There's a big difference between "artist who didn't have a deep knowledge of their art-form" and "artist who didn't follow an explicit system to memorize a bunch of rules to make their art".

Pollock is often regarded as pushing painting forward, for example

Thanks, I don't know enough about him - does that support my hypothesis or tear it down?

Pollock was obsessed with creating an art style that had no basis in any other style, something truly "original." He felt the abstract style he created fit that aim.

That being said, in some ways you could say that the splatter paintings he's known so well for are in fact influenced by all the art he studied and discarded along the way. They were definitely influenced by the principles of artistic design he learned, even if they looked different from what people were used to.

In my opinion, your hypothesis is supported, though maybe in a bit of a roundabout way.

Wait, why do you think Picasso didn't have deep knowledge? He studied both at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona & the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, for ~5 years before moving to Paris.

Borges was incredibly talented, but it's worth keeping in mind his dad was a writer too.

Good art very much relies on being exposed to lots of other good art first. I don't know that rote memorization is the best way to achieve that, but you definitely need that exposure.

Sorry, I must have expressed myself badly. I'm picking examples of people I think did/do have deep knowledge of their chosen mediums.

I don't think it's possible to have "good taste" without exposure to lots of examples, because I believe taste it culturally bound. Whether you do it explicity via a system, or on a more ad hoc basis, I think most artists need it.

It might be interesting to look at film, where the process is compressed into a couple of generations. I don't know it it will support my argument or not.

Ah, misread you then, thanks for clarifying.

I don't think film will look very different here - early film work was very much informed by theatrical tastes at the time, and then started to diverge as people figured out what else they could say in the language of film.

Fundamentally, all art exists in a cultural context. If you've ever taken an art history course, you've been hit over the head with that info a few times ;) And that means furthering/changing taste in a given field means being aware enough of the existing rules to deliberately choose which ones you're breaking, and why.

There are some (very few) artists who didn't have a formal grounding, but I'd argue that even they were steeped enough in cultural context to be informed by it. Even famous autodidacts like Grandma Moses did develop a love for art based on being exposed to a bunch of it.

(Fully recognizing that it's a somewhat tautological argument because it's kind of impossible to grow up in a society without being somewhat exposed to its predominant art forms)

Picasso was a hack. People often cite his "early masterpieces", but those pieces are pretty mid in the context of 19th c. painting.

I think that argument is that these artists did not memorized rules or previous pictures and then applied them. They did put a lot of effort into learning, but that is different claim. If you define "memorization" as "any learning of anything", then the word is kind of useless.