The retrospective of paintings by Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art was organized as an effort to define a figure whose place in twentieth-century art has long been formidable. In its scale and presentation, the MOMA show milks both Pollock the artist (ambitious, tumultuous, and flawed) and Pollock the myth (heroic, hard-drinking, and radical) to impressive, if not altogether convincing, effect. Reviews of the exhibition itself have been, on the whole, laudatory, yet the new consensus on Pollock’s “mastery” is less certain. Put another way: man and myth aren’t as inextricably linked as they once may have been. Even defenders of the status quo admit that Pollock was, at best, an erratic painter. Do I recall correctly one critic stating that Pollock painted only three or four good pictures? Out of a hundred or so at MOMA? Art isn’t a matter of bean counting, but such statements signal a turn in the artist’s reputati ...

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