At Daniel Miller's general store in Springs, NY, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock talk with Tino Nivola, a new arrival at the artist colony that began to sprout around the Pollocks' Long Island village in the late 1940s. Nivola would eventually become a celebrated sculptor and muralist. Read more: rare-unpublished/#ixzz26FZOtOOv rare-unpublished/#ixzz26FZOtOOv

In August 1949, Life’s five million readers were confronted with a two-and-a-half-page spread, in both black-and-white and color, under a headline that turned a statement Greenberg had made about Pollock into a deliberately provocative question: “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”

Unpublished. Despite moving out of the city to live on a farm near the ocean, it's hard to say that nature was an inspiration for Pollock's paintings, which were so abstract that their only apparent source was the artist's subconscious. Still, nature found its way into his paintings in the form of sand (which this unpublished Holmes photo shows Pollock gathering) and other organic materials that the artist routinely applied to his canvas along with his paints. Read more: rare-unpublished/#ixzz26FZYo9eE rare-unpublished/#ixzz26FZYo9eE

One of the inspirations for Pollock's action paintings was the sand painting of Navajo Indian artists, a ritual involving the careful spilling of sand on a flat surface to create intricate forms and figures. In this Martha Holmes picture published in the 1949 LIFE story, Pollock pours sand along with paint onto the canvas. Pollock would use sand, crushed glass, metal fragments, and other materials, including the cigarette ash from his own lips, to add texture to his work. Read more: rare-unpublished/#ixzz26FZqGrtM rare-unpublished/#ixzz26FZqGrtM

Today, a painting from Pollock's drip period might go for $100 million. Pollock's local grocer, Daniel Miller (left) paid the artist himself (in doorway) a lot less for the Pollock original hanging in his store. (In the next room, Lee Krasner can be seen chatting with another local artist, Tino Nivola.) Visiting merchants unfamiliar with Pollock's non- representational style would ask Miller what the painting depicted. He would respond that it was an aerial view of Siberia. inShare26