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Lot Essay
This raw and powerful painting is one of the first examples of the artist's dynamic, forceful and ultimately tortured personality coming to the fore in his art. The culmination of an important group of screaming heads that Pollock gave to his psychoanalyst Dr. Joseph Henderson, Orange Head is a highly personal response by Pollock to the profound influences of Picasso and Primitive art.
In January 1939 Pollock saw for the first time Picasso's Guernica when it was exhibited along with a number of preparatory works at the Valentine Dudensing Gallery. Pollock returned again and again over the next few weeks to make sketches from this masterpiece, drawing a number of personalized visions of tortured mask-like heads that emulated the anguished faces of Guernica. These intense drawings formed the basis for a number of his most important paintings of this period, including, Orange Head, Naked Man, Masqued Image, (Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth) and Birth, (Tate Gallery, London.)
In each of these works Pollock attempts to express the tormented psyche of modern man by using vibrant color and distortion to create a mask that reveals the inner state of man. Adopting the role of totemic images, the masks that appear in these works were an amalgamation of the haunted faces that populated Pollock's drawings, the mythological imagery of Picasso and the reductive forms of much Native American Art. Orange Head in particular, recalls Picasso's painting Girl Before a Mirror of 1932 which had recently been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art along with an Eskimo mask from Hooper Bay in Alaska which Pollock had first seen in a 1937 article on Primitive Art and Picasso written by his friend and mentor John Graham.
Fig. 1 Mask, Eskimo, Nunivak Island, Alaska, Thomas Burke Memorial Washington State Museum, Seattle
In January 1939 Pollock saw for the first time Picasso's Guernica when it was exhibited along with a number of preparatory works at the Valentine Dudensing Gallery. Pollock returned again and again over the next few weeks to make sketches from this masterpiece, drawing a number of personalized visions of tortured mask-like heads that emulated the anguished faces of Guernica. These intense drawings formed the basis for a number of his most important paintings of this period, including, Orange Head, Naked Man, Masqued Image, (Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth) and Birth, (Tate Gallery, London.)
In each of these works Pollock attempts to express the tormented psyche of modern man by using vibrant color and distortion to create a mask that reveals the inner state of man. Adopting the role of totemic images, the masks that appear in these works were an amalgamation of the haunted faces that populated Pollock's drawings, the mythological imagery of Picasso and the reductive forms of much Native American Art. Orange Head in particular, recalls Picasso's painting Girl Before a Mirror of 1932 which had recently been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art along with an Eskimo mask from Hooper Bay in Alaska which Pollock had first seen in a 1937 article on Primitive Art and Picasso written by his friend and mentor John Graham.
Fig. 1 Mask, Eskimo, Nunivak Island, Alaska, Thomas Burke Memorial Washington State Museum, Seattle