Portrait and a Dream

Jackson Pollock's Portrait and a Dream brings a head and an elusive figurative image into one broad canvas. Painted in 1953, it belongs to the Dallas Museum of Art, which records its medium as oil and enamel on canvas. Its stretcher measures 148.59 × 342.27 centimetres: more than three metres across. The title invites us to consider their relationship. ^[1]

Kirk Varnedoe describes Pollock combining oil brushwork, undertaken with the canvas upright, with the poured-enamel manner of his 1951 black paintings. For Varnedoe, the relationship between head and body becomes almost diagrammatic, comparable to a cartoon character beside a thought balloon. He connects the uncertain contours on the left with Echo: Number 25, 1951, where a figure seems continually about to become legible. His comparison gives the two sections a shared subject: the distance between outward appearance and imagined experience. ^[2]

Line becomes a face

The distinction between recognisable imagery and abstraction runs through the painting's technique. Pepe Karmel singles out its right-hand head as an example of a comparatively conventional figure drawn with a dripped line. That observation complicates any division of Pollock's career into figurative brush painting followed by abstract pouring. An application method can serve different kinds of image. Here a line associated with his abstract work can help establish a face, giving the viewer something recognisable without requiring Pollock to abandon the possibilities of liquid paint. The question becomes what the line does within this particular painting. ^[3]

Echo offers a useful earlier point of comparison. MoMA describes its black enamel lines as controlled and economical, and identifies an eye in its upper-left corner. The museum's account allows the work to remain abstract while acknowledging its suggestions of bodies and faces. Following that uncertainty is a helpful way into Portrait and a Dream: recognition can begin with a small cue and then lose its foothold as the surrounding lines resist a complete figure. A reader need not identify every shape before attending to the different degrees of legibility that Pollock makes available. ^[4]

There is also the scale of the encounter. Robert Storr includes Portrait and a Dream among the few later works that approach the grandeur of Pollock's great canvases of 1950. His judgment concerns pictorial ambition and size; the divided design carries that ambition into a particularly explicit meeting of images. ^[3]

Bernice Rose places Pollock's work around 1953 within a renewed investigation of paint itself, especially oil paint and the material possibilities of impasto. In her account, images emerging in the drawings of 1951–53 entered this exploration of surface. She points to Ocean Greyness and The Deep as examples of the new directions available. That framework helps locate Portrait and a Dream within a period of varied experiments. Its joined techniques can be understood as an active choice among resources Pollock already possessed. A change in the balance of drawing and painting opens a different problem for the artist: how a material mark can carry an image while still declaring its own physical character. Rose's emphasis on investigation keeps attention on those artistic decisions and on the possibilities of paint. ^[5]

A face and a possible mask

The Dallas Museum of Art presents the head on the right as a possible self-portrait, perhaps partly concealed by a mask. It relates the face to drawings that critics have associated with Pollock's Jungian analysis. On the left, the museum suggests that a loosely painted reclining female figure may embody the dream. These are interpretive possibilities. They encourage an encounter between a person and a dream image while leaving open who the figures are and how precisely the title attaches to them. ^[1]

In a note, Varnedoe relays Francis V. O'Connor's account that Pollock told his doctor, Elizabeth Wright Hubbard, the head showed himself “when I'm not sober.” The same note reports O'Connor's suggestion that a crescent-bearing head on the left resembles Krasner. These identifications reach us through other people's accounts; they leave much of the painting unresolved. ^[2]

What Krasner remembered

Lee Krasner remembered Pollock speaking about the imagery. Interviewed by B. H. Friedman in 1969, she remembered a visit by Lillian Kiesler and Alice Hodges during which he talked at length about the left section. There was no recording. What stayed with her was his description of the upper-right corner of that left section as “the dark side of the moon.” The phrase belongs to that particular area, and her memory preserves part of the conversation. ^[6]

The interview also makes the joined format matter. Krasner described Pollock's decisions about cutting, orienting and grouping canvases, stressing that the final choices were his. She gave Portrait and a Dream as an example of successive panels treated together, and recalled a dealer asking why he did not cut it in half. Her story directs attention back to the work's unity: keeping its contrasting sections together was itself a consequential artistic decision. ^[6]

From Janis to Dallas

The painting appeared at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York from 1 to 27 February 1954, in a solo exhibition of ten works made in 1953. O'Connor's chronology lists it as Portrait with a Dream, explaining that the title later became Portrait and a Dream. The exhibition also included Ocean Greyness, The Deep and Easter and the Totem, placing the divided composition among markedly different responses to painting. ^[7]

A later critic found that division troubling. Reviewing Pollock's memorial retrospective in The New Yorker on 29 December 1956, Robert M. Coates called Portrait and a Dream “too rigidly compartmented.” Yet he also recognised in it an attempt to find a new approach, alongside Ocean Greyness and Easter and the Totem. His reservation concerns the way the parts hold together, the same relationship that other interpreters have found productive. It is a specific response to the painting's construction, written two years after the Janis exhibition. ^[7]

The work entered the Dallas collection in 1967, accession number 1967.8, as a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Algur H. Meadows and the Meadows Foundation, Incorporated. ^[1]

Leigh Arnold's history of contemporary collecting in Dallas explains the setting for that gift. After Merrill Rueppel became director in 1964, he encouraged an expansion of the museum's contemporary holdings and helped guide Meadows's collecting. Portrait and a Dream was among eleven works Meadows gave during his lifetime in the museum's growth under Rueppel. Arnold places it alongside works by Rothko, Krasner and Kline. She also explains that Meadows sought contemporary paintings specifically to donate to the museum. The Pollock consequently belongs to a sustained effort to build a public collection, with patrons and museum leadership shaping what Dallas audiences could encounter. Its history joins a difficult artistic proposition to the practical work of making contemporary art publicly accessible. ^[8]