Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Around 1945, Jackson Pollock abandoned a Surrealist mode of painting (inspired by psychoanalysis he was undergoing) to experiment with radical abstraction. The drip paintings he produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s have become icons of modern art. He created these works by dripping and dribbling liquid enamel paint directly from cans onto a canvas laid on the floor, then manipulating the paint with sticks or stiff brushes. Through this technique, which highlights artistic process and materials, he produced a richly layered web of patterns and colors. In 1948, to further emphasize the works’ lack of traditional subject matter, Pollock began to title his paintings only with numbers and dates.