This is a disappointment, in that we miss so much of Pollock's most fertile period. My first sensation on walking around was that too much emphasis had been given to his difficult gestation as an artist, and that his three or so years of great work between 1947 and 1950, and his subsequent, faltering recapitulation and decline, are represented as a foreshortened and frightening descent.
But it really was like this, and the mythic, tragic aspect of Pollock as the live-fast, die-young Wild One of Abstract Expressionism is unavoidable. It is part of Pollock's greatness (a word I don't use lightly). And anyhow, there are six or seven works here that probably say everything that needs to be said about his achievement. The rewards of his best works are endless: they are paintings without end, to which one wants to return again and again.
Pollock was born in 1912 and died at 44 in 1956, when the car he was driving crashed into a tree, killing the artist and one of the two women passengers. Pollock's end is like a bad novel, or the undoubtedly bad movie his life is about to become. His studied inarticulacy, his abusiveness to women, the alcoholic binges, the punch-ups, the outbursts and self-recriminations and self-doubt which destroyed him are true to a morbid fiction of artistic behaviour, an American existential myth.
Pollock was no role model as a man. It must be said, too, that a great deal of his early work, from the early 1930s to the early 1940s, is terrible - the first half of the exhibition is an almost unrelievedly painful record of perseverance against ineptitude, a struggle for identity, of ambition overcoming seeming insurmountable difficulty. Pollock's problems, personal and artistic, unmade him as a man and made him, all too briefly, as a towering artist.
Pollock was eight years younger than fellow Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, both of whose works had a superficial maturity by the late 1930s. Both, too, were Europeans - Dutch and Armenian respectively - while Pollock, Wyoming-born and West Coast raised, struggled against different odds for an independent artistic identity. While Gorky (a self-mythologiser if ever there was one) could say urbanely, 'I was with Cézanne for a long time, and now, naturally, I am with Picasso', Pollock's development was an archetype of oedipal struggle, a perfect example of Harold Bloom's theories of poetic usurpation: Pollock wanted to kill Picasso, but at the same time Picasso was the father figure he never escaped.
Pollock the artist was formed out of a mish-mash of influences: Thomas Hart Benton's xenophobic, American Regionalism; Albert Pinkham Ryder's overcooked and eccentric old-masterisms; the muscly proletarian heroics of Mexican muralists Siqueiros and Orozco. Masson and Miro and Michelangelo are in the mix too, undigested and indigestible. All art has to come from somewhere, and Pollock's came from an America which was, through the 1930s and '40s, almost nowhere on the international art map.
Whatever one might surmise about Pollock's psyche - and commentators constantly return to it - his overriding problem as a would-be painter was his cack-handedness, his bludgeoning lack of feel for paint, his lack of a subject to meet his imagination and his needs. Pollock's difficulties as a painter led him on terrible detours, into vague mythological and Jungian references, but they constituted the very thing he had to overcome. Early apologists, like Frank O'Hara, wallowed in the symbolism as a way to avoid the problems of paintings like Guardians Of The Secret and Pasiphae.
Only when he speeded up the application of paint to such an extent that it overcame the sullen inertia of his touch, and when he actually stopped touching the painting at all, did his paintings finally develop into something marvellous. Ditching overt figuration helped too, though it was always in and under the surface somewhere, however much he masked it. All those palimpsests of overladen imagery; the impacted, overpainted moves and countermoves of his moiled surfaces; the cartoon flailings of his loony figures; the press of bodies and body parts into crudified walls of paint were aspects of a necessary failure. If he hadn't been so bad, he would not have become so great.
The 'drip paintings' appear to escape from his difficulties, although they too may be seen as a figuration of inner turmoil, and to literally embody it as the trace of the act of painting. They are unprecedented. I think of Pollock painting in the late 1940s. The enamel paint, scooped out of a can with a brush, is stringy and viscous. It runs like syrup in a continuous thread. It flows from the brush on to the canvas on the floor. It isn't so much poured as drooled, flicked and arced, ejaculated across the space between the brush in his hand and the canvas beneath it. Its trajectory is always somewhat uncertain: the paint lands as though it were still in mid-flight, still on the way somewhere. It still has energy and direction as it hits the canvas.
