This small, square, pocket-sized book gives readers all they need to know in order to stand in front of one of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings and resist the impulse to say, "My kid could do that." It puts the man, the myth, and the paintings in context of both pre- and post-war America. One of the Essentials series (which includes similar little books on Edward Hopper, Salvador Dali, and Vincent Van Gogh), the book presents many bright, colorful reproductions; cutesy, but quick and painless lessons in art talk--"new for this year: gestural automatism (huh?)"; and readymade underlinings with important words and phrases italicized for the hurried reader who only has time to skim the text.

Writer Justin Spring settles into Pollock's biography with narrative ease. By the end of the book he has made good on his promise to show us that it "isn't hard" to understand Pollock. He thoroughly but respectfully describes the artist's fatal alcoholism (he died in a car crash that also killed another passenger), his womanizing, his dependence on his wife, painter Lee Krasner, and his groundbreaking art. The Abstract Expressionists were an earnest bunch, Pollock especially. His unstable psyche and his drinking, intertwined, were his Achilles heel, but he emerges as the brilliant, voraciously curious cowboy-intellectual that he was. As Spring writes, Pollock created "a distinctive identity for American postwar art," for which he "endured poverty, loneliness, ridicule, and immense psychic anguish." --Peggy Moorman

FROM OUR EDITORS

This offering from the Essentials series delivers a lot of information in a little package. A candid biographical sketch and an informal discussion of form and technique provide readers with an introduction to the man who paved the way for a rule-breaking new style of art in postwar America. With many high-quality color and black-and-white reproductions.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Many people consider Jackson Pollock to be the most important American painter of the 20th century. This shy, handsome Westerner invented a brilliant new style of painting that propelled him to international celebrity and prominence. What is so sexy about: his "Drip" paintings? his drunken brawls, womanizing, and personal myth? his mental breakdown? his Wild West roots? his death in a car crash?

SYNOPSIS