Somewhere deep in every American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe.
—D. H. Lawrence, 1923.

Until well into the 1940s, Jackson Pollock’s painting remained locked in a struggle to master and overcome the influences of the European modernist painters he took as his models—primarily Picasso, Kandinsky, and Miró. That he was not himself an artist in their class was more or less taken for granted even by his most ardent admirers at the time. It is doubtful that Pollock himself believed he was an artist in their class. Yet what he brought to his encounter with these European masters was a fierce determination to produce an art that would somehow carry him beyond the styles and conventions he was wrestling with. Among much else, this meant that traditional easel painting had to be abandoned in favor of something the European masters of modernism had not yet attempted to place at the center of their art—a mode of mural-scale wall painting of a radically subjective character.

Pollock seems to have understood that as an easel painter he would never be able to trump his European masters. Not only did they bring to the tradition of the easel picture a richer and more complex command of experience than any that was within his own reach, but they had effectively transformed the content of the easel picture to conform to the imperatives of that experience. Mural-scale wall painting of a certain persuasion—painting that would