Untitled (Small Composition)

Pollock studied under regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League of New York, and worked for the Federal Art Project/Works Project Administration during the Great Depression. He and artist Lee Krasner married in 1945 and moved to Springs, Long Island, where he established a studio and began to explore the experimental “drip” technique that would become his groundbreaking signature. Using unconventional materials—commercial paints and found objects—and working on the floor rather than on an easel, Pollock divorced himself from long traditions of representation and from various avant-garde forays into abstraction. He created an entirely new paradigm for abstract painting. 

Francis. V. O’Connor provides convincing evidence of the close relationship between Untitled (Small Composition) and Number 10, 1949, based on the remarkable similarity of their “puddled surface” treatment. He ascribes to the painting a monumentality, “an achievement of perceived scale that transcends size and attributes to the smaller work as much formal and aesthetic heft as the larger.”

Pollock’s painting (and Krasner’s) came to Wellesley as part of a gift of fifty-seven works from Merrill Millar Lake ’36. Lake had a home in Springs, where she was surrounded by artist neighbors whom she supported through purchases.