Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock was the American painter who turned the act of painting itself into the subject. Born in Wyoming in 1912, he trained in a fairly traditional way before breaking loose in the late 1940s with the drip paintings that made him famous. He laid huge canvases on the floor and flung, poured, and dripped house paint across them, moving around all four sides as he worked, which is why people called it action painting.

Those tangled webs of paint look chaotic at first, but there is real control and rhythm in them once you spend time looking. Pollock became the public face of Abstract Expressionism and helped shift the center of the art world from Paris to New York. His fame came with heavy drinking and a restless temperament, and he died in a car crash in 1956 at forty four, his short career already legendary.