Fortunately, we have more to measure the "boldness and breadth" of the two artists' respective achievements – at this formative stage in the unveiling of the drip technique – than Greenberg's suspiciously "furtive" assessment. Placed side-by-side with Sobel's earlier painting Milky Way, Pollock's Galaxy is murky and muddled, like someone still searching for his voice or burying it under lashings of doubt. After all, Pollock's painting is, literally, a cover up. "At first, in a picture such as Galaxy," explains his biographer Deborah Soloman, "Pollock spattered paint to obscure an image that had begun as a human figure." For Sobel, the invention of drip painting was a ritual of self-revelation. For Pollock, at least initially, the technique was imitative and self-concealing: a mask.
