Untitled

The late 1930s marked a key period of transition for Jackson Pollock, in which he began to separate himself from the influence of his early mentor, the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. Pollock became engaged in an intense dialogue with the work of the Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros; he was inspired by their social commitment and use of primitive, archetypal imagery. The expressionistic style and oblong format of Untitled recall Orozco’s murals at Pomona and Dartmouth Colleges, which Pollock had seen firsthand. The bullfight imagery evokes the work of Pablo Picasso, whose Guernica (1937) made a powerful impression on Pollock when he saw the painting in New York in 1939.