Artwork detail
Sleeping Effort
1953
American, 1912-1956
Oil and duco enamel on canvas
49 7/8 x 76 "
University purchase, Bixby Fund, 1954
WU 3842
© Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
A prominent figure of post-World War II painting in New York, Jackson Pollock produced Sleeping Effort when he returned to abstract figuration after making his famous drip paintings in the late 1940s, in which he explored completely non-representational forms. In Sleeping Effort, while working with abstract representational or referential imagery, Pollock synthesized the expressive handling of his drip paintings with the psychological interests of his work from earlier in the 1940s. In his psychological images he was influenced by Jungian and Surrealist notions of the human subconscious, both of which focus on dreams as conduits to the psyche. Sleeping Effort itself suggests a dreamlike state: a reclining figure in the foreground is surrounded by unidentifiable imagery floating in an amorphous blue background, as if providing insight into the figure's subconscious. Building up layers of paint into a thick impasto of rich colors, Pollock's loose brushwork is typical of Abstract Expressionist gestural painting, in which visible brushstrokes were seen as traces of the creative act. The fragmentation and dissonance of form and color, viewed within the context of the postwar nuclear era, link this painting to the world in which it was produced.
