This book is welcome. The purchase of Blue Poles, the most expensive American painting ever bought by an Australian gallery – for more than US$2 million in 1973 – brought into focus a range of Australian cultural and political attitudes of the 1970s. But what are we to make of the subtitle? Was Blue Poles really ‘the painting that changed a nation’?

Tom McIlroy starts off with a straightforward biography. Jackson Pollock, born in 1912 into an itinerant Wyoming farming family, decided at the age of eleven to become an artist. He moved to Los Angeles and New York to study art and came into contact with influential art dealers and other established and emerging artists, including Max Ernst and Robert Motherwell. He began developing his famous ‘drip technique’ in the New York studio of the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros, who poured, dribbled, and spattered paint across large canvases on the floor, using unorthodox tools such as airbrushes.