The Key

Jackson Pollock's "The Key" (1946) belongs to the artist's "Accabonac Creek" series, named for a stream near the East Hampton property that Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner purchased in late 1945. The painting marks a crucial transitional moment in Pollock's development — the point where his work began to move from the figurative, psychologically charged imagery of his earlier paintings toward the all-over abstractions that would define his revolutionary "drip" paintings of 1947–50. The move to East Hampton — financed by Peggy Guggenheim, Pollock's dealer and patron — was a turning point in his career. In the spacious barn studio at Springs, Pollock had room to work on a larger scale than ever before, and the surrounding landscape of ocean, woods, and creeks provided a new set of visual stimuli that fed directly into his paintings. The Accabonac Creek series — which includes "The Key" and several related works — takes its name from the local waterway, but the paintings are not landscapes in any conventional sense. Instead, they use landscape as a starting point for an exploration of pure gesture, color, and rhythm. "The Key" is a painting of contrasts and tensions. Bold, sweeping strokes of black paint slash across a field of luminous color — yellows, pinks, blues, and whites that create a shimmering ground against which the black gestures perform their violent dance. The title suggests both a musical key and a literal key — a device for unlocking something — and the painting does feel like an opening, a breakthrough from one way of working to another. The figurative elements that still haunt Pollock's earlier work — faces, hands, mythological symbols — have been largely suppressed here, replaced by abstract marks that carry their own urgency and meaning. Pollock's technique in "The Key" anticipates the drip painting method he would fully develop in 1947. The black strokes are applied with a loaded brush or stick, creating thick, calligraphic lines that hover between drawing and painting. Some areas show evidence of paint being flung or dripped — a technique that Pollock had been experimenting with since 1943 but that would not become his primary method until the following year. The colored ground, with its areas of contrasting hue, suggests the kind of built-up surface that Pollock would later achieve through his signature technique of pouring, dripping, and splashing paint directly onto unprimed canvas laid on the floor. The years 1946–47 were a period of intense experimentation for Pollock. He was absorbing the lessons of Surrealist automatism, Native American sand painting, and the theories of Jungian psychoanalysis, while simultaneously developing a technique that would make him the most famous — and most controversial — artist in America. "The Key" captures this moment of transition, when everything was about to change.

Pollock's Accabonac Creek series, including The Key, represents the crucial transition from his earlier figurative symbolism to the all-over drip paintings that would establish Abstract Expressionism as America's first internationally influential art movement.

This transitional painting captures the moment when Pollock's black calligraphic gestures began to break free from figurative reference — a key that unlocked the all-over abstraction that would transform American art.