Naked Man with Knife

Tate records Jackson Pollock’s Naked Man with Knife as an oil painting made about 1938–40. Measuring 127 × 91.4 centimetres, it is taller than it is wide: a substantial upright painting, with space for bodily forms to assert their presence. It entered Tate through Frank Lloyd’s gift in 1981 and carries the accession number T03327. Those measurements describe the painted support; the surrounding frame is larger. The approximate date is part of the painting’s identity and should remain approximate. ^[1]

The title directs attention towards a figure and a weapon, but it leaves the action open. The 1998 Museum of Modern Art retrospective catalogue calls the work Untitled [Naked Man with Knife] and identifies it as number 60 in the O’Connor–Thaw catalogue raisonné. Its caption dates the painting to about 1938–40 while recording the older catalogue’s range of about 1938–41. This small difference matters: the work cannot be securely attached to a single year merely by shortening its label. The combination of Untitled and the descriptive phrase also gives readers two useful ways of approaching it. One identifies the object; the other suggests a subject without supplying a complete story, named participants or a particular historical event. ^[2]

Bodies made present through paint

The painting’s physical force was central to its presentation in Nudes, the exhibition organised by Münster’s LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in cooperation with Tate, held from November 2023 to April 2024. In the accompanying booklet, Ann-Catherine Weise describes intertwined bodies whose fleshliness is conveyed through expressive colour, producing a sense of power and danger. Her comparison with Willem de Kooning’s The Visit places Pollock within a discussion of paint’s capacity to suggest bodily presence. In that pairing, de Kooning’s colour and texture suggest intimacy; Pollock’s treatment gives flesh a more threatening energy. It is a helpful distinction because the nude here becomes more than an anatomical subject. Paint participates in how the body is experienced. Weise’s curatorial reading encourages attention to the relationship between material and sensation: how the representation of flesh can feel forceful, vulnerable or dangerous before its action has been fully explained. ^[3]

A different comparison helps explain the picture’s charged human grouping. In his essay “A Piece of the Action,” Robert Storr connects Naked Man with Knife with José Clemente Orozco’s Barricade, a 1931 oil painting. He places it alongside Pollock’s red conté sketchbook drawings, a gouache of about 1938–41 and the much later Black and White Painting III. The breadth of that comparison is useful. Orozco’s example becomes a recurring resource for thinking about bodies and pictorial force, reaching across differences of medium and date. Storr’s argument also gives the Tate canvas a specific artistic neighbour within the larger category of Mexican influence. The comparison invites readers to consider the organisation and intensity of the figures together, instead of allowing the knife alone to determine the subject. It is an argument about an artistic relationship, however; it does not establish that Pollock copied Barricade or intended an identical narrative. ^[4]

Violence, history and ritual

Barricade carries its own history of translation between formats. The Whitney Museum’s 2020 Vida Americana labels explain that Orozco based it on a detail of his 1926 mural The Trench in Mexico City. Making a smaller, portable painting helped him circulate imagery developed for a fixed architectural setting. The label interprets its dark palette, sharp diagonals and violence through Orozco’s pessimism about revolutionary struggle and war. This supplies a valuable context for the comparison with Pollock: a muralist’s influence could travel through an oil painting, with political meaning already embedded in its construction. The same exhibition’s labels list the Tate canvas separately from Pollock’s Untitled (Figure Composition), the gouache belonging to the Metropolitan Museum. Keeping those objects distinct allows the comparison to remain precise. Shared dates and related figurative concerns connect works without making their materials, histories or subjects interchangeable. ^[5]

Another strand leads to Orozco’s Dartmouth murals. Writing for the Hood Museum’s 2012 exhibition Men of Fire, Sarah G. Powers describes Pollock’s 1936 visit to Dartmouth and his subsequent engagement with myth, sacrifice and fire’s destructive and regenerative possibilities. She proposes that Naked Man with Knife depicts ritual sacrifice probably inspired by the mural panels Gods of the Modern World or Ancient Sacrifice. This is a more specific reading than a general recognition of violence, and its qualification is essential. Powers offers a likely relationship, leaving room for uncertainty about the scene. Her discussion puts the work within a group of Pollock’s paintings and drawings responding to Orozco, including The Flame. For the Tate painting, the ritual interpretation gives the knife a possible ceremonial role and the encounter a larger imaginative setting. It remains a proposal that can deepen attention without settling every figure’s identity or the sequence of events. ^[6]

Following the figure and the painted surface

The competing demands of body and surface offer another way into the work. In Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting, Bernice Rose describes an early practice in which linear construction and the desire for expansive space met an equally strong interest in volume and substantial paint. Her account of figures and surrounding areas exchanging visual roles provides a useful question for looking at an early figurative canvas: where does a line describe a body, and where does it begin to organise the whole painted field? Rose also situates the late 1930s and 1940s within Pollock’s engagement with the Mexican muralists’ emotionally charged figuration. Taken together, these arguments help explain why recognising a human form need not exhaust the experience of the painting. The relationships among contour, colour and surface remain active after a subject has been proposed. Through Rose’s framework, attention moves between the legibility of the figure and the life of the painted surface. ^[7]

Pollock’s own published words offer a final point of orientation. Asked in a 1944 questionnaire whether technique mattered, he treated craftsmanship as essential, alongside the painter’s tools, pigments and working surface. Elsewhere in the same exchange he rejected the idea that the basic problems of contemporary painting belonged to one country. These remarks came after Naked Man with Knife and cannot serve as a diary of its making. They do, however, help frame the attention the canvas deserves: to the practical work of constructing a picture and to an artistic exchange extending beyond national boundaries. His statement gives craftsmanship a place alongside subject matter in the experience of a painting. Applied to this particular canvas, that means allowing questions about its construction to remain as interesting as the question of what is happening. A proposed narrative can begin the encounter while leaving room for further attention. ^[8]