Untitled, c.1950

A drawing can preserve an experiment on an intimate scale. Jackson Pollock’s Untitled, dated approximately 1950, is an ink drawing on paper measuring 44.5 × 56.6 cm in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Its accession number is 448.1982; it was given by Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in honour of Eliza Parkinson Cobb. The museum’s date leaves its precise moment of making open. ^[1]

Its place among Pollock’s drawings invites a broader question: how much can a sheet of paper accomplish on its own? The Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s account of the 2005 exhibition No Limits, Just Edges describes a practice extending across approximately seven hundred works on paper, using media from pencil and watercolour to poured enamel. Its curatorial argument gives paper and canvas equal artistic weight. Pollock had exhibited drawings alongside paintings at his first solo show in 1943. Smaller works offered practical advantages because they were easier to sell, but the exhibition account stresses artistic ambition as well as that consideration. Within such a varied practice, an ink drawing has a claim on our attention independent of any larger painting it might help us understand. ^[2]

That independence also has a basis in Pollock’s own thinking. Francis V. O’Connor’s 1967 catalogue reproduces a draft associated with the artist’s 1947–48 statement My Painting. In it Pollock describes his drawings as related to his painting without being made for it. This distinction is especially helpful when considering a sheet close in date to changes in his canvases. A relationship between media need not mean that the smaller work is a plan to be enlarged. Drawing may test an idea with its own material conditions and arrive at its own result. The draft predates this sheet, so it supplies a position Pollock had already expressed, rather than a description of this particular drawing’s purpose or a record of its making. ^[3]

Ink carried through the air

MoMA proposes that Pollock probably used a mouth atomizer: a straw-like instrument loaded with ink, through which air is blown. Its label compares the resulting splatter to fireworks. The qualification matters. This is a likely method identified by the museum, without proof that the tool was an ordinary drinking straw or that every mark was made in the same way. ^[1]

Ink itself offers a range of possibilities. MoMA’s materials glossary distinguishes traditional black drawing ink, made with fine carbon particles in water and a glue or gum binder, from modern liquid India ink containing shellac and sometimes dyes. It also describes familiar ways of applying ink with a pen or in brush washes. Against that background, the atomizer proposal concerns the delivery of a drawing material as much as an unusual tool. Material and application are separate parts of the question. The glossary explains the medium’s general vocabulary; it does not identify the formula or manufacturer of the ink Pollock used here. ^[4]

Pollock’s interview with William Wright supplies a useful way into such experiments. In the transcript, dated late 1950 in Pepe Karmel’s anthology, he argues that technique develops from an artist’s expressive needs. He also describes learning to control flowing paint through experience, while allowing that a finished image emerges during work. His earlier My Painting, published in winter 1947–48, explicitly accommodates alteration and the destruction of an image. Together these statements connect inventive means with decisions made as a work develops. They help explain why an unconventional application need not imply a wholly uncontrolled result. They remain broader statements about his practice: neither gives instructions for making this ink drawing, and the Wright interview’s recording and broadcast history has been dated differently in institutional accounts. ^[5]

When black becomes a shape

The black and white relationship was central to John Elderfield’s discussion of this drawing in The Modern Drawing in 1983. He describes lines expanding into shapes and a shifting sense of which part occupies the foreground. Black can appear to float over the sheet, then become an absence within a more substantial white field. His comparison with Rorschach configurations concerns these suggestive forms; it does not establish a psychological diagnosis or a clinical purpose for the drawing. This reading gives the viewer something more specific to consider than energetic movement alone: the apparent weight and position of black and white can exchange as attention moves between them. Elderfield treats that instability as a new spatial possibility, without requiring the forms to identify recognisable objects. ^[6]

Bernice Rose’s 1980 study places the small ink drawings around 1950 within another kind of experiment. She distinguishes an open group on sheets of varying sizes from a denser group on equally sized Japanese paper. Her account proposes that these drawings probably helped initiate the black and white canvases that followed. The two groups already show why a single recipe cannot explain this moment: changes in support, density and format were part of the investigation. Rose also considers how increasing a drawing’s dimensions can change the scale of the gesture itself. These are relationships across bodies of work, rather than a secure assignment of the Lauder sheet to one particular sequence. Her discussion of ink bleeding through stacked sheets concerns later drawings of 1951; it gives no basis for attributing that process to this c.1950 work. ^[7]

Drawing beside the canvases

The chronology assembled by Elizabeth Levine and Anna Indych makes the transition tangible. Pollock’s November–December 1950 exhibition at Betty Parsons included works as varied as One: Number 31, 1950 and his painting on glass, Number 29. By June 1951, writing to Alfonso Ossorio, Pollock described a period of drawing in black on canvas and the reappearance of earlier imagery. His next Parsons exhibition combined primarily black paintings with watercolours and drawings. This sequence places the ink experiments beside a changing painting practice. It also keeps the chronology flexible: the approximate date of the present sheet cannot establish exactly when it entered those exchanges, or which canvas followed directly from it. A year can contain several active approaches to making a picture. ^[8]

The drawing’s later exhibition life brings that variety back into view. MoMA included it in Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey, 1934–1954, held from 22 November 2015 to 1 May 2016 and organised by Starr Figura with Hillary Reder. Approximately fifty paintings, drawings and prints brought customary materials together with less orthodox procedures. The survey gave particular attention to works on paper and printmaking that could be overshadowed by the famous canvases. In that setting, this sheet helped represent an artist continually testing how a mark could be made. The exhibition’s emphasis on process encourages a useful double attention: curiosity about the physical means of applying ink, and patience with the picture those means produce. The question of a tool opens the encounter; it need not exhaust it. ^[9]