Jackson Pollock, Number 27 (detail), 1950. Courtesy of Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Warhol, Pollock and other American spaces
21 Oct 2025 — 25 Jan 2026 at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain
24 OCTOBER 2025
The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is organising an exhibition that brings together the work of Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock, two key figures in 20th-century art who focused on issues relating to new spatial strategies. Like other artists of that generation also present in the exhibition, they were united by their interest in changes in the pictorial tradition, spatiality and, in some cases, the use of large formats.
The works featured in the exhibition reveal how Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was not always an “abstract master”, while also presenting a more complex Andy Warhol (1928–1987) than the artist of dispassionately depicted, banal themes from popular culture. Midway between the abstract and the figurative, in their own way both set out to reassess the concept of space and its use as a place of concealment; a space revisited through repetition and seriality. Pollock and Warhol disrupted the notion of background and figure and developed a project which, through its very pictorial strategies, had something of camouflage about it. Frequently present in the works of both artists are traces and vestiges that refer to certain autobiographical aspects.
The exhibition, which has benefited from the collaboration of the Comunidad de Madrid and the Department of Culture, Tourism and Sports of the City Council of Madrid, features more than one hundred works, many of which have never previously been seen in Spain. Loaned from around thirty institutions in the United States and Europe, they include works by Warhol and Pollock as well as other artists such as Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Marisol Escobar, Sol LeWitt and Cy Twombly. Among them, Brown and silver I by Pollock, Express by Robert Rauschenberg and Untitled (Green on maroon) by Mark Rothko are all from the Thyssen collection.
Robert Rauschenberg, Express (detail), 1963. Courtesy of Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Marisol, Untitled, 1960. Courtesy of Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Andy Warhol, Jackie II (sheet 5 in: 11 Pop Artists II), 1966. Courtesy of Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Lee Krasner in her New York studio, c 1939: ‘She didn’t suffer fools.’ Photograph: Photograph by Maurice Berezov
Reframing Lee Krasner, the artist formerly known as Mrs Pollock
Lee Krasner’s huge contribution to abstract expressionism was overshadowed for years by the work of her husband, Jackson Pollock. On the eve of a major London show, we trace her story
Rachel Cooker
Sunday 12 May 2019
In the autumn of 1945, two artists – not young, but not quite middle-aged, either – moved from New York to a village called Springs, near East Hampton on Long Island. These newlyweds had no money. It would be a while before they could make the small clapboard farmhouse that was to be their new home any less freezing in winter, let alone install an indoor bathroom. But this isolated spot, with its ramshackle outbuildings and its view of the Accabonac Creek, was for them a bit of heaven – in the beginning, at least. Together, they cooked and gardened. Together, they went digging for clams, travelling to the beach on their bicycles (they did not own a car). Above all, they worked: he in their barn, she in an upstairs bedroom. Life was, for them both, mostly about painting. Their allegiance to it was fierce: as intense as their loyalty to each other, from which it could never fully be separated.
Patron and painter … Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock in front of Mural in 1943. Photograph: George Kargar/Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Jackson Pollock, the one-man tornado who spattered his way to fame
In the 1940s, the poor alcoholic artist was saved by a rich heiress, Peggy Guggenheim. Now the pair are reunited in a knockout Venice show that busts all the myths about America’s noblest savage Jonathan Jones Friday 24 April 2015
I
n a black-and-white photograph taken in about 1946, they pose together awkwardly before a vast, swirling, abstract painting. She clutches pampered little dogs in each arm. He wears a suit, for once, as he looks at Peggy’s pooches with a shadowed face.
Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock were not lovers. They were not even friends. But the encounter between these two very different people changed art.
At the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, at the grandest end of Venice’s Grand Canal, where Guggenheim settled in the late 1940s and which is today a museum of her compelling art collection, that encounter has just been recreated. Earlier this week, a barge made its way up the Grand Canal carrying a very large and very precious cargo. Boxed up and bouncing on the waves came Jackson Pollock’s painting Mural – the canvas in that photograph. More than 6m wide and almost 2.5m tall, this epic canvas is the painting that made Pollock into Pollock and gave birth to the art of our time. At last, it has been reunited with the spirit of the woman whose bold passion for art brought it into being, as part of a remarkable exploration by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection of Pollock’s legend and achievement.
