Charles Cecil Pollock (25 December 1902 Denver, Colorado - 8 May 1988 Paris) was an American painter and eldest brother of Jackson Pollock. His parents were Stella May McClure and LeRoy Pollock, his father, who born McCoy, had taken the surname of his parents' neighbours who adopted him after both his own parents died within a year of each other.[1][2][3]
Charles Pollock's career as a painter is sharply divided into two periods. Until the 1940s, Pollock followed the social realist movement, studying under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League of New York. Pollock was inspired by the works of the Mexican Mural Renaissance, particularly the works of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. During the Great Depression and the New Deal era of the 1930s, Pollock began working for the Resettlement Administration, alongside fellow Social Realist Ben Shahn, supervising murals through the Midwestern and Southern United States. Pollock was then selected as supervisor of the mural painting and graphic arts division of the Federal Art Project at the WPA, settling in Detroit, Michigan.[4]
Charles Pollock abandoned social realism in the 1940s, and turned to abstract expressionism and Color Field painting. Some attribute the shift to the influence of his famous brother Jackson; however Pollock painted a very calm and organized style unlike Jackson's drip painting style. Pollock found work after the New Deal teaching calligraphy, printing, typography and design at the Art Department of Michigan State University until 1965. Pollock had painted public works projects for the University in the early 1940s, when it was then Michigan State College; three of his murals can be seen in the Fairchild Theatre foyer. A collection of Pollock's later abstract expressionist works is housed in Paris, the city where Pollock died in 1988.