Jackson Pollock’s Sketchbooks and Other Works on Paper at The Met

The Met’s robust holdings of works on paper by Jackson Pollock—with forty drawings given by Lee Krasner in 1982, and three featured sketchbooks bequeathed after her death in 1984—reveal an artist searching for his creative foundations. The once spiral-bound sketchbook studies and the loose-leaf drawings are informed by Pollock’s time studying with the American painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League in New York. From 1930 to 1932, Pollock would be deeply influenced by his teacher’s dynamic sense of composition and expressive geometries alongside his disciplined study of art history.

Throughout these pages, it is evident that elements of works by El Greco, Michelangelo, Peter Paul Rubens, and Tintoretto, along with the muralism of José Clemente Orozco, were sources of inspiration for the young artist. While Pollock encountered many of these works through reproductions, as the contents of his home library attest, he also visited a number of these artworks in person—the most formative being Orozco’s murals at Pomona College and Dartmouth College in 1930 and 1936, respectively.

Pollock eventually rejected Benton’s Regionalist, figurative principles in search of his own approach to abstraction. As he said in a 1950 New Yorker interview: “He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into non-objective painting.” His resulting drip technique sublimated Benton’s pillars of gesture, movement, and dynamism into a register all his own. Later drawings, also featured, showcase an artist working through the vagaries of process and psychology, which he would also parlay into his radical approach to painting.

On the occasion of the exhibition Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, curated by David Breslin and Brinda Kumar, these sketchbook pages have been newly photographed and digitized. This work builds upon the extensive research conducted in 1997 for Jackson Pollock: Early Sketchbooks and Drawings, an exhibition and facsimile edition accompanying curated by Nan Rosenthal at The Met.