Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) is one of the masterpieces of Jackson Pollock's drip period. He made it in the summer of 1950 in the barn he used as a studio at Springs, near East Hampton on Long Island, where he had lived since 1945. The canvas, about 221 by 299.7 centimeters, is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which bought it in 1976.

What you are looking at

The entire canvas is covered, edge to edge, in a dense web of poured and flung paint. There is no center, no focal point and no figure: Pollock's so-called "all-over" composition gives every part of the surface roughly equal weight.

The web is built in layers. Long, looping lines of black run through everything, some thick and puddled, some thin as hair. Over and under them lie skeins of white, pale gray, salmon pink, tan and blue-gray, with flecks of silver from aluminum paint. In places the paint has pooled into small blots; elsewhere it has been flicked into spatters and dots.

The famous lavender is an illusion. There is almost no lavender paint in the picture. The soft violet haze comes from the eye mixing the pinks, blues, grays and whites at a distance, which is why the critic Clement Greenberg suggested the title. Along the top edge, look for the prints of Pollock's own hands, pressed into the wet paint.

How it was made

Pollock unrolled unprimed canvas on the floor and worked from all four sides, walking around and over it. He poured and dripped commercial enamel house paint, oil and aluminum paint from cans, sticks and hardened brushes, controlling the flow with his arm and body. He described being "in" the painting while he worked. That same summer, the photographer Hans Namuth photographed and filmed him at work, images that made his method famous.

The process looks random but is not. Pollock built the web over days, adding layers, judging the density and rhythm, and stopping when he felt the painting was complete.

Context

Lavender Mist was shown at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in late 1950, in an exhibition that also included Autumn Rhythm and One: Number 31, the three great canvases of that summer. It marks the high point of the drip paintings, a style he would largely abandon after 1951. Compare it with his earlier, symbol-filled Guardians of the Secret and The Deep.

Where to see it

The painting hangs in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. See also the Jackson Pollock page and, for a later take on poured paint, Left-Over Paint Abstraction.