Tickets

Jackson Pollock Easter and the Totem 1953

  • Not on view

After 1952, dripping and pouring paint were no longer the primary means of expression for Pollock. The totemic forms at the left and right in Easter and the Totem reflect his renewed interest in using a brush to paint quasi-figurative images. The bright colors and expansive spaces anchored by large swaths of black suggest the influence of Henri Matisse, who was the subject of a large retrospective that Pollock would have seen at MoMA the previous year. The push and pull between abstraction and figuration is a thread that weaves through Pollock's entire career. As he said, in the last year of his life, "I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time."

Gallery label from Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey, 1934-1954, November 22, 2015–May 1, 2016.
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
6' 10 1/8" x 58" (208.6 x 147.3 cm)
Credit
Gift of Lee Krasner in memory of Jackson Pollock
Object number
425.1980
Copyright
© 2024 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Department
Painting and Sculpture

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