Composition with Oval Forms

Born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, Jackson Pollock arrived in New York City in 1930 by way of Arizona and California, a young artist without a formal training nor direction, but one determined to succeed as an artist. As such, the 1930s were a period of self-discovery for Pollock—both physically with his materials and psychologically—to imbue his work with meaning. These circumstances give his work from this period a certain unrefined rawness. This body of work can also be seen as a response to the burgeoning artistic styles surrounding him, which became a primary source of inspiration.
Pollock spent his first two years in New York studying under Thomas Hart Benton, whose all-American regionalist approach also appealed to the young artist's western roots. Indeed, the American West had a certain mystique for Pollock, which he would continually draw on. Since his youth, Pollock had been fascinated by Native American art and symbols, exploring Indian mounds and cliff dwellings with his brothers in Arizona. These influences are clearly evident in the stylized and abstracted landscape in Composition with Oval Forms, circa 1934-1938. The bold, brushy blues and yellows create a vibrant contrast against the rich brown background, flattening the picture plane and giving the work a kind of immediacy and two-dimensionality that is suggestive of a cave painting. The piece seems to be imbued with a sense of primal energy—an energy that for Pollock was inextricably bound up with the act of painting itself. This notion—the unleashing of a primal energy through the physical act of painting—would ultimately lead him several years later to tack his canvases to the studio floor and dance about them in a sort of ritualistic trance as he painted.