Nowhere is the complex and destructive painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) revealed with more compassion and insight than in this exemplary biography. Friedman, a friend of Pollock's and active in the art world, shows him to be a brilliant man tormented by his relationship to his family; an artist who worked hard through years of poverty to achieve his controversial painting technique; the first American painter to gain an international reputation for himself and for what has been variously called Action Painting or Abstract Expressionism; and a man who struggled with alcohol and the tension...