Mural is an explosive meeting of worlds, of cultured sensibility and raw energy.
Jackson Pollock’s masterpiece Mural, 1943, oil and casein on canvas. Photograph: University of Iowa Museum of Art
At the start of the second world war, Guggenheim, a member of one of New York’s wealthiest families, whose sheltered childhood had been emotionally shattered when her father died on the Titanic, went on a spending spree, buying modern art from artists who were desperately planning their escapes from the Nazis. She set sail from Nazi-occupied France in 1941 with a surreal cargo. Literally. She not only took crates full of surrealist art but an actual surrealist, Max Ernst, whom she saved from the Gestapo and married, only to separate from him in 1943.
Pollock was a desperate, failing artist struggling to survive in New York. He had been declared medically unfit to serve in the war as a result of alcohol dependence and depression. The artist started drinking as a teenager in Los Angeles. He came from a rural family so poor and rootless that even their name was not their own – his father was given away, perhaps even sold, as a child to a farming couple called the Pollocks, who used him practically as a slave. Oddly, the Pollock sons – starting with the eldest, Charles, whom his kid brothers, including Jackson, emulated – all wanted to be artists.
Jackson and Charles Pollock in New York, 1930. Photograph: Charles Pollock Archives/Peggy Guggenheim Collection
A drawing by Charles on show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection portrays Jackson in 1935 wearing jeans and waistcoat and playing a banjo. He looks like a character from a John Steinbeck novel or a bluegrass singer – a son of the Great Depression, playing sad songs of America. Pollock’s early paintings, shown here alongside Charles’s far more realistic and far less original works, are like illustrations to strange country ballads. His intense little painting Going West (c1934-35) is a hypnotic vortex of gothic Americana. A ghostly wagon train heads through the desert under a spectral moon. The first myth this exhibition’s new look at Pollock knocks down is the notion that he had no natural talent: his early works glow beside his brother’s studious efforts. His weird American genius is already exploring some lost highway all its own.
When it comes to the imposing Mural, more myths tumble. When Peggy Guggenheim first looked at a painting Pollock submitted to Art of This Century, the gallery she opened in 1940s New York, she sneered. Her adviser, Piet Mondrian, made her look again. She not only gave Pollock a one-man show at her gallery – which he filled with the mythic women he was then painting in imitation of his heroes Picasso and Miró – but commissioned him to paint a mural for her townhouse at 155 East 61st Street, New York.
Charles Pollock’s ink drawing ,Steel Mill, Gary, Indiana, 1933. Photograph: Charles Pollock Archives/Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Mural is in every textbook history of modern art as a heroic turning point, but it has been difficult to respond to it as a work of art. Guggenheim gave it to the University of Iowa in 1951 and it is rarely seen elsewhere. Moreover, it was dirty, varnished and the worse for wear.
The Mural that has come to Venice ahead of this summer’s biennale is a masterpiece reborn. It has been immaculately cleaned and restored at the Getty Conservation Institute. The result is a scintillating starburst of vitality, a tornado of reds, yellows, blue-greys and browns that roll and twist across the widescreen canvas like a prairie storm, sweeping up cattle, people, and all previous notions of art in its path.
Pollock’s widow, the artist Lee Krasner, recalled that he stared at the long white canvas on which he was going to paint Mural for weeks, paralysed with anxiety, before suddenly painting the whole thing in a single night. She was romanticising. The restorers have discovered layers of work that prove Pollock worked on the piece for weeks or months.
Another legend is that it wouldn’t fit into Guggenheim’s hall, and so her friend Marcel Duchamp cut it down. Again, this is not true – the restorers found no evidence of such an alteration.
The only story their examination cannot disprove (you either believe the anecdote or don’t) is the most dramatic. After installing Mural in Peggy Guggenheim’s house, Pollock is said to have walked over to her fireplace while a polite party was going on, and urinated into the hearth.
If that crazed gesture – some say he was naked at the time – really happened, it was of a piece with the raging abandon of Mural.
