The Moon Woman

Jackson Pollock’s The Moon Woman brings a human figure into a field of signs and forceful colour. Painted in 1942, it is an oil painting on canvas measuring 175.2 × 109.3 cm, in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, accession 76.2553 PG 141. ^[1]

The title distinguishes this painting from The Mad Moon-Woman of 1941 and The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle, dated about 1943. Those related names identify distinct works, each with its own composition. ^[2]

A body drawn in colour

The Musée national Picasso-Paris describes the painting through three interacting elements: red against green, black lines that establish the body, and patches of thick paint beside drawn signs on the left. These offer a useful order for looking: begin with the colour opposition, follow the figure’s dark construction, then consider the smaller marks around it. Paint has several jobs here. It creates substantial areas of colour while also behaving like a drawing instrument; the body and the surrounding inscriptions share the surface without becoming one continuous kind of mark. The French museum relates the profile to Picasso, locating Pollock’s figure within a conversation about how a face or body can be assembled pictorially. Its comparison with Stenographic Figure also brings out a material distinction: that painting gives its calligraphic lines more room, with smoother areas of colour and a more open composition. The comparison makes the particular density of The Moon Woman easier to understand. ^[3]

MoMA’s account of Stenographic Figure suggests why recognition in these paintings can remain unsettled. One reading finds a reclining woman; another distinguishes two upright figures. A final covering of scratchy lines adds another level of activity. Those alternatives belong to that particular painting, but they suggest a useful question to bring back to The Moon Woman: how much does a title help us organise marks into a person? A viewer can use a recognisable head as an anchor while remaining attentive to the surrounding painted field. The comparison does not establish that both pictures represent the same woman, or that either is a portrait of Lee Krasner. Even MoMA phrases the connection between Stenographic Figure and Pollock’s new relationship as a possibility. The value of placing the pictures together lies in comparing how bodies, space and writinglike marks can coexist, rather than assigning both works a shared biographical identity. ^[4]

Painting before the pours

The Venice collection’s comparative technical study places The Moon Woman among Pollock’s earlier figurative canvases made with oil paint, brushes and an easel. Its account of eleven paintings from 1942–47 distinguishes that practice from the tube-squeezed impastos of Eyes in the Heat and Croaking Movement, both 1946, and the poured paintings of the following year. That distinction helps explain why the black drawing here should be understood through its own material setting. A line applied with a brush can carry energy without having been poured through the air. Nor does the presence of thick paint turn every passage into an example of the later tube technique. The study gives a history of changing possibilities within Pollock’s practice. Its specific discoveries of alkyd paint concern named colours in other works; they do not supply a new chemical description of this canvas. The Moon Woman remains a substantial example of his brush painting in its own right. ^[5]

A possible moon from poetry

The owning museum places the picture within Pollock’s engagement with Picasso, Miró and Surrealist ideas about the unconscious. It also proposes a literary association with Baudelaire’s prose poem Les Bienfaits de la lune, which its English account calls Favors of the Moon. The distinction between association and established source matters: the museum considers direct knowledge possible, while favouring the broader interest in Baudelaire and French Symbolist poetry circulating among Pollock’s contemporaries, including Baziotes and Motherwell. That context makes the poem worth reading alongside the painting without turning it into an illustrated script. ^[1]

In Baudelaire’s original French, the moon notices a sleeping infant and descends through the window. Her caresses leave colour on the child’s face, green eyes and unusually pale cheeks. The room becomes saturated with a phosphorescent glow, at once intimate and disturbing. The moon promises that the child will love what she loves: water, clouds, silence, night, strange flowers and creatures associated with unruly desire. These gifts reach beyond appearance into the person’s future attachments. In the final movement, the narrator lies at the grown woman’s feet, seeking the reflection of the power that visited her cradle. The poem thus joins a female celestial presence to a human woman through colour, fascination and an unsettling inheritance. Beside Pollock’s title, it supplies an imaginative parallel. There is no need to identify every painted sign with a flower, animal or nocturnal promise from the poem to understand the association. Baudelaire’s speaking moon belongs to his narrative; her words are not an explanation supplied by Pollock. ^[6]

How far can the signs be read?

Elizabeth Langhorne’s 1979 interpretation treats the woman as a creative anima, connecting disc-and-crescent eyes and a flower with Jungian ideas, the Golden Flower and yoga’s chakras. Her account also describes a doubled head, bringing frontal and profile aspects together. William Rubin, writing that year, cautions that the lunar title cannot establish Jungian derivation: private associations remain unknown, and other moon-woman legends were possible. Pollock’s 1944 questionnaire adds a different restraint. He called perceived calligraphic references unintended, while affirming admiration for Picasso and Miró, interest in the unconscious and the necessity of craftsmanship. Krasner later insisted on intellect and accumulated experience in his work. Together, these accounts make symbolic interpretation an argument to consider, with room for uncertainty about individual signs. ^[7]

Kirk Varnedoe connects the early paintings’ hieroglyphic mystery with a wartime search for weighty content beyond naturalistic representation. He argues that such images could suggest significance while withholding a knowable message, and stresses Pollock’s varied contemporary experiments. That variety makes The Moon Woman compelling as a particular solution to painting a figure, with possibilities beyond its place in a path towards dripping. ^[2]

From New York to Venice

The painting was already part of Pollock’s public career well before his poured works became famous. Francis V. O’Connor records it in the first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century, New York, held from 9 to 27 November 1943. The list also includes The Mad Moon-Woman and The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle: viewers encountered several treatments of the lunar subject together. O’Connor then lists The Moon Woman in the Arts Club of Chicago exhibition of 5–31 March 1945, alongside Male and Female, Pasiphaë and Stenographic Figure. The 1942 date therefore identifies its making, while 1943 and 1945 mark distinct moments in its exhibition life. These lists give the work a place within an ensemble of early paintings. They also show how the lunar figure continued to represent Pollock publicly as he explored other subjects and ways of applying paint. ^[8]

Elizabeth Levine and Anna Indych’s chronology records its inclusion with Eyes in the Heat and Two when Guggenheim’s collection appeared at the Venice Biennale, 29 May–30 September 1948. The exhibition, expanded with four additional Pollocks, continued to Florence and Rome in 1949. These are journeys made by the collection’s paintings; they do not describe Pollock travelling abroad. ^[2]