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Lot Essay
Jackson Pollock's Untitled, 1944, is a work of mixed media consisting of gouache, brush and ink, colored pencil, and sgraffito on paper. Untitled is not a study for a future painting but, rather, a notation of ideas, a key transitional work, and a rare view into Pollock's unconscious mind. "These works demonstrate Pollock's developing and wide-ranging imagination, his ability to adapt the innovations of others to his own purposes, and his exuberant willingness to violate the conventions of traditional media for expressive effect in works of a smaller scale than his paintings" (F.V. O'Connor, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works, Vol. 4, New Haven, 1978).
Pollock's style during the 1940s is marked by the development of three key methods: all-over drawing, automatic drawing to elicit unconscious imagery, and an attempt at obscuring or veiling this imagery. In Untitled each of these methods is equally present and they are all interdependent. Images are fused until they are almost indistinguishable and the dense compaction of shapes gives the impression that all available space has been filled even in the areas at the top and bottom where the composition fails to reach the edges of the paper.
Like other New York artists at the time, especially Gorky, Motherwell, and Baziotes, Pollock was also influenced by the ideas and practices of the European surrealists. "The importance of Pollock's discovery of automatic drawing cannot be overstressed. Automatic drawing released the images in his imagination to his hand, and enabled his hand to free him from dependence on those images" (B. Rose, Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1980). Drawing's affinity with the mind has long given it a capacity to evoke the speed of thought -the sudden impulse or flash of inspiration. This connection is clearly evident in automatic drawing, a practice developed by the surrealists as a means to visually express the unconscious with as little interference as possible. The pronounced influence of a type of unconscious automatism in the composition of Untitled can be seen in the figures' free-flowing lack of symbolic reference.
Untitled, like other Pollock drawings from this period, is a "transformed mythology, a narrative scene of the artist's more private fantasies" (C. L. Wysuph, Jackson Pollock: Psychoanalytic Drawings, Horizon, New York, 1970). Yet the allegorical content unconsciously revealed is informed by a type of violence in which linear patterning and chiaroscuro rhythms overcome or veil the imagery. The inter-relationship of dissimilar and opposing elements creates visual tension as plasticity gives way to fluidity and non-representational abstraction. Pollock's predilection for interwoven, linear surface forms and centrifugal motion is at the fore. Untitled's aggressively frontal linear screen leads to an infinite but not pictorially recessional space, implied behind the image through breaks in the linear network. Although we can recognize some figures like eyes in Untitled, it is the abstract qualities of these figures that are emphasized. In this way, Pollock engages in the process of abstraction through one of obstruction.
Untitled is a good example of the way in which Pollock's Surrealist-period drawings capture the spectrum of the artist's thought and the extensive, torturous evolution of his technical dexterity. In Untitled we see Pollock combining European and contemporary American influences to suggest an unfiltered language that is uniquely his own.
Pollock's style during the 1940s is marked by the development of three key methods: all-over drawing, automatic drawing to elicit unconscious imagery, and an attempt at obscuring or veiling this imagery. In Untitled each of these methods is equally present and they are all interdependent. Images are fused until they are almost indistinguishable and the dense compaction of shapes gives the impression that all available space has been filled even in the areas at the top and bottom where the composition fails to reach the edges of the paper.
Like other New York artists at the time, especially Gorky, Motherwell, and Baziotes, Pollock was also influenced by the ideas and practices of the European surrealists. "The importance of Pollock's discovery of automatic drawing cannot be overstressed. Automatic drawing released the images in his imagination to his hand, and enabled his hand to free him from dependence on those images" (B. Rose, Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1980). Drawing's affinity with the mind has long given it a capacity to evoke the speed of thought -the sudden impulse or flash of inspiration. This connection is clearly evident in automatic drawing, a practice developed by the surrealists as a means to visually express the unconscious with as little interference as possible. The pronounced influence of a type of unconscious automatism in the composition of Untitled can be seen in the figures' free-flowing lack of symbolic reference.
Untitled, like other Pollock drawings from this period, is a "transformed mythology, a narrative scene of the artist's more private fantasies" (C. L. Wysuph, Jackson Pollock: Psychoanalytic Drawings, Horizon, New York, 1970). Yet the allegorical content unconsciously revealed is informed by a type of violence in which linear patterning and chiaroscuro rhythms overcome or veil the imagery. The inter-relationship of dissimilar and opposing elements creates visual tension as plasticity gives way to fluidity and non-representational abstraction. Pollock's predilection for interwoven, linear surface forms and centrifugal motion is at the fore. Untitled's aggressively frontal linear screen leads to an infinite but not pictorially recessional space, implied behind the image through breaks in the linear network. Although we can recognize some figures like eyes in Untitled, it is the abstract qualities of these figures that are emphasized. In this way, Pollock engages in the process of abstraction through one of obstruction.
Untitled is a good example of the way in which Pollock's Surrealist-period drawings capture the spectrum of the artist's thought and the extensive, torturous evolution of his technical dexterity. In Untitled we see Pollock combining European and contemporary American influences to suggest an unfiltered language that is uniquely his own.