Jackson Pollock, widely regarded as the most important painter of the second half of the twentieth century, was the first American artist to capture the public imagination. This book features eleven paintings by Pollock selected from The Museum of Modern Art's substantial collection of his work. His groundbreaking "drip" paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s are here, along with early and late works demonstrating the fluid interaction between figuration and abstraction in his art and the direction of his painting at his untimely death. A lively essay by Carolyn Lanchner, a former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum, accompanies each work, illuminating its significance and placing it in its historical moment in the development of modern art and in Pollock's own life.