Blue (Moby Dick)

Jackson Pollock’s Blue (Moby Dick) brings a suggestive literary name to a small object. Dated about 1943, it is made with gouache and ink on fiberboard and measures 48 × 60.5 centimetres. It belongs to the Ohara Museum of Art in Kurashiki, Japan, accession 1110 (I-A・141). Its modest dimensions invite attention to a concentrated encounter between colour and drawing. ^[1]

Blue space and restless lines

Melville scholar Elizabeth Schultz, as quoted by Adam Mellion in 2025, describes an intense blue ground, long lines sweeping across the lower area and jagged black and white marks suggesting an agitated sea. She compares its mixture of organic and geometric forms to Miró. Her reading offers a way into the picture through competing directions of movement: outward across the blue and back towards the clustered forms. ^[2]

The relationship between line and colour has a broader place in Pollock’s work. In Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting, Bernice Rose argues that his early paintings bring graphic structure into tension with the physical and spatial effects of paint. A line can establish a figure, then become an independent movement across the surface; a coloured interval can function as background or acquire the force of a shape. Rose’s framework helps explain why recognition need not settle into a stable scene. Applied cautiously to Blue, it encourages attention to the work that marks perform as well as to the things they might resemble. The blue may prompt thoughts of water or distance while remaining a field against which other colours and lines act. Drawing and painting become interdependent ways of organising attention. ^[3]

In a 1944 questionnaire, Pollock named Picasso and Miró as the artists he most admired. His statement provides context for the formal comparison with Miró, while leaving particular borrowings open. ^[4]

A title with an unsettled history

Mellion reports that Ellen Landau consulted the 1978 catalogue raisonné and found the first documented public use of Blue (Moby Dick) at MoMA in 1967. He also reports her statement that Pollock’s authorship of the title is unknown. This reported search does not prove that no earlier name existed. Mellion brings together conflicting recollections of Pollock’s reading, from doubts about how much he read to memories of repeated engagement with Melville. Neither certainty that he knew the novel thoroughly nor certainty that he never read it follows. ^[2]

The distinct 1943 canvas now called Pasiphaë was originally called Moby Dick. William Rubin recounts that Peggy Guggenheim disliked that name and James Johnson Sweeney proposed the replacement during a studio visit. The painting itself did not change. Rubin treats this as evidence of an indirect, metaphorical relationship between image and name, while resisting the sweeping conclusion that Pollock cared little about titles. The episode gives Blue a useful companion: names can open associations without supplying a scene-by-scene explanation. It does not establish that Pollock transferred the abandoned name to the smaller work, or that the two pictures express an identical programme. ^[4]

Schultz also discusses Blue (Moby Dick) in her essay on T. L. Solien’s response to Melville. She considers an association with the novel likely, but makes a separate and explicit distinction: there is no evidence that Pollock’s 1952 Blue Poles refers to Moby-Dick. Solien subsequently made his own work called Blue Poles, engaging with both Pollock and the novel. These are three distinct objects. Their overlapping names show how a later artist can bring an earlier painting into a new literary conversation. That later conversation belongs to the history of interpretation; it cannot retrospectively supply Pollock with a documented intention. Schultz’s argument remains valuable precisely when its level of certainty is preserved: an informed Melville association for Blue, alongside a clear boundary around what is known about the other Pollock painting. ^[5]

Why the date is approximate

Older publications can place the work later. Francis V. O’Connor’s 1967 MoMA catalogue captions Blue (Moby Dick) as 1946, with the year in parentheses, and describes gouache and ink on composition board. It names the Ohara Art Museum as the collection. Readers encountering that date are therefore seeing a genuine stage in the painting’s cataloguing history. The older caption is useful evidence of how the object was identified at the time, even though its dating has been superseded. ^[6]

By the 1998 MoMA catalogue, the caption and illustration index both place the work around 1943. The caption records gouache and ink on fiberboard, 48 × 60.5 centimetres, in the Ohara Museum of Art. The earlier dating was therefore established well before the recent institutional record. Approximation remains part of the identification: the evidence supports about 1943, rather than a particular month or a securely documented sequence of studio events. ^[7]

That earlier placement also encourages a fuller view of Pollock’s development. Kirk Varnedoe’s 1998 essay challenges accounts that force the artist’s work into a predetermined historical direction. His discussion of Greenberg exposes the distance between a critic’s expectations and the paintings that actually emerged. For Blue, this offers a useful caution against treating an early work chiefly as a promise of the famous poured canvases. Its particular scale, medium and uncertain associations deserve attention within their own circumstances. ^[7]

From collecting history to the museum

The institutional provenance record lists Robert Elkon Gallery in New York and Tokutaro Yamamura before the Ohara Museum’s acquisition in 1964 through Minami Gallery, Tokyo. This establishes a collecting history connecting New York and Japan, while leaving intervals unfilled. The record, citing the 2011 Ohara catalogue, reports labels on the reverse of the frame connected with MoMA’s 1998 exhibition and Tate’s 1999 presentation. These extend its public history beyond the permanent collection. ^[1]

The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo included the work in Jackson Pollock: A Centennial Retrospective, held from 10 February to 6 May 2012. Its checklist places Blue in the section covering engagement with modern art in 1942–1946, and repeats the approximate date, materials, dimensions and Ohara collection. ^[8]

On the same checklist page, Blue appears alongside Composition with Pouring II, an oil on canvas dated 1943, as well as subsequent works in ink and gouache and a sequence of prints. The exhibition’s grouping brings several approaches together within these years of experiment. It gives the reader a more varied context than a career defined by a single celebrated technique. A gouache need not serve as a rehearsal for an oil painting simply because it belongs to the same period: the checklist presents Blue as an exhibited work in its own right. ^[8]