Number 7A, 1948

Number 7A, 1948 is the largest of Jackson Pollock’s famed “drip” paintings to remain in private hands. This majestic and mesmeric canvas represents a key moment not only in the artist’s short but explosive career, but also in the wider historical canon. For it is with this work that Pollock finally frees himself from the shackles of conventional easel painting and produces one of the first truly abstract paintings in the history of art. Number 7A, 1948’s sophisticated progression of drips, pours, swoops, and pools of black paint is evidence of the genius for which Pollock is globally celebrated, for across this expanse of raw canvas there is a complete absence of the narrative or fictive elements that had previously sustained humanity’s artistic endeavors for millennia. In the twentieth century, it was Picasso, Matisse, and Cezanne who took tentative steps towards what became known as abstraction, but it is only in the paintings of Pollock that we finally see a completely new and unrestrained form of painting. Thus, in Number 7A, 1948 we witness the reinvention of painting, opening the door to a pure form of expression suitable for the modern postwar world.
The cultural and historical significance of Number 7A, 1948 cannot be overstated, as evidenced by the painting’s impressive provenance. It has been owned by some of the most important collectors of art of the past half century, beginning with Herbert Matter, who acquired the painting directly from the artist. Matter, a Swiss photographer and graphic designer, did much to shape the visual vocabulary of the twentieth-century, and he became one of Pollock’s early champions. The pair first met through their partners—Lee Krasner and Mercedes Carles—who were both arrested during a riot at the Works Progress Administration (WPA) building in New York in 1936, and soon afterwards their husbands became firm friends. Indeed, Matter’s innovative brand of action photography has been credited with helping Pollock to conceptualize his unique way of painting, and Matter would go on to acquire a number of Pollock’s paintings during his lifetime. Following Matter, the owners of Number 7A, 1948 were Kimiko and John Powers, a couple who amassed one of the most significant collections of postwar art, including important examples of work by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. Finally, for the past twenty-five years, the present work has resided in the collection of Si Newhouse.
Rarely seen by the public since it was painted in 1948, Number 7A, 1948 is a work that represents painting in its purest form. Measuring over eleven feet wide, this ‘architectural’ canvas presents an epic sweep of lyrical painterly gestures. Laid down on raw, unprimed canvas, the highly poetic composition is the result of Pollock’s revolutionary new technique that equated to "drawing in space." Very little, if any, of the pigment is applied directly to the surface of the painting, instead it is poured, dripped, flicked, and pooled into a lyrical dance of intertwined black trails. Some of these marks are substantial, anchoring the core of the composition, others are gossamer thin: all of them are spun into a magical web of painterly gestures. Into this are inserted discreet passages of red pigment, a device which Pollock sometimes used to heighten the sense of drama, and when combined with the raw canvas and energetic gestures, the effect can be truly euphoric.
It is this level of sophistication that distinguishes Number 7A, 1948 from its peers; the openness of the composition allows the viewer to witness the quality of each of Pollock’s individual gestures, while the balance of intermittent and more substantial elements and the rhythm with which they flow across the surface of the canvas is without parallel. This progression of elongated gestures evokes the parade of nymphs in Botticelli’s Primavera (circa 1480, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), while the fluidity of their execution recalls the flowing limbs in Henri Mattise's choreographical masterpiece Danse (I) (1909, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Perhaps more than any other work from Pollock’s oeuvre, Number 7A, 1948 is the embodiment of the artist’s own statement when he said that his paintings were “energy and motion made visible” (quoted in H. Harrison, Jackson Pollock, London, 2014).
