This fall, I visited 17 art museums in four weeks, a van-camping trip that traced a line of Pollock artwork from Pittsburgh to Omaha, San Antonio, and Bloomington. This was the latest step in my quest to see every Pollock by following a dynamic roadmap that has materialized over decades through the actions of museum acquisition committees, generous donors, dealers, and collectors. It tracks the narrative of Pollock’s fame and his influence on the art world since the late 1940s. 

The map, which makes art destinations of Utica, Iowa City, and Hartford, also reflects the economic history of the United States in that postwar period, when today’s Rust Belt was the beating heart of American industrial power. A museum or collector acquiring a Pollock painting in those years was sending an unmistakable signal: wealth, cultural sophistication, self-confidence, and maybe a bit of cool. 

I have seen more than 140 Pollock works so far, and I’m nowhere near the halfway point.

When you are driving thousands of miles across the country, from art museum to art museum, you meet new people and hear their stories. As I tell mine in exchange, I’ve come to anticipate one universal response. After hearing my travel plans, there is a pause, maybe a sip of beer, and my new friend will say, “But why Pollock?” 

Great question.

When I started the Pollock Project, I was drawn to the myth-making life of the artist. But over time, my project has become less about the person and more about his artwork and how it has been received by the world—the people who have admired and studied it, bought and sold it, loved it, and even the many who have dismissed it. 

Pollock’s life has been explored in depth by academics and experts, including a 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. He was a notoriously difficult person, haunted throughout his adult life by alcoholism. In the end, that disease killed him. Pollock died when he crashed his car while drunk in 1956. He was 44.

In the decades since, Pollock’s work has reached prices that could buy a fighter jet. His works have been the subject of hundreds of scholarly studies and analyses. I want to understand that enduring fascination with his paintings. I want to learn why the Pollock works are where they are. 

In other words, I ask the same question: Why Pollock? I’ve learned that each Pollock work deserves its own biography. The biographies include many characters: muses, patrons, critics, fakers, art dealers, curators, lovers, and friends. I am gathering the brush strokes of each of those life stories by visiting each painting, talking with collectors and curators and museum visitors, and looking through the object files maintained by most art museums. The lives of some works are quirky and dramatic, while others are reserved and mysterious. Taken together, these stories and human sketches are the Pollock Project. Imagine a catalogue raisonné in real life.

My project has its own origin story, which arises from one of Pollock’s works. 

“I want to understand that enduring fascination with his paintings.”

It begins with his 1950 painting Mural on Indian Red Ground. It is a sprawling skein of black and white lines and swirls on a dark red field, the viewer’s eye teased by yellow and green tones that barely suggest themselves against the bold lines. At least, that’s what I could glean from the reprints in books and digital renderings online. Painted as a wall-sized commission for a Breuer-designed house on Long Island, Mural today sits in the basement of the contemporary art museum in Tehran. In the mid-1970s, the shah of Iran acquired the painting for his new museum of modern art. Only a few years later, it was seized by the Iranian
government after the 1979 revolution.

Most experts agree that 1947-1950 were the peak years of Pollock’s creative genius, and that Mural is one of his greatest works. For clear geopolitical reasons, Mural does not travel to the United States or Europe, and my van will not be taking me to Iran. I knew I would never meet this Pollock masterwork in person. 

I set out to find and interview someone who had seen the work since it moved to Iran. Thus began my approach of collecting the oral histories that make up the life—the human provenance—of a work of art. Mural was shown in Japan in 2011-2012, and an American art expert met the painting there. She graciously shared photos of Mural being uncrated and displayed in Nagoya and later Tokyo. I also learned of two German museum leaders who visited Iran and were shown Mural during a brief thaw in relations with Iran in 2014.

As I dug further into the provenance of the painting, I learned that in the 1950s, the original owner, Bertram Geller ’37, donated a half-interest in Mural to his alma mater. Geller later transferred his partial interest to William Rubin, a legendary art collector and Museum of Modern Art curator.  

An agreement was reached in 1963 that Mural would be displayed in Dartmouth’s new Hopkins Center art gallery during the summer months. It seemed like a sensible joint custody arrangement, with Mural spending its summers in the cool hills of New Hampshire and the high art season in New York City.

I was born in 1957 in Hanover, where my father was on the Dartmouth faculty. As a grade-schooler pedaling around town on my red bike, I watched the construction of the Hopkins Center, a combination of performing arts venue, museum, and student center. 

When the Hop opened, I was particularly happy to see that it included a campus snack bar and a bank of food vending machines, one of which magically dispensed ice cream sandwiches. The Hop snack bar became a frequent afternoon stop for me.

Free to explore the new building, I used to visit the art gallery on the ground floor, drawn in by the huge panels of color. I remember a wall-sized red and black painting that towered over me.

Did I see Mural in Hanover in the 1960s? I’m certain I did. My search for an eyewitness to Mural has brought me full circle to my own childhood. It’s my subliminal “Rosebud,” in a huge Pollock drip painting. As my project has evolved into an exploration of the people whose lives each work has touched, it was a joyful surprise to find that I am one of them.

Why Pollock? Well, here I am.

The project will likely take another year of travel. That’s only the road trips to see American holdings. Scores of Pollock’s works are abroad in museums, private collections, living rooms, galleries, and even a Tehran basement. 

Will I see every one of Pollock’s works? Of course not. But I will meet most of them, and I will meet many more people who have been fascinated and inspired by his artwork. That process of discovery—uncovering the layers of the artist’s enduring hold on so many people—is the driving force of this project. That’s enough of an answer for me.                  

Sam Seymour lives in New York City.