Landscape with Steer

Jackson Pollock made Landscape with Steer around 1936–37, combining lithographic printing and colour applied with an airbrush. MoMA identifies this impression as a lithograph with airbrushed lacquer additions, a gift of Lee Krasner Pollock, numbered 1186.1969. The composition measures 34.7 × 47.1 cm on a sheet of 40.4 × 58.1 cm. The edition record singles out this example for its added colour. ^[1]

A printed image and an individual sheet

MoMA also holds an impression catalogued simply as a lithograph, numbered 1259.1979. Its image measures 34.7 × 47.3 cm on a sheet of 40.2 × 58.1 cm. Those closely related measurements belong to a separate physical object. The museum estimates the edition at approximately two or three, describes it as unpublished, and identifies no printer. A small edition can still involve several distinct sheets: the title identifies their shared composition, while each accession record identifies a particular impression. Holding that distinction in mind makes the added colour easier to understand. The relationship between the two records is a relationship within printmaking, where an image can recur without every surviving sheet having precisely the same material history. Readers exploring Pollock’s prints encounter this distinction between a composition and the individual object on paper again. ^[2]

Lithography offers artists a way of translating drawing into a printed image. As the National Gallery of Art explains, the artist works with a greasy drawing material on a prepared flat stone or metal plate. Chemical treatment fixes the image; water and oily ink then behave differently across the drawn and undrawn areas. The image accepts ink, while the damp blank areas resist it. Pressure transfers the ink to paper. The drawing therefore reaches the reader through a printing surface. This helps explain why a lithograph can retain the immediacy of a drawn mark even though the sheet itself has passed through a press. Screenprinting uses a different mechanism: ink passes through the unblocked areas of a stretched screen. The two names describe distinct ways of making an image on paper, an essential distinction when reading accounts of Pollock’s varied printmaking. ^[3]

The airbrushed impression already occupied a clear place in the 1998 MoMA retrospective catalogue. Its caption calls it Untitled [Landscape with Steer] and describes airbrushed enamel over lithograph, giving the catalogue raisonné number OT 1065. The bracketed descriptive title helps readers recognise the subject across publications. More significantly, the caption’s ordering of the materials makes the additional operation explicit: colour has been applied over a lithographic image. This provides a useful way to think about the sheet’s individuality. Printing supplies a repeatable foundation; intervention after printing gives this impression its own further history. The catalogue also traces a practical setting for such experiments. Its chronology records Pollock and his brother Sande preparing posters, banners and a float for a May Day celebration in Siqueiros’s workshop in 1936. ^[4]

The West and the workshop

MoMA’s 2015–16 collection-survey label places this work among twelve lithographs Pollock made around 1934–37. Its label describes loose gestures, washes and scratches, connecting the Western subject to his upbringing. The museum’s later course text also draws attention to Thomas Hart Benton’s Regionalist influence and the romance of Pollock’s Western identity. Here a recognisable animal and landscape coexist with experiments in handling. MoMA says he may have learned airbrushing from David Alfaro Siqueiros; that qualification preserves the difference between a documented association and certainty about a particular lesson. ^[1]

Pollock’s own account of the West gives that subject a more particular resonance. In a questionnaire published in Arts and Architecture in February 1944, he described a continuing attachment to the land’s broad horizontal extent, while explaining why he preferred the intensity of New York. He also treated his training with Benton as both a lasting introduction to Renaissance art and something against which he later reacted. These are the artist’s retrospective explanations, several years after the lithograph. They suggest that place and training remained active questions for him. In the same interview he rejected the idea that modern painting should become an isolated national enterprise. A Western subject could belong to an American painter who valued artistic exchange across borders. Subject matter and artistic allegiance need not fit into a single geographical category. ^[5]

The Whitney’s 2020 exhibition Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 placed Landscape with Steer within that exchange. Its wall label identifies the airbrushed lacquer impression from MoMA and describes Pollock as an early participant in Siqueiros’s New York Experimental Workshop in 1936. The group produced temporary art for political events. Its materials and methods included stencils, spraying and several ways of applying fluid paint. That setting gives the airbrush a social as well as a technical history: experiments happened among artists making things together for public occasions. The label reads the lithograph as evidence of Pollock absorbing those methods early. Within the exhibition, this small work on paper helped connect the history of American modernism to Mexican artists’ practical innovations. Its value in that argument lies in the surviving operation on the sheet, alongside the account of the workshop where unconventional application was encouraged. ^[6]

Experiment without a predetermined destination

Robert Storr offers a useful limit to the story in his essay for Jackson Pollock: New Approaches. Writing in 1999, he identified this work and Figures in a Landscape as the only then-known examples of Pollock’s immediate use of Siqueiros’s experimental techniques. He also emphasised how much Pollock’s subsequent attention turned towards Orozco. Storr’s account makes the interval between learning a method and developing an individual practice consequential. Airbrushing a print was a concrete early application; it did not mean that every workshop possibility immediately transformed Pollock’s paintings. The distinction allows Landscape with Steer to remain an experiment with its own scale, medium and subject. Its historical interest grows when we allow the artist’s choices to branch, pause and change. A technique can be available before an artist finds reasons to use it extensively. ^[7]

Bernice Rose’s Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting supplies another way into this early work. Her argument centres on the exchange between line and painterly effects across Pollock’s practice. She describes his early art as grappling with the demands of linear form, space, volume and surface, with drawing repeatedly helping to organise the result. Applied as a general framework, her account invites attention to what different kinds of marks can do together. A printed line can describe a subject; a wash can establish a broader tonal area; a later application can change how those elements relate. These are different pictorial tasks within one object. The framework also makes room for paper as a place where artistic problems are worked through. For readers following Pollock’s drawings alongside his prints, it offers a connection based on the activity of making marks and organising a surface. ^[8]