At the time there were many to doubt him. Some saw Pollock as the creator of “nothing more than interesting if inexplicable decoration”. Others considered his work to be degenerate. The Wyoming-born painter who, while trying to make murals for his studio hut in East Hampton, had found himself mesmerised by the paint drips that splattered the floor and so had started to reproduce them on huge-scale canvases, made images that were as “unpalatable as yesterday’s macaroni”, one outraged spectator declared. But any critical confusion about his stature has long since been cleared up.

And it is not hard to see why his work No 5, 1948 should yesterday have become the most expensive piece of work on the planet. It is not simply that for the past decade or so art prices have continued to soar, meaning that records are bound to be smashed every season. This is an artist who, though he has been dead for 50 years, can still speak clearly to our age.

For a start, his work is instantly recognisable in a culture that sets high store by the brand. It almost symbolises its era: those groundbreaking years when American culture confronted the tenets of Western tradition headlong. Pollock replaced brush and palette and all premeditation with an impetuous process of swinging and pouring and spattering and dripping.

His canvas was less a construction than an arena of action. What unfurled on the long bolts of cotton rolled out across his studio floor was less a portrayal of intention than an improvisation, a spontaneous record of some spur of the moment dance.

And what more can we ask for in an age of celebrity obsession? Pollock’s paintings are splashed straight from the psyche of a rebellious boho. The wild personality of this live-hard, die-young alcoholic American is marketed as part of his work. His legend hangs about him like a cloud — and not least because it has such a memorable ending. The man who habitually drove drunk was thrown to his death at the age of 44 from the car that he slammed into a tree.

Little wonder that Pollock has become almost a myth. That he is the subject of several documentaries and a biopic; the inspiration for John Updike’s Seek My Face, and most recently, a risqué joke in John Cameron Mitchell’s new movie Short Bus. John Squire of the Stone Roses, painted a Pollock pastiche for an album cover. The appeal of Pollock still feels as fresh as his spontaneous style. But maybe this is only what you should expect of a man whose advice was “Don’t look for anything. React!”

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