A Story Told About Itself: Jackson Pollock’s Number 7A, 1948

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) painted the work now known as Number 7A, 1948, when he was thirty-six, in the barn outside his house at Springs, near East Hampton, at the end of Long Island. He had been using it as his studio for the preceding two years.[I]

It was in this makeshift studio that he began working with canvases tacked onto the wooden floor, saying in 1947, “On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.”[II] The studio was relatively small; roughly twenty-one feet square. This painting is a long rectangle, three-feet by roughly ten feet, and some other paintings made there are even larger; the canvas therefore unrolled as he worked. But he would then tack a painting to the wall to judge it, usually returning it to the floor for more work, saying: “I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.” Number 7A, 1948 does look as if it has a life of its own, uncannily at once showing the means of its making and not revealing exactly how it was made.

I shall have more to say about this in due course, but let me now say what topics I want to address, in varying details, that afford context to this particular painting. First, its prosaic title, which seems more like a code number on an appliance than an inviting name for a great painting. Second, the early appreciation of this and related works, especially that by his most fervent supporter, critic Clement Greenberg. And third, in conclusion, some thoughts on what showing the means of making implies.

What’s in a name?

When an account is written of Abstract Expressionists’ methods of naming their paintings, it will need to range from those with descriptive titles that definitely require explanation, like Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis and Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic, to those of an increasing number of artists who simply used numbers, like Jackson Pollock eventually. However, the paintings in his first solo exhibition, from January 5 to 23, 1948, at New York’s Betty Parsons Gallery (hereafter Parsons 1) at 15 East 57 Street in Manhattan, all had descriptive titles, which led to sometimes rich interpretations. According to Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, these titles were chosen by a neighbor in Springs, Ralph Mannheim,[III] an acclaimed translator whose career began in 1943.

The most apposite is probably the title of the 1947 Full Fathom Five (fig. 1), famously the opening of Ariel’s beautiful song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Full fathom five thy father lies/ Of his bones are coral made/Those are pearls that were his eyes/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change…” Pollock may have already known, if not learned from Mannheim, that it had been repurposed in the stream-of-consciousness prose of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which has been associated with his own method of composition.[IV] However, its burial-at-sea association has been more frequently made: The art historian and painter John Golding imagined that Pollock may have begun this painting as a two-figure composition which “has been buried, drowned, by the dense skeins of paint that flow back and forth, meshing and tangling as they do so.”[V]

It is known that some such paintings do have imagery hidden beneath their surfaces; Pollock apparently told critic Thomas Hess that they did, and conservators have found some.[VI] The surface of Full Fathom Five is dense, the paint encrusted with nails, buttons, coins, cigarettes, and so on, that conceal whatever may be beneath it. But we have to allow that Pollock, whose backyard looked onto Accabonac Creek, which fed into Long Island Sound, alternatively (or additionally) to his approving the Shakespearean association, thought of the title as simply a description of deep water: A fathom is six feet of water; shallow water. “Full fathom five” means water thirty feet deep; deep water. Still, I think we can understand why, as the authors of the catalogue raisonné of Pollock’s paintings explained, he soon wanted “to avoid glossing the ‘meaning’ of an abstract work by appending a verbal title,”[VII] and began numbering his paintings.

He began badly: For Parsons 2, which ran from January 24 to February 12, 1949, he numbered the paintings 1 through 26. Then, for Parsons 3, in the same year from November 21 to December 10, he showed another sequence of works and numbered them 1 through 25. You may imagine that his gallerist was not amused. She no longer had to try to sell a painting with a watery-grave title, but selling different works with the same numbered titles would have been even worse. The authors of the Pollock catalogue raisonné explained her solution: “In order to distinguish the unsold 1948 works from the 1949 works with identical numbered titles, Mrs. Parsons, as of November 14, 1949, placed the letter ‘A’ after the numbers of the 1948 paintings that remained in her inventory from the earlier show.”[VIII] She did this because she included ten such works from Parsons 2, among them Number 7, along with the twenty-five new ones in Parsons 3. (Needless to say, she would not have considered naming the new works, B paintings.) Of course, she could also have told each owner of a work purchased in Parsons 2 to put the letter A after its number, but she didn’t, creating confusion to be sorted out, as best as it could be, by the authors of the catalogue raisonné.

While Lee Krasner was among those who had been happy with Mannheim’s titles for her husband’s paintings, she soon became an advocate for his using numbers. “Numbers are neutral,” she said. They make people look at a painting for what it is—pure painting.”[IX] But numbers are not neutral: They imply a sequence. And Pollock’s numbering system does not provide one. As the catalogue raisonné’s authors tell us, the numbering of most of his works from 1949 to 1952 was basically arbitrary; sometimes determined by size, by storage considerations, and by which paintings were chosen for exhibition. The numbers do not indicate the sequence in which the paintings were made.[X] Does this matter? Not much, if we do know when they were first exhibited, which we do. And knowing that helps us to understand what Krasner meant by “pure painting.” So do the responses to Pollock’s exhibitions by his greatest early supporter, critic Clement Greenberg.

