No. 5, 1948 by Jackson Pollock – Facts & History about the Painting 8 ft × 4 ft 2.4 m × 1.2 m Time and time again, innovative art styles become the new mainstream. People have gone through lengths to express how they feel over a canvas or any form of media. People are very interested with the history and techniques of different artists. We have thousands of painters all over the world that graced the diverse world of art with their contributions. One famous art piece is No. 5, by Jackson Pollock that gave a whole new meaning to the Abstract Expressionism. A Great Contribution to the Abstract Expressionist Movement The Abstract Expressionism movement was started just right after the World War 2. This American movement was able to achieve worldwide influence. It was also the movement that placed New York City as the center of the art world. The name of this American movement came from a fusion of the German Expressionists’ self-denial and emotional intensity. The Abstract Expressionistic Movement also had an image of being anarchic, rebellious, and even nihilistic. No. 5 and Abstract Expressionism Jackson Pollock is considered to be one of the leading contributors of this movement.

He was able to bring a whole light to the art scene by creating No. 5 in 1948 (it is also called No. 5, 1948). No. 5 became the most expensive and famous artwork that Pollock painted. This painting was also considered as the epitome of the Abstract Expressionism. The Intricate Style in No. 5 This painting was created on an eight by four feet fiberboard. The style that Jackson Pollock used for this art work was the use of liquid paints. He decided to move away from the traditional style of using paints on canvas. No. 5 can be seen with huge amounts of yellow and brown paint drizzled on it. Pollock was inspired to create this painting out of his own emotions. He deviated from the traditional use of liquid paints. The painting’s layout appears a nest-like and inspired different emotions in those viewing the painting. It was this intricacy and dedication that brought this art work to the top of the art scene. The use of action painting or the spontaneous dribbling, smearing, and flinging of liquid paint was the main style that Pollock used for No. 5. Pollock also wanted to bring a whole new perspective into painting.

He wanted to convey through No. 5 the culmination of the artist’s emotion in his very own unconventional painting technique. No. 5 brought a whole new influence to abstract expressionism. He was able to advance the Abstract Expressionistic movement by giving this piece a number instead of a name. He was able to bring a new effect to viewers of his art work as well. He wanted people to focus on the painting and feel what it brought to them. No. 5 is considered to be a valuable piece in the world and brought Pollock to the ranks of America’s greatest artists. Leave a Reply Jackson Pollock, An American Painter, and His Painting Number 5, 1948 Sold for $140 Million - YouTube Jackson Pollock, An American Painter, and His Painting Number 5, 1948 Sold for $140 Million Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later.

Published on Apr 3, 2013 Jackson Pollock, An American Painter, Battled Alcoholism, and His Painting Number 5, 1948 Sold for $140 Million Authentic Hand Painted Canvas Art (Famous Masterpieces) Free Shipping and Free Returns.... Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 -- August 11, 1956), known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety, a major artist of his generation. Regarded as reclusive, he had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy. While painting this way, Pollock moved away from figurative representation, and challenged the Western tradition of using easel and brush. He used the force of his whole body to paint, which was expressed on the large canvases.

In 1956, Time magazine dubbed Pollock "Jack the Dripper," due to his painting style. "My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added. When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess.

Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well." — Jackson Pollock, My Painting, 1956 Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related, single-car accident; he was driving. In December 1956, several months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London. In 2000, Pollock was the subject of the film Pollock, directed by and starring Ed Harris, which won an Academy Award. The Guardian, Friday 3 November 2006; Mexican splashes out record $140m for Jackson Pollock's drops of genius. The price obtained by Sotheby's for Pollock's Number 5, 1948 would make it the highest figure known to have ever been paid for a painting.

Category No.5, 1948 – Jackson Pollock – world’s most expensive painting | Understanding Paintings Wake up in an artwork » No.5, 1948 – Jackson Pollock – world’s most expensive painting No.5, 1948, painted by Jackson Pollock, is currently the world’s most expensive painting ever sold. It was priced at $140 million in 2006, when it changed hands from one collector to another. Here’s my attempt at explaining what the buyer could have seen in Jackson Pollock’s painting that could justify the price tag. Art Collectors and investors are always on the look out for gaining exclusive collector’s items, which could increase their prestige and also serve as an excellent investment medium. In the art field that means, an artwork that has made a significant impact on the history of art or an artwork created by a very influential artist. It is even better if the artist brought about a paradigm shift that changed the conventions of the time. Eg: da Vinci with Mona Lisa, Picasso with Cubism, Lichtenstein with Pop-Art. Such works automatically assume an august stature which attracts art collectors and investors.

