Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement and the most influential American painter of the twentieth century. Although he died at the age of 44, he left an unsurpassed body of work.

Throughout his life, Pollock wrote very little about his own art or that of others. Nevertheless, in the few writings we do have, and in a few unpublished, undated notes – all of which are gathered together in this volume – the themes are remarkably similar. After acknowledging his initial debt to the Native American sand painters, who gave him the idea for putting the canvas on the floor and working it “in the round”, Pollock routinely referred to his interest in the unconscious as the source of modern art, as it enabled the direct expression of an “inner world,” of individual feeling and experience of the modern age. Moreover, it is clear from his statements that Pollock himself was open to the possibility of such a subjective approach to painting as an international enterprise. He never suggested that the modern world, characterized, in his words, by “the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio,” and which the modern artist had the responsibility to express, was specifically American, but rather that these were features of modern life in a much broader sense. In her in-depth essay, Nancy Jachec sketches an accurate profile of the artist and takes a closer look at his work, as well as detailing the enormous number of studies on the artist.