One: Number 31, 1950
Jackson Pollock (1912 to 1956) · 1950
More than five metres of canvas are covered from edge to edge in a web of poured and flung paint: black, white, brown, teal and grey lines that loop, splash, pool and cross one another in thousands of layers. There is no centre, no top or bottom, no image. Stand in front of it and your eye is pulled into the tangle, then out again to the whole field, and you begin to sense a rhythm, dense in some places, open in others, like the canopy of a forest seen from below.
Pollock made it in the summer of 1950 in a barn on Long Island, with the unstretched canvas laid flat on the floor. He walked around and over it, dripping and pouring commercial enamel from cans, sticks and stiffened brushes, working from all four sides. Look at the different qualities of line: thin threads where the paint was flung fast, thick puddles where it was poured, sprays of tiny dots where it splattered. There are handprints and footprints in the surface if you look hard enough. Nothing is painted with a brush touching the canvas.
One was among three enormous drip paintings Pollock finished that year, the peak of his career, before drink and doubt overtook him; he died in a car crash in 1956. The painting was bought by the collector Ben Heller and came to MoMA in 1968 through the Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund by exchange. In 2013 conservators spent months removing a discoloured varnish that a restorer had added in the 1960s, and it now looks as raw as Pollock left it. Give it time; it changes the longer you look.
Did You Know? Conservators found that a coat of varnish added in the 1960s had yellowed the whole painting, and its removal in 2013 revealed Pollock's original matte surface.
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