In December 1956, four months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

[3][7] He was also heavily influenced by Mexican muralists, particularly José Clemente Orozco,[8][9] whose fresco Prometheus he would later call "the greatest painting in North America".

[10] In 1930, following his older brother Charles Pollock, he moved to New York City, where they both studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League.

Benton's rural American subject matter had little influence on Pollock's work, but his rhythmic use of paint and his fierce independence were more lasting.

[3] In the early 1930s, Pollock spent a summer touring the Western United States together with Glen Rounds, a fellow art student, and Benton, their teacher.

[11][12] Pollock was introduced to the use of liquid paint in 1936 at an experimental workshop in New York City by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

In the summer, he went to Dartmouth College to study José Clemente Orozco's 3,200 square foot mural, "The Epic of American Civilization.

After his move to Springs, New York, he began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor and he developed what was later called his "drip" technique.

[14] During this time Pollock was trying to deal with his established alcoholism; from 1938 through 1941 he underwent Jungian psychotherapy with Dr. Joseph L. Henderson and later with Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlo in 1941–42.

According to Robert Storr, "there is no other experience in his professional life that is equal to the decade that he spent learning from and observing the modern Mexican muralists…," especially when comparing this period of informal training to his formal education with Thomas Hart Benton, which, although critical to his beginnings, was short lived.

[21] Additionally, when specifically asked about how the "drip" came to be, Pollock disavowed his association with Siquieros on multiple occasions and made contradictory statements.

[22] Eventually, Pollock became famous from his "drip" paintings, and on August 8, 1949, in a four-page spread in Life magazine, he was asked, "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?"

[44] In December 1956, four months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

[1][2] For the rest of her life, his widow Lee Krasner managed his estate and ensured that Pollock's reputation remained strong despite changing art world trends.

I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.

Austrian artist Wolfgang Paalen's article on totem art of the indigenous people of British Columbia, in which the concept of space in totemist art is considered from an artist's point of view, influenced Pollock as well; Pollock owned a signed and dedicated copy of the Amerindian Number of Paalen's magazine (DYN 4–5, 1943).

[58] Another strong influence must have been Paalen's surrealist fumage technique, which appealed to painters looking for new ways to depict what was called the "unseen" or the "possible".

He completely forgot that Lee and I were there; he did not seem to hear the click of the camera shutter ... My photography session lasted as long as he kept painting, perhaps half an hour.

... Pollock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas.

Continuing to evade the viewer's search for figurative elements in his paintings, Pollock abandoned titles and started numbering his works.

Critic Robert Coates once derided a number of Pollock's works as "mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless".

[68] Throughout his life, Glasco continued to reflect on Pollock’s artistic influence, particularly in the early to mid-1970s when his style changed to all-over collage paintings with their emphasis on rhythm and process.

The script, by Christopher Cleveland, was to be based on Jeffrey Potter's 1985 oral biography, To a Violent Grave, a collection of reminiscences by Pollock's friends.

[72] In September 2009, the art historian Henry Adams claimed in Smithsonian magazine that Pollock had written his name in his famous painting Mural (1943).

[77] Blue Poles was a centerpiece of the Museum of Modern Art's 1998 retrospective in New York, the first time the painting had been shown in America since its purchase.

12 (1949), a medium-sized drip painting that had been shown in the United States Pavilion at the 1950 Venice Biennale, fetched US$11.7 million at Christie's, New York.

[80] In February 2016, Bloomberg News reported that Kenneth C. Griffin had purchased Jackson Pollock's 1948 painting Number 17A for US$200 million, from David Geffen.

[87] In 2006, a documentary, Who the *$&% Is Jackson Pollock?, was made concerning Teri Horton, a truck driver who bought an abstract painting for five dollars at a thrift store in California in 1992.

The Archives of American Art also houses the Charles Pollock papers, which include correspondence, photographs, and other files relating to his brother Jackson.

The foundation functions as the official estate for both Pollock and his widow, but also under the terms of Krasner's will, serves "to assist individual working artists of merit with financial need".