Croaking Movement

A white line in Jackson Pollock’s Croaking Movement can give a misleading account of its making. Conservator James Coddington explains that the bold white passages, apparently cut through colour, were actually squeezed from a tube onto earlier paint. Finer marks really were scraped out, apparently with a brush handle, before the heavier white additions. Removal and addition produce related effects, letting a new layer seem to disclose an older one. That difference gives the painting an unusually absorbing surface history: the mark that looks like an opening can be fresh material laid on top. ^[1]

Painted in 1946, the oil on canvas measures 137 × 112 centimetres. It belongs to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where its accession number is 76.2553 PG 148. ^[2]

A painting within Sounds in the Grass

Croaking Movement appeared in Pollock’s exhibition at Art of This Century in New York, held from 14 January to 1 February 1947. Francis V. O’Connor’s exhibition history places it among seven paintings grouped as Sounds in the Grass, alongside Eyes in the Heat, Shimmering Substance, Earth Worms, The Blue Unconscious, Something of the Past and The Dancers. The exhibition also contained the separate eight-work Accabonac Creek group, including The Key, and Mural. These groupings give the painting a particular historical company; they do not establish a single recipe or uninterrupted painting session for all seven canvases. ^[3]

The relationship between the two groups may reach beneath the surface. Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro suggests that Croaking Movement embellishes colourful underpainting resembling the Accabonac Creek works, especially The Key. Resemblance remains the operative idea: her account proposes a relationship between kinds of painting, without identifying a concealed version of The Key. ^[1]

O’Connor also records the painting at La Strozzina in Florence in 1949, the Museo Correr in Venice in 1950 and Tendances actuelles at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1955. His lists identify it as Sounds in the Grass [Croaking Movement], showing the group title being used for this individual painting. They do not document all seven canvases travelling together. ^[3]

Drawing with a material that has weight

Bernice Rose’s account of Pollock’s development offers a useful way into the tension between line and thick paint. She describes an artist drawn both to graphic organisation and to the physical presence of a painted surface. In her reading of the earlier work, squeezed paint could perform the organising work of drawing while remaining emphatically material. Areas between linear figures could become active shapes themselves, exchanging the roles of figure and background. This framework asks us to attend to what a line does: whether it describes a boundary, binds scattered passages together or becomes an independent accent of colour. It also keeps abstraction from becoming a simple test of whether we can discover a recognisable object. Rose is proposing a formal relationship, rather than supplying a key to a particular hidden subject here. ^[4]

Technical evidence gives that discussion a firmer material footing. A 2020 study lists Croaking Movement as oil paint identified through non-invasive investigation, with brushwork, squeezing and smearing among its applications. The authors describe the Sounds in the Grass paintings as surfaces worked with utensils, pushing and spreading paint into pronounced texture. Their comparative table separates Croaking Movement from Circumcision, where brushwork and dripping are recorded, and from Eyes in the Heat, where alkyd was identified in orange paint. Even within 1946, gesture, texture and paint chemistry need to be considered separately. The table records principal findings and applications; it is not an exhaustive inventory of every substance present. ^[5]

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s account of its 2013–15 research places Croaking Movement within a group of eleven paintings dating from 1942 to 1947. That range allowed investigators to compare changing methods across several years, connecting the appearance of the surface with the materials used to build it. The museum describes Croaking Movement and Eyes in the Heat as transitional works made with oils squeezed directly from tubes into thick impasto. Its discussion links new paint types with the possibilities of later pouring. The early alkyd finding concerns orange in Eyes in the Heat; no alkyd identification is reported for Croaking Movement. For this painting, the useful distinction is between manipulating substantial paint against the support and allowing a liquid line to travel through the air. The word “transitional” describes its place within a changing practice; it cannot by itself tell us the order, duration or tools of every intervention. ^[6]

Two revealing companions

Eyes in the Heat offers the closest comparison in the Venice collection. Its museum text describes colour squeezed from tubes, then pushed and smeared with blunt implements into a textured crust. Broad movements carry the gaze around the canvas, while the eyes suggested by its title emerge among the paint. The account associates the lighter palette and nature-related themes with Pollock’s move to rural East Hampton. This is useful context for the group’s sensibility, but its particular imagery belongs to Eyes in the Heat. A comparison becomes more revealing when we preserve those differences: a shared interest in vigorous surface manipulation can coexist with different relationships between paint and suggested creatures. The companion painting’s interpretation supplies no reason to turn Croaking Movement into a literal picture of a frog or a documented imitation of animal sounds. ^[7]

Shimmering Substance, now at the Museum of Modern Art, provides another point of comparison. MoMA describes its tube-applied paint as subsequently manipulated into open loops, possibly with a palette knife or a finger. The uncertainty about the implement matters: a published suggestion should retain its tentative character even when the resulting effect is clearly described. MoMA emphasises the painting’s nonrepresentational character and reads its light and nature associations as a possible response to East Hampton. Taken together, those observations make the series more interesting than a collection of interchangeable demonstrations. The same broad practice of handling thick colour could generate an independent abstract surface, and its title could invite a sensation of light without requiring a pictured landscape. That possibility leaves room for the other paintings to establish their own kinds of movement. ^[8]

Change, resistance and the later poured paintings

Pollock’s own statement My Painting, published in Possibilities in winter 1947–48, describes an active relationship with an evolving picture. He explains his preference for a hard wall or floor because it provides resistance, and the ease of moving around a canvas on the ground. His tools and materials include sticks, trowels, knives, fluid paint and heavy impasto. He also describes a period of getting to know the painting and his willingness to change or destroy an image as it develops. This is a general account made after Croaking Movement, rather than a record of its individual stages. Its value lies in the room it gives to revision and responsiveness. The artist’s account accommodates both fluidity and weight, both sustained contact with a resistant surface and a changing assessment of what has appeared. ^[9]

Kirk Varnedoe, writing in 1998, cautions against treating the dense Sounds in the Grass paintings as an inevitable route into the poured works of 1947. He finds backward-looking elements in their trowelled and incised surfaces, including the writing-like marks of Croaking Movement. In his argument, the distance separating these pictures from works such as Full Fathom Five and Sea Change is considerable. Those later paintings combine pouring with previously built compositions, suggesting a more complicated history than a technique simply arriving fully formed. This is a critical judgement about development, not a verdict that the earlier work failed. It encourages us to give Croaking Movement its own duration: a painting with problems and solutions particular to its thick surface, rather than an illustration inserted between two supposedly inevitable career stages. ^[10]