Untitled, c.1951: Ink on Japanese Paper

In Jackson Pollock's Untitled, made around 1951, liquid colour travels through paper. MoMA describes organic shapes and softly edged pools produced by staining absorbent sheets laid together. Ink passed downwards, leaving increasingly indistinct versions of a composition: the receiving material helped change the mark. ^[1]

The museum identifies this drawing as ink and coloured ink on Japanese paper, measuring 62.1 × 87.3 cm, from the Joan and Lester Avnet Collection, accession 153.1978. Its title is simply Untitled. The distinguishing “I” sometimes attached to it should not be understood as Pollock's designation of a numbered suite. “Japanese paper” also should not automatically be expanded into a claim that the sheet consists of rice fibres. ^[1]

A mark can become another drawing

Bernice Rose's 1980 catalogue reconstructs a triplet: CR 825, then this Avnet drawing, CR 823, then CR 824. She identifies CR 823 as a reworked bleed from CR 825; CR 824, then in Jackson Friedman's collection, is a separate sheet and mirror image of CR 823. Her checklist additionally calls CR 823 a mirror image of CR 825, although its plate caption omits that qualification. The catalogue’s differing wording leaves that reversal qualification uneven. ^[2]

Rose describes removing sheets, turning them front to back and adding ink, sometimes while they remained stacked. Absorption supplied starting points for decisions and, for Rose, painterly colour. Her possible unopened package of paper does not establish a bound drawing pad. This triplet differs from her six-sheet group beginning with CR 811. She calls CR 823's support mulberry paper and records 61.9 × 87 cm; that older measurement does not establish subsequent trimming. She also leaves uncertain whether the paper drawings or black canvases came first. ^[2]

What Pollock said in 1951

Pollock's letters give the experiments a more immediate setting. Francis V. O'Connor's chronology reproduces a January 1951 letter to Alfonso Ossorio in which Pollock says he has been making drawings on Japanese paper and feels encouraged by them. His phrase “feel good about them” gives his own encouraging assessment. It establishes enthusiasm for drawings of this kind, while leaving the individual sheets unnamed. We cannot turn the letter into a dated description of the Avnet drawing. ^[3]

On 7 June he wrote to Ossorio about “drawing on canvas in black,” adding that earlier imagery was returning. In the same letter he praised Lee Krasner's current painting and anticipated her exhibition. Paper experiments and ambitious canvas work thus enter the correspondence as active concerns within a shared artistic household. The phrase about drawing on canvas is especially useful alongside Echo: Number 25, 1951: it shows how widely Pollock could apply the word drawing, without supplying a sequence of inventions for this sheet. ^[3]

Letting a technique develop

In his interview with William Wright, recorded in late 1950, Pollock connected changes of method with changes in what an artist needed to express. He also described painting as direct, explaining that he did not enlarge preliminary drawings into finished canvases. That distinction helps us approach the Avnet sheet as an artistic result in its own right. Calling it a drawing need not make it an instruction for something larger. ^[4]

Pollock acknowledged having a general idea of his direction while leaving the particular image to emerge through making. He told Wright that experience enabled considerable control over flowing paint, and that technique served the eventual statement. Those comments offer a useful way into his wider working methods. They describe his thinking near this period; they are not a transcript of the making of Untitled or evidence that he predetermined each ink pool. ^[4]

Reading the material description

Ink itself is a broad material category. MoMA's glossary distinguishes traditional carbon drawing ink, dispersed in water with glue or gum, from modern liquid India ink with a shellac binder and possible dye colourants. It also describes both pen application and brushed washes. These alternatives explain why the word ink alone cannot identify an artist's complete recipe or tool. Recognising that breadth helps distinguish a medium's name from a method of applying it. The glossary supplies possibilities, not a chemical analysis of Pollock's particular black and coloured liquids. ^[5]

A place among independent works on paper

The Avnet Collection has an important place in MoMA's history of collecting drawings. In 1983 John Elderfield described the Avnet Collection as having been formed with the museum's needs in mind. His introduction also traced a shift in institutional attention: works on paper had initially been collected partly to support the painting and sculpture collection, whereas a separate Drawings department was established in 1971. This history helps explain the importance of treating a sheet as a complete work with its own material problems and ambitions. The category drawing carries a history of collecting and looking as well as a description of medium. ^[6]

A related curatorial argument shaped No Limits, Just Edges, organised by Susan Davidson in Venice in 2005. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection's exhibition account notes that Pollock exhibited both paintings and drawings at his first solo show in 1943. Smaller works offered practical sales advantages, but the museum also argues that both forms deserved equal attention as expressions of his artistic aims. Its retrospective brought together fifty-one works on paper across his career. This is a broader context for the Avnet drawing, without establishing that this particular sheet was a loan. It invites readers of Pollock's drawings to follow changing methods across paper supports as carefully as across canvases. ^[7]

Thomas Krens's preface to the exhibition's 2006 catalogue similarly placed draftsmanship within Pollock's transformation of figurative line into nonfigurative expression. The exhibition travelled from Berlin and Venice in 2005 to New York in 2006. Its emphasis makes the distinction between line and fluid colour a productive question: a work on paper can participate in the same large artistic inquiry while retaining its own scale and means. That is a curatorial framework for understanding this field of work, rather than documentation of an intention Pollock assigned to the Avnet sheet. ^[8]

The drawing's gallery label belongs to MoMA's 2015–16 Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey, 1934–1954. ^[1]

The survey assembled approximately fifty paintings, drawings and prints, with Starr Figura and Hillary Reder organising the exhibition. Its account emphasised experimentation across traditional and unusual media. Rare engravings, lithographs and screenprints joined the drawings, widening the range of processes under consideration. The curatorial emphasis encourages attention to how an image takes shape through its materials. A survey organised around that question allows smaller works to contribute discoveries that could be overlooked in an account concerned mainly with large paintings. ^[9]