Pure Painting

Reviewing Parsons 1 in The Nation of January 24, 1948, Greenberg spoke of Pollock as an artist who “will in time be able to compete for recognition as the greatest American painter of the twentieth century,” praising him for his “concentration on surface texture and tactile qualities, to balance the danger of monotony that arises from the even, all-over design which has become Pollock’s consistent practice.”[XI] However, he did have some reservations, especially about Pollock’s use of aluminum paint as making a picture “startlingly close to prettiness”; “even, “almost too dazzling to be looked at indoors,” and “an unwarranted dissimulation of the artist’s weakness as a colorist.”

A year later, writing about Parsons 2 in The Nation of February 19, 1949, Greenberg mentioned Seven (the Number 7 that would be renamed Number 7A) as one of the paintings that “seemed more than enough to justify the claim that Pollock is one of the major painters of our time.”[XII] He again spoke of the artist’s limitations with regard to color, but also of how the works in the show “manifested in general a greater openness of design than before.” Greenberg had written in 1947 that “Pollock remains essentially a draftsman in black and white” who “tends to handle his canvas with an over-all evenness,”[XIII] and would continue to stress these aspects of Pollock’s art. These characterize Number 7A, being more visibly all-over drawn than, say, Full Fathom Five. The critic had also written of Pollock’s earlier canvases, like that one, as “American and rougher and more brutal” than those of European painters. In Number 7A, these qualities have not so much been tempered as replaced by an American frankness of a painting that clearly reveals the means of its making. This is perhaps what Krasner meant by “pure painting.”

Pollock’s work had indeed changed in the year between his first two Parsons exhibitions. This may well have been affected by his seeing an exhibition in the Charles Egan gallery at 63 East 57 Street just a block away from Betty Parsons. This was the first solo exhibition of the forty-four-year-old Willem de Kooning. Greenberg reviewed it in The Nation on April 24, 1948, saying that, “For de Kooning black becomes a color… Spread smoothly in heavy somatic shapes on an uncrowded canvas, this black identifies the physical picture plane with an emphasis other painters achieve only by clotted pigment.” Perhaps a dig at Pollock’s “concentration on surface texture and tactile qualities”?

Greenberg does not mention this, but Pollock would surely have noticed that the black in de Kooning’s works like Painting (fig. 2), was composed not only from conventional artists’ oil paint, but also from commercial enamels, finding confirmation of his having begun to use them together in his own poured paintings. These dried more slowly and to a slick, glossy finish that reflected some light, producing a livelier surface than artists’ oils: Not dazzling like aluminum paint, Pollock had to have seen, but lively enough to afford a contrast with the opaque blacks of the oils. They also offered a contrast of the fluid and the firm that he would make even greater use of than de Kooning had. We see this explicitly in the oil and enamel Number 7A, 1948. It is also one of the sparest, most conspicuous examples of Pollock’s 1948 canvases that fit the description Greenberg applied to the works in de Kooning’s exhibition; his “insistence on a smooth, thin surface is a concomitant of his desire for purity, for an art that makes demands only on the optical imagination.”

A story told about itself

I earlier quoted Pollock’s 1947 statement of his preference for working on the floor because he could walk around a painting and work on it from all four sides. He also said, “I need the resistance of a hard surface,”[XIV] and I think it is fair to say that the sparer one of his paintings is, the more that we are aware of the canvas as a hard planar surface that runs through whatever is on it. (Prior to painting, Pollock at times used glue to harden the canvas surface to control the degree that his poured paint soaked into it.)[XV] But his aim was not to offer a sense of the ground as a plane separate from whatever is arranged on top of it; rather, of the plane brought up into its painting.

In 1954, Greenberg would claim that a painting like Pollock’s “has lost its ‘inside’ and become almost all ‘outside,’ all plane surface.”[XVI] Painter Brice Marden, who adopted the term “plane image” for his own canvases (fig. 3), was more nuanced, when speaking of Pollock’s One, Number 31 of 1950 (fig. 4), in saying that Pollock “could control the whole feel of the painting by going back to the original ground layer and bringing it back up. The ground is the canvas, and what happens in the painting is a dynamic play between the applied and what is applied on [it].”[XVII] However, he effectively agreed with Greenberg’s statement that, again thinking of Pollock, “often we cannot distinguish centers of interest within the abstract picture’s field and have to take the whole of it as one single, continuous center of interest, which in turn compels us to feel and judge it in terms of its over-all unity to the exclusion of everything else.” He refers to what nowadays, painter Terry Winters tells me, are called “random networks,” networks without hierarchies because their constituent “nodes” (the points on a plant stem where leaves and branches attach and grow) have a similar power and number of connections.[XVIII]

For Marden, One, Number 31 comprises a random network, reading as one single continuous center of interest because, “the colors may look layered, but I think there was a more organic flow between what looks like the bottom layer and what looks like the top layer… Pollock doesn’t let the painting read as layers, and all those marks and colors become the real space of the painting.” The test of this is trying to follow the trails of poured paint, “there’s always some point where you lose the trail; you just can’t read it because it never reads as layering.”

