?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
JACKSON POLLOCK Untitled.
Drypoint and engraving printed in dark, brownish-black on white wove paper, circa 1944-45. 373x450 mm; 14 3/4x17 3/4 inches, full margins. Third state (of 3). Numbered 21/50 in pencil, lower right. Printed by Emiliano Sorini, New York, with the blind stamp lower left, in 1967. Published by Lee Krasner Pollock, Estate of Jackson Pollock, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with the Pollock blind stamp lower left. A very good impression of this extremely scarce, early print.
'Pollock's prints, nearly fifty compositions in all, went through evolving states, trial proofs, variant inking and uses of paper, and hand additions. The work illustrated here comes from a group of eleven plates he prepared at Atelier 17 . . . It was there that exiled European artists gathered and introduced the principles of Surrealism to their young American counterparts. Hayter himself encouraged a method of engraving that allowed for a spontaneous articulation of line resembling 'Automatism,' an unfettered Surrealist drawing technique in which thoughts and desires deep in the subconscious were prompted to the surface.
Pollock's engravings reflect his absorption not only of Automatist drawing, but also of totemic imagery of the American Southwest, mythic archetypes from his Jungian psychoanalysis, and the work of such artists as Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. This print is a quintessential example of that realm between representation and abstraction occupying him in the mid-1940s and ultimately leading to the totally abstract, linear skeins of his most celebrated canvases,' (Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2004, p. 129). O'Connor/Thaw 1078.
