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Dimensions: 17 1/2 by 21 1/2 in. 44.4 by 69.8 cm.

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Provenance: Betty Parsons Gallery, New York
Steingrim Laursen, Copenhagen
C & M Arts, New York

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Exhibited:

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Literature: Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works, Vol. 3, New Haven & London, 1978, cat. no. 840, p. 315, illustrated

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Notes: 1951 was by many accounts, Jackson Pollock's most important and productive year as a draftsman. Infamously obsessed with draftsmanship, 1951 marks the first and only time in his career where the styles and preoccupations of painting and drawing merge both technically and aesthetically. In the present work, Untitled, 1951, we see evidence of Pollock assuming a radical method of drawing: pouring. In this groundbreaking process, Pollock poured, dripped and stained ink onto stacked sheets of rice paper. The ink was absorbed by the fibrous paper so that Pollock could remove a sheet and subtly alter the composition, working between drawings without losing sight of the original poured drawing. Therefore, the very paper he chose was a deliberate part of the aesthetic process for Pollock, who seemed to carefully choose paper for their absorbent properties. As Bernice Rose noted, these drawings were "a new kind of stimulus to Pollock, a new kind of 'automatic' or hallucinatory drawing in which the remnants of one image suggested the others. Sometime the second or third sheet is more elaborated, in other cases it is less material. In both cases the works acquired a new kind of ambiguity that is both optical and metaphysical." (Bernice Rose, Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1980, p. 23).