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Abstract
This dissertation is a monographic study of a series of cut-outs that Jackson Pollock (1912-56) started in 1948. My study takes its point of departure from Cut Out, the principal work in the Cut-Out series. Cut Out is generally thought to be a work from around 1948-50. However, in 1999, T. J. Clark pointed out that Cut Out is shown in a different form from the present one in a photograph of Pollock's studio taken soon after the artist's death in 1956. According to my research, Pollock's widow, Lee Krasner, completed the work in its present form two years after the artist's death. I reinterpret Cut Out by going back to the state in which Pollock himself ultimately left it. This reinterpretation leads to the restructuring of the entire Cut-Out series because Cut Out is the pivotal work in the series.
Pollock's cut-outs were strongly influenced by Henri Matisse's Jazz (1947), as well as his paper cut-outs. Thus they represent a significant aspect of Pollock's engagement, staring in 1942 and continuing until his final year, with the French modern master's art. Pollock's cut-outs are also remarkable within the context of American Abstract Expressionism. They forge deep relationships with Lee Krasner's collages of 1953-55, with Willem de Kooning's black-and-white abstractions of 1946-49 and Woman series of 1950-55, and with Alfonso Ossorio's Victorias paintings of 1950. At the same time, Pollock's cut-outs present an interesting parallel to Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, an intellectual current that was internationally in vogue at mid-century. Furthermore, Pollock's cut-outs closely relate to important concerns within his own work from its earliest period on, such as the masking technique, the images of the moon-woman, and the subject of "male and female." This dissertation thus opens/reframes various significant aspects of Pollock's art through the examination of his cut-outs.
