After a school arts & crafts project of macaroni, glittery glue, and scribbles, it’s hard to imagine telling a six-year-old: “That’s not art.” Art is, perhaps in purest form, the visual expression of the human self; at “worst,” a celebration of the vanity of creation, and for over a century now, we have reveled in the idea of art for art’s sake. In 1948, Life magazine, then the leading weekly in the U.S., held an international roundtable discussion on whether “modern art, considered as a whole, [was] a good or bad development.” One of the works under consideration was Jackson Pollock’s abstract painting Cathedral, notable for its striking use of lines and loops of black paint, though detractors said it resembled “drool.” Still, Pollock’s work could not be discounted as an important part of the avant-garde abstract expressionism that had begun to attract attention in American art.

The decision to run a two-and-a-half page spread of Pollock’s work in the August 1949 issue of Life, with the headline “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” brought over five hundred response letters from readers, stirring the minds of the American public. Readers were also confronted with the image of Pollock himself; in his denim jacket, cigarette hanging from his lips, and a defiant look towards the camera, he seemed dangerous and less of a painter than, as Willem de Kooning said, “some guy who works at the service station pumping gas.” Evelyn Toynton’s forthcoming Icons of America biography, Jackson Pollock, explores how Pollock’s tortured and conflicted character transformed popular culture. Against a backdrop of criticism that found American art inferior to its European counterpart (Marcel Duchamp wrote that “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”), Pollock’s controversial, even rebellious, work was provocative for generations old and new. Before Marlon Brando and James Dean, there was Pollock: macho and emblematic of the complexity of manliness, both publicly himself and on his canvases.

Toynton moves through Pollock’s humble upbringing in the West, the Surrealist movement, the Great Depression in New York, and his rise to notoriety by the end of the 1940s. An equally notorious and fierce alcoholic, Pollock died on August 11, 1956 in a car crash at age 44. Fifty-five years later, he has remained a canonical figure in American popular culture, captivating audiences beyond his own medium through uses and references of his name and art in music and film, not to mention the instantly recognizable style of his paintings. In the wake of two world wars, at the moment when the U.S. perhaps needed most to establish itself as a cultural, not only militaristic, power, here was the cowboy; here was the hero; here was the American icon.