This is from the 1948 LIFE Magazine spread that truly made Pollock famous, in addition to propelling the whole AbEx movement into the mainstream, where it ended up stealing the idea of modern art from Europe and became the American art movement that dominated the world post WWII.

Jackson had already become in his work the leader of the movement within their circle. Brilliant, but also an alcoholic bore, he bludgeoned his way to the top by his visionary journeys into the Jungian jungles of the subconscious bringing his inner thoughts and mindscapes onto canvas—here just on the other side of the threshold of the drip, with the paintings being just taken off their easel and onto the floor of the barn studio in the Springs.

With the support, mentoring and dialog with Lee and in conversation with her work, he began sublimating the automatic derived surrealist-like forms with undulating rhythmic gestures, overlaying streams of lattice-like spider spines of lines in which to create inner worlds. He micromanaged, seeing through the threads of paint to cosmological fractal universes, that for me are windows onto other worlds.

I’m inspired by Pollock, and as a son of a psychoanalyst, and am interested in bringing out my own dreamworlds into a plastic, more Renaissance-like space (without illustrating the figures and forms that I see) in my abstract Iconscape paintings. It was a fascinating challenge to translate his work and see through the drips-which for Pollock we’re always a “means to an end”—and to more fully render his dream worlds I see when gazing into his paintings. I didn’t change a thing, but to see into the cosmos of his language, that seem like portals to other universes of form and feeling-but also other dimensions.

His success became a blessing but a curse-he was able w confidence move forward to his best, soberly derived works, but after the Namuth film, worried his celebrity made him a phony, plunged into drink & eventually perished.