Prints

Jackson Pollock’s prints bring different kinds of making into view: a mark transferred from a lithographic surface, a line cut into metal, ink passed through a screen. MoMA’s 1998 exhibition Focus: Pollock and Printmaking brought together nearly thirty works and emphasised his patient experimentation on paper. ^[1]

The word print needs some care. It can describe an artwork produced through a printing process, an individual impression of that artwork, or a modern reproduction of a painting. These meanings overlap in everyday conversation. For Pollock, asking how a particular sheet was made leads to a much richer answer than asking whether the image looks familiar. Read a sheet as an object with its own history, and those overlapping meanings become easier to separate.

This guide follows those projects through named museum examples. Along the way, it explains why two sheets can share a title yet differ materially, why a print can have more than one relevant date, and why an edition number belongs to a particular publication history. The broader development of the canvases appears in Pollock’s paintings; his drawings offer another route into the importance of line and paper.

How the image reaches the paper

In lithography, an image is prepared on a flat stone or metal plate using a greasy material. The surface is treated so that the image accepts printing ink while the surrounding areas repel it. Screenprinting works through a mesh: a stencil blocks the areas that should remain unprinted, and a squeegee pushes ink through the open parts. Intaglio uses a different relationship between surface and ink. The ink sits in recessed lines or areas of a plate, which supply the printed image. These are three different ways of carrying marks from a prepared surface to a sheet. ^[2]

Engraving and drypoint belong to the intaglio family. An engraver cuts into metal with a burin, a sharp tool that removes a furrow. In drypoint, a needle scratches the plate directly. The plate, screen or other prepared printing surface is often called the matrix. An impression is the particular print taken from it. ^[3]

These distinctions change the questions we ask of Pollock’s lines. A line can originate in the movement of a tool across metal or be transferred photographically from a line already painted on canvas. Both routes involve decisions, but the decisions occur at different stages. Paper, ink, scale, the preparation of the matrix and the act of printing all belong to the finished work. The catalogue word naming the process helps us recover that sequence.

The presence of a printer’s name is useful for the same reason. A print can involve the artist, a specialist printer and a publisher with separate responsibilities. Reading all three fields makes the collaboration visible. It also prevents the easy assumption that every operation must have been performed by the artist alone for the sheet to belong to his work.

A landscape in two impressions

Landscape with Steer, dated about 1936–37, offers an unusually clear introduction. MoMA’s airbrushed example is accession 1186.1969. Its medium is recorded as lithograph with airbrushed lacquer additions, while the edition field describes one impression with enamel additions. The composition measures 34.7 × 47.1 cm on a sheet measuring 40.4 × 58.1 cm. MoMA places it among twelve lithographs made around 1934–37 and relates its western subject to Pollock’s upbringing. The museum suggests that he may have learned the airbrush technique from David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose New York workshop he attended; the connection remains a qualified one. ^[4]

MoMA also owns a monochrome Landscape with Steer, accession 1259.1979. This is catalogued simply as a lithograph, with an unidentified printer and an approximate edition of two or three. Its composition measures 34.7 × 47.3 cm, its sheet 40.2 × 58.1 cm. The shared title and approximate date connect the records, while the accession numbers and medium descriptions distinguish the actual sheets. ^[5]

The comparison is valuable because it allows printing and later additions to remain separate parts of a work’s history. An image can be transferred to more than one sheet, then receive further work that makes one impression different. When reading a caption, therefore, continue beyond the title. The few words following lithograph can explain a material difference that the title alone conceals.

Dimensions offer another clue. The composition measurement describes the image area, while the sheet measurement includes the paper around it. Comparing the width of one composition with the width of another whole sheet creates an apparent discrepancy before any real comparison has begun. A print record rewards the same care we give to its image: each field answers a different question.

Early screenprints and a later rediscovery

Pollock was already combining a printed base with direct additions in an Untitled screenprint dated about 1938–41. MoMA’s 1998 checklist describes gouache and India ink additions and identifies the sheet as accession 11.1982. The same checklist includes small screenprints dated about 1943–44, among them accessions 50.1996 through 54.1996. These works establish a history of experimentation with the medium well before the better-known portfolio of 1951. ^[6]

According to MoMA’s 1998 account, six early screenprints in its exhibition had been found in 1984 and were first documented and publicly shown in 1995. Deborah Wye organised the exhibition, which ran from 29 October 1998 to 2 February 1999. ^[1]

Discovery dates matter because an artist’s familiar story depends partly on what has survived and become available to study. A newly documented sheet can alter the balance of that story without altering its own date. Here, early screenprinting becomes easier to recognise as a sustained practical interest. It invites us to think of printing as a place where Pollock tested what an image could do on paper.

