Eyes in the Heat

In Eyes in the Heat, paint has weight as well as movement. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection describes a crust of colour pushed into broad, turning passages, with eyes appearing among them. These small suggestions of creatures make looking an unsettled exchange: the viewer searches the surface and encounters something that seems to return the gaze. Jackson Pollock painted the canvas in 1946. It measures 137.2 × 109.2 cm and belongs to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, where its medium is recorded as oil and alkyd enamel on canvas. ^[1]

A studio beside the creek

Pollock and Lee Krasner moved to Springs, near East Hampton, in November 1945. During 1946 he worked first in an upstairs bedroom, then in a barn relocated on the property; Krasner took over the bedroom studio. Their new surroundings supplied both working spaces and proximity to Accabonac Creek. When Pollock exhibited at Art of This Century from 14 January to 1 February 1947, the presentation distinguished the Accabonac Creek paintings made upstairs from the Sounds in the Grass group finished in the barn. That distinction gives the groups a practical studio history, without making the move itself a complete explanation of their different surfaces. ^[2]

Eyes in the Heat belongs to the seven Sounds in the Grass canvases. The Venice museum associates their lighter colour and natural references with the rural setting. Here Pollock squeezed paint from tubes and worked it with blunt tools. Pressure, smearing and the resistance of thick paint were active parts of making the network. A raised tube line and a stream poured through air can both describe movement, but the first also records direct engagement with a yielding surface. ^[1]

Weight, loops and surviving layers

A comparison with Shimmering Substance helps separate the possibilities within this group. MoMA describes that 1946 painting as tube paint manipulated into open loops, possibly with a palette knife or a finger. Its lighter palette and curling movement invite the museum's analogy with summer sunlight. At 76.3 × 61.6 cm, it is a compact painting whose loops approach real edges—a physical character that an illustration can obscure. MoMA’s description makes touch as relevant as colour to its effect. The question of whether a knife or finger shaped those loops also keeps the account appropriately open. MoMA's account of Shimmering Substance emphasises its departure from recognisable figures; the eyes in Pollock's other title keep that question open. ^[3]

Kirk Varnedoe distinguished the tight, knotted handling of Eyes in the Heat from the curling paint of Shimmering Substance and the scratched effects of Croaking Movement. Conservator Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro adds another way to understand such density: she includes Eyes in the Heat among works where openings preserve earlier paint as reference points in the finished composition. Earlier layers could remain participants in a painting's organisation. Density, then, need not mean that every previous decision has been buried. Attention can move between the accumulated surface and the small surviving intervals within it. ^[4]

This also changes how Pollock's writing about process can be read. Pepe Karmel points out that Eyes in the Heat was among the earlier paintings reproduced beside “My Painting” in Possibilities in winter 1947–48. That publication cannot be treated solely as an illustrated explanation of the newly developed poured canvases. Its discussion of hard surfaces, tools and impasto belongs partly to an existing history of contact and revision. ^[4]

Pollock's statement allowed for a period of recognising what had happened, followed by changes, even destruction of an image. His account joins absorbed work to subsequent judgement. In his interview with William Wright, dated late 1950 in the published transcript, he described control of paint flow through experience and a general sense of the result he wanted. These remarks help explain how an apparently improvised network could involve decisions made before, during and after a passage of painting. They offer no fixed recipe for this particular canvas, but they do give the viewer a reason to notice adjustment alongside momentum: a mark can be an answer to what is already there. ^[5]

What the orange paint establishes

The material history became more precise through the Venice study of eleven Pollocks dating from 1942 to 1947, conducted in 2013–15. Non-invasive FTIR spectroscopy identified an alkyd binder in orange paint in Eyes in the Heat. This places documented alkyd use before the previously established 1947 threshold; it does not identify every colour in Eyes, a particular manufacturer, or a pigment merely from its binder. Costanza Miliani's accompanying interview explains how a portable laboratory worked inside the museum. Complementary elemental and molecular investigations helped researchers distinguish materials and understand their distribution, providing information for conservation as well as painting history. The orange result makes 1946 an episode of material experiment in its own right. ^[6]

The published scientific chapter adds precision to the orange result: Raman spectroscopy identified chrome orange, while the analysed passage also contains lead white and barium sulphate, with alkyd as its binder. The chapter describes alkyd in black and yellow passages of Untitled, 1946, as possible. The earlier date therefore rests securely on Eyes in the Heat itself. ^[7]

A landscape that looks back

Omri Moses offers a philosophical reading of the eyes and the surrounding paint. He treats Sounds in the Grass as a passage towards landscape metaphor, with different senses brought into relation. In Eyes in the Heat, he asks whether the emerging eyes contemplate the mass of paint or seem to belong within nature itself. Their multiplication gives the spectator many possible points of encounter, without supplying one commanding viewpoint. This is a useful way of staying with the title's peculiar invitation: heat names a bodily sensation, while eyes name organs of sight. Moses's interpretation explores that overlap between sensation, landscape and human presence. It remains an interpretation, rather than a recovered statement of Pollock's intention. A reader can test its usefulness against the experience of being drawn into the network and repeatedly finding suggestions of a watcher inside it. ^[8]

An early public life

The 1947 exhibition already prompted debate about what Pollock's new abstraction meant. Clement Greenberg praised its movement beyond explicit ideographic imagery and its higher colour range. By 1950, Bruno Alfieri was citing Eyes in the Heat when arguing that suggestive titles should not dictate a picture's meaning. His provocative account described disorder while ultimately placing Pollock at the leading edge of contemporary art. These responses preserve an argument about abstraction, control and naming, rather than a story of unanimous rejection. The title could encourage recognition even as a critic insisted that the painting exceeded the ideas its words suggested. ^[9]

The painting acquired a European audience: it appeared in Peggy Guggenheim's collection exhibition at the 1948 Venice Biennale, which travelled to Florence and Rome in 1949. Varnedoe cautioned against treating the varied paintings of 1946 as inevitable steps towards a single later method. Eyes in the Heat rewards that pause in the story: its material weight and persistent eyes are subjects for attention. ^[2]