Untitled, c.1950: The Avnet Fund Drawing

Jackson Pollock’s Untitled, dated about 1950, is an ink drawing on paper in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Measuring 47.9 × 63.1 cm, it carries the credit The Joan and Lester Avnet Fund and the accession number 663.1983. That combination identifies the particular sheet discussed here. MoMA’s title contains no Roman numeral: the designation Untitled II should not suggest a numbered series established by Pollock. ^[1]

The drawing offers an entry into a medium that Pollock pursued alongside painting. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s account of his works on paper estimates a lifetime output of approximately seven hundred sheets across several media. It also recalls that he included drawings with paintings in his first solo exhibition in 1943. Smaller works had practical advantages for sales, but the museum argues that their inclusion also expressed his conviction that paper and canvas deserved equal artistic attention. This is a useful starting point for Untitled: a sheet can carry an artistic proposition of its own, without requiring a larger painting to complete it. ^[2]

What ink brings to drawing

Ink is a material with its own possibilities. MoMA’s glossary distinguishes traditional black drawing ink, made with fine carbon particles in water and a glue or gum binder, from modern liquid India ink, which uses shellac and may contain dyes. Bottled ink can be applied with a nib or brushed into washes. The same general medium therefore accommodates a narrow inscription and a spread of liquid across a surface. These definitions explain the range behind the word ink; they do not identify the exact ingredients or applicator Pollock used for the Avnet Fund sheet. A museum’s concise medium description leaves such material questions open. ^[3]

Bernice Rose placed small ink drawings at an important junction in Pollock’s development. In Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting, she distinguished two groups around 1950: freer, more open drawings on sheets of different sizes, and denser drawings on equally sized Japan paper. She proposed that the small nonfigurative drawings probably helped generate the black paintings that followed. Her account also explains why changing dimensions could change the gesture itself: a larger support demands a different reach and movement. This gives the Avnet Fund drawing a productive wider context, without assigning it a particular position in a reconstructed sequence. In Rose’s reading, the relationship between drawing and painting involves the physical conditions of making, as well as the resemblance of one finished work to another. ^[4]

A drawing with its own purpose

Pollock had already described a close but independent relationship between the two activities. Francis V. O’Connor’s 1967 catalogue reproduces a draft associated with Pollock’s 1947 statement “My Painting,” in which drawings are related to his paintings without being made as preparations for them. This distinction matters when approaching a small sheet from a painter’s career. A drawing may develop an idea that also interests the painter on canvas, while reaching its own resolution on paper. The relationship allows discoveries to move between media without reducing every drawing to a preliminary stage. The broader drawings guide follows the variety of purposes paper served in Pollock’s work. ^[5]

His own discussion of technique adds another useful distinction. In the William Wright interview, dated late 1950 in the published transcript, Pollock described experience as enabling control of flowing paint, while acknowledging that a finished image did not exist in advance. In “My Painting,” published in 1947–48, he also described recognising what he had done and being willing to change or destroy an image. Together these statements suggest a practice in which responsiveness and judgment remain active throughout making. They offer a general understanding of his approach, rather than a record of the Avnet drawing’s individual gestures. A spontaneous mark can become the occasion for another decision; immediacy does not make the finished result a record of unqualified chance. ^[6]

Comparing two different sheets

A comparison with another ink drawing from about 1950 helps to make the variety concrete. That smaller work, accession 448.1982, was given to MoMA by Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in honour of Eliza Parkinson Cobb. Its museum label proposes that Pollock probably used a mouth atomizer, an instrument through which loaded ink or paint can be blown. The proposal belongs to that drawing. It demonstrates one possibility within his ink practice, while leaving the Avnet Fund drawing’s method to be established from its own evidence. ^[7]

John Elderfield’s The Modern Drawing also discusses the Lauder sheet. He interprets its black and white as producing an unstable relationship between figure and ground, with lines expanding into shapes. His account suggests how drawing can organise space even when it describes no recognisable object. That is a critical comparison, rather than a description of marks on the Avnet sheet. Elsewhere in the same book, Elderfield recounts MoMA’s growing commitment to drawings and the importance of the Joan and Lester Avnet Collection within that growth. The institutional story helps explain why works on paper merit sustained museum attention. The Avnet Collection and the Avnet Fund are distinct credit descriptions, however; the book’s general collecting history does not supply this drawing’s complete provenance. ^[8]

Three museum settings

MoMA’s exhibition-history text identifies this drawing in Drawing since 1940 in 1987, The New York School in 1998–99 and Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey, 1934–1954 in 2015–16. These records trace its presentation within both broader drawing exhibitions and a focused examination of Pollock. ^[1]

The 1998 exhibition, organised by Magdalena Dabrowski, assembled about eighty drawings to provide context for the concurrent Pollock retrospective. Its artists included Lee Krasner, Arshile Gorky, Helen Frankenthaler and Willem de Kooning. The museum’s announcement connected earlier work with Surrealist automatic drawing and symbolic imagery, while Dabrowski stressed the diversity of expression within the New York School. That setting encouraged attention to a shared field of artistic problems and to differing answers among artists. For this sheet, it supplied a conversation wider than the familiar story of Pollock alone. The announcement’s more sweeping language of American cultural triumph belongs to its historical curatorial rhetoric; the concrete value of the exhibition lay in the opportunity for comparison. ^[9]

The 2015–16 survey offered a different emphasis. Organised by Starr Figura with Hillary Reder, it brought together approximately fifty paintings, drawings and prints from MoMA’s holdings. Its introduction stressed experimentation across traditional and unusual materials, bringing lesser-known works on paper into a career survey that also included the vast One: Number 31, 1950. The range made differences of medium and scale central to the account of Pollock’s development. Within that approach, an ink drawing participates in the same history of inquiry as a major canvas. The Avnet Fund sheet’s museum life offers a way into it through drawing as a medium, through exchanges among artists, and through Pollock’s continuing exploration of what a mark could do. ^[10]