In July 1943, Peggy Guggenheim commissioned Jackson Pollock to create an 8-by-20-foot painting mural for her new NYC townhouse, at the suggestion of her friend and advisor Marcel Duchamp. The legend has it that the artist painted the mural in one night after weeks of hesitation. Recent research has now proven that the artwork was finished in November and done in several stages.

Pollock’ said “Every good painter paints what he is », « It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement », « a reviewer wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was ».

His wife Lee Krasner will be key in his success by promoting his work and connecting him with for example art critic Clement Greenberg. The post is dated on November 27, 1943, date of the closing of Pollock’s solo show at Peggy Guggenheim Gallery. That same day, a review by Greenberg was published in The Nation : While he critiqued Pollock’s larger paintings as the artist taking “orders he can’t fill,” Greenberg did find the smaller work “much more conclusive… among the strongest abstract paintings I have yet seen by an American.”

​

 

Sources:

 "Conservation as a Connoisseurship Tool: Jackson Pollock's 1943 Mural for Peggy Guggenheim, A Case Study"

Jackson Pollock’s Mural for Peggy Guggenheim, Francis O’Connor.

Jackson Pollock: A Biography, Deborah Solomon, 1987