The metal plate and the later impression

Pollock’s work at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 belongs to 1944–45. Elizabeth Levine and Anna Indych’s chronology records his beginning there in autumn 1944, after returning to New York. The workshop was across the street from the apartment he shared with Lee Krasner. Printmaking thus had a specific place within his working life, as well as a place within the history of his materials. ^[7]

MoMA preserves a physical Plate for Untitled (4), accession 452.1969. Dated about 1944–45, it is described as engraving and drypoint on steel-faced copper and measures 37.8 × 45.4 cm. This is the worked metal object from which an image could be printed. The survival of a matrix allows the history of a design to be followed separately from the history of each paper impression. ^[8]

The paper Untitled (4) numbered 443.1969 has its own record. MoMA identifies engraving and drypoint, gives Emiliano Sorini as printer, names Lee Krasner and MoMA as publishers, and records an edition of fifty. The website currently displays the date range 1934–1967. That range differs from the plate’s circa 1944–45 dating and should be read alongside it. The paper record gives a plate area of 37 × 45 cm and a sheet of 50.2 × 69.3 cm. Neither its accession number nor its measurements are interchangeable with those of the metal plate. ^[9]

Some later impressions have a more explicit double date. The 1998 checklist identifies Untitled (2), accession 441.1969, and Untitled (3), accession 442.1969, as 1944 designs printed in 1967. It also dates Trial proof for Untitled (6), accession 447.1969, to 1944–45, printed in 1967. These are particular posthumous printings. Their dates cannot be extended to every Pollock intaglio. ^[6]

A date attached to a print can therefore refer to the creation of the design or matrix, the pulling of an impression, or the publication of an edition. Reading these as separate events makes a later printing intelligible. It preserves Pollock’s authorship of the worked design while leaving the later printer and publisher in their proper historical roles. The sheet’s history continues after the artist’s work on the plate has ended.

Six paintings become six screenprints

The 1951 portfolio makes a different kind of translation. MoMA catalogues Untitled, accession 1188.1969.1–6, as a portfolio of six screenprints in an edition of twenty-five, published by Pollock and printed by Pollock with his brother Sanford McCoy. Its gallery label explains that sculptor Tony Smith suggested the project. Each print was based on a painting in Pollock’s 1951 Betty Parsons Gallery exhibition, with minor modifications and a reduction to about one-quarter size. MoMA records the sheet dimensions as 73 × 58.5 cm. ^[10]

The Kemper Art Museum’s 2018 collection text identifies the source works as black paintings and supplies the photographic stage: negatives were transferred to screens in McCoy’s commercial screenprinting workshop. Its discussion stresses the change in texture and tonal variation when stained enamel paintings became smaller printed images. The museum’s Number 9, accession WU 3856.6, is a screenprint dated 1951 and purchased for the university in 1952. Its record gives an edition inscription of 5/30, although the accompanying essay describes twenty-five portfolios. Those two pieces of evidence remain unreconciled; twenty-five should not be imposed as a universal denominator for every related sheet. ^[11]

Here the ordinary distinction between original print and reproduction becomes more interesting. We can describe the portfolio as an original print publication and explain its reproductive method in the same breath. Pollock participated in its making and published it himself. That documented project gives these sheets a particular relationship to his activity, different from a modern decorative reproduction carrying the same painted image. ^[10]

The reduction in scale also asks us to change our attention. A painting translated to paper offers a new encounter with its arrangement of marks, but the printed sheet has its own surface and dimensions. Treating it as a print allows both objects to retain their interest. The question becomes what the translation carries across and what changes in the passage from one medium to another.

Bernice Rose’s Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting provides a useful framework for this movement between media. Her opening essay treats line as a persistent concern joining Pollock’s drawing and painting, and examines the renewed prominence of line against the ground in the black canvases of 1951. This is a scholarly reading of the relationship between practices. It helps explain why a print after a painting can be worth considering beside drawings and canvases, even when their materials and methods differ. ^[12]

The announcement has its own history

Another screenprint belongs to the same exhibition setting: Exhibition Announcement, Betty Parsons Gallery, Nov. 26–Dec. 15, 1951. MoMA’s accession 1187.1969 is dated 1951, signed 1954. The printer is Acme Press, New York, and the edition is unknown. The record distinguishes compositions on the front and back of a sheet measuring 43 × 55.8 cm. This announcement is a separate printed object from the six-sheet portfolio. Its later signature is a distinct event in its history and does not establish an edition size. ^[13]

This is a useful reminder that a print can serve a public purpose as well as carry an image. An exhibition announcement belongs to the way art reaches an audience. Its title, printer and dates describe that purpose with a precision that the broad word poster would miss. For reproductions intended for display, see Jackson Pollock posters.

Reading a Pollock print record

Start with the full title and date, then find the accession number. The accession identifies the museum’s particular object; an untitled work especially needs that anchor. Continue to the medium and look for additions, such as airbrushed paint, gouache or ink. Read the dimension labels before comparing measurements. The sheet, composition and plate area describe related but different things.

Then distinguish state from edition. A state is a materially different stage of a printed image, often resulting from changes to the matrix. An edition concerns the group of impressions taken from it. A change of state can alter the design, while two impressions within an edition can share that design. These terms answer different questions about the life of a print. ^[3]

Finally, read the printer, publisher and inscription together. The examples above show how much those details can contribute: a shared title can conceal an added medium, a date can refer to a later printing, and a signature can have been added after the object was made. Such records give us a practical way into the art. They let us follow the passage of Pollock’s marks through surfaces, workshops and publications, one particular sheet at a time.