Sculpting took on an even more intimate role for Pollock that year, when his heavy drinking landed him in a treatment center for alcoholism. Part of the program involved therapeutic artmaking of any sort, but he chose to focus solely on sculpture. His only surviving work from the summer of 1938, an 18-inch-wide circular copper relief, features several nude, intertwining muscular bodies; it is one of Pollock’s most blatantly figurative works.

By the 1940s, however, Pollock turned his attention towards painting again, largely to address what he saw as “the problems of modern painting”: too much reliance on the easel, on idleness, on tradition. Painting was a dying form, he wrote in 1947—a year after he arrived at his signature drip painting method and two years before Life magazine posed the rather leading question: “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”