ABSTRACT
In August of 1949, Life magazine published a feature article titled “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?”1 The article was prompted by a growing recognition that Pollock was the leader of a group of artists centered in New York who were producing the most important new art of their time. The fame of Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and others in the group continued to grow, so that by 1955, when William Seitz completed the first major academic study of their art he concluded that it was nearly “impossible to fully convey the degree to which Abstract Expressionism has become a universal style.”2
