Jackson Pollock valuation

Between 1944 and 1945 Pollock made eleven engravings at Atelier 17, the workshop Stanley William Hayter had moved from Paris to New York during the war. He pulled only trial proofs in his lifetime. The impressions usually met with were printed from the plates in 1967, after his death, mostly in editions of fifty, and are correctly described as posthumous. Knowing which of the two you have is the first question for any Pollock print.

For paintings and works on paper the scientific evidence carries unusual weight, because no body now issues opinions and his materials are well understood. Analysis of pigments and binders can date paint, and has more than once found materials in a supposed Pollock that were not available until after his death. A recent attribution, a work that surfaced without exhibition history, or a story of a gift from the artist all call for that analysis before anything else.

Pollock first used liquid paint in 1936, at an experimental workshop in New York run by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. In July 1943 he signed a contract with Peggy Guggenheim, who commissioned Mural, eight feet by twenty, for her townhouse; Duchamp suggested he paint it on canvas so it could be moved. He applied paint with hardened brushes, sticks and basting syringes. Clement Greenberg later wrote that Pollock admitted Janet Sobel's all-over paintings, which they saw at Guggenheim's gallery in 1946, had made an impression on him.

The black pourings he showed at Betty Parsons after 1951 did not sell, and he moved to the Sidney Janis Gallery. Scent and Search, both of 1955, are his last paintings; in 1956 he made only a few sculptures of wire, gauze and plaster at Tony Smith's home. In 1973 the Australian government bought Blue Poles for the National Gallery of Australia, and the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of 1998 was the first time it had been shown in America since the purchase. Lee Krasner managed the estate for the rest of her life.