Stenographic Figure

Jackson Pollock’s Stenographic Figure, painted around 1942, brings bright colour and restless drawing into an open early composition. A body seems to extend across it. MoMA describes this lightness against the darker, crowded spaces of much of his early work. It is oil on linen, measuring 101.6 × 142.2 cm, accession 428.1980. ^[1]

Colour beneath the writing

The surface has an order beneath its apparent commotion. Kirk Varnedoe describes flat turquoise, cream-yellow and red shapes, followed by broad lines, then finer yellow, black, white and orange calligraphy. The broad drawing sometimes follows an existing colour boundary and sometimes establishes a shape of its own. Fine marks add another scale of activity across this larger structure. Originally exhibited as Painting, the work acquired a title that directs attention towards these writing-like traces. The layers matter: different kinds of mark occupy the same field without having to perform the same task. ^[2]

The Musée national Picasso-Paris’s account offers some useful footholds. It identifies a triangular profile at the left, interlaced arms and a raised arm or claw-like form towards the right. It also stresses the smoother coloured planes and the greater breathing room between forms. Its comparison with The Moon Woman follows the use of black to draw a body, while Two and Male and Female provide other examples of Pollock reassembling anatomy. These comparisons make the distortions more intelligible: separate anatomical clues can remain recognisable even when their combination unsettles the whole body. ^[3]

One body, or two people?

MoMA’s label offers two ways to organise these clues. In one, a reclining woman stretches across the width: her profile is high on the left, arms and hands open across the middle, and legs with paw-like feet spread towards the right. In the other, two upright figures stand apart, one near the right edge and one just left of centre. The imagined space changes with each reading. The label also tentatively connects the painting with Pollock’s new relationship with Krasner; these remain suggestions, rather than an identified portrait. ^[1]

Pepe Karmel develops the second reading into a tentative scene. He sees a triangular-headed person reaching towards another across a table, possibly playing a game. Grey, red and white distinguish the tabletop from surrounding blue, yellow and black. For Karmel, colour carries much of the work of defining forms; the scribbled overlay hangs in front like a veil. He compares its elusive inscriptions with Miró’s, while distinguishing their role from the more descriptive lines of Picasso and Klee. The game remains a hypothesis, but it gives the reaching gestures a possible relationship. ^[4]

Carolyn Lanchner places more weight on the reclining female nude. Her account of the painting’s hybrid protagonist allows bodily recognition to survive its awkward transformations. She also emphasises the thin paint, flattened planes and freer improvisation that distinguish this work from heavily built earlier pictures such as Bird and Birth. This reading changes where attention settles: the horizontal body becomes the thread through the surface’s scattered activity. Readers need not choose permanently between it and the two-person interpretation. Trying each offers a way of testing how much the painting’s coherence depends on an assumed subject. Its apparent openness involves both the spacing of forms and the freedom to connect them differently. ^[5]

The title’s suggestion of rapid notation belongs to a wider interest in marks that approach writing. In his February 1944 questionnaire, Pollock acknowledged that viewers found calligraphy in his pictures, while saying such references were unintended. He also named Picasso and Miró as the artists he most admired and expressed interest in the unconscious as a source for art. These remarks give the painting an intellectual setting without supplying a dictionary for its signs. Lee Krasner later resisted descriptions of his practice as an unaware emotional outpouring, stressing the painter’s experience and intelligence. Taken together, their statements help keep two aspects in view: a mark can feel spontaneous while participating in a considered pictorial structure. The visible analogy with handwriting does not, by itself, establish an actual shorthand transcript or a scene of dictation. ^[6]

The painting that opened doors

Stenographic Figure appeared at Art of This Century’s Spring Salon for Young Artists, held from 18 May to 26 June 1943. The jury included Mondrian, Duchamp, Alfred H. Barr Jr., James Thrall Soby and James Johnson Sweeney. Jean Connolly reported the jury’s enthusiasm; Robert M. Coates’s review of 29 May singled out Pollock’s Painting as a discovery, finding echoes of Matisse and Miró. ^[7]

MoMA reports Mondrian’s striking praise for the painting. His favourable response belongs to its reception history, preserved through reported testimony. ^[1]

The Picasso-Paris dossier places this success within a meeting ground of European modernism and younger American artists. Guggenheim’s Art of This Century brought abstract and Surrealist work into the same professional orbit. Pollock’s opportunity involved practical support as well as admiration: a gallery contract, a regular income and an individual exhibition. The setting helps explain how an experimental painting could change an artist’s prospects. Its reception activated a network in which exhibiting, discussing and supporting new work were closely connected. ^[3]

Pollock himself linked the breakthrough to this painting in his 29 July 1943 letter to Charles: “Things really broke”. He described his contract and the commission for Mural. Howard Putzel’s surviving correspondence records the sustained work behind the November exhibition. That first solo show ran from 9 to 27 November and included Stenographic Figure. Coates’s 20 November review tempered his earlier enthusiasm: he thought this painting and The She-Wolf suffered from overworking, while praising Pollock’s colour and fluent design. Recognition accommodated reservations about particular pictures. ^[7]

Lee Krasner belongs to this history as an artist with her own developed understanding of modern painting. Helen A. Harrison records her substantial formal training and her further study with Hans Hofmann, through which she revised her work towards a Cubist idiom. Krasner exhibited with the American Abstract Artists and admired Matisse and Mondrian. This background gives substance to the idea of artistic exchange around Pollock: a conversation about colour or structure could draw on her independent experience. Her contribution encompasses the work of a painter and critical interlocutor, with interests of her own. The fuller story of Krasner and Pollock extends beyond the question of whom one ambiguous figure might represent. ^[8]

A continuing experiment

The painting entered MoMA in 1980 through purchase from Pollock’s estate, alongside The Flame and other works chosen to broaden the museum’s representation of his career. Its acquisition followed decades after its gallery breakthrough. Barr, Soby and Sweeney’s involvement in the Spring Salon had already connected that early exhibition with the museum’s circle. ^[4]

The credit names the Mr. and Mrs. Walter Bareiss Fund. ^[1]

Varnedoe connects the separation of line from coloured edges, and the layering of different kinds of movement, with later works including Alchemy. He also cautions against a tidy progression: Pollock pursued markedly different densities and manners alongside one another. Stenographic Figure offers a particular solution to holding form and free marks together; it leaves other solutions available. ^[2]

Lanchner’s emphasis on the painting’s continuing immediate appeal is helpful here. Reading it only as a forecast of later poured paintings would pass too quickly over the lively, unstable bodily presence that makes this particular work distinctive. ^[5]