Jackson Pollock

Betty Parsons Gallery, New York
Dwight Ripley, Greenport, New York
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Christie's, New York, November 3, 1987, lot 15
Acquired by the present owner from the above

The late 1940s witnessed the emergence of the New York school of Abstract Expressionism as a historic movement that both celebrated the groundbreaking schools of Modernism and forged a uniquely independent departure into new territories of artistic expression.  Jackson Pollock gained recognition as a modern master largely due to his revolutionary drip paintings.  Pollock had spent two years formulating and evolving the drip paintings in the Long Island barn that was his studio and by 1949 the breakthrough technique was perfected.  Number 26, 1949, in its perfect balance between figuration and abstraction, abandon and control, is an example of Pollock’s assured command of his innovative technique.

Prior to moving to Long Island in 1945, the most apocryphal moment in Pollock’s career was the creation of the mural painting commissioned by his dealer, Peggy Guggenheim, for the entrance hall of her New York townhouse in 1943. Daunted by the large blank canvas and the importance of the commission, Pollock struggled for months to even begin the painting. Then in one day and a night, he completed Mural, a twenty-foot canvas that was his first purely "expressionist" abstract painting, with no figuration and completed with utter abandon and recklessness. Once in Long Island, the need to gesture and paint on a grand scale was answered by placing the canvas on the floor so Pollock could freely move around his chosen support. Yet even on his larger paintings, Pollock never restricted his arm or pigment to only the grand sweeping arc. His compositions also contained subtle pauses while the drip thinned to a delicate trickle or sprays that fanned across the work from a quick flick of the wrist or elbow. By 1949, Pollock’s control of his technique and pigment application was easily adaptable to different supports (paper, canvas or masonite), shifting palettes and varying scales.

Departing from the mural sized drip paintings of 1948, Pollock also created paintings in smaller formats that captured pulsating energy in a cohesive "all-over" composition on an intimate scale. In Number 26, 1949, Pollock presents the viewer with a rich but limited color palette of mainly black, red, and yellow.  The colors combine in both dense and frenetic splatter collisions, and the rhythms of the paint unify the canvas.  The thin skeins of paint weave among the more richly pooled areas, creating a network of oscillating speeds.  With Number 26, 1949, Pollock combined sinuous arcs and abrupt changes of direction with the same genius for linear facility and muscular presence as in his monumental mural-size paintings.  As Kirk Varnedoe noted in the 1998 retrospective of Pollock’s work at The Musuem of Modern Art in New York, "When the poured paintings did get underway, the manner arrived full-blown,…and in between, works of widely varying sizes and formats are remarkably coherent in manner….Gestures made within the compass of the wrist had to be translated into stretching sweeps at the maximum of the artist’s reach, and vice versa…Paint had to yield a similar line quality whether made to drizzle in toothpick thinness or thickened to hold together in broad ropes.  Hence the naturalness and spontaneity of making, and the 'life of its own' to which Pollock claimed to respond in each painting." (Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Jackson Pollock, 1998, p.50)

In his quest for spontaneity and freedom of expression, Pollock had been heavily influenced by the Surrealist artists.  Surrealism’s dreamlike emotive content and organic forms were seen as a tool for liberating an artist’s internal psyche, and the abstract figurations of Pollock’s work of the 1930s and 1940s abound in Surrealist references.  In Joan Miro’s, Peinture, from 1936, the projected simplified forms are spontaneous and never static, as Miro incorporates dynamic gestures as well as blots and splotches into the rhythms of his paintings. In his own work, Pollock struggled to infuse such subconscious content into his work as he called on his inner voice as the catalyst for creative expression.  Pollock was influenced by both the technique and content of Surrealist painters and attempted to meld them into a unique form of painterly abstraction. By the late 1940s, this fusion was largely complete yet traces of figuration, always a component of Surrealism, still subtly emerged in Pollock’s work. Number 26, 1949 retains faint traces of figuration in its contrapuntal composition, suggestively revealing hints of a form in motion. Although Pollock’s "drip paintings" initially seem to defy spatial illusion and press forward toward the picture plane, the layering of his skeins of paint and the arcs of his "moving" line implied a shallow sense of depth and volume. The black lines in Number 26, 1949 can suggest a dancing, sweeping figure which has much in common with the delicate sculptural forms of David Smith’s  Pillar of Sunday, 1945.  In both artists’ work, one can trace these vestiges of figuration to the influence of Surrealism, just as both are identified as artists for whom the articulation of form was closely linked to drawing: "drawing in space" for Smith and "drawing into painting" in the case of Pollock.