I know I'm attacking him right off, but I just do not understand at all how he is a famous person, and not a crazy person that flings paint and calls it art.
What was the situation or environment that lead to Jackson Pollack becoming a respected and historical artist? Was he controversial at all? Were there people at the start of his career that just shrugged him off as silly?
This is actually a fairly big question. We can break it down into three parts:
What was Pollack's historical moment in the art world? How did he arrive at the kind of painting he did?
What institutional factors made it possible for Pollack and related painters of the New York School to become prominent?
What larger cultural factors made his kind of painting popular and emblematic of modern art?
I'll discuss all of these at least in brief, but mostly focusing on #1.
Pollack is coming out of what might be termed the confluence of three modernist streams-surrealism, expressionism a la Kandinsky, and 20s and 30s American painting. Pollack's initial training took place under the American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton and indeed the emphasis in much American landscape painting can I think be detected in his interest in overall fields(although this is somewhat contested ground) and more significantly gave him concrete reasons to push back against the kind of realistic and explicitly narrative painting Benton espoused. More accepted is the combination of Surrealism and the idea of abstraction as a 'pure expression of feelings'. As early as 1911 Wassily Kandinsky had argued for abstract art as a way to convey emotion and sentiment independently of narrative content, most famously expressed in his famous analogy between painting and music. Mondrian espoused similar ideas, advocating the direct expression of "relationships" and therby a kind of painting that could represent feeling without reliance on naturalism. A little later, the Surrealists in Paris sought to express feeling without direct artistic intervention in a oddly similar way, through a kind of art-making that drew primarily on the unconcious mental processes and automatism. Yves Tanguy's dreamscapes are I think a good example of this (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/38/Mama%2C_Papa_is_Wounded%21.jpg). Moreover, important representatives of these trends were active in the United States in the 1940s-Piet Mondrian was in New York for the last four years of his life and the surrealists Arshile Gorky and Matta both lived in the United States. Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie Gorky's late works in particular(see for example The Liver is The Cock's Comb are a sort of useful example of how the impulses behind Mondrian and the Paris Surrealists could produce this kind of abstract painting reliant on overall pictorial effects and a kind of "automatic painting". So there were very good reasons for him to be doing what he did and once we set him in his historical context it becomes very clear why "flinging paint"*(a criticism, incidentally, that has been leveled at nearly every modern artist since Whistler) could be seen as a useful and productive artistic approach.
2: What institutional factors made him well-known?
Pollack was active in New York, of course, which helped a lot, as did his popularity with Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg. In particular, he fit into both these figure's ideas(but mainly Greenberg's) of a teleology of "modern painting" by which narrative and space were gradually subsumed into abstraction and the flatness of the pictorial plane. Pollack wasn't the only artist who became popular because of these ideas; Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko all had similar tendencies and were collected by MoMA(although Newman tended to benefit the most of these artists from Barr and MoMA). Nor was Barr the only museum director in New York who made these decisions; Peggy Guggenheim for instance was an early advocate of Rothko.
Here we are onto more difficult ground; the social history of postwar are is still a very young field. Part of the popularity was the way it answered cold war anxieties about communism; artists like Pollack could be viewed as paragons of individualism and artistic freedom because of their independent methods and desire to cultivate markedly different styles from each other and contrasted with the ostensibly collectivizing and undifferentiated 'social realism" sponsored by most Communist states. This is a large part of why the CIA promoted Abstract Expressionism overseas, although that doesn't explain its popularity within the United States. It also probably was at home in the postwar discourse on gender roles. The "New York School" was overwhelmingly male and most of the artists who were favored by it were male, and more than a few historians have detected in the public image surrounding it a kind of emphasis on virile and masculine painting-even going so far as to emphasize the idea that they compared painting and combat. Our public image of Pollack's studio practice in particular emphasizes the physicality of his method of painting. This has been read in line with the post-war emphasis on traditional gender norms found elsewhere in American culture.
*Incidentally, most of our evidence of his studio technique is that this was somewhat of a retorical gesture and he was actually very carefully controlling where his paint wound up.
