Picasso Museum in Paris shows early Pollock works

Jackson Pollock never met Pablo Picasso in person. And yet the influence on his art, especially on the US painter's early creative years, was profound.

With around 100 works on display until January 19, the Picasso Museum in Paris is illustrating the extent to which the Spanish master of Cubism inspired the artist that went on to become "Jack the Dripper".

The show is one of the few that illuminates the beginnings of the important representative of abstract expressionism to this extent. It covers the years 1934 to 1947, which were characterised by Native American art and the European avant-garde, among others, within which Picasso (1881-1973) played an important role.

Pollock (1912-1956) learnt about Picasso's work through his older brother Charles Pollock, who was also a painter. He had sent him magazines with reproductions of Picasso's works, as curator Joanne Snrech explained.

He was particularly fascinated by "Guernica" and discovered Picasso's most famous work in 1939 in a Picasso exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York.

The influence, when seen side by side, is striking. Motifs of the mask and the bull appear in his drawings and paintings.

The formal proximity to Picasso is also recognisable. From 1946, Pollock developed the action painting technique, in which the colour is roughly painted, poured or dripped onto the canvas with a brush or directly from paint containers. This earned him the nickname "Jack the Dripper" and made him famous worldwide.