War

Jackson Pollock’s War is a drawing whose violence emerges through tangled lines as well as recognisable bodies. The Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies a human figure and bull thrown onto a pyre, with a possible hooded crucifixion at the right. ^[1]

Why the date varies

The drawing has a history of changing dates. Francis V. O’Connor’s 1967 Pollock catalogue lists it as War, 1947, entry 136, then belonging to the artist’s estate. It appears among the works on paper, with brush, pen, ink and crayon given as its materials. That early published classification is useful: this is a substantial drawing with a named subject, alongside the many untitled sheets in Pollock’s graphic work. ^[2]

Bernice Rose’s 1980 exhibition Drawing into Painting, held from 4 February to 16 March, presented a different chronology. Its checklist placed War around 1943–44 and described the 1947 inscription as subsequent. This distinction separates an estimated time of making from the date written on the sheet. ^[3]

The 1998 MoMA retrospective supplied another qualified date: about 1944–46, while retaining the information that the work was dated 1947. Its caption identifies the same drawing through catalogue number OT 765, dimensions and museum credit. These alternatives describe the history of one object’s interpretation; they do not establish successive versions of War. A reader encountering different years in books is therefore seeing a real disagreement over where the sheet belongs in Pollock’s development. The earlier estimates remain approximate, and the inscription remains part of the evidence. ^[4]

Violence in the line

The Met currently lists War as 1947: ink and coloured pencils on paper, 52.4 × 66 centimetres, accession 1982.147.25. Its commentary relates the imagery to 1943–44 and calls it Pollock’s only titled drawing. It describes figures camouflaged by darkened, thickened lines, sharpened by red and yellow accents. Identifying the bodies takes effort; the graphic agitation carries the violence before the scene becomes legible. ^[1]

The museum’s 1983 acquisition account singles out rapid, short ink marks. It records the lower-right signature and date as “Jackson Pollock 47,” making the inscription’s wording explicit. War belonged to Lee Krasner’s gift of forty Pollock works on paper, given in his memory in 1982. ^[5]

Rose offered a more particular connection between the pyre and Picasso’s The Dream and Lie of Franco, also linking War with Guernica. In her account, the fierce pen line itself participates in that relationship. She thought War probably had a specific storyline, although she did not identify a recoverable plot. That qualified suggestion leaves room for narrative without supplying names for every figure. Her broader discussion of early drawings follows a growing independence of line: imagery becomes harder to separate from the pattern moving across it. Applied cautiously here, that framework helps explain why following an outline can become as absorbing as recognising a body. ^[3]

Picasso and the experience of war

Picasso’s work was available to Pollock in New York well before the date inscribed on War. Charles Stuckey describes the May 1939 showing of Guernica and its studies at the Valentine gallery, organised to benefit refugees from the Spanish Civil War. The painting returned later that year for MoMA’s major Picasso retrospective. This sequence makes the encounter concrete: Pollock could study an immense finished statement together with drawings concerned with its individual parts. The refugee benefit also brought the painting’s subject into the circumstances of its exhibition. For understanding War, that setting matters more than a vague resemblance between two artists associated with energetic distortion. Picasso offered an example of how invented forms could carry an urgent public subject, and how drawing could contribute to an image of collective suffering. ^[6]

The Musée national Picasso-Paris’s 2024 account of Pollock’s early years places that encounter within a wider attraction to Picasso’s hybrid figures of the 1930s. It also situates Pollock among the European Surrealists working in New York, where automatic writing and drawing offered ways of generating unfamiliar imagery. This context helps bring the human and animal world of War into focus. A body need not retain ordinary anatomy to be expressive, and a composition can suggest an episode without arranging its figures into a plainly readable illustration. The Paris exhibition treats these early years as an extended artistic formation before the large numbered abstractions. Reading War within that formation gives its strange creatures and crowded action their own importance, beyond their possible place on a route towards the poured paintings. ^[7]

Picasso’s The Dream and Lie of Franco gives the comparison a sharper political edge. The Met explains that its two prints form an eighteen-scene attack on Francisco Franco, with proceeds supporting the Spanish Republican government. Franco appears as a monstrous figure; the final four scenes, added after the bombing of Guernica, connect with studies for the mural. Here, grotesque invention served an identifiable political intervention. That history clarifies what is at stake when scholars connect Pollock’s drawing with these prints. The comparison concerns an expressive language capable of joining bodily distortion, violence and protest. It does not by itself establish that Pollock repeated Picasso’s characters or that the bull in War carries a single equivalent political identity. ^[8]

A companion drawing and a mythic neighbour

An untitled sheet in the Met, accession 1982.147.23, offers a close comparison within Pollock’s own work. The museum associates its size, palette and composition with War and reads a bonfire in both. In the untitled drawing, its commentary identifies a human form and a birdlike figure holding a knife, describing a scene of mythic sacrifice. Those particular figures belong to the companion sheet. They should not be imported into War to complete its story. The comparison is valuable precisely because similar materials and imagery can open different narrative possibilities: warfare, ritual destruction and sacrifice overlap without becoming interchangeable. The museum leaves a further question open in the untitled drawing, asking whether its figures attend the fire or are conjured by it. That uncertainty offers a useful way to approach the pair. Recognising a figure can sharpen a scene’s emotional force while leaving the nature of its action unresolved. ^[9]

The painting Pasiphaë, dated about 1943 by the Met, provides another useful neighbour. The museum describes broken forms and swirling or angular lines pressed towards the picture’s front, with sentinel-like figures flanking a prostrate central form. It connects the painting’s development with Pollock’s coloured drawings and his adaptation of Surrealist automatism. Its title also has a revealing history: Pollock first called it Moby Dick, then renamed it after hearing the story of the mother of the Minotaur. A mythological title could therefore become attached to an already developing image. This helps a reader keep title and interpretation in proportion when considering War. Words direct attention, but Pollock’s crowded imagery can sustain relationships that exceed a simple scene description. Beside Pasiphaë and the untitled bonfire drawing, War belongs to an inventive figurative world in which human and animal forms make violence palpable while the movement of line keeps recognition unsettled. ^[10]