Though his “drip paintings” brought him enormous critical and financial success, rather than continuing in this vein Pollock switched course. In 1951, he began a series of paintings that included Echo: Number 25, 1951. He reduced his palette solely to black and poured the enamel paint onto unprimed canvas with a slowness and control that resulted in compositions characterized more by delicacy and economy than by explosive, radiating energy. Even more radically, he re-introduced hints of figuration into these works, such as the eye that peers out from the upper-left corner of Echo, or the faces and bodies that emerge from his lines in the other canvases in this series. Pollock’s new direction confounded many admirers and critics. Anticipating this, he wrote to a friend, “[I] think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing,” yet his pared-down approach introduced a new creative pathway that helped lay the ground for Minimalism.
Additional text from In The Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting online course, Coursera, 2017