There is also the economics of art that plays a role, the rarer the painting the better the investment. No.5, 1948 has all this going for it. Pollock’s radical techniques and methods made sure that his drip series were (still is) talk of the art community nationally and internationally, with several show conducted in leading the US and Europe. The drip series established Pollock as a leading figure of new American painting. Pollock was an iconoclast and a rebel, which got him a reputation that made him infamous. This in turn was great publicity for his drip series. Pollock with his unconventional methods influenced many artists to abandon conventions of fine art and encourages more creativity and boundary-less expression. Pollock created art history with his new kind of paintings. There’s also a mathematical theory that explains the popularity of Pollock’s drip series. Mathematicians and Scientists believe that Pollok’s drip series contains a mathematical, yet natural, concept called a fractal. It is a rough, geometric object that can be subdivided into parts, each of which looks like a reduced-size copy of the whole. In a fractal pattern, each smaller configuration is a miniature, though not necessarily identical, version of the larger pattern.

Mathematicians believe this phenomenon is what attracts people to Pollock’s drip series. The fractal pattern they claim is subconsciously pleasing to the eyes. Now here is my speculation, in addition to the above qualities, the painting was also supported by economics. All of Pollock’s paintings in the drip series (this is Pollock’s trademark) are safeguarded in museums except the No.5, 1948. The paintings hanging in museums rarely get sold which in turn creates a lack of supply in the market that the only one that can be a potential asset is priced exorbitantly. Pieces like this will not only be a good investment but also a status symbol worth exhibiting.

Sources: Triva - world's most expensive paintings 3 paintings are works of Picasso 2 paintings have the same model - painted by Klimt 1 painting has a double of it, differentiated mainly by the colour, painted by van Gogh the latest of the lot was sold this year in May 2010, for $106.5 million 1 painting is actually not a painting at all - its screen printing by Warhol 3 paintings have the artists' mistress as models 50% of the top 10 paintings were sold in 2006 This entry was posted on July 19, 2010 at 9:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site. 9 Responses to “No.5, 1948 – Jackson Pollock – world’s most expensive painting” July 20, 2010 at 11:00 am | Reply Areas of texture in this work might called geometric – if they are bounded geometrically, otherwise, where is the geometry?

If that is the case, there are many textures that fit the description of a fractal surface as you have defined it in this article, like top views of aggregate concrete, sand on a beach or mud that has cracked in the sun for example. Artspeak. For the most part, I do not take issue with your attempt to explain why No. 5, 1948 (as well as other paintings) sold for so much money. I would like to contribute another perspective though. Jackson Pollack was promoted by Peggy Guggenheim. Collectors like her have enough money to CREATE the market for any artist they choose to support. That is why his patrons originally bought his work, that’s why he became famous and that’s why so-called “major works” continue to be valued at astronomical prices today. Those who have invested obscene amounts of money in art in the past must continue to do so – to see their investments increase in value and maintain their position as leading connoisseurs of art. There are lots of unrecognized artists who come up with cutting edge approaches to art, it happens often. Some of them are children.

The vast majority of them go unnoticed and unheralded because they are not recognized or backed by an “annointed art authority” (i.e.; individuals who have enough money [and therefore, supposedly, the worldly aesthetic accumen] to pronounce to the rest of the us those artists whose work is to be recognized as meaningful. Before art could be placed in museums, generally only the wealthy were able to appreciate it. Typically, successful artists were court painters and their paintings were either portraits, or historical/religious works that often included visages of their patrons. In otherwords, the collectors were able to use art to make themselves stand apart from commoners and appear to be more important. When photography was popularized, 2D illusions of a 3D world lost much of their mystique. The general public became able to create endless images of themselves and thus leave their mark for posterity with great ease. Collectors needed new ways to set themselves apart from the masses. Artists also found themselves in competition with the camera. Art had to be reinvented. Thus, art that depicted human perception of the outer world was dubbed passe, illustrative and literal.