In addition to the unique method of paint handling, the revolutionary nature of this painting is also due to the fact that Pollock removed his chosen canvas support from its traditional position on the easel and placed it directly on the floor. This allowed him to involve his whole body in the painterly process. In a statement published in the winter 1947-1948 issue of the avant-garde journal Possibilities, he wrote “I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting… On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer. More a part of the painting, since I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting” (in E. Landau, Jackson Pollock, New York, 2000, p. 168). Indeed, Pollock believed this unique way of addressing the surface allowed him a more intimate relationship with his canvas. “When I’m in my painting I am not aware of what I’m doing,” he continued. “It is only after sort of ‘getting acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about… the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through… there is a pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well” (ibid.). The combination of Pollock’s body movements and his ability to use entire space around his canvases in service of his form of abstraction clearly impressed one reviewer who noted “The effect is dizzying… Space is limited; Pollock apparently isn’t” (Y. Szafran et al., Jackson Pollock’s Mural: The Transitional Moment, Los Angeles, 2014, p. 12).
This revolutionary approach to painting was not, as is often thought, the result of a singular moment of creative genius, instead it was the result of years of concentrated study, continuous innovation, and intense practice. Although others had, independently, been experimenting with the idea of dripping paint onto the surface of the canvas (among them Mark Tobey, Janet Sobel, and Ralph Rosenborg), it was Pollock who successfully turned this technique into the ultimate form of artistic expression for the twentieth century. He first began dripping pigment onto his canvases as early as 1936 when he attended classes run by artist David Alfaro Siqueiros at his experimental Laboratory of Modern Techniques in Art in New York. Here, Siqueiros would encourage participants to use industrial materials such as Duco enamel paints, which he would drip or spray onto canvas. For Pollock, these early incarnations used the drips more as a framework upon which he would then build a more finished composition.
Another important early influence was the artist’s longstanding interest in Surrealism, in particular automatic drawing. By the early 1930s, Surrealism had made its way from Europe and was beginning to be shown in the United States, a phenomenon which hadn’t escaped a young Jackson Pollock’s attention, and which he himself flirted with during his early years in California. However, Pollock never sought to assimilate the Surrealist’s desire to allow the unconscious to lead the creative process (his drips, pours, and splatters were all very deliberate), but he did greatly admire their ability to think beyond the conventional.
But perhaps the greatest influence on paintings such as Number 7A, 1948 was the work of Pollock’s friend and mentor, the muralist Thomas Hart Benton. From an early age his family encouraged Pollock’s love of art, and with his older brother sending him magazines featuring the work of the Mexican muralists, the impact of these large-scale paintings on the young Pollock has been described by one author as his “first great aesthetic shock” (J. Snrech, “Jackson Pollock from 1930 to 1947: From the 'Young Man from Wyoming' to the 'Strongest Painter of His Generation,'” in Jackson Pollock The Early Years, Paris, 2024, p. 13). When Pollock finally arrived in New York, he enrolled at the Art Students League where Benton became his mentor, and the younger artist learnt much from him, including learning to look at—and understand—Renaissance masterpieces, plus absorbing the underlying techniques of pictorial composition contained in Benton’s influential treatise The Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting. Pollock’s older brother, Charles, admitted that “the analytical methods of Benton, with their references to Renaissance and Baroque art” were among the defining influences on his younger’s brother’s artistic training (quoted in ibid.).
This exposure to Benton’s work, plus those of other muralists such as Siqueiro and José Clemente Orozco, was also crucial to Pollock’s understanding of scale and composition, elements essential to the success of Number 7A, 1948. In an early text about the large-scale paintings that Pollock began to produce beginning in 1940s, Frank O’Hara astutely detected what made Pollock stand out with these ‘mural’ sized works. The poet and critic noted the important difference between size and scale, and identified scale as the mysterious and ambiguous quality that reflects the emotional effect of the painting on the spectator, rather than just simple dimensions, a quality clearly apparent in the present work.
Pollock’s breakthrough with large-scale canvases came in 1943 when he completed Mural, a commission for his then dealer, Peggy Guggenheim. Despite being a relatively unknown artist at the time, Pollock was given carte blanche to paint whatever he thought most suitable for Guggenheim’s New York townhouse. Although his chosen subject matter was still very much surrealist in nature—contorted figures in an enigmatic landscape—in producing a work that measured 93 inches by 238 inches, Mural was Pollock’s first foray into painting the large-scale canvases that would ultimately result in the paradigm-shifting big pictures such as Number 7A, 1948. As Landau has pointed out “Mural was to become a fundamental means for Pollock to express his ‘passion as an artist.’” (E. Landau, in Y. Szafran, op. cit., p. 15).
