A rare find: a mid-century drip painting in a multitude of materials, dated “1956” and “NY”. Although unsigned, this piece is of very high quality. This is a rare example of action painting, from the period.

In 1947 Jackson Pollock arrived at a new mode of working that brought him international fame. His method consisted of flinging and dripping thinned enamel paint onto an unstretched canvas laid on the floor of his studio. This direct, physical engagement with his materials welcomed gravity, velocity, and improvisation into the artistic process, and allowed line and color to stand alone, functioning entirely independently of form. His works, which came to be known as “drip paintings,” present less a picture than a record of the fluid properties of paint itself.  The profound influence of Pollock’s approach—at once emphatically literal and radically open to the world—may be found in the words of his fellow artists. The experimental Gutai group, which formed in Japan in the mid-1950s, cited his work as a crucial encouragement to “impar[t] life to matter” and pursue “pure creativity.”. n 1967, Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd would write in Arts Magazine, “It’s clear that Pollock created the large scale, wholeness and simplicity that have become common to almost all good work.”

Action painting, signed and dated verso

Medium: mixed oil  on canvas,
Provenance: Private collection, NL