Troubled Queen

Troubled Queen has the physical presence of a tall, upright canvas. Jackson Pollock made it around 1945; MoMA’s 1998 retrospective catalogue records oil and enamel on canvas, measuring 188.3 × 110.5 cm, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Its height exceeds six feet, giving the encounter a bodily scale, while the narrow width concentrates attention. The catalogue identifies the canvas as OT 128 within the O’Connor–Thaw catalogue raisonné. Date, support and dimensions distinguish the particular object behind the evocative title, grounding its story in a substantial expanse of fabric and paint. ^[1]

An Associated Press acquisition report published in January 1985 described a grey background bearing green and purplish brown, with yellow, red and dark blue subsequently poured or dripped across it. That account gives a useful starting point: follow the relationship between the darker foundation and the brighter applications crossing it. The colours belong to different moments in the painting’s development, allowing the surface to carry movement as well as an image. ^[2]

The curator Theodore E. Stebbins, recalling the MFA’s 1984 acquisition in a 2020 interview, described two anguished figures and some dripping. He had encountered the work at Stephen Hahn’s gallery and found it ugly, powerful and important. His response makes room for a demanding encounter: a painting can arrest a viewer through its emotional pressure without first offering the attractions of grace or ease. ^[3]

Paint that remembers

Conservator Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro places Troubled Queen among Pollock paintings that preserve an exposed portion of an initial paint layer or ground. In her account, such openings act as reference points within the completed work. Earlier material remains available to the eye even as later applications transform its surroundings. She relates this practice to a dialogue between making and responding: each stage gives the painter something further to work with. A surviving lower layer therefore belongs to the final composition’s active relationships. This is a particularly useful way to approach a dense picture, where attention can settle on what remains open as well as what has accumulated. Her examples include Eyes in the Heat and The Key, giving Troubled Queen a place within a continuing exploration of retained paint. The connection concerns the visibility of earlier stages; each painting still requires its own account of how those stages were made. ^[4]

Bernice Rose’s study of Pollock’s drawing helps explain another aspect of that encounter. She describes a conflict in the early paintings between the desire to define forms through line and the desire to build a substantial painted surface. Figure and surrounding space could exchange their apparent roles as Pollock worked between them. Drawing remained involved even where the paint was thick: a line might describe a body, link one area to another or act as an accent of colour. Applied to the viewing of Troubled Queen, this broader argument encourages a slower reading of its figures. One can follow their relation to the field around them without expecting every passage to behave like a securely enclosed body. Rose’s account also explains why a discussion of the picture’s figures cannot exhaust its interest. The activity of the surface has its own demands, and the viewer moves between recognition of something human and awareness of the marks through which that recognition becomes possible. ^[5]

A title without a key

Pollock’s own words from the period offer a way to keep that uncertainty productive. In a questionnaire published in Arts and Architecture in February 1944, he emphasised craftsmanship while expressing interest in European modern artists’ conception of the unconscious as a source of art. Picasso and Miró were the painters he singled out for admiration. He also rejected the idea that contemporary painting’s fundamental problems belonged to one country alone. These comments place an ambitious exchange of artistic ideas around Troubled Queen, without supplying a particular identity for its queen. They invite attention to a painter thinking through the means and sources of painting, including sources that resist immediate explanation. The title can accompany that experience without becoming a complete set of instructions for it. Interest in the unconscious, as Pollock expressed it, leaves ample room for conscious craft and sustained decisions about what a painting needs; it supplies no diagnosis of either the artist or the figures. ^[6]

The first audience

Troubled Queen appeared in Pollock’s solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York, held from 2 to 20 April 1946. Francis V. O’Connor’s exhibition chronology lists eleven oils and eight temperas, with Circumcision, The Little King and Moon Vessel among its companions. The critical response makes the encounter’s difficulty historically tangible. Reviewing the exhibition on 13 April, Clement Greenberg argued that Pollock could make violent, extravagant art while retaining stylistic discipline, and predicted that apparent ugliness would eventually establish a different standard of beauty. Ben Wolf, writing on 15 April, found surface facility insufficiently resolved into pictorial achievement. These were judgments about the exhibition as a whole; neither excerpt singles out Troubled Queen. Their disagreement gives a useful context for the work’s early public life while leaving its individual reception open. O’Connor’s 1967 catalogue later listed the canvas in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Hahn, a historical location preceding its Boston museum life. ^[7]

Choosing a Pollock for Boston

For Stebbins, Troubled Queen expanded what the MFA’s existing Number 10, 1949 could convey about Pollock, connecting him with earlier expressionist painting. He recalled trustee Jack Gardner asking, “Will it last?” Gardner meant both its materials and its aesthetic value. The question captures the purchase’s stakes, though it was no conservation assessment. Stebbins also remembered a critical Boston Globe editorial and defended the exchange, regarding the Renoir he discussed as dispensable within the museum’s holdings. His conviction records one curator’s priorities in a contested decision. ^[3]

The contemporary AP report makes the financial choice concrete. It said the museum funded the purchase by selling Renoir’s Woman with Black Hair and Girl Reading, and Monet’s Autumn at Jeufosse; prices were undisclosed. Director Jan Fontein presented the Pollock as a major addition anchoring the American abstract and modern collection. Gaining that centre of attention required relinquishing other works, making the acquisition a public statement about the collection’s direction. ^[2]

The 1998 catalogue credit names the Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Mrs. Albert J. Beveridge and the Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection, recording the acquisition as an exchange. That credit connects the painting’s Boston home with earlier acts of collecting. ^[1]