Rebel With an Abstract Cause

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.