A Rare Pollock Sculpture Gets a Home

Featured on nytimes.com

There are only six surviving sculptures by Jackson Pollock.

Now the Dallas Museum of Art owns one of them.

The museum has acquired one of two untitled works created by Pollock in the summer of 1956, while he was recovering from depression at the home of his friend Tony Smith.

Only one other museum in the world has a Pollock sculpture (the other is the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), and the work joins the museum’s Pollock paintings: “Cathedral” (1947) and “Portrait and a Dream” (1953).

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Gavin Delahunty, the museum’s senior curator of contemporary art, said he told the collectors Gayle and Paul Stoffel in seeking their help in the purchase of the sculpture from the Tony Smith estate. “They immediately were on board.”

The sculpture — featured in the museum’s current survey of Pollock’s black paintings, on view through March 20 — was one of a series of abstract sculptures, modeled after the human body and made of sand, plaster, wire and gauze, that Pollock produced during a single weekend. They are believed to be the last works he completed before dying in a car accident at 44.

“I would like to think that Pollock turned to sculpture in times of crisis — it was almost like working it out,” Mr. Delahunty said. “The physical act of making — and the rendering of something in three dimensions — was pregnant with ideas for him. But it also was a release and a doorway.”

Click here to read the full article.