In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim commissioned her newest protégé, the thirty-one-year-old Jackson Pollock, to paint a mural for the entrance hall of her apartment in a townhouse on East Sixty-first Street. Earlier that year, the truculent young Westerner had exhibited a canvas of an abstracted reclining figure—or, possibly, two upright figures on opposite sides of a table—in the Spring Salon for Young Artists at Guggenheim’s recently opened Art of This Century gallery. The painting, now known as Stenographic Figure (1942, Museum of Modern Art, New York), impressed the exhibition’s jurors, Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian. Mondrian, who had been resident in New York since 1940, called Pollock’s submission “the most interesting work I’ve seen so far in America.” This enthusiasm probably influenced Guggenheim’s support of the aspiring painter, which, in addition to the commission, included a stipend that allowed him to paint full time for the next four years, as well as his first solo exhibition, to be held at the end of 1943. Pollock’s career was launched.

Pollock wrote to his artist brother Charles that the mural commission came “with no strings as to what or how I paint it. I am going to use oil on canvas. They are giving me a show November 16 and I want to have the painting finished for the show. I’ve had to tear out the partition between the front and middle rooms