If there had been charts for painters, Jackson Pollock would likely have made it to the top. Millions have heard of ''Jack the Dripper,'' but only a fraction saw his pictures and realized his ''dripping technique'' had revolutionized modern pictorial art.

BASEL - If there had been charts for painters, Jackson Pollock would likely have made it to the top. Millions have heard of ''Jack the Dripper,'' but only a fraction saw his pictures and realized his ''dripping technique'' had revolutionized modern pictorial art.

Pollock's work shapes the core of a major Swiss show of abstract expressionist imagery known as ''Action Painting'' on view tfrom May 12.

Along with key samples of Pollock's art, the Beyeler Foundation Museum in suburban Riehen has assembled pictures and sculptures of 26 other artists, mostly Americans. More than 100 works are on display, loaned from museums and private collections in the United States, Europe and Israel. A few have such large formats that they had to be lifted into the building by cranes.

New museum director Sam Keller said the show makes plain that action painting is an ''international, even global art movement.''

He said some of the exhibits are rarely loaned or were even never shown. Transport costs and ''astronomical insurance premiums,'' especially for Pollock and others commanding many millions of dollars on the market, made the exhibition ''a very expensive affair,'' Keller said.

Pollock's ''November 7, 1950,'' on loan from New York's Museum of Modern Art, makes the cover of the exhibition catalog. Done in oil, enamel and aluminum on canvas, its shape is quite unusual - six times as wide as it is high.

His large-format paintings, up to almost 10m wide, are too fragile to travel. Instead, visitors may take a look at a 15m wide recent work by a Swiss artist, John Armleder, using oil, auto paint and other pigments. It's not part of the exhibition.

A famous photograph taken by the well-known Hans Namuth in 1950 gives viewers an idea of how Pollock created his paintings. It shows him gesturing and dancing around the borders of a canvas laid flat on the floor, splashing it with paint. Visitors can also watch Namuth's film of the artist at work.

''On the floor, I am more at ease,'' Pollock once said. ''I feel nearer, more a part of the painting since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.''

With the rhythm of his bodily movements, he defined the appearance of the paint on canvas, the exhibition catalog notes. So he did not leave the pictorial record of his gestures to chance.

The Pollock works on view cover his career between 1935-55. Highlights are numbered or just dated by him to avoid distracting the viewer from what he saw as an expression of his unconscious.

Since his younger years, Pollock had recurrent bouts of alcoholism. Despite some treatment during his years of intense creativity, he began to drink heavily again in 1951. Even later he did some strong paintings, but his health began to fail. He died in 1956 in a car crash at age 44.

He was survived by his wife, Lee Krasner, a painter herself who once described her husband as a ''living force.'' The catalog notes that Krasner produced her own most important work after the death of Jackson Pollock.'' Three of her pictures are on view. Krasner was a student of German-born Hans Hofmann, founder of a highly influential school of fine arts in New York, Hofmann emigrated before the Nazis seized power. Four of his paintings can be seen.

''In all probability, he was already experimenting with dripping and pouring paint on to the canvas even before his close friend Jackson Pollock,'' the catalog notes about Hofmann.

Along with other exhibits are four paintings by Dutch-born Willem de Kooning, whose work is also highly prized on the international art market. He is quoted as having once said that ''Pollock broke the ice.''

Kazuo Shiraga, the lone Japanese artist, is represented by two paintings. He had a laborious technique of his own, throwing lumps of paint on the canvas on the floor while hanging with his feet from a rope and then walking over it.

Visitors can also study an equally unusual approach to action painting _ a three-dimensional work by French-born Arman, known as an ''assemblage artist.'' The untitled work is from his ''Dirty Paintings'' series and features acrylic and paint tubes squeezed on canvas mounted on board.

''The action painters mastered what they held to be unique forms of self-expression, but their languages remain little understood by contemporary audiences,'' one catalog author, Jason Edward Kaufman, observed.

Ulf Kuester, curator of the exhibition, says that action painting requires visitors to be active viewers.

''Art that is reduced to the artist's persona, to gesture and materials, requires an active, committed viewer,'' he writes in the catalog.