Curiously, today, art which is DEPENDENT upon the written and spoken word to explain it to the uninitiated, i.e.: abstract, expessionistic, minimallistic, conceptual, etc. is not considered to be “literal” despite the fact that it, more often than not, must be explained with language to be “understood”. (Unless, of course, one is a member of the elite few who understand it inherently, but must explain it to others to convince them why it has value.) Eventually, artists and collectors realised that one way to set themselves apart was to claim that great art need not be done with great skill – and that if the masses could not appreciate a given work at face value, so much the better. No more, would anyone be able to value art according to any particular standard. No more would the general public, the uninitiated or the “uneducated” be able to grasp a work on its own merit. The means by which artists and especially art collectors could control the art market and separate the classes was to simply come up with images that required explanation by people who would benefit from convincing others that great art must be explained by great appreciators of art.

There are many points that may be made to explain why the ultra-rich might pay $100,000,000+ for a “masterpiece” … but they all involve one common characteristic, self-aggrandizement. August 11, 2010 at 7:17 pm | Reply If all art were free, how would artists earn a living? If “Artist” is actually a professional artist, that’s a question worth considering. In our culture, those who care about art and can afford to buy it, do so. But affordability is hardly an issue. People at every economic level have access to art. Many galleries and museums offer affordable prints for sale, as do many individual fine artists. The art community is made up of artists at every level of skill and reputation, and many of us, recognizing that we’re not household names as yet, offer our art at affordable prices. Those who can’t afford the work of an emerging artist or a print of a masterpiece are in the (perhaps enviable) position of having to visit galleries and museums to view an endless array of all kinds of art, all for free or, in the case of some museums, for a relatively modest admission fee.

And the view changes every month or so! Thank goodness for the free enterprise system. Even the highly restricted version we now have in the US is the artist’s best friend. No artist is required to provide his or her art for free. With time, energy and effort, we can all succeed at the level our talents permit. And whatever public we are able to attract via our talents benefits from our creations. Nice to get the useful information of Jackson Pollock paintings. It’s really interesting blog. Thanks to share! Wesselgaard June 24, 2012 at 9:57 pm | Reply Jackson Pollock, maybe the most important art painter ever. Once you have seen his paintings you cannot forget. The timing, from beginning of his life 1912 – until to day 2012 – he manage to become a representing icon of his time, for us to review the past. What he saw and understood to what he reviled; we to day see the bits and glints of his time in the most beautiful way.

Not the poverty he experienced in the beginning of living in New York, or the poor people he lived together with under the great depression in the 1930th; how he himself had to – more or the less – find his food and accept “unemployment pay” from the government and living in cold apartments together with his brothers. We do not see this. We do not se the photo of a young man, very beautiful, a mother’s darling and a father’s proud ness. We saw a man getting lower and lower down in his own life, fighting with his inner demons. We saw a man getting older and more and more crazy, while his wife had to coop everyday with his bad behaviour and mood, only to find moments of joy and happiness. We saw finely a man going to peaces and dreaming of a life of love and understanding, but without no consolation what so ever, but his love to a young lady, coming to an end in a fatal car accident. He managed to reveal the beauty of life “even so” for us to day, that we might understand, understand ourselves. Yes, as times go by we only remember the beautiful moments, usually. A Genius of his time and his art.

The ultimate art from Jackson Pollock, New York 1949 — spring, winter. When time and space find each other, led by a master – everything possible can happen. This was Jackson Pollock moment and to day we step back in admiration. Jackson Pollock New York. “The feature we will have to wait for”. Can I therefore invite you to have a look into “the feature”? Please have a tour on this beautiful museum in Denmark, “Rudolph Tegner Museum” where the most wonderful artist Jackson Pollock was exhibited last year; one of his outmost wonderful paintings. Around the museum: Number 5, 1948 - Jackson Pollock - WikiArt.org Jackson Pollock it is a historically significant artwork the image is only being used for informational and educational purposes the image is readily available on the internet the image is a low resolution copy of the original artwork and is unsuitable for commercial use More … WikiArt.org allows unlimited copying, distributing and displaying of the images of public domain artworks solely. We use here Copyright term based on authors' deaths according to U.S. Copyright Law, that is 70 years. In other countries, the duration of copyright term may differ.

