Laboring in the galleries: Little with Pollock's TheShe-Wolf , 1943 Photo: Lynn Saville '71

In a gallery on the fourth floor of New York's Museum of Modern Art, David Little Ph.D. '01 stands in front of Jackson Pollock's The She-Wolf. Completed in 1943, the painting is crisscrossed with heavy black-and-white lines and patches of color from which the suggestion of the figure of a wolf emerges. The composition, says Little, has "a terrifying quality, a rawness."

The She-Wolf is important to Pollock's development as an artist, says Little, a Pollock expert and director of MoMA's adult and academic programs. "It shows the beginnings of his 'drip-and-pour' technique. Here, these are experimental gestures; he doesn't yet have the confidence to give up figurative imagery and create completely abstract compositions."

The work was also important to MoMA's own development. It's the first Pollock that the museum purchased--in 1943 from Peggy Guggenheim's

Art of This Century Gallery. "This really marked a bold move by the museum," Little says. "This was the beginning of a transition in the history of modern art, when, in the 1940s, curators, critics, and galleries began to acknowledge the influence of Americans. Pollock was the first American to have a one-person show at Guggenheim's gallery, which was a New York outpost for the Surrealists and other European artists during the war."

Some associate Pollock with an aesthetic of chaos, Little says, but that's a misreading. "There's so much to say" about the mural-sized One: Number 31, 1950, he says. He points out that the interlaced strings of tans, blues, grays, blacks, and whites, hovering beyond the relatively empty borders of the composition, convey a sense of balance or harmony even as they project great energy. They form relationships that hark back to the Cubists' concern with geometry: Large, thick, black lines serve as structural elements, building a sort of scaffolding for containing colors and shapes. "As you look at the painting, it's very clear how Pollock had extraordinary control over his drip-and-pour technique," he says. "He was always conscious of where he was going with the painting and always conscious of the structural elements."

Pollock redefined the art of making a painting as a kind of performance, Little notes--thus the label "action painting" that critics would later pin on Pollock. Traditionally, artists would interpret an object that resided beyond the canvas. But Pollock would place himself directly above the canvas, and so he would find himself connected directly to the canvas and not to an external object. He would commit to the canvas his own bodily movement, his own consciousness, and his own working process. Certain thin, wavy lines in Pollock's One: Number 31, 1950 could never have been created with a brush; they show Pollock in a state of heightened energy. Other areas of the canvas, where the poured paint forms in puddles, show the artist at rest, moments of contemplation.

Little first encountered Pollock's work in an art-history survey course, when he was an undergraduate at Bowdoin College. "Since I could not articulate a sense of meaning in Pollock's paintings but felt moved by their ambition, I read just about every interpretation of Pollock I could find," he says. He wrote a senior thesis on Pollock's drip technique and had his first live encounter with a mural-sized Pollock at MoMA in the winter of 1985. Fourteen years later, he lectured on Pollock to the general public in MoMA's galleries for a major retrospective.

After a stint in academic publishing, Little went on to do graduate work in art history, earning a master's from Williams College before heading to Duke for his Ph.D. He worked with Professor Kristine Stiles on his dissertation, which examined the art and history of a New York City artists' group. The group began "as an independent nonprofit organization to combat the commercial gallery system, and set out to provide a new model of artistic production through collaboration," he says.

Little says he chose Duke because "it was the only program I found that was truly committed to interdisciplinary studies," and he reveled in the freedom to supplement art history with study in areas such as literary criticism. While working toward his Ph.D., he lectured at MoMA. He later taught modern and contemporary art at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where, in 2003, he organized an exhibition of contemporary video, "Empire: Images from a New World Order." For many years, he has taught through Duke's Leadership and the Arts in New York program. In his MoMA position, Little oversees all public programs for adults and the academic community, including public lectures, symposia, courses, gallery talks, and panels. MoMA has always seen itself as being, in part, "a laboratory for ideas," he says, and so it takes seriously its founding mission of education and research.

He is now working on a debate series that will feature two leading intellectuals in a dialogue about a significant issue in art and culture today. "The series hopes to provoke true debate," he says, "during a time when real debate, I think, is discouraged and even seen as disruptive."

--Robert J. Bliwise