The nine works shown here—six in the vitrine and three above it—are from a cache of sixty-nine screenprints (or silkscreens) found after Pollock's widow, Lee Krasner, died in 1984. Previously unknown, they are the result of experiments he made with this stencil-based printing technique between 1943 and 1944. Pollock worked briefly at a commercial silkscreen workshop in 1943 and acquired his own small printing screen there to use at home. The three screenprints to the left, with a pattern of looping squiggles, predate Pollock's first abstract "drip" paintings by at least two years. Pollock and Krasner sometimes used screenprints like these as greeting cards.
Gallery label from Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey, 1934-1954, November 22, 2015–May 1, 2016.