PROVENANCE

WPA Federal Art Project
U.S. Government Auction, 1944
Unknown Plumber
Henry C. Roberts & Co.
Harry Zitter, Brooklyn, New York
Mildred Goor, Brooklyn, New York
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
The Anschutz Collection, Denver

EXHIBITIONS

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, Jackson Pollock: New Found Works, October 5-November 27, 1978, and toured: National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, DC, December 22, 1978-February 11, 1979, David and Alfred Smart Gallery, University of Chicago, March 12-March 6, 1979

National Academy of Design, New York, American Masters in the West, July 7-September 15, 1979, and toured: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, WY, October 6-November 30, 1979,Gilcrease Institute, Tulsa, OK, October 21, 1980-January 5, 1981, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ, February 25-March 3,1981

Helsingen Taidetalo, Helsinki, Finland, Great Masters of the West, August 27-October 5, 1980

Musee Royaux des Beaux, Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Painters of the American West, May 15-June 28, 1981, and toured: Musee Jacquemart-Andre, Paris, November 15-December 15, 1982

Pompidou Center, Jackson Pollock, January 21-April 19, 1982

Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna, January 20-March 13, 1983

Palm Springs Museum, Palm Springs, CA, Masterpieces of the American West, November 18-December 24, 1983, and toured: Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, FL, Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis, TN, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ, The Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY, American Museum of Natural History, New York, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, Arkansas Art Center, Little Rick, AK, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Lakeview Museum of Art and Sciences, Peoria, IL, Sierra Nevada Museum, Reno, NV, Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City, OK, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, Los Angeles, CA, San Antonio Museum, San Antonio, TX, Museum of New Mexico, Sante Fe, NM, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Regional Art Gallery, Novosibirsk, USSR, Georgian State Art Museum, Tbilisi, USSR, January 1984-February 1990

University of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie, Wyoming, Selections form the Anschutz Collection, January 14-March 13, 1994

Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf, Germany, Siqueiros/Pollock/Pollock/Siqueiros, September 30-December 3, 1995

Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut, The American Avant-Garde: A Decade of Change 1936-1946, September 30 - Dec 31, 2000

Pinacothèque de Paris, Jackson Pollock et le Chamanisme, October 15, 2008-February 15, 2009

LITERATURE

Francis Valentine O’Connor, Eugene Victor Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Work (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 1: 44-45, no. 57

Irene Rawlings, Painters of the American West (Denver: The Anschutz Collection, 1981), no. 99

Irene Rawlings and Elizabeth Cunningham, West, West, West (Denver: The Anschutz Collection, 1982), no. 99

Painters of the American West (Paris: Pompidou Center, 1982), p. 108

Matthaus Kattinger, Kunst des Wilden Westens Bosenkurier, January 27, 1983

Martin Schweighofer, Wildes aus dem Western Wochenpresse, January 18, 1963, p. 34

Elizabeth Cunningham, Masterpieces of the American West: Selections from the Anschutz Collection (Denver: The Anschutz Collection, 1983), n.p., no. 121

Exhibit Documents Styles, Interpretations of the West, Arkansas Gazette, March 30, 1984, p. 9B

Masterpieces of the American West: Paintings from Anschutz Collection, US AIR Magazine (August 1985): 49

Elizabeth Cunningham, Zapad, Zapad, Zapad (Denver: The Anschutz Collection, 1989)

Justin Spring, Carrés d'Art: Jackson Pollock (New York: The Wonderland Press, 1998), p. 26 (reproduced)

Carol Sims, The American Avant-Garde: A Decade of Change 1936-1946, Antiques and The Arts Weekly, November 17, 2000, p. 33 (reproduced)

Stephen Polcari Jackson Pollock et le Chamanisme (Paris: Pinacothèque de Paris, 2008), p. 140, no. 21 (reproduced)

Man, Bull, Bird was painted during the period 1938-1941 when Pollock was working in the easel division of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, which provided him with a source of income and played an important role in furthering his artistic development. The canvases, drawings and prints that survive from this period illustrate Pollock’s complex synthesis of sources as well as the emergence of his original pictorial language. At this time Pollock worked under the influence of Picasso, certain aspects of Surrealism, especially the use of mythical or totemic figures as archetypes of the unconscious, and the Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. In the late 1930s and early 1940s he created a series of paintings with mythic and sometimes, brutal themes under the impact of these varied influences.

Kirk Varnedoe has noted that many of his works of the time are “centered in dark oppositions or gloomy menace” (“Comet: Jackson Pollock’s Life and Work,” essay in Jackson Pollock [New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998], p. 30). Man, Bull, Bird appears to reflect Pollock’s exposure to Picasso’s Guernica at the Valentine Gallery in New York in the spring of 1939, and also demonstrates the fiery palette and bold, expressionistic painting style of Orozco.