The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle

Jackson Pollock’s The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle belongs to the Centre Pompidou, which dates it [1943]. Painted in oil on canvas, it measures 109.5 × 104 cm: an almost square format. Frank K. Lloyd gave the painting to the French national collection in 1980; its inventory number is AM 1980-66. ^[1]

Figures in motion

In Olivier Michelon’s account for the Pompidou, Picasso’s example meets the interests of the Surrealists exiled in America during the war. Automatism offered Pollock a way to release forms from rigid geometry. The museum identifies dancing shapes, a feathered head, a dagger and a crescent, associating them with Indigenous American ritual. Michelon also reproduces Pollock’s 1944 explanation that such references arose from early enthusiasms and memories, without deliberate intention. This is an interpretive account of Pollock’s imagery, rather than documentation of a particular community’s ceremony. Its force lies in the combination of bodily movement and suggestive signs: the painting invites recognition while leaving the relations between its actors unsettled. ^[1]

The earlier The Moon Woman is a separate painting, dated 1942, in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Its much taller canvas measures 175.2 × 109.3 cm. The Venice museum places the recurring moon-woman subject within a wider interest in mythic figures and the unconscious. It also mentions Baudelaire’s prose poem Favors of the Moon, while carefully allowing that Pollock’s connection may have been to the period’s general enthusiasm for French Symbolism. A shared subject therefore need not imply a single literary script. The moon woman could carry associations across several paintings without becoming a character whose successive actions must be read like chapters in a story. The earlier work offers a useful companion to the Paris painting, with a related imaginative world and a substantially different format. ^[2]

The Musée national Picasso-Paris’s account of the early paintings helps make that relationship more concrete. Its discussion of the 1942 Moon Woman draws attention to the profile face, the body established with black lines, thick areas of colour and the signs beside the figure. Turning to Stenographic Figure, it describes smoother colour areas and a more open composition through which numerous lines travel. These comparisons give the moon-woman motif a material setting. Around it, Pollock was varying how much a body needed to be filled in, how much could be conveyed by a few marks, and how actively the surrounding space might participate. Picasso’s importance becomes intelligible through these particular treatments of faces, limbs and signs. It is a working dialogue about representation, rather than a label that explains every feature of the later Circle. ^[3]

Painting around the forms

Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro’s technical discussion supplies a striking reversal of an ordinary figure-and-background relationship. The blue in The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle was painted over an otherwise red painting; the openings left in that blue establish shapes. Red survives along the left tacking edge. She also records three superimposed signatures, in red, green and black. Those successive inscriptions make revision unusually explicit. Kirk Varnedoe connects their repetition with the painting’s repeatedly followed contours: line begins to acquire a rhythm beyond its job of enclosing a form. Together, the accounts make the surrounding colour an active agent in constructing the image. An apparently empty interval can be a result of deliberate painting around something already present. The surface preserves decisions about what to retain, what to cover and what to restate. ^[4]

Bernice Rose’s broader study of Pollock’s drawing provides a helpful way to understand this exchange. She describes an early tension between a linear conception of form and the physical presence of paint. In her account, flatter colour placed between open figures makes figure and ground exchange roles, so that a shape may appear unstable. This gives a viewer something practical to follow: attend to the intervals as well as to the outlines, and consider how the colour beside a figure helps determine its edge. Rose’s argument concerns a developing practice across several works. Applied as a way of looking here, it keeps the painted field in view while the title draws attention towards an action. The image depends on relations between areas and marks as much as on the possible identity of the figure. ^[5]

What does the title explain?

Elizabeth L. Langhorne proposed a Jungian reading in 1979. Relating the painting to the earlier Moon Woman, she interpreted the dagger as cutting a third eye and the diamonds as signs of a higher union of opposites: a drama of sacrifice and renewal. William Rubin challenged both the psychological scheme and its reliance on the title that same year. He argued that titles could arise after painting and work by association; identifying this circle as an eye forced an uncertain image into a predetermined story. Langhorne offers a sustained hypothesis about connected motifs, while Rubin asks how much the words have encouraged us to see. Neither position supplies direct access to Pollock’s thoughts during painting. ^[6]

An early public life

The painting had a public history before the poured works made Pollock famous. Francis V. O’Connor’s exhibition chronology places it in his first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in November 1943. The checklist separately names The Moon-Woman, The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle and The Mad Moon-Woman, alongside The She-Wolf and other works. Those distinct entries matter when following the recurring subject. O’Connor also records The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle and The She-Wolf in MoMA’s circulating exhibition Twelve Contemporary Painters, which toured universities and museums from February 1944 to May 1945. Its early audience therefore extended beyond the New York gallery. In that exhibition, Pollock appeared among painters including Matta, Arshile Gorky, Morris Graves and Andrew Wyeth. The painting’s travels placed its ambiguous figures within a contemporary field of different approaches to painting, well before its later place in a national museum collection. ^[7]

Varnedoe’s 1998 account finds a further connection in the layered organisation of Stenographic Figure. Broad shapes, bolder lines and finer calligraphy can operate with different degrees of independence. He relates such procedures to The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle, The Key and eventually Alchemy, while resisting a tidy sequence of inevitable progress. That qualification protects the particular interest of this painting. Its figures and its alterations remain substantial subjects in their own right. The work can help explain later abstraction through the independence of line, the construction of forms by surrounding colour and the layering of different kinds of mark. These connections leave room for Pollock’s continued experimentation, and for an encounter with a painting whose material changes are more securely recoverable than the single story its evocative title seems to promise. ^[8]