Raise the Hammer

Pollock never painted a good painting in his life. He was not a naive painter, as you say, but he was a talentless one. He trained under Thomas Hart Benton, but the work from that period shows that he was not able to fully master Benton's technique. In my opinion, anyone having such training who is unable to master such a simple, stylized technique has to be profoundly talentless, and is quite probably of below average intelligence. He explored expressionism, and his morose and permanently angry personality comes out in the ugly, gloomy paintings, along with his total inability to draw. He explored cubism and non-veristic surrealism -- methods of painting that require no artistic talent, and was as good or bad at such painting as anyone else. The abstract expressionist paintings express nothing at all. They follow the method of "automatic painting", which, according to the dogma of the time (based on erroneous psychological theories), release the subconscious and reveal deep sentiments. Actually, they are just pure, empty scribbles, and like all scribbles, completely meaningless.

It is an article of faith that Pollock is a genius and that his paintings express profound sentiments or ideas. There is not one shred of evidence to support this belief, and a mountain of evidence to contradict it. Pollock never said or did a single thing in his life that showed the spark of genius -- in any area of life, never mind art, but he did a great deal to show that he was an inarticulate, drunken, irascible, irresponsible, narcissistic, morose lout. He also was inconsiderate enough to murder the young Edith Metzger for no reason at all.

Pollock-worship is a faith-based religion.

Oh, by the way, this thing about old masters like Rembrandt letting pupils do all their work for them and taking all the credit is nonsense. Unlike the Andy Warhols and Damien Hirsts of today, they had rules; paintings produced in the studio entirely by pupils cost less than paintings made by pupils according to the master's design and with intervention from the master, and these in turn cost less than "autograph" works done mainly or entirely by the master. Furthermore, the pupils were not anyonymous, but upon graduation became masters in their own right, and some of them earned lasting fame.
Rembrandt taught his pupils to imitate his own technique and style very closely, and what with art dealers in the 17th and 18th century selling everything that looked vaguely Rembrandt-like as a "Rembrandt", it is no wonder that there is now uncertainty about some works.