Born in Cody, Wyoming to Scotch-Irish parents, Jackson Pollock was dubbed "Jack the Dripper" (Time magazine 1956) for his revolutionary technique of gestural painting that freed generations of American artists from academic strictures. He used dissonant, garish colors, and applied paint with energetic circular motions to large canvases so that his work exuded physical energy. It also, according to many art historians, reflected his own turbulent, manic depressive personality.

Pollock was raised in Arizona and California and helped his father in the late 1920s with a surveying job on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. It is thought that his life-long compulsive fear and fascination of vast, open spaces "probably orig...