AMERICAN ABSTRACT.

Half a century ago, on August 11, 1956, an Oldsmobile convertible driven by Jackson Pollock, who was drunk, hit a tree in the Springs, killing the artist and a passenger. It's a dismal enough anniversary--marked with scant attention by the finest art show in New York this summer, "No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper," at the Guggenheim--but glamorous, in its way. Pollock, like other doomed artists and martyrs to fame in his era--Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean--advanced and, by destroying himself, oddly consecrated America's postwar cultural ascendancy. Sometimes a new, renegade sensibility really takes hold only when somebody is seen to have died for it.

Tragedy enhanced Pollock's status as the first American painter, after the corn-belt realist Grant Wood, to achieve general popular renown, as a shining native son. Born in Wyoming, Pollock came to New York, from California, in 1930. He was mentored at the Art Students League by Wood's American Scene colleague Thomas Hart Benton. He soon found the Expressionist and Surrealist tendencies of the downtown avant-garde more congenial than Benton's mannered figuration, partly because he was tormented by a belief that he could never draw properly. But a sense of nationalist mandate stayed with him. It's an undertone in his famous reply to the German painter and pedagogue Hans Hofmann, who had suggested that he try working from nature: "I am nature." The glowering Westerner who became known as Jack the Dripper seemed to speak not just for the country but as it, in person: the Great American Painter, at a moment that was hot for Great American thises and thats. His helplessly photogenic, clenched features, broadcast by Life in 1949, made him a pinup of seething manhood akin to Marlon Brando. It wasn't even necessary that Pollock be a great artist, though he was. Unlike Wood, he countered the humiliating authority of European modern art not by rejecting it but by eclipsing it. Abstraction may have still scandalized most Americans, but suddenly it was a homegrown scandal, with nothing sissified about it. The macho pose, an obligatory overcompensation for aestheticism in the nineteen-fifties, ill suited a man whose ruling emotion was fear, which sprung from an anxious childhood in a ragged, nomadic family. But it sold magazines.

Ed Harris's surprisingly trenchant 2000 bio-pic, "Pollock," showed why it isn't possible to separate the artist's legend from his work. Pollock's all-or-nothing ambition channelled the hopes of an idealistic, conspiratorial milieu. His wife, the artist Lee Krasner, the critic Clement Greenberg, the collector and dealer Peggy Guggenheim, and other ardent sophisticates--abetted by pressure from competing new masters, chiefly Willem de Kooning--groomed Pollock like a skittish thoroughbred for the big race. Before his myth became a media circus, it was a cottage industry, though conceived in rigorously artistic terms as an overthrow of Cubist and Surrealist conventions in avant-garde painting--of Picasso, in a word. "No Limits, Just Edges" recovers that focus, more through than despite an absence of big canvases. The show's limitation to works on paper (credibly termed paintings, not drawings, because even when the format is small and the medium is ink Pollock's practice obviates the distinction) is a boon to understanding the revolutionary character and protean magic of the drip technique. If there's a weakness in the show, it's an overrefinement in the curating, betrayed by the preference of the organizer, Susan Davidson, in league with other scholars, to call Pollock's procedure "pouring," a fussy nugget of jargon with no support from the dictionary. (Poured paint plays a supporting role in only some of the work.) Not just more accurate and time honored, the vulgar "drip" resonates with a still potent shock of naked materiality which Pollock originated and which has been a major trope in new art (it was decisive for minimalism) ever since. If we want to be precise ...