Jackson Pollock: A BIOGRAPHY by Deborah Solomon (Simon & Schuster, $19.95; 256 pp., illustrated)

Thirty-one years after his violent death, Jackson Pollock tightens his hold on the American imagination. He is becoming our Van Gogh.

“Pollock was so involved with his uncontrollable neuroses and demons,” his great contemporary Robert Motherwell said, “that I occasionally see him like Brando in ‘Streetcar’--except that Brando was much more controlled than Pollock.”

What a subject--a man less controlled than Stanley Kowalski who somehow becomes the first American painter to capture the world’s imagination. Deborah Solomon, a Columbia journalism alumna, sifts the familiar Pollock legends, discarding many but documenting all the most moving.

To start, the one thing everybody knows about Pollock--that he was from Cody, Wyo.--isn’t quite so. In 1912, at 10 months of age, Pollock left Cody “and never went back.”

Yet if Pollock was not a Cody cowboy, his life still comes across, in Solomon’s book, as American myth. It’s easy (and, I’ll suggest in a moment, appropriate) to continue Motherwell’s film analogy.

Solomon shows us a troubled, inarticulate, yet sensitive teen-ager who fails out of every school he attends. His father is weak, a self-described “failure,” who periodically flees the boy’s moody, dominating mother. She moves the family restlessly--Chico, Phoenix, Riverside, Calif., Los Angeles. Her angry son, perpetually the new boy in school, becomes increasingly violent, begins drinking to escape.

Does Pollock’s boyhood sound familiar? It’s James Dean’s character in “Rebel Without a Cause.”

“Some people are born with too big an engine inside them,” his dealer Betty Parsons later said. “If Pollock hadn’t painted, he would have gone mad.” Like Van Gogh, Pollock was, till mid-life, as desperately poor as he was frantic to invent his art. The American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, more impressed by Pollock’s dedication than by his talent, gave him odd jobs to do, let him spend three summers in a converted chicken shack behind Benton’s summer place.

Years of frustration drove Pollock, like Van Gogh, deeper into alcoholism and violence. Clement Greenberg first suggested that Pollock had to invent his famous spatter methods to deal out that being which indoors dwelt (if I may paraphrase Hopkins). Pollock’s mythic agonies of rootlessness and alienation are the very stuff of his paintings.

When the great European teacher/painter Hans Hofmann visited Pollock’s studio and found no “antique casts . . . no still-life arrangements from which the artist could abstract,” Hofmann wondered, “Do you work from nature?”

“Pollock blurted angrily, ‘I am nature.’ ”

Van Gogh’s story ends the way a European writer would end it. Pollock’s American version includes overnight celebrity, 5 million copies of Life wondering: “JACKSON POLLOCK--Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” (And Undisputed Heavyweight Champion?)

Pollock buys a Cadillac, goes through what we might call his Jet Rink phase (remember Dean as Jet in “Giant,” drunk after the oil came in?). Sadly, Solomon must discard most of the stories of Jackson urinating naked into heiresses’ fireplaces and ripping toilets out of bar bathroom walls. Happily, not all.

And the fierce integrity that made him a painter remains: After Art News has “gushed” over a sculpture Pollock himself thought “trivial,” he finds it too large, after the show, to fit in the Cadillac’s trunk. “He tossed it into the street and stomped on it until it was flat. He took it home and later threw it away.” Which of our little MBA artists would do that?

That integrity, Solomon argues convincingly, caused Pollock’s tragedy. The nascent New York gallery system already demanded that a painter keep grinding out whatever had won him fame. Pollo1667966835forms--even back into figuration.

Unable to sell his new style, congenitally unable to turn fake and paint official “Jackson Pollock,” his drives were again as bottled up as before his breakthrough. After two terrible years of painter’s block and public wildnesses, Pollock crashed his car into a tree and died.

Elisabeth Frank’s 1983 “Pollock” is a more richly illustrated introduction, but Solomon’s text is more detailed. A university press book would be more methodologically self-conscious--but it’s a relief to read a book without one reference to deconstruction.

Solomon’s prose sometimes lumbers. She avoids, however, that tone of querulous gloom that academics confuse with seriousness; and her subject--that improbable mix of Kowalski, James Dean and Van Gogh--never fails to amaze.