This marked the beginning of a period in which the artist completed some of his most important and sophisticated works, including Number 7A, 1948. It also coincided with the eventual closure of Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, and his subsequent representation by Betty Parsons, one of the most important dealers of her generation with a roster of artists that came to include Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Robert Rauschenberg, amongst many others. This new arrangement resulted in a remarkable period of creativity for Pollock. “I’m just now getting into painting again,” he wrote at the time, “and the stuff is really beginning to flow. Grand feeling when it happens” (quoted in E. Landau, Jackson Pollock, New York, 2000, p. 166). In October 1947 Pollock applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, although ultimately unsuccessful, it gave him the opportunity to formalize the new direction of his painting. “I intend to paint large movable pictures which will function between the easel and the mural,” he stated… “I believe the easel picture to be a dying form…” (quoted in ibid.). The move from easel to floor also allowed him to free himself from the using the conventional artists’ tools, stating “I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives…” (quoted in ibid., p. 168). This transition opened up a whole new range of graphic gestures as he skillfully learnt to combine the movement of his hand and with the liquid properties of the paint as it fell from his chosen implement onto the surface of the canvas. Although highly audacious, what—to the uninitiated—might at first glance seem either easy or, paradoxically, risky, was for Pollock highly controlled, containing no element of chance. He knew exactly what he was doing “I can control the flow of paint; there is no accident” (quoted in ibid., p. 172). The impetus for this radical departure was Pollock’s desire to create a holistic experience for both himself and the viewer, he firmly believed that a painting should have no beginning and no end and that the ultimate goal for painting was to formulate “unframed space” itself.
With paintings such as Number 7A, 1948, Pollock not only achieved the heights of artistic endeavor, he also took art into the realm of popular culture more than ever before. Just as Marcel Duchamp had done when he exhibited his Fountain at The Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917, and Andy Warhol would do when he exhibited his Campbell’s Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in 1962, Pollock’s paintings became firmly entrenched in the public’s consciousness. They became the subject of much discussion, not just in intellectual circles but also around dinner tables across the country. In August 1949, that debate came to a head when Life magazine (which had a circulation of 5 million copies a week at the time) published its now famous article “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” It characterized the heated discourse that characterized contemporary painting at the time, and noted Pollock’s role at the vanguard of this new form of painting. It chronicled his unique style of painting, delighting in his unusual repertoire of tools and materials including, as the article noted, sand, broken glass, cigarette ash, “and the occasional dead bee”. It also highlighted one American critic’s reaction upon seeing his painting, declaring him “the greatest American painter of the twentieth century” (“Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?,” Life, August 8, 1949, p. 45).
The critical and popular reaction to paintings such as Number 7A, 1948 cemented Pollock’s place in the pantheon of great twentieth-century artists, alongside fellow radicals such as Picasso, Malevich, Mondrian, Rothko, and Warhol. Pollock’s paintings are still truly revolutionary; they broke with centuries of convention, and the artist’s bravado and vision led to a completely new form of art. With Number 7A, 1948 he reached the peak of his expressive authority. His almost supra-natural skill in controlling the uncontrollable nature of liquid pigment resulted in one of the most extraordinary paintings of Pollock's career, and consequently of the modern art historical canon. He became a champion for a new generation of artists who were determined to forge a path on their terms and in a way addressed their concerns. Just a few short months after the present work was painted, the ultimate authority on the art of the period, Clement Greenberg, anointed Pollock as the leader of this new generation when he declared, “Jackson Pollock's show this year at Betty Parson's continued his astounding progress. The general quality that emerged from such pictures seemed more than enough to justify the claim that Pollock is one of the major painters of our time” (quoted in T. de Duve, Clement Greenberg between the lines: including a debate with Clement Greenberg, Chicago, 2010, p. 35).