Many American painters, after a decade dominated by realistic art (Regionalism, American scene, Social Realism), turned to abstraction in the 1940s, in search of imagery expressing universal values. The art of Vasily Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstract painting, was well known to Jackon Pollock thanks to the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim, in whose museum Pollock had briefly worked in 1943. The ‘pressure’ of the blue surround in this busy and intensely worked gouache may derive from Kandinsky.