Untitled

Prints and Drawings

1951

Jackson Pollock
American, 1912–1956

In 1951, a pivotal year for Jackson Pollock, the artist made a body of work that reincorporated aspects of the natural world that were absent from his purely abstract work of the previous four years. Typical of this new style, Untitled exhibits vigorous, spiraling gestures, but also forms that suggest written language or pictograms.

That same year, Pollock was given a supply of highly absorbent handmade paper made of pure fiber, with no sizing or glues. The ink he used to make Untitled, which he applied with an eyedropper, spread out in all directions as it seeped into the paper, in a manner that mimicked his famous drip paintings.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Prints and Drawings

Artist: Jackson Pollock
Title: Untitled
Place: United States (Artist's nationality)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1951
Medium: Brown ink, dripped, with touches of pen and black ink, on mottled, tan wove paper
Inscriptions: Signed and dated, lower left: “Jackson Pollock 51”
Dimensions: 31.5 × 40.6 cm (12 7/16 × 16 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Richard and Mary L. Gray
Reference Number: 2019.859

Betsy Fahlman, Matthew Baigell, Susan C. Larsen (et al.), American Images: The SBC Collection of Twentieth-Century American Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), pp. 133 and 298, no. 62 (color ill.).
Francis O’Connor and Eugene Thaw (eds.), Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 312, no. 836 (ill.).

New York, Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer, New York Abstract Expressionism, 1975, cat. 11 (color ill.).
Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Texas Collects: Willem de Kooning and His Contemporaries, 1995 (no cat.).
Dallas Museum of Art, Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots, 2015–16, pp. 129, 157 (color ill.).
The Art Institute of Chicago, “Pure Drawing: Seven Centuries of Art from the Gray Collection”, January 25 - May 10, 2020, pp. 90-91, cat. 33, pp. 124-125, fig. 33.1, p. 145, GC 128, traveled to New York, The Morgan Library, February 19 - June 6, 2021, and Berkeley CA, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, August 4 - November 28, 2021.

Probably given by the artist to René Bouché (1905–1963), New York; by descent to his wife, Denise Lawson-Johnston Bouché, New York, to at least 1978 [O’Connor and Thaw 1978]. Private collection, London. Sold, Sotheby’s, New York, May 5, 1994, lot 83, to Southwestern Bell Corporation, Texas, to at least 1996 [Fahlman, Baigell, and Larsen 1996]. Sold by C. and M. Arts, New York, to a private collector; sold, Sotheby’s, New York, May 10, 2012, lot 122. Private collection; sold though Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, to The Gray Collection Trust, Chicago, Apr. 10, 2015; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2019.

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