The paint is driven by gravity and the propulsive energy of the artist's wrist, his arm, the punch he puts into his shoulder, the twist of the torso. The action is sometimes like the follow-through a fly fisherman performs when punching a line out into the wind, and sometimes it is like a choppy, locked-elbow table-tennis block and return. Sometimes it is a jerky twist-of-the-wrist, slathering with wetness and spray. When he puts enough energy into that blind stroke in the air, the arc of paint breaks up into droplets, each with its particular slipstream trail. You can see the direction they were travelling in when they hit the canvas, catching on the nub of the raw cotton, skidding slightly on the thinner paint already on the surface. It has partially soaked in to the weave. Sometimes the colour is close in warmth and tone to that of the canvas - a bit darker or lighter, so that the painting appears to have grown from the surface itself. There are earthy browns, industrial greys, metallics and whites, with the tan colour of the canvas sometimes showing through and around the edges of the canvas.
He leans out to reach the centre of the unrolled bolt of cotton. Scoop and flick, scoop and arc. Breathe in, breathe out. The painting seems to breathe back. Take one step, then another. There are several syncopated rhythms here, superimposed on the trace of yet earlier rhythms. The layers go down, but the effect is visual and visceral rather than musical. There's a kind of elastic tension building up, as each layering both cancels what went before and adds something more. Sometimes he'll superimpose an earlier colour, so that you can't exactly read the succession of layers, at least not optically. What is building here is a kind of resonance, a squeezing and trapping of space between the layers.
Look into the surface, as you'd look into water, and you see that there are great deeps in the gaps in the skeins. Yet from a distance, or out of the corner of your eye, all the layers flatten out, and everything seems to catch the light and glisten. Looking at the surface face-on, up close, the surface disappears, the paint apparently hovering in an indeterminate space. I feel I could stick my hand into these particles and blobs and streamers and swirl them around.
The artist can see his paint-spattered shoes, his paint-smeared hands, the can and the brush filthy with paint. The painting at his feet goes in and out of focus. Enamel paint reeks, and he can taste the reek through the cigarette smoke. 'Is this a painting?' Pollock once asked his wife, the painter Lee Krasner. Pollock's paintings were something as yet undefined.
This is how I imagine Pollock painting, how I know him from Hans Namuth's famous photographs, how I imagine I know him from my own experience as a young painter, a 20-year-old belatedly method acting the broody but sensitive, deep and dark stance. Pollock's appeal (separate from the appeal of his paintings) has an adolescent streak. Looking at the painting, raised up on to the wall and evenly lit, one sees the painting not as Pollock saw it as he painted it. Pollock painting and Pollock's paintings are different things, even if, by their nature, the cumulative act and the object itself seem inextricable.
I think of the painter's body in motion and the painting taking shape, and as I step towards the surface, so that a section of the painting entirely fills my field of vision, I feel something happening to my own body. It is a sensation of immersion and exhilaration. The painting has been dry since before I was born, but I feel its liquidity, as though it were still being made as I look, as though it were still taking shape around me.
The feel of these drip paintings is not at all homogenous: Autumn Rhythm has a faster pace than Lavender Mist. Summertime seems to furl and unfurl and helix through itself in a sedate rolling movement as I watch - I feel like I'm watching something in flux rather than looking at something static. Number 32, from 1950, is a painful wrung-out black, a wrenching sobbing web, tarry on the matt canvas. I feel the endless emptiness of the space between and beyond the black, not of the dull background of unpainted canvas, but nothingness itself. Which is where his handprints are, in Number 1A, 1948, trapped between the loops and splats and the blankness beyond.
The violence and delicacy of the best Pollocks go right through me. I want to defend their presence heart and soul. The space he created in these paintings is more like a discovery of a natural phenomenon than an invention, and these works go on being vital and intangible and indefinable and utterly compelling to this day.
Adrian Searle will give a talk at the Guardian Readers Evening at the Jackson Pollock exhibition on April 14. For £10 (plus £1.50 booking fee) readers can enjoy a private view with champagne. Booking line opens on Thursday: 0870-842 2233.
