Gothic

Jackson Pollock’s Gothic holds the human figure at the edge of recognition. MoMA’s account identifies suggestions of faces and hands among limbs that swing or jut through a densely organised composition. Black lines give the painting an architectural framework, while the bodies remain difficult to separate. Painted in oil on canvas in 1944, it measures 215.5 × 142.1 centimetres: a vertical work a little over seven feet high and about four feet eight inches wide. The museum records it as the bequest of Lee Krasner, accession number 533.1984. ^[1]

Figures and interlacing lines

Picasso offers a useful way into this restless organisation. MoMA’s gallery label for its 2015–16 Pollock survey reports that Pollock told a critic he had based the composition on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907. The museum connects the two through clustered figures and arching forms. This reported connection leaves individual marks open to interpretation. The black framework and residual bodies give a reader concrete points of comparison without requiring a single story to emerge from them. ^[1]

The Musée national Picasso-Paris placed Pollock’s years before the great poured paintings within a sustained dialogue with Picasso in its 2024 exhibition. Its introduction stresses Pollock’s encounter with Guernica and the 1939 MoMA Picasso retrospective, particularly the hybrid figures of the 1930s. That setting helps explain why a painting such as Gothic can be both strongly figurative and hard to decipher. The human form had become material for transformation, capable of carrying force without remaining anatomically complete. In this curatorial account, the earlier paintings have their own artistic and intellectual complexity. Approaching Gothic through that framework keeps attention on the problems Pollock was working through in 1944, when the relationship between expressive figures and informal painted structures was still open. ^[2]

Pepe Karmel gives the Picasso comparison a more particular history. His note in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches traces the Demoiselles association to a remark by Clement Greenberg recorded in Judith Cousins’s memorandum of 26 June 1981. He also points to the interwoven contours of Picasso’s Three Women of 1908 and suggests a route through Thomas Hart Benton’s teaching. These are related possibilities: Pollock’s study of Picasso could overlap with compositional ideas transmitted by his former teacher. Karmel’s discussion does not establish one exclusive source. ^[3]

Bernice Rose’s account of Pollock’s early work makes the instability of the figures easier to understand. She describes a continuing negotiation between drawing and the physical presence of paint. A line can define a body, then become part of an organisation extending across the surface; the intervals around a figure can acquire an activity comparable to the figure itself. Applied to the question raised by Gothic, this provides a useful reading strategy. Follow a contour long enough to recognise a possible body, then consider how it participates in the surrounding pattern. Recognition and uncertainty can coexist. Rose’s argument concerns Pollock’s broader development, so it should not be treated as a reconstruction of this canvas’s making. It does, however, explain why searching only for separate people leaves much of the painting’s organisation unaccounted for. The same lines can carry figurative suggestions and hold the painted field together. ^[4]

After Mural

Kirk Varnedoe connected Gothic closely with Mural, seeing it as a later development from that composition. In his comparison, Gothic has a more heavily worked surface and more balanced rhythms, together with a renewed sense of Picasso’s construction. This makes the relationship more interesting than a simple passage from figures towards abstraction: Pollock could take up a previous invention and reorganise it under different pressures. Varnedoe also mentions brief, obscure notes suggesting that Gothic might have been envisaged within a larger triptych. That remains a possibility about its conception; it does not establish a completed three-part painting or identify missing companions. ^[5]

The comparison with Mural also needs the benefit of later technical research. Getty’s 2014 conservation account found a rapidly applied initial composition followed by many additions over paint that had already dried. The researchers concluded that days or weeks separated some painting sessions. Their findings allow speed and sustained revision to belong to the same work. For a reader comparing Mural with Gothic, this matters: a difference between freer and more laboured effects does not by itself tell us how quickly either painting was completed. The technical evidence concerns Mural specifically. It supplies no equivalent sequence of layers or working sessions for Gothic. ^[6]

An early advocate and a changing audience

Gothic had a public life before Pollock’s poured paintings became famous. Francis V. O’Connor’s chronology records its inclusion in Cincinnati Art Museum’s forty-ninth annual exhibition, The Critics’ Choice of Contemporary American Painting, from 10 March to 8 April 1945. Greenberg selected it, and Art of This Century lent it. The choice documents his advocacy for this particular canvas. From 5 to 23 January 1948 it appeared among seventeen paintings in Pollock’s first solo show at Betty Parsons Gallery, alongside Full Fathom Five and Cathedral. It returned in the Sidney Janis Gallery retrospective, 15 Years of Jackson Pollock, from 28 November to 31 December 1955. These successive settings changed its company: an individual critic’s selection became an encounter with recent work, then a place within a career survey. The exhibition record lets us follow that change without assuming that every review of a show described Gothic itself. ^[7]

One review did address it directly. Writing about the Parsons exhibition in January 1948, Greenberg judged Gothic strong while preferring the stylistic coherence and harmony of Pollock’s newest paintings. He also noted that this was its first New York showing. His enthusiasm had room for distinctions between canvases he valued. In December 1955 Leo Steinberg responded to the Janis retrospective by treating Gothic as a fresh synthesis that Pollock subsequently broke apart again. Read together, the two critics give it different positions in the developing work: Greenberg measured it against recent achievements, while Steinberg used it to describe invention followed by renewed disruption. Neither response fixes the painting as a failed preliminary stage. Both make its particular arrangement of forces relevant to how Pollock’s changing art was understood. ^[8]

The title and the collection

The word Gothic also belonged to Greenberg’s critical vocabulary. Varnedoe explains that his usage linked emotional expressionism with the pressures of modern capitalist society, within a historical outlook shaped by Marxist debates. That category should be distinguished from an explanation of this painting’s subject. It provides no documented church, window or religious intention for Pollock’s title. ^[5]

Its arrival at MoMA belongs to another chapter. Varnedoe and Karmel describe the museum’s 1980 agreement with Krasner to acquire seven paintings through a combination of purchases and gifts. Gothic was an additional promised gift within that agreement and became museum property in 1984. Its acquisition therefore followed its creation by four decades. The history joins Krasner’s stewardship to the museum’s effort to represent Pollock across his career, preserving this early painting within a collection spanning his career. ^[3]