Pollock's radical methods and growing reputation quickly caught the attention of the mass media. In August 1949, Life magazine ran a feature story posing the question: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The text was alternately mocking and respectful. But Arnold Newman's photograph of the painter dressed in black denim, lounging against a colorful abstract canvas with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, created an indelible image of Pollock as the quintessential modern artist: a working-class rebel instead of an effete aesthete.