Untitled, 1945 (Two Figures)

Jackson Pollock’s Untitled brings pastel, gouache and ink together on paper. Dated 1945, it measures 77.7 × 56.9 cm and belongs to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund. “Two Figures” describes the subject; the museum’s title is simply Untitled. ^[1]

The sheet has a particularly useful identity within Pollock’s many untitled drawings. The 1998 retrospective catalogue lists it as plate 79, with the number OT 991, the same materials, measurements and museum collection. Two other drawings share that catalogue page, but have their own dates and numbers. This is the 1945 pastel and gouache work, distinct from the adjacent 1944 ink and watercolour sheet and the larger drawing dated around 1944, then privately owned. ^[2]

Two bodies, one surface

MoMA’s 2015–16 gallery label identifies two facing, “totemic” figures; the right figure’s bent leg runs along the bottom. Its central observation concerns the spaces they occupy. White paper appears inside their outlines, while blue fills the interval between them, reversing the usual figure and ground relationship. Calligraphic marks and splatters bring attention back to the sheet’s surface and spread a linear structure across it. In this curatorial reading, the figures and their surroundings share a shallow plane. The word “totemic” supplies a suggestive description; it does not identify a particular cultural source for the figures. ^[1]

Bernice Rose’s account of Pollock’s drawing offers a way to understand what is at stake in that exchange. She describes his early work as pulled between a linear conception of form and a desire for substantial, painterly surfaces. Painting the intervals around open figures could make space and body exchange roles. Line then connected the parts across the surface, whether it had been made with a brush or squeezed from a paint tube. Her account helps distinguish a mark’s material from its pictorial job. Applied here, the useful question is what a line does. It can delimit a body while also joining a larger pattern. Drawing becomes one of the means by which a painting holds together, and paint becomes a material with which to draw. Rose sees the eventual drip line as bringing those functions together. ^[3]

Colour that can be drawn and painted

The medium names help explain why the drawing can sustain both ways of working. MoMA defines gouache as a water-based, matte paint whose opacity can come from white fillers or a high proportion of pigment to binder. Pastel is a soft stick of finely ground pigment held together with binder; its particles rest on the paper and can be blended. These descriptions offer more than a division between a dry tool and a wet one. They suggest different ways of building an edge or an area of colour: laying down a painted shape, drawing a coloured mark, or softening the boundary between marks. They are general properties of the materials, rather than a chemical analysis of Pollock’s supplies. The medium list gives us reason to attend to those differences without supplying a complete sequence of application. ^[4]

Pastel itself can move between drawing and painting. The National Gallery of Art’s introduction to The Touch of Color explains that it may be used wet or dry, applied with an intact stick or reduced to powder and brushed onto a support. A pastel designation therefore allows a much wider range of handling than the familiar image of a coloured stick suggests. This matters when approaching a mixed-media sheet: the name of a material cannot, by itself, tell us whether a particular mark was brushed, rubbed or drawn directly. The Gallery’s account describes possibilities within pastel practice, not a documented wet-pastel procedure for Pollock’s Untitled. It encourages a useful distinction between knowing what a work contains and knowing precisely how every part was made. ^[5]

Experiment and decision

Pollock’s own statements place material experiment beside artistic judgment. In a questionnaire published in February 1944, he affirmed the necessity of craftsmanship while expressing particular interest in the unconscious as a source of art. Those positions belong together: a source of imagery and the ability to handle materials address different parts of making a picture. A few years later, in “My Painting,” he described becoming acquainted with a work as it developed and being willing to alter or destroy an image. This was an account published in winter 1947–48, rather than a record of the day he made the drawing. Nevertheless, it supplies a valuable perspective on experiment. An unplanned beginning could lead to recognition, adjustment and further work. The freedom associated with his art included the freedom to respond to what had already appeared on the surface. ^[6]

The relationship to paintings also needs care. In the draft of his 1947 statement, as published by Francis V. O’Connor, Pollock explicitly distinguished drawings related to his painting from drawings made for it. This leaves room for ideas to pass between media without requiring a sheet to be the blueprint for a particular canvas. It is a helpful distinction for this Untitled, whose combination of materials and concentrated pictorial problem give it an interest of its own. A drawing can participate in the same investigation as a painting while arriving at a different result. The draft is evidence of how Pollock described that relationship later; it cannot prove that every earlier sheet had the same purpose. Readers can follow the wider variety of those relationships through his drawings, where studies and independent works belong within a shared practice. ^[7]

A place in two museum arguments

This drawing appeared as entry 28, CR 991, in the checklist for MoMA’s Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting, held from 4 February to 16 March 1980. Directed by Rose, the exhibition brought together 85 drawings and five paintings to examine connections between drawing processes and the better-known poured works. That balance gave paper a substantial role in the account of his achievement. The exhibition announcement also distinguished the New York selection from a somewhat different version that had toured Europe. The surviving checklist thus establishes a specific appearance for this sheet in New York, within an exhibition expressly concerned with the questions its mixed materials raise. Its place there connected it to a sustained investigation of drawing, extending across several decades of Pollock’s work. ^[8]

The later Collection Survey, open from 22 November 2015 to 1 May 2016, widened that perspective to approximately fifty paintings, drawings and prints from MoMA’s collection. Organised by Starr Figura with Hillary Reder, it brought little-known graphic works into the same account as large canvases such as One: Number 31, 1950. Its stated emphasis was experimentation through a range of materials and techniques. That setting offered a productive way to approach the 1945 drawing: paper was one of the places where Pollock tested pictorial possibilities, with its own range of tools and effects. The exhibition’s breadth also makes comparison more open-ended. Connections can concern a shared problem of line, surface or space, without turning every drawing into a preliminary stage on the way to a famous painting. ^[9]