Pasiphaë  1943

Finished just after Pollock's first exhibition in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim's New York gallery, Art of This Century, Pasiphaë is the largest of the painter's mythologically themed pictures of the mid-1940s. Originally named Moby Dick, the picture was retitled before it was exhibited in 1944 when James Johnson Sweeney, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, related the story...