Towards abstraction … Jackson Pollock’s painting The Moon Woman, 1942. Photograph: Peggy Guggenheim Collection
People had painted abstractions before, in Europe, but the art of Kandinsky or Mondrian seems almost staid compared with the wild release of Mural. On the cleaned painting, lurid splashes of bright paint are spattered over the canvas’s swarming serpentine shapes. Pollock’s revolutionary idea of throwing or pouring paint starts here. So does his mind-expanding sense of scale. Mural is not a work to be looked at – an “easel painting”, as Pollock’s critical champion Clement Greenberg dismissively called all the polite little European pictures it rendered obsolete – but to be embraced by. It pulls you in, absorbs you. It is bigger than you and it has no end – the forms would swirl on for ever if the canvas was expanded infinitely. It is a landscape to inhabit, a place to be.
It is also a person. It is Pollock. He releases himself into this painting, and to stand in front of it is to feel a connection. Soul speaks to soul. Pollock was never happy, said Krasner, and this time she was surely telling the truth. He was a very lonely man, ultimately unable to communicate even with Krasner, numbing himself with alchohol until he died in a stupid, unnecessary car crash in 1956. But in Mural and the great expansive paintings that followed, he found a way to break out of his solitude and connect with others, to glorify life with improvisations that are the painterly equivalents of saxophone or guitar solos. American freedom and American tragedy dance a desperate duo in his story.
The paintings are so fragile now. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection has also restored Alchemy, its 1947 Pollock masterpiece that was recently cleaned at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, where they are more used to repairing Raphaels. It has been deemed so frail that it will never leave Venice. The endlessly fascinating curls and wisps of paint on its surface look so delicate.
Art of This Century has become Art of That Century. Pollock painted Mural 72 years ago. Yet it contains the art of today within it: installation and performance, and the sense that art can be anything, absolutely anything, are more eloquently embodied in Pollock’s liberating vision than in any number of dry remarks Duchamp once made to some fawning interviewer.
In a vitrine at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, you can see the sticks Pollock used for pouring paint in great astral arcs. So crude, so magical.
Guggenheim was a very civilised person, as her palace attests. But her greatest moment was when she sponsored the genius of America’s noblest savage.
With their sooty pools and block structures, the ‘black pour’ paintings of Pollock’s late period mark his rejection of sex and the erotic aspects of his drip techniques. A new exhibition shows how the artist formerly known as ‘Jack the Dripper’ reached the end of the line
James Hall Friday 19 June 2015 11.30 BST
After Late Matisse, Late Rembrandt and Late Turner comes Late Pollock, the most daring late show of all. Jackson Pollock (1912-56), the great leaky Prometheus of American art, is always assumed to have peaked around 1950, thereafter succumbing to the demons of drink, depression, adultery and cack-handed and colourless quasi-figuration, followed by (in 1953) painter’s block. Pollock’s descent into hell ended horrifyingly and murderously when, in an alcohol-fuelled rage, he drove his convertible Oldsmobile into a tree at 80mph, decapitating himself and killing a female passenger – and nearly killing his young mistress – in the process. No wonder Pollock has been the textbook example of Scott Fitzgerald’s line about there being no second acts in American lives.
Jackson Pollock, Portrait and a Dream 1953. Courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Tate Liverpool’s show flies in the face of conventional wisdom, and looks set to be one of the most provocative and absorbing shows of the year. It centres on the so-called “black pour” paintings, made from 1951-3 using black enamel paint on unprimed canvas, which is often left bare. The enamel is iridescent and tar-like when it pools; sooty when it soaks directly into the linen fabric. These were Pollock’s attempts to move on from the expansive, multilayered drip paintings that had made him the most famous artist in the US, Jack the Dripper. His ascetic diet of black, bulked up with enigmatic biomorphic bits and pieces, seems to have been an attempt to counter claims that his “all-over” pictures were facile, flimsy, hedonistic and decorative. As early as 1948, Leigh Ashton, director of the V&A, had said that Pollock’s Cathedral (exhibited here as a contextual piece) “would make a most enchanting printed silk”, and in March 1951, American Vogue staged a photoshoot with a model in silk evening gown before Lavender Mist. Pollock wrote to a friend three months later: “I’ve had a period of drawing on canvas in black – with some of my early images coming thru – think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing – and the kids who think it’s simple to splash a Pollock out.” No one would want to buy a “black pour” fabric, or use one as a backdrop for a selfie, though as Aubrey Beardsley demonstrated with his ink drawings, black lines can be very sexy.
