Jackson the Ripper No. 21 Painting

Think of Jackson Pollock, and you immediately think of his iconic white T-shirt, dripping with paint splatter. Unbeknownst to most art historians, when he was done with a day of drip painting, Jackson would whip off his shirt and rip it to shreds, saving the scraps in a plastic bag. After he died, his wife, Lee Krasner, gave the colorful fragments, now in a dozen bags, to a family friend, who stored them in the back of a closet in his apartment in the West Village of Manhattan, an apartment that I would move into some 40 years later, where I discovered these essential relics of art history. After careful assembly of these near-holy objects, I present them now to you, as Jackson the Ripper. (Needless to say, that origins story is a work of fiction; Bryant Rousseau is the sole artist of this work.)