At the tender age of 17, Paul Jackson Pollock — better known now just as Jackson Pollock — moved to New York City to study, with his brother, under Thomas Hart Benton (an artist at the forefront of the American Regionalist movement).
Pollock had a nomadic childhood, bouncing from Wyoming to San Diego, to Arizona to Chico in California, and was expelled from at least two schools. Then again, which culture-defining artist wasn’t? Think Salvador Dalí, Lucien Freud and Nic Fiddian-Green. Raw creative talent can rarely be contained between four walls.
Pollock, however, did live between the top four walls of 46, Carmine Street, in New York’s West Village, while he was honing his craft. Now, it is for sale with Compass for $1.99 million (about £1.45 million).
The Federal-style townhouse — which boasts two centuries of history, more than double the average New York City home — was built in 1827. A milliner sold hats and bonnets from the lower floors in the 1850s. Artists, including Pollock, moved in in the 1930s, and the building was landmarked as part of the Greenwich Village Historic District in 2010.
Underneath the 14-feet, vaulted ceilings there’s an open kitchen-cum-living room with a decorative fireplace, one en-suite bedroom with a walk-in wardrobe, a separate bathroom and a loft. The fact that 46 has some extra inches on the buildings and trees around it means light can pour in from the skylights at all times of day — perfect for budding and established artists. The condo’s whitewashed brick walls might scream bohemian, but there’s also very necessary split-system air conditioning, new kitchen appliances and plenty of hidden storage. Plus, communal outdoor space, with a grill. Think counterculture, but make it comfy.
Pollock’s breakthrough came about a decade after his stint at 46 when the gallerist and art collector Peggy Guggenheim commissioned a painting for her New York townhouse. When art critic Clement Greenberg saw the 20-feet-wide work of art (Mural, 1943), he remarked that ‘Jackson was the greatest painter this country has produced.’
A leading figure of Abstract Expressionism and undisputed master of the ‘drip technique’, Pollock measured himself against Pablo Picasso, whose work he admired and was desperate to surpass. You could argue that this year, 70 and 53 years after their respective deaths, Pollock achieved such a thing — at least if money is the metric. In May 2026, his Number 7A (1948) sold at Christie’s in New York for $181.185 million (£135.3 million); in May 2025, Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) (1955) sold at the same auction house for $179.4 million (£116.4 million at the time). They are the most expensive works by both artists to sell at auction.
Pollock resented the way celebrity, critics and the art market threatened to take control of his identity and his work, and rejected his iconic drip paintings, while they were at the height of fashion, in favour of the so-called ‘black pourings’: ‘Austere compositions,’ according to Christie’s, ‘in black enamel on unprimed canvas.’
In 1945, Pollock and his wife, fellow artist Lee Krasner, moved to a modest farmhouse in Springs, a hamlet in East Hampton, where the relative isolation gave him space to work. Today, the house and studio — still splattered with paint — is a National Historic Landmark. The only thing better than a trip to see it, of course, is living in the same space that Pollock once occupied when on the precipice of greatness.
46, Carmine Street is for sale through Compass — see more details.