A number of New York artists – including the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning – had recently tried painting in a restricted palette of black and white, but Pollock’s black pours are especially distinctive because of their drily rebarbative, block-like structures. They don’t feel as if they have been effortlessly “splashed out” (code for “ecstatically ejaculated”) so much as strenuously carved and kneaded. Rather than being “all-over”, with the potential for limitless lateral spread, they often have a tight internal frame that seems to compress the contents. This is most apparent in Untitled (Black and White Polyptych) (1951), which comprises four discrete components of blockish shape lined up horizontally. Each section was turned into individual screenprints that stop well short of the edges of the paper.
Jackson Pollock, Yellow Islands, 1952. Courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2015
The catalyst for this shift was a resurgence, in the late 1940s, of Pollock’s long-standing interest in sculpture. Writing to his father as a 20-year-old in 1932, he had expressed a preference for the form: “I’ll never be satisfied until I’m able to mould a mountain of stone, with the aid of a jack hammer, to fit my will.” Gutzon Borglum was then dynamiting and jackhammering presidential heads into the granite cliffs of Mount Rushmore. At this time Pollock carved a small black basalt head, a death mask with closed eyes. His painting teacher, the muralist Thomas Hart Benton, got his students to make small plasticine versions of the figures in their paintings. Most of Pollock’s subsequent sculptures (about 12 are known, with five exhibited here) are like miniaturised 3D incarnations of his drip pictures, made from bent wire, plaster and papier mache. The spirit of sculpture even informs his intensely physical painting methods. He worked in a barn, with a vast canvas laid unstretched on the floor, crouching over it, approaching from all angles: it echoes traditional images of the sculptor crouching over a lump of stone, carving “in the round”. One impetus for his late experiments with sculpture may have come from the publication of the first book about Picasso’s scarcely known sculptures in 1949, which created a buzz around the idea of the “painter-sculptor”.
Most of Pollock’s late imagery is suggestively and surreally figurative rather than clearly narrative – except in the case of what has been called his last major work,Portrait and a Dream (1953). Featured in the Tate exhibition, this comprises two distinct parts, like a diptych. The left half – the “dream” – is a squarish skein of poured, squirted and blotched black lines within which we can discern the fragmented lineaments of a reclining female nude, with a multilayered spiky head at top right. Pollock’s long-suffering wife, the artist Lee Krasner, recalled him saying that the top right part was the “dark side of the moon”: traditionally the moon is a female element and visible at night, the time for sex and dreaming. Pollock was fascinated by psychoanalytic readings of symbols, and had several courses of therapy.
Jackson Pollock, Untitled, 1951. Courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2015/The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
The “portrait” side is usually interpreted as a self-portrait, and the frontal format is similar to that of an earlier self-portrait with staring bug eyes, painted in the 1930s using a fiery palette of oranges, reds and browns. The 1953 self-portrait is lacerated with patches of whisky-orange and yellow, suggesting smouldering passions, barely held in check. Here, however, the side of the face and eye nearest the moon woman is covered by a bulbous Picassoid growth that completely masks it – and which prevents him from seeing her.
Portrait and a Dream addresses an issue that had been of obsessive interest to artists and thinkers for at least a century: the relationship between sex and genius. Should male artists be having sex, or should they be channelling their sexual energy into their work? The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that great male artists were physically strong with lots of surplus sexual energy, and prone to intoxication – “how wise it is at times to be a little tipsy!” But much of the time the male genius was chaste (and sober), refusing “to expend himself in any casual way”. In Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Wake (1899), the sculptor hero (based on Rodin) believes his artistic vision will be lost if he so much as touches or desires his female model. Pollock would have known Picasso’s Vollard Suite of the 1930s, a series of prints in which a sculptor does his best not to look at his naked models, and, in some, fixates instead on his own self-portrait bust, almost as if he were Narcissus staring at his own reflection after rejecting the advances of the nymph Echo.
Jackson Pollock, Number 7, 1952. Courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2015/The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
In what should more accurately be called Masked Self-Portrait and a Wet Dream, Pollock (left) seems to be repudiating not just sex and sexual desire, but the uninhibitedly erotic aspects of his drip technique. No wonder he stopped painting. Without ecstasy, without an art of feeling and sublimated sexual energy, he had reached the end of the road.
• James Hall is the author of The Self-Portrait: a Cultural History (Thames & Hudson). Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots takes place at Tate Liverpool, 30 June - 18 October. tate.org.uk.