Please check here copyright length according to your country's legislation before you consider reproducing images borrowed from Wikipaintings.org Artworks protected by copyright are supposed to be used only for contemplation. Images of that type of artworks are prohibited for copying, printing, or any kind of reproducing and communicating to public since these activities may be considered copyright infringement. Jackson Pollock References: en.wikipedia.org Jackson Pollock’s paintings are no strangers to high prices at auction, and his Number 5 is no different. In November of 2006, Number 5, painted in Pollock’s unique drip technique, was sold for $140 million dollars, the highest price ever paid at auction for a painting, to an unknown buyer. This price exceeded both the high price paid for his Blue Poles, which sold in 1973, as well as Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which previously held the high price record. Using his entire body to paint in a method called “action painting,” Pollock dripped and splattered layer upon layer of paint to create his chaotic patterns. No.

5 (1948) Jackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Full Screen Slider Today - Buy Now from Art.com No.5 1948 is a famous oil on fibreboard painting from Jackson Pollock which has been at the centre of a number of high profile private sales. No. 5 measures an impressive 8ft long by 4ft wide and resides in a private collection in New York. It is typical of Pollock to produce such large scale paintings, particularly during his best known style of drip, abstract art. Brown paint forms the base for this painting, with several layers of that colour then added to with yellow drizzles through out. The constant layering gives a finished work with volume and allows it to really impress when seeing the original with the naked eye. Many of Pollock's abstract works are far better when viewed in public, and No.5 is one of those. The detail, textures and mixed media cannot effectively be covered by photography. This specific painting has drawn much discussion from in the art world and also outside. Mathematicians and Physicians have both studied this artwork in great detail, with many different theories being produced regarding the ideas in the artist's mind at the time that he produced it.

This is perhaps surprising considering that some claim most abstract art to be lacking in thought and technical ability. The drip painting techniques used here were found in Pollock's career from 1947 to 1950, which was a prolific and prominent time in his career. This finish involved a combination of pouring and activity afterwards, with the artist characteristically being bent down over the canvas on the floor, where he tended to feel most comfortable and in tune with his canvas. You can learn more about the No. 5 painting in this Wikipedia article which also covers more on other elements of the artist's life and career, including his personal struggles and most famous paintings. No.5 1948 Stone Roses were a music band in the UK who helped add further exposure to the work of Pollock through mention of him in their lyrics as well as a famous album cover which was a photograph of a painting produced by one of the band's guitarist, which bears an obvious similarity to the abstract expressionist style of their favourite artist. Various Stone Roses memorabilia is available that includes this painting and many falsely believe that the photograph is actually of a genuine Pollock painting, rather than an amateur painting strongly inspired by him. No.

5 achieved one of the highest prices in at history for any painting when sold ay auction in 2006. The media is always excited by such business, but it has little real impact in the real art world, where a higher price does not necessarily make one artwork better than an other. Having said that, Pollock paintings are expected to make great investments over coming years as fewer and fewer of them are available for purchase, with supply shortening due to private purchases of much of the best modern art. Advertisment Number 5, 1948 by Jackson Pollock Number 5, 1948 by Jackson Pollock Courtesy of Number 5, 1948 is a painting by Jackson Pollock, an American painter known for his contributions to the abstract expressionist movement. The painting was done on an 8' x 4' sheet of fiberboard, with thick amounts of brown and yellow paint drizzled on top of it, forming a nest-like appearance. It was originally owned by Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr.

and displayed at the Museum of Modern Art before being sold to David Geffen and then allegedly to David Martinez in 2006 (though the supposed sale of this painting to Martinez has been denied by his attorneys). According to a report in The New York Times on November 2, 2006, the painting was sold by David Geffen, founder of Geffen Records and co-founder of Dreamworks SKG, to David Martinez, managing partner of Fintech Advisory Ltd, in a private sale for a record inflation-adjusted price of $140 million. The sale was reportedly brokered by Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer, however, the law firm of Shearman & Sterling, LLP, issued a press release on behalf of its client, David Martinez, to announce that contrary to recent articles in the press, Martinez does not own the painting or any rights to acquire it. It is speculated that Geffen sold the painting, along with two others, to raise enough funds to bid for the Los Angeles Times. Martinez has reportedly been amassing an art collection, buying multiple modern artworks in recent years.

