Is it possible for another show of Jackson Pollock (1912-56) to teach us anything new about the Dionysian artist who dripped and flung paint before dying in a drunken car crash? That is the question I asked myself as I headed up to see “No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper,” an exhibition of approximately 65 works that just opened at the Guggenheim. The short answer is a resounding “Yes!”

One of the problems with the last major Pollock retrospective, in 1998 at the Museum of Modern Art, was that the show’s sheer number of mediocre works, some of them huge, overwhelmed the artist’s masterpieces, many of them small. Pollock’s hand became tedious, and it seemed as if he had a great run from the late 1940s through the early 1950s, but that his career basically wrapped itself up long before he gave up painting for the bottle in 1954, and then two years later wrapped his car around a Long Island tree.

The MoMA show also made too much fuss about Pollock’s “pouring” technique – a method he downplayed and did not invent – and about the heroic, made-in-America scale of his floor works. Worse yet, so much attention surrounded the Hans Namuth photographs and film of the artist at work pouring paint (and the recreation of Pollock’s studio barn in the galleries) that the show’s circus stole center ring away from its art.Although the overreaching title of the Guggenheim’s show sounds more like an action thriller than an exhibition about an action painter, “No Limits, Just Edges” presents us with just the art. And much of the art is beautiful.

Curated and lovingly installed by Susan Davidson, the exhibition reprises some of the MoMA retrospective. But these familiar works only steer our attention back to pictures that were overlooked or overshadowed by the presence of Pollock’s floor-made behemoths. A gorgeous, dense, and intimate selection of small paintings on paper (from postcard-scale up to roughly 25 inches by 40 inches), “No Limits, Just Edges” presents us with a painter who was constantly experimenting and challenging himself. We see an artist who never lost his edge, and who had enormous range, inventiveness, and virtuosity. We also see an artist who, although he was influenced by any number of things – Native American art, Andre Masson, Surrealism, Kandinsky, Klee, Thomas Hart Benton, El Greco, Picasso, Marin, and Miro – was concerned first and foremost with creating not pastiches but, rather, with making “Pollocks.”

Generally when I think of Pollock I think of the large-scale works from the late 1940s. In the best of these fullfrontal linear explosions, figure and ground become paradoxically interchangeable, and you feel simultaneously spun into Pollock’s web, suspended in a free fall, and held spinning within a boundless energy.At the Guggenheim’s show I did not miss Pollock’s muralscale paintings. I was completely taken with the small works at hand.

The show is basically chronological: It begins with representational works completed during the mid 1930s, such as the watercolor “Harbor and Lighthouse” (c. 1934-38), when the artist was still under the spell of Benton, and moves quickly into the late 1930s, with inventive and self-assured copies after Old Masters, when Surrealism set Pollock free. But the exhibition is small enough, and the works close enough together that I was encouraged to revisit pictures that, though decades apart, inform, bounce off, and extend one another. And as I did so, Pollock’s voice became clearer.

Pollock seemingly drew from nearly everyone and everything and twisted it all beautifully on the page – or at least until he could twist it no more. One of the first works on view is “Untitled” (1939-40), a copy of a crucifixion. An expressionistic gouache on paper, it is an explosion of red, yellow, black, and blue that is reminiscent of Rouault. Nearby, we see obsessive doodles charged with shamanistic power and influenced by Picasso, primitive art, children’s art, and Masson. “Untitled” (1943), an ordered though indecipherable narrative work in three parts – black square with red figures, white circle with black lines, and cream-colored frame – feels linked to hieroglyphs, red-figure Greek pottery, Picasso, spinart, star-gazing, and signs gleaned from outer space.

The early drawings are evocative of ruins,ancient symbols,abstract cosmos, and battles between insect gods. They are usually dirty, hard-scrabbled, and tightly packed. They are almost always either overdone or underdone, yet most feel crazy enough to be just right.

“Untitled” (c. 1939-40), a colored pencil and crayon drawing, resembles a triangular pileup of figures and stars; three fish escape from the bottom of this maze. “Drawing With Two Signatures” (c. 1941) is a dense, confusing code-like page of tiny composite sketches – doodled masks, figures, animals, totems – that are fascinating for their sense of search, drive, and passion. “The Mask” (c. 1943), an impenetrable, gray constellation out of which a ghostlike head emerges, feels like an incantation.

In many of these works, Pollock is a mad scientist on the move between figuration and abstraction: Fast and furious, he starts fires, breeds monsters, and builds universes. None of this would matter, though, if he did not get his rectangles to feel open, fluid, and forceful. His volumetric forms twist within the rectangle in “Untitled” (c. 1943), a pen, ink, and colored-pencil line drawing. An animal figure’s legs swell like lobster claws at the center of a strange grouping of creatures, while feathery rocks at the drawing’s base soften the insanity of the gathering.

No matter what Pollock drew or painted (and these works, like most of Pollock’s pictures, all are equally drawings and paintings), he did so with verve and vigor. He brought every line and form to life. Sometimes those lines may struggle for their life on the page – as in “Abstract Painting” (1943), a childlike collage that feels as if it was abandoned just before it might have driven the artist mad – but there is life just the same.

By the time Pollock hit his stride, in the late 1940s, he was working on the floor, creating airy, calligraphic, lacy, and playful works. In these, arabesques are as commanding as they are graceful and space paradoxically compresses and explodes with equal force against the plane.

In “Number 4, 1948: Gray and Red” (1948), painted lines pool, become milky and translucent, and then whip like jagged livewires. In “Number 15” (1949), enamel and aluminum painted lines thrash as if swimming in the bowels of a furnace. In the white-on-black “Untitled” (c. 1948), a squid seems to swim among the stars.

These great late works are not rote or repetitive. They are simultaneously fire, storm, dance, and Eros. Each picture is an immersion and a gamble – the artist throwing himself and the viewer, all over again, into the fantasy and the flame.

Until September 29 (1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, 212-423-3500).