An influx of influence across the border

JACKSON POLLOCK’S BEST-KNOWN influences are greats of European modernism like Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. But often overlooked is the artist’s time at New York City’s Experimental Workshop, founded in 1936 by David Alfaro Siqueiros, who along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco led the postrevolution Mexican muralism movement. As an impressionable young painter there, Pollock was exposed to the techniques that would shape his signature “drip paintings” more than a decade later.

A new exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Vida Americana,”