Jackson Pollock

One of the earliest of Pollock’s poured paintings, Magic Lantern reveals his tight control of a technique through which he covered a canvas with looping skeins of color. The free-form automatist drawings of the Surrealists inspired Pollock in his development of a personal language of abstraction. Improvising with gesture and materials, he used a variety of available paints to create the hard, dense surface of this compact image, scattering it with carpet tacks to intensify its physicality. Unlike his later poured paintings, Magic Lantern has an intimate scale that encourages close examination of its construction. It was given to the RISD Museum by Peggy Guggenheim, the legendary American collector who had encouraged Pollock by exhibiting his work in her Art of this Century Gallery in New York during the 1940s.