"New needs need new techniques. The modern painter cannot express this age in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique." The new technique that became painter Jackson Pollock's signature style necessitated putting his canvases on the floor and dripping, splattering, and throwing paint on them. This radical approach--with which the painter hoped to express his energetic vision--won both enthusiastic admirers and heated detractors. His life was cut short by an automobile accident when he was only forty-four years old, but forty years later his work occupies a storied place in modern painting and has been crucial to the development of a number of subsequent styles.

Paul Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyoming. It is central to many of the myths surrounding Pollock's life that he was born in Wyoming, this somehow connecting him to...