On January 14, 1947, Jackson Pollock's fourth solo exhibition opened in the Daylight Gallery of Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century in Manhattan. The date falls at a hinge point in Pollock's career: Guggenheim's gallery had already given him crucial solo exposure, but it closed later that year as she returned to Europe. The Art Story and gallery histories emphasize Art of This Century as a short-lived but unusually influential space where exiled European modernism and young American abstraction met. Pollock would soon make the first mature drip paintings in East Hampton, while Betty Parsons took over representation for several Guggenheim artists. The January show therefore belongs to the last phase of the gallery system that helped move the center of advanced painting toward New York.
The show marked Pollock's final Guggenheim-gallery phase just before the breakthrough drip paintings.
