DMA Acquires Rare Jackson Pollock Sculpture. Don't Run Out of Time to See It!

I knew this would happen for some of you. You've been telling yourself that you have plenty of time to see Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots at the Dallas Museum of Art. It's up through March 20, you said. That's the distant future, you said. I'll get around to it, you said. Well, that's three weeks, people. This is not a drill! 

News broke this morning that a Pollock sculpture — one of six in the world — will stay in Dallas when the DMA packs up the exhibition and ships it back to the museum and private collections from which they borrowed the rarely seen black enamel paintings. "Untitled (1956)" is a minute, precarious little critter, intricate in its disorder. The press release announcing the acquisition explains its value as a predecessor to the movements known as Anti-Form, Post-Minimalism or Process art, ideas explored by artists like Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman. 

This sculpture, like the entirety of the show, casts a new light on Pollock the painter. It shows an artist who didn't just progress in one realm of art, but who found himself drawn to other media as well. Not only do you glimpse Pollock the sculptor, but elsewhere in the exhibition, Pollock the printmaker. The exhibition is so large, so educational, so meditative that I would venture even the least enthusiastic museumgoer will appreciate Blind Spots.

The acquisition of "Untitled (1956)" won't make it the first Pollock work in the DMA collection, which owns both "Portrait and a Dream (1953)" and "Cathedral (1947);" the latter was one of the first drip paintings collected by an American museum. These are also on display in Blind Spots — "Cathedral" in a room where you familiarize yourself with Pollock's early work before seeing his lesser-known black paintings; "Portrait and a Dream" is one of the later works in Pollock's life.

See Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots through March 20, 2016, at the Dallas Museum of Art. Admission is $16. More at dma.org.