Flipping his colors onto the canvas, pouring and dripping his paints in a quintessentially American gesture, Jackson Pollock redefined the art of painting. It was the fate of Pollock's gesture, which reflected America's largest, most optimistic ideas of itself, to be mimicked, modified, and denied by artists of immense stature, among them Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Robert Smithson.Drawing from twenty years of experience as an art critic in New York, Carter Ratcliff maps the Manhattan art world from Fifty-seventh Street to SoHo, revisiting the world of studios, galleries, and artists' bars where those personalities met and clashed. In addition to providing an intimate biography of Pollock and the history and development of his ideas, Ratcliff explores the lives and consciousness of the other major American artists of the day. He follows the story of postwar American art from the late 1940s through the triumph of Abstract Expressionism and the sudden explosion of Pop Art, all the way to the boom of the 1980s, which brought stardom to an array of young artists. Over it all looms the monumental and tragic figure of Jackson Pollock, the measure of all who have felt compelled to challenge him.