One year later, Pollock's artistic style was captured for posterity on film. By then, the public spotlight had reached unbearable brightness and Pollock descended into self-destructive alcoholism. The filming is seen by many as the day on which his downward spiral began. Pollock's story ended after a drunken binge in August 1956, when he died in a high-speed car-crash. He died with only $350 to his name.

Aside from the commercialism and mythology, what meaning do Pollock's swirling patterns of paint really have and what was his role in generating them? Art theorists now recognise his patterns as a revolutionary approach to aesthetics. In an era characterised by radical advances in art, his work is seen as a crucial development. However, despite the millions of words written on Pollock, the precise quality which defines his unique patterns never has been identified. More generally, although abstract art is hailed as a modern way of portraying life, the public remains unclear about how a painting such as Blue Poles shows anything obvious about the world they live in.

The one thing which is agreed upon is that Pollock's motivations and achievements were vastly different from those associated with traditional artistic composition. His drip paintings eliminated anything that previously might have been recognised as 'composition'; the idea of having a top and bottom, of having a left and right, and of having a centre of focus. Pollock's defence was that he had adopted a "direct" approach to the expression of the world around him, concluding that "the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old form of the Renaissance, each age finds its own technique."