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- the artist at work - abstract expressionism - layered paint technique - a Guggenheim commission

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The canvases are layered with colors darting diagonally, stretching in circles and splashing in seemingly random fashion. They are mood portraits devoid of figures.

They are the paintings of Jackson Pollock in a major exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The first American retrospective on the artist in more than three decades, the show is expected to be one of the biggest museum draws of the year.

Pollock was a pioneer of abstract expressionism and one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

When he created many of his mammoth paintings in the years just after World War II, they were like visual alarm clocks awakening other artists to new possibilities in self-expression.

"His main innovation is to have taken pouring and dripping paint, and turned it into the central premise of a new way of painting. He discovered that this method could make a whole painting, and make something colossal," said Kirk Varnedoe, curator at MoMA.

"His main innovation is to have taken pouring and dripping paint, and turned it into the central premise of a new way of painting. He discovered that this method could make a whole painting, and make something colossal," said Kirk Varnedoe, curator at MoMA.

Pollock used no easel, no palette -- not even a brush. He applied industrial paint directly from the can, dripping it onto his canvas or flinging it with sticks or knives. At his farmhouse in East Hampton, Long Island, he would place his canvas on the floor and attack it from all sides.

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"He wouldn't decide until later in the game whether the canvas was going to be horizontal or vertical," Varnedoe said.

Pollock worked in energetic bursts. One 20-foot mural commissioned by art patron Peggy Guggenheim resulted from a 15-hour frenzy of painting.

"I don't work from sketches or drawings. My painting is direct," the artist once said.

Rare film footage captures Pollock in action. With movements like a dancer, he works around the canvas, splattering and pouring, sometimes waiting for paint to dry before applying a new layer, sometimes painting wet on wet. If he wasn't happy with a section of the piece, he would pour more paint over it.

Pollock sometimes embedded materials like sand, bottle caps and cigarette butts into his paintings. Sometimes, he left his fingerprints on the surface.

When he began churning out his large action paintings in the late 1940s, Pollock sparked a debate in the art world. Usually, he didn't title his works, a habit that added to their abstract aura.

Some artists and gallery owners viewed Pollock's unconventional style as liberating, while others believed his work was empty of meaning and referred to him mockingly as "Jack the Dripper."

"The myth is (that) any one quadrant of the picture looks like any other quadrant," Varnedoe said of a Pollock painting. "It's totally untrue. It's equally untrue that a small bit of it looks like the big picture."

The MoMA retrospective includes examples of Pollock's earlier work along with the later abstract pieces. The paintings from the early years include figures, but Pollock left them behind to distort the practice of painting itself. He wanted to convey what he had to say using line, color and composition.

"For all his tremendous insecurities, every testimony said he had an iron sense he was going to beat Picasso," Varnedoe said.

But Pollock, who was an alcoholic, never really had the chance. His career was cut short one night in 1956, when he died at the age of 44 after crashing his car into a tree.

"He was determined he was going to be an artist as a young man, and when he was a painter in the 40s, doing his best work, he knew it was great work. And that's what lends such an extraordinarily tragic dimension to the end of his life," Varnedoe said.

That life endures on the canvas. The Pollock retrospective, which opened November 1, will remain at the MoMA until February 2, 1999.

Correspondent Phil Hirschkorn contributed to this report.