However, Number 7A, 1948 is not like this. Because it is less conspicuously layered, you are invited to follow the trails for longer. Moreover, you can distinguish centers of interest within the abstract picture’s field and as well as take the whole of it as one single, continuous center of interest. It comprises what Winters tells me is now called a “scale-free network.” This is to say, a network that may be as much an “allover” one as a random network, but whose topology is of a fluctuating density held together both by nodes of a similar power and connectivity and by large hubs of a greater power and connectivity. This is what he commonly uses (fig. 5), and is effectively how Number 7A is composed: as an all-over frieze with a varying density of finer, filament-like lines, and denser trails of paint, poured, drizzled, and guided by a brush or a stick, and interspersed by splotches and puddled clusters of lines into shapes of varying size and reflectivity that especially attract our interest. And there is no imagery hidden beneath all of this.

A philosophical writer on art, Philip Fisher, has observed that originality has an instantaneous quality to it that does not commonly seem to embody prized artisanal skills;[XIX] hence the puzzled, even hostile reactions to Pollock’s allover paintings from those who thought that they were rapidly executed. However, as Fisher concludes, the “original” object is prized precisely because the process of invention is not obscured and made into a mystery, as in a denser painting, but comprises a record of the thought and impulses that produced it. He says of especially the sparer paintings by Pollock, that they “offer the feeling of calligraphy, of writing without words, and, finally, even of a kind of abstract story telling.”[XX] His conclusion can serve as mine on Number 7A, speaking of “the history of traces that the final work presents simultaneously as a space and an open narrative history, a story told about itself.

JOHN ELDERFIELD

John Elderfield is Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and was the inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum. He is the author of many books, more than one hundred articles and, over thirty years, the organizer of seminal retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art of Kurt Schwitters (1985), Henri Matisse (1992), Pierre Bonnard (1998) and Willem de Kooning (2011-12); and exhibitions in London, Paris, and Washington, D.C., of Cezanne Portraits (2017) and, in Princeton, of Cezanne's Rock & Quarry Paintings (2020), and most recently, Willem de Kooning's Breakthrough Years (2026).

Citations

[I] © John Elderfield, 2026. The literature on Pollock is enormous, and it would have made these notes far too lengthy if they provided references to texts by the many authors who have addressed topics that I refer to in this simplified account of the present subject. I have therefore restricted them to solely providing sources for quotations and critical factual information.  As usual, I am indebted to the review and suggestions of my first reader, Jeanne Collins. [II]  ‘My Painting,’ Possibilities (Winter 1947-1948), and for the following quotation. Reprinted in Francis Valentine O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, Jackson Pollock. A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1978), Volume 4, p.241. [III]  Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 169. [IV] Ibid., pp. 172-174. [V] John Golding, Paths to the Absolute (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p.134. [VI] Pepe Karmel, ‘Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,’ Jackson Pollock (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 103; James Coddington, “No Chaos Damn It,” in Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Carmel, eds., Jackson Pollock. New Approaches (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), pp. 103-104. [VII] Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 2, p.1. [VIII] Ibid. [IX] Quoted by Berton Rouéche, ‘Unframed Space,’ The New Yorker, 25 (August 5, 1950), p. 16; cited in Chronology, Jackson Pollock, 1999, p. 323. [X] Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 2, p.xix. [XI] John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 202-203, and for the following quotation. [XII]  O’Brien, Volume 2, p. 286. [XIII] O’Brien, Volume 2, p.125. [XIV] Notes by Jackson Pollock, [I] Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner papers, Box 1, Folder 3, 1,1: Biographical Material, c. 1938-1956. Quoted in Jackson Pollock. The Early Years 1934-1947 (Paris: Flammarion, 2024), p. 181. [XV] Coddington, ‘No Chaos Damn It,’ pp. 110-111.  [XVI] ‘Abstract and Representational,” Art Digest, I (November 1954); John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950-1956 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 191. [XVII] Interview with Brenda Richardson, in her Brice Marden. Cold Mountain (Houston: Houston Fine Art Press, 1992), p. 43. [XVIII] Reported in ‘Space to Paint,’ in my de Kooning, A Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2011), p. 15; along with the following statement by Winters. [XIX] Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art. Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 178. [XX] Ibid., p. 190