Untitled (Sheet of Studies)

Jackson Pollock’s Untitled (Sheet of Studies) brings animal imagery and invented signs into the small compass of a drawing. MoMA dates it to about 1939–42 and identifies its medium as black coloured pencil on paper. Measuring 27.8 × 35.4 centimetres, the horizontal sheet belongs to the museum’s collection through the gift of Charles B. Benenson. ^[1]

The interest lies in the meeting of recognition and invention. Pollock’s own words offer a useful starting point. In a questionnaire published in February 1944, he named Picasso and Miró as the artists he most admired and expressed interest in the unconscious as a source of art. He also insisted on the necessity of craftsmanship. These positions belong together: an openness to unexpected imagery could coexist with a serious concern for the means of making it. The questionnaire postdates the drawing’s estimated date range, so it provides a later statement of his interests, rather than a report written while he worked on this particular sheet. ^[2]

Inherited images and invented signs

Picasso was a powerful presence in Pollock’s New York. Elizabeth Levine and Anna Indych’s museum chronology records that in 1939 he repeatedly visited Guernica and its preparatory drawings at the Valentine Gallery, sometimes sketching. MoMA’s extensive Picasso exhibition followed that winter. This history gives the association a concrete setting: Pollock could study the relationship between an immense painting and the drawings surrounding its development in the city where he lived. It also helps explain why a small drawing deserves attention within his encounter with Picasso. Works on paper were part of that encounter from the beginning. Yet the broad dating of Sheet of Studies leaves its exact position within these experiences open; a particular visit cannot be assigned as its moment of origin. ^[3]

The word “constellations” also has a history in modern drawing. In his essay “A Sum of Destructions,” Pepe Karmel follows a vocabulary of dots and connecting lines back to Picasso’s drawings inspired by astronomical charts. Those drawings became more widely available through their publication as book illustrations in 1931. Karmel traces Miró’s responses, including his Constellations of 1941, which were exhibited in New York in 1945. This offers a useful vocabulary for thinking about a sign’s double life as an image and a connection within a larger arrangement. The chronology also matters: that 1945 exhibition comes after the estimated making of Pollock’s sheet. It cannot explain the drawing as a direct response to that exhibition, and resemblance alone cannot establish a particular Miró work as its source. ^[4]

What a line can do

Bernice Rose’s Drawing into Painting approaches Pollock’s development through the changing responsibilities of line. In her account, a line can delineate a figure, contribute to a surface pattern or extend beyond the image it initially describes. She sees a persistent exchange between drawing and painting, with techniques passing between the two and with figure and surrounding space sometimes exchanging their usual roles. Applied as a way of looking, her argument encourages a reader to follow a mark beyond the instant when it becomes recognisable. A figure’s outline may attract attention as a subject; the same outline also has direction, rhythm and a place among other marks. This approach gives a sheet of studies a substantial artistic problem of its own: how can particular images and the movement of the drawing hold our attention together? Rose’s argument concerns Pollock’s wider practice, rather than a documented account of this sheet’s making. ^[5]

MoMA’s gallery label makes the distinction between borrowing and invention especially clear. It associates the bull’s head on the right with Pollock’s interest in Picasso, while describing the stick-figure constellations as Pollock’s own inventions. Its suggestion that the apparently arbitrary juxtaposition of signs might arise from an attempt to reach the unconscious remains explicitly tentative. That qualification leaves room to experience the relationships among the marks without converting each one into a fixed psychological symbol. A recognisable motif supplies an entry into the drawing, while the invented signs keep its associations open. ^[1]

A study need not promise a painting

Pollock had worried about the expressive life of drawing long before this sheet. In a letter of January 1930, reproduced by Francis V. O’Connor, he criticised his own work for lacking freedom and rhythm. The youthful dissatisfaction is relevant to a drawing built from signs: fluent line was something he wanted to achieve through work. Years later, in a draft associated with his 1947 statement on painting, he distinguished drawings related to his paintings from drawings made specifically to prepare them. His concise formulation was that they were “relative to my painting but not for it.” This later distinction helps keep the word studies open. It can describe the exploration of a visual vocabulary without supplying evidence for a particular intended canvas. The sheet can reward attention as an encounter among possibilities, even when no completed painting is named as its destination. ^[6]

The material of the marks

The phrase coloured pencil deserves care even when the colour is black. In their study of wax-based drawing media, conservators Margaret Holben Ellis and M. Brigitte Yeh describe coloured pencils as a varied category whose lines can appear matte or shiny. Their materials discussion distinguishes them from graphite pencils and from other wax-based drawing tools. They specifically note Pollock’s use of pencils with different sensitivities within a single composition. That observation concerns his practice generally; it is not a published analysis identifying the ingredients of Sheet of Studies. It nevertheless explains why the everyday word pencil cannot settle a drawing’s exact material character. A museum’s medium description carries information that a general description such as “black drawing” would lose, while a precise chemical account would require evidence specific to the object. ^[7]

The drawing in the museum

A secure early museum record comes from Recent Acquisitions: Drawings, organised by John Elderfield and held in MoMA’s Sachs Galleries from 19 March to 2 June 1981. The announcement presented new purchases and gifts as additions that filled gaps or complemented existing holdings. The checklist includes Sheet of Studies, dated about 1941, as charcoal and pencil, with the same dimensions used today. It records the purchase as the gift of Charles B. Benenson and gives the accession number 712.80, the earlier form of today’s 712.1980. These details securely connect the historical entry to this drawing. They also show how descriptions change: a narrower approximate date and a different medium label were once attached to the same object. Such differences document the history of cataloguing; they do not by themselves demonstrate a physical alteration to the sheet. ^[8]

The 2015 collection-survey checklist placed it within a concentrated group of Pollock’s earlier work. The same checklist page lists Untitled (Animals and Figures), dated 1942 and made in gouache and ink, and Stenographic Figure, a painting dated about 1942. The differences in medium make these useful companions for a reader interested in Pollock’s drawings. Paper and canvas, pencil and liquid colour offer distinct ways to pursue images and signs within a closely related period. Read across those entries, Sheet of Studies has a clear place in a varied practice: its concentrated scale gives the encounter between individual marks a particular intimacy. ^[9]