Finished just after Pollock's first exhibition in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim's New York gallery, Art of This Century, Pasiphaë is the largest of the painter's mythologically themed pictures of the mid-1940s. Originally named Moby Dick, the picture was retitled before it was exhibited in 1944 when James Johnson Sweeney, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, related the story of the Cretan princess Pasiphaë who gave birth to the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. The Minotaur had been a favorite motif of Picasso and of the Surrealists (Minotaure had been the name of their literary magazine from 1933 to 1939, for which Picasso had designed the first cover).

Here Pollock incorporates two sentinel-like standing figures at the left and right and a prostrate figure at center. Pollock weaves these figures into a complex field of arcane symbols and free-form abstraction, his own novel interpretation of the Surrealist practice of automatism, wherein the artist's unconscious is used to organize composition.

• Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

  Inscription: Signed (lower left): Jackson Pollock

• Provenance

  the artist, East Hampton, N.Y. (1943–at least 1944; gift to Krasner); his wife, Lee Krasner, New York (until 1982; sold to MMA)
  
  

• Exhibition History

  Australia: Australian National Gallery, Mar. 1-Apr. 27, 1986; Queensland Art Gallery, May 7-July 1, 1986. ¦20th Century Masters from The Metropolitan Museum of Art¦. exh. cat., p. 67 (illus. in color).
  
  New York: Museum of Modern Art, November 4, 1998 - February 16, 1999. ¦Jackson Pollock Retrospective¦. Pg. 179, no. 69 illus. in color.

• Timeline of Art History (2000–present)
  Thematic Essays

  Abstract Expressionism

  Jasper Johns (born 1930)

  The Pictures Generation

  The Postwar Print Renaissance in America

  Timelines

  The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.–present
• MetPublications
  "The Abstract Expressionists": The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 44, no. 3 (Winter, 1986–1987) (1986–1987)

  The Jackson Pollock Sketchbooks in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1997)

  Notable Acquisitions, 1981–1982 (1982)

  Twentieth-Century Art: Selections from the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 1, Painting, 1905–1945 (1986)