Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Pasiphae”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 142.6 x 243.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Finished just after Pollock’s first exhibition in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery, Art of This Century, Pasiphaë is the largest of the painter’s mythologically themed pictures of the mid-1940s. Originally named Moby Dick, the picture was retitled before it was exhibited in 1944 when James Johnson Sweeney, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, related the story of the Cretan princess Pasiphaë who gave birth to the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. The Minotaur had been a favorite motif of Picasso and of the Surrealists (Minotaure had been the name of their literary magazine from 1933 to 1939, for which Picasso had designed the first cover).

Here Pollock incorporates two sentinel-like standing figures at the left and right and a prostrate figure at center. Pollock weaves these figures into a complex field of arcane symbols and free-form abstraction, his own novel interpretation of the Surrealist practice of automatism, wherein the artist’s unconscious is used to organize composition.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Blue Poles″, Enamel and Aluminium Paint with Glass on Canvas, 1952, National Gallery of Australia

“Blue Poles” was first exhibited at Pollock’s solo show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1952 where it was titled “Number 11, 1952″. Pollock’s decision to forego conventional descriptive titles and simply number his paintings, including the year of their execution, began with his 1949 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Some paintings originally given number titles when they were first exhibited were later given more descriptive titles. For example, “Number 10, 1952″ became “Convergence”.

This is also the case with “Number 11, 1952″. The painting was first given the title “Blue Poles”, and dated separately as 1952, in the exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1954. Sidney Janis recalled clearly that the new title came from Pollock himself. Thereafter the painting is usually referred to as “Blue Poles”, although occasionally the earlier and late titles are combined as “Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952″.

Note: An Interesting discussion of Pollock’s actual painting of “Blue Poles’: http://nga.gov.au/International/Catalogue/Detail.cfm?IRN=36334&MnuID=2&GalID=1

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Naked man with a Knife”, Oil on Canvas, 1938-40, Tate Museum of Art, London

Pollock was beginning to find his own individual style when he made this work. The startlingly violent image of three interlocking figures was derived from a lost work by the Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco showing the fraternal struggle between Cain and Abel. Pollock’s exploration of the theme may reflect his interest in the archetypal myths explored in Jungian psychoanalysis. The subject may also refer to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, which engulfed Europe as America looked on with horror.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “The Key”, Oil on Linen, 1946, 150 x 208 cm., Art Institute of Chicago

“The Key” belongs to Jackson Pollock’s ‘Accabonac Creek’ series, named for a stream near the East Hampton property that he and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, purchased in late 1945. Marking a crucial moment in his evolution as an artist, this quasi-Surrealist painting was created on the floor of an upstairs bedroom and worked on directly from all sides.

Although there is a general suggestion of landscape, here the process of painting became primary, expressing the power of spontaneous action and chance effects. The resulting abstraction, with its expressive, gestural appearance, prefigured the all-over compositions of Pollock’s celebrated drip paintings, which debuted the following year.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Number 8”, 1949 Drip Period, Enamel and Oil on Canvas, Neuburger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase

In the 1949 painting “Number 8”, Jackson Pollock’s line of paint has the capacity to be everywhere at once, to serve the ends of both illusion and substance. The paint line functioned supremely well as the vehicle of a speed of light all-overness, creating the impression that Pollock’s large poured all-over paintings arrived at their structure both internally and immediately. Pollock’s delicate crusts, which achieved an infinitesimal layer of relief, had profound affinities with two related modernist achievements, the Analytic Cubism of Picasso and the late wall-sized Impressionism of Claude Monet.

Pollock’s encrusted, puddled, labyrinthine, and weblike surfaces are physically and erotically present, enticing the viewer into a relation in which his body, and not just his eyesight, directly confronts the abstract field. This relation, which is at least as close to the experience of architecture as it is to the tradition of seeing through or “into” an illusionistic painting, can be deceptive. By means of his interlaced trickles and spatters, Pollock created a fluctuating movement between a clearly definite surface and an illusion of indeterminate, but somehow, definitely shallow depth. This effect reminds viewers of what Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque arrived at with the facet-planes of their Analytical Cubist paintings.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “The She-Wolf”, 1943, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

In the early 1940s, Jackson Pollock, like many of his peers, explored primeval or mythological themes in his work. The wolf in the 1943 painting “The She-Wolf” may allude to the animal in the myth of Rome’s birth that suckled the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus.

However, “She-Wolf”came into existence because I had to paint it,” Pollock said in 1944. In an attitude typical of his generation, Jackson Pollock added, “Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.”

“The She-Wolf” was featured in Pollock’s first solo exhibition, at the Art of This Century gallery in New York in 1943. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the painting the following year, making it the first work by Jackson Pollock to enter a museum collection.