This sale would make the painting the second most expensive ever sold, privately or at auction, exceeding the sale of Gustav Klimt 's 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I to Ronald Lauder, heir to the Estee Lauder Companies fortune, by around five million dollars, trailing only the sale of The Card Players of Paul Cezanne to the Royal Family of Qatar reportedly for between $250 to $300 million. David Cook, deputy director of painting at Sotheby's Australia, stated that the price of Pollock's paintings will continually rise in value, as very few of Pollock's paintings are still left. Cook has also stated that another of Pollock's paintings, Blue Poles , is worth at least 180 million AUD and possibly even more than Number 5, 1948. In addition to the refutation issued by Shearman & Sterling, the auction expert Josh Baer indicated that Martinez was not the buyer of the painting.

MOST POPULAR PAINTINGS Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) , Number 19, 1948 | Christie's +1 212 636 2159 Lot essay Number 19, 1948 is one of the great 'drip' paintings that Jackson Pollock made in a legendary three-year burst of creativity between 1947 and 1950. It was these startling, original and accomplished paintings that, in Willem de Kooning's phrase, finally 'broke the ice' for American painting, completely revolutionizing it and in the process reshaping the entire history of twentieth century art. Displaying a fascinatingly dense, intricate and animated abstract surface--one that reveals the extraordinary mastery that Pollock had over his radical new medium of pouring, dripping and flicking enamel paint onto an unprimed ground--Number 19, 1948 is one of the richest most engaging and successfully resolved of all these famous works.

Indeed, along with the larger painting Number One A also of 1948-the first Pollock 'drip' painting to be purchased by New York's Museum of Modern Art--this work, Number 19, 1948, was singled out as one of the finest of Pollock's achievements to date by the great pioneering champion of Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg, when it was first shown at the artist's second solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in January 1949. "The general quality that emerged from such pictures," Greenberg wrote, "especially (Number) Nineteen, seemed more than enough to justify the claim that Pollock is one of the major painters of our time" (C. Greenberg, The Nation, 19 February, 1949, reproduced in J. O'Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 2 Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, Chicago, 1986, pp.

285-6) Despite Greenberg's laudatory praise for this show and for works such as Number 19, 1948 however, it was to take another six months and another exhibition at Betty Parson's Gallery later in the year before more mainstream critics were to recognize the scale and importance of Pollock's achievement and the artist was to begin his meteoric rise to success and notoriety. Pollock had first begun to experiment with the pouring and dripping of paint in his work around 1943 but it was not until 1947 that he made the all-important break away from applying paint directly onto the canvas plane to create completely freeform works composed solely of a complex veil-like surface of drips, splashes and spills made from above. In his early experiments of 1943 Pollock had, following a spirit of automatism then common amongst many Surrealist and avant-garde American painters, briefly explored a pouring technique with the aim of freeing further the code-like figurative calligraphy that both distinguished and often overlay his work of this period. Central to the development of his painting in respect of these works was his decision around 1946 to begin painting his works on the floor.

"On the floor I am more at ease," he later said. "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" (J. Pollock, 'My Painting', Possibilities, New York, Winter, 1947-8) Emulating the techniques of the Navajo Indian sand painters that Pollock had known as a child, the placing of the painting on the ground made a surprising degree of difference to Pollock's working practice. Not merely in terms of enhancing the ritualistic and totemic nature of his picture-making, but in freeing the painting from its traditional vertical place on the easel, it completely opened Pollock's painting to the spatial field within which it was to be worked. Not only did his placing of the canvas on the ground then actively encourage drips and spills of paint onto its surface rather than direct application with a brush but, most important of all, it enabled and encouraged the artist to work around the picture from all sides and to treat its entire surface equally and non-hierarchically--to treat the canvas and its image as an holistic as well as a totemic and ritualistic entity.

These relatively simple features of this comparatively unorthodox manner of painting were to have a profound impact on the radical break-away from the tradition of European-orientated easel painting, that Pollock's great 'drip' paintings of the late-1940s came to represent. And, with their apparent link to Native American tradition, they had the added advantage of placing Pollock's work in a distinctly American tradition. Intuitively following the fluid, material nature of his paint as if it were a guide that led him to a pure, unmediated painterly outpouring of his inner thoughts and the often turbulent emotions that welled up inside him, throughout 1947, Pollock experimented with the dripping and pouring of paint as a more direct and automatic language of self-expression. Where before Pollock's painting had been a convoluted mixture of half-conscious imagery subsequently veiled and obscured by subsequent overpainting and calligraphic gesture, such compulsive creation and correction, stating and then obscuring, now came to be fused into a single act with the new process of painting gesturally in the air above the canvas and letting the thinned paint fall and splatter onto the surface below.

