IN May 1956 Jackson Pollock got a letter from MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at his home in Springs at East Hampton on Long Island. They were about to embark on a series of exhibitions devoted to artists in mid-career and they wanted him to be first. Why not? Although only in his mid-40s, he was the most famous artist in America, foremost among a group of Abstract Expressionist painters who had given American art, long in the shadow of Europe, a new, self- confident sense of identity.
He was also a wreck. Always an outsider, he couldn't adjust to life as an insider, and was perpetually insecure about his own work. In fact he hadn't painted a picture in more than 18 months. Battling with personal demons, and in analysis for depression, he looked bloated and unhealthy, reputedly because he drank huge quantities of beer in a futile attempt to avoid drinking spirits. He was virtually estranged from his wife, the painter Lee Krasner who, although widely disliked and criticised for being manipulative and over-possessive, had guided him through his most productive years.
When MOMA's Pollock exhibition opened in December 1956, the "mid-career" tribute had become a posthumous retrospective. Since February that year, the artist had been involved in a stormy, destructive relationship with Ruth Kligman, a painter in her 20s. When Krasner went to Europe in July, Ruth visited him at Springs. One weekend in August she brought a friend, Edith Metzger. After a day spent drinking gin, Pollock set off in his V-8 Oldsmobile to drive them all to a concert.
In the midst of rows, recriminations and tears - tears from Metzger, who was terrified - he insisted on turning and heading for home. Driving the heavy car at suicidal speed, he lost control on a difficult stretch of road and ploughed into a strip of woodland. When the car eventually flipped over, Kligman was thrown clear and survived, Metzger was killed by its weight and Pollock was catapulted some 50 feet through the air, headfirst into a tree trunk.
In the most terrible way the tragedy marked the final stage in his transformation from mere mortal to cultural icon and American legend - James Dean had made a similarly dramatic exit just the year before. Pollock was literally the first all-American artistic genius, a real, hard-drinking macho Westerner who'd grown up in Arizona and California. It was an important point because, when, in 1949, Life magazine put him on the cover and rhetorically asked if he was the greatest living American painter, other pretenders to the throne were arguably better painters, but they weren't quite American enough: Willem de Kooning was Dutch, Mark Rothko was Russian, Gorky an Armenian, and so on. But Pollock was home-grown.
The defining image we have of him is as a scowling figure in blue jeans and T-shirt, a Camel cigarette between his lips, creating a masterpiece by pouring, dripping and splashing paint onto a vast canvas stretched out on the ground, an improvisatory genius on a par with the giants of that other great American art form, jazz. It's such a photogenic scene, and his life is such a dramatically perfect story, that it's amazing no one has yet managed to put it on film. This lapse is currently being rectified by the actor Ed Harris, who not only bears a striking physical similarity to the painter but also happens to be obsessed by him.
Yet though the myth of Jackson Pollock transcends mere facts, ultimately the power of the myth depends on the work he created during his lifetime. It's a point emphasised by MOMA's Kirk Varnedoe, curator of the Pollock retrospective that was an enormous hit when it opened in the US last year. The paintings, he argues, have become so cocooned with words, so insulated from our gaze that they are taken for granted. They are so much part of the mythic package, we don't see them as paintings any more. On Thursday, a slightly slimmed-down version of the MOMA show opened at the Tate Gallery in London. It is the first full-scale Pollock retrospective to be shown in Britain in four decades, and it provides us with a chance to look afresh at the work behind the legend.
It's a mixed bag. Pollock was famously lacking in natural facility and was painfully aware that he couldn't draw. He served a long, slow apprenticeship doing student-quality work that is mostly crude, mannerised and earnestly symbolic, clumsily reflecting myriad influences, from Miro to tribal art. It's like watching a young bird attempt flight. It seems impossible that it will succeed, then suddenly it's away, in its element. But Pollock is a more uneven artist than, say, Rothko. He didn't settle into a mature style and stick with it. He chopped and changed uncertainly.
Time has drained much of the fabled aggression from his work. What once seemed violent and iconoclastic now looks poised and tasteful. Equally, at the time his penchant for all-over compositions seemed shocking, even nihilistic. "All-over" simply means evenly worked paintings in which no one element is dominant, in contrast to the hierarchical system of composition, whether representational or abstract, that had been the norm in Western art since the Renaissance.
It seems an incredibly minor point now, but it was important then and obviously caused Pollock much grief. He felt isolated and vulnerable, and was instinctively inclined to revert to his heavyhanded symbolic figurative imagery. In fact, there is now compelling evidence that such imagery underlies even some of the most ostensibly abstract and radical of his drip paintings. When he did try to find a way back into overt figuration, notably in 1951, the results were lamentable - and there's a whole roomful of them at the Tate to prove the point.
An essential element of the myth is his rivalry with de Kooning. Yet though they were not friends, there was a healthy mutual regard between them. De Kooning's generous remark, that it was "Jackson who broke the ice", for he and the other Abstract Expressionists was, untypically, matched by comments from Pollock: "We've just had a painter here who's better than me," he said to a friend after a visit from de Kooning. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's exhaustively researched biography details how the rivalry was, disastrously for Pollock, fomented by Krasner over an indirect, perceived slight. By attacking de Kooning, a popular figure, she effectively alienated much of the art world.
IT'S difficult not to feel sorry for Pollock. When we look at Lavender Mist, or Full Fathom Five, or the stunning Blue Poles, we see brilliant, exuberant, buoyant lyricism, an artist happily doing what he does best, someone thoroughly at home in his own work. But Pollock was never in a position to enjoy the benefit of such perspective. It never seemed like that to him. He may fulfil the stereotype of the tortured genius, but behind the bluster and braggadocio he really was tortured, plagued by self-doubt, unsure at the most basic level of the artistic legitimacy of what he was doing, emotionally isolated and unhappy. Yet, fallible and confused though he was, he managed to make some truly great paintings and they, rather than the legend of yet another doomed genius, are what make a visit to the Tate worthwhile.
Jackson Pollock is at the Tate Gallery, London until June 6th. Admission stg £7. You can book in advance via First Call 0870- 8422233, (booking fee stg£1.60).