Untitled,

1951, printed 1964

Pollock’s 1951 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery was a landmark event for the New York art world. The show’s monochrome black paintings marked a turning point. Made by pouring thinned black enamel paint onto unprimed cotton canvas, these works reintroduced suggestions of figurative imagery into the artist’s practice. Pollock selected six paintings from the exhibition to reproduce as a portfolio of screenprints, hoping to make his work available to a broader audience. His brother Sanford McCoy photographed the paintings using high- contrast film to create the screen matrices for the portfolio of six impressions from which these two have been selected. Photo-screenprinting was highly unusual in an artistic setting at the time. A decade later Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg would be heralded as pioneers for employing this technique drawn from commercial media in their artistic practices, but Pollock’s innovative use of the technique is rarely noted.