Chiefly concerned with tracing Pollock's artistic influences, with who and what shaped his work. Adams argues that the most important influences were filtered through his first and most significant mentor, Thomas Hart Benton. Through Benton, the teacher who provided him with his first serious instruction, Pollock absorbed elements of Synchromism, modernism, Jungian symbolism, compositional practice, creating movement, the manipulation of space and volume, the use of colour. What Adams really succeeded in interesting me in is Benton. about whom I knew absolutely nothing and about whose work I would now like to know more.