As if to suggest the almost ritualized nature of this practice many of these first works were, at the suggestion of his friends subsequently given quasi-mystical titles such as Alchemy, Enchanted Forest, Cathedral and Lucifer. As the artist's wife, the painter Lee Krasner recalled, Pollock's radical new technique of painting was primarily a way of "working in the air" gesturallly creating "aerial forms which then landed" (L. Krasner, quoted in S. Naifeh and G. White Smith, Jackson Pollock. An American Saga, New York, 1989, p. 539) Pollock would, "take his stick or brush out of the paint can," the photographic documenter of his working practice, Hans Namuth recalled, "and then, in a cursive sweep, pass it over the canvas high above it, so that the viscous paint would form trailing patterns which hover over the canvas before they settle upon it, and then fall into it and then leave a trace of their own passage. He is not drawing on the canvas so much as in the air above it" (H.

Namuth, ibid) In many cases Pollock appears to have still been working within a kind of figurative tradition, drawing in places, specific forms spontaneously suggested by his unconscious mind in the air above the canvas. He told Nick Carone for instance, that "he wasn't just throwing paint, he was delineating some object, some real thing, from a distance above the canvas" (N. Carone, ibid). Accepting of the results of this strange, balletic fusion of figuration and abstraction, now taking place in mid-air above the canvas rather than flatly on it, Pollock explained that "when you are painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge...I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all the time" (J. Pollock, quoted in S. Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York, 1961, p. 8) The spontaneity and immediacy of this method of working in space at a remove from the canvas plane not only liberated Pollock but also quickly led to the artist developing a surprising to degree of control and even graceful mastery over the new technique.

It was this mastery that in turn led to the creation of new freeform compositions of surprising energy and diversity such as Number 19, 1948, that appear to chart a dynamic balancing act between order and chaos. In a unique series of almost revelatory notes to himself that he made about the new works he described these paintings as "States of order-- Organic intensity--Energy and motion--Made visible--Memories arrested in space, human needs and motives--acceptance." What was essential, Pollock also asserted in these rare personal notations, was "total control - denial of the accident." Confident that these works represented a major step forward in art, Pollock, was fearful of being wrongfully dismissed as a mere agent of automatism or worse, a Surrealist-imitator. It was of crucial importance, he felt, to make the public aware that although he might enter a kind of transcendent state when he painted, whereby his actions were often prompted by the apparent demands of the painting itself, these actions and his brushwork were never left to mere chance.

After gaining control over the technique in 1947, Pollock subsequently developed the practice to such a refined degree of mastery that he claimed to know exactly where the drips would fall even after the wildest of gestural splashes. In support of this, Lee Krasner recalled that Pollock's "assuredness at that time is frightening to me. The confidence, and the way he would do it was unbelievable" (L. Krasner, 'Jackson Pollock at Work: An Interview with Barbara Rose,' Partisan Review 47, No.1. (1980): 82-92 p. 45). Indeed, running contrary to the creative self-doubt that he suffered from throughout much of his life, in the great years of creativity, boldness, energy and sobriety of 1947 to 1950, Pollock's self-confidence in his art was running on such a high that he confided to Krasner in all sincerity, that he believed jazz music, particularly in the form of the Bebop of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie 'Bird' Parker, to be the "only other creative thing happening in this country" (L.

Krasner, quoted in R. G. O'Meally, Cool Jazz and Hard Bob: Painting and Picturing the Jazz Experience, New York, 1998, pp. 178-179.) Reflecting to some extent a similarly exhilarating high-wire act to 'Bird's' own improvisational flights of musical genius at this time, Pollock's drip-paintings were themselves often dazzling virtuoso performances and precarious balancing acts that teetered on the brink of chaos. Forged from a similar spirit of risking it all in the name of spontaneity, improvisation and unconscious impulse, Pollock's radical new working practice of painting in the air with thrown, splashed, flicked and splattered paint was one that marked the development of the language of painting into the realm of a performance or what would soon be termed 'action painting'. Miraculously, Pollock's paintings of this period almost never dissolved into chaos but, as in Number 19, 1948 appeared to hover delicately and intriguingly on the edge of an abyss.

More than merely two-dimensional records of the balletic three-dimensional movements in space that the artist's hand, wrist and arm had gone through in order to create the work, Pollock's paintings mysteriously seemed to transfer something of the spatial acrobatics that had gone into their making onto the picture plane itself. As the endlessly mysterious and fascinating spatial depth of a work such as Number 19, 1948 shows the expansive nature of Pollock's unique painterly practice in fact opened up the flat picture plane to powerful evocations of an entirely new dimension of space. Distinctive for its dense all-over web of fine gossamer-like dripped lines vying with one another in a shimmering but united field of energy and seemingly motional fluid form, Number 19, 1948 is one of the finest of a series of medium-scale paintings that Pollock made at the height of this tumultuous period of creativity and outward expression.

Beginning with a series of strong meandering black lines dripped onto a stiff, white-primed paper surface, Pollock has overlain these initial marks with a fine white lattice work and then a sequence of differing muted tones again including white and black as well as red, turquoise and finally gray in a way that anticipates the delicate color schemes of the vast, later masterpieces such as Lavender Mist and Autumn Rhythm. From this gradual build-up of spiralling interactive form a dense, dynamic and febrile web of exquisite painterly form has been made that radiates with energy and establishes an extraordinarily rich and complex spatial field. Here, as the Greenbergian critic Michael Fried once wrote of Pollock's work, all the conventional functions of line, space, color and composition have been denied in favour of a wholly new way of working in which each element, line especially, becomes a purely constructional part of a universal whole. "Pollock's finest paintings" he wrote, "reveal that his all-over line does not give rise to positive or negative areas: we are not made to feel that one part of the canvas demands to be read as figure, whether abstract or representational, against another part of the canvas read as ground.

There is not inside or outside to Pollock's line or the space through which it moves. Pollock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas" (M. Fried, Three American Painters, exh. cat., Cambridge, Mass, 1965, p. 34) Rare among Pollock's paintings for being able to generate a uniform, all-over feel of painterly action usually confined to larger canvases such as One, Number 31, 1950 or Lavender Mist, here, in Number 19, 1948, space, form, color and depth of field all merge into one another to generate a dense, universal, landscape-like plane of painterly energy. Comprised solely of lines, dribbles and splashes, the intricacy and complexity of the work is, in fact, too great for the eye to comprehend in any one glance. It gets seduced and then lost in the painting's frenetic and spectacular myriad of detail.

Pollock's field of vision and extraordinary ability to have juggled all these possibilities and yet kept control of the over-all cohesiveness of the work in the midst of such ever-developing depth and complexity is simply dazzling. The entire composition--if indeed composition is the right word to describe such a volatile entity--is, in the end, held together solely by the artist's final act; the extraordinarily fine twisting calligraphy of the last color he applied, gray. It is this gray, like the 'blue poles' with which he later resolved his famous late painting of the same title that ultimately unites Number 19, 1948, holding both itself and all them myriad of spiralling forms beneath it into a fascinatingly tumultuous, non-hierarchical, non-representational, egalitarian whole. "Abstract painting is abstract," Pollock once said. "It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was" (J.

Pollock, quoted in 'Unframed Space,' Interview with Berton Roueché, The New Yorker, 5 August, New York, 1950, p. 16). Cataloguing & details Janet Chase Hauck, New York Anon.

sale; Christie's, New York, 4 May 1993, lot 10 Private collection, Paris Acquired from the above by the present owner Pre-Lot Text Number 5 1948 By Jackson Pollock - Oil Paintings & Art Reproductions - Reproduction Gallery Number 5 1948 By Jackson Pollock Size: 47 x 80 cm (18.5 x 31.5") Oil Painting on Canvas Choose Painting Size (Height x Width) Proportions will be maintained 47 x 80 cm (18.5 x 31.5") = $289 56 x 95 cm (22.0 x 37.5") = $344 65 x 111 cm (25.6 x 43.6") = $400 74 x 126 cm (29.1 x 49.6") = $455 83 x 141 cm (32.7 x 55.6") = $510 95 x 162 cm (37.

4 x 63.7") = $584 Color Match Gallery Wrap +$12.00 Extended Gallery Wrap +$25.00 Free Shipping Worldwide 100% Money Back Guarantee We offer a 100% money back guarantee or replacement service.

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Question: Who painted "Number 5" in 1948?
Answer: Jