Jackson Pollock, Number 28, 1950

Jackson Pollock (American, Cody, Wyoming 1912–1956 East Hampton, New York)

Title: Number 28, date: 1950

Medium: Enamel on canvas

Dimensions: 68 1/16 in. × 8 ft. 8 13/16 in. (172.9 × 266.2 cm)

Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

After Pollock’s move to Springs, in the town of East Hampton on Long Island in 1945, he took up painting in a barn adjacent to the home he shared with his wife, fellow artist Lee Krasner. This larger space expanded his practice, allowing for painting on and around unstretched canvases on the floor, a process the artist likened to Native American sand painting. Pollock appears to have begun this composition by dripping and spilling great amounts of black and ocher-colored medium onto the canvas. These hues are visible from the reverse side of the canvas, but they became buried under subsequent layers of paint applied in acrobatic swirls and dribbles. With their expansive scale and decentered compositions, the “drip” paintings exceed their own boundaries, “as though refusing to accept the artificiality of an ‘ending,’” in the words of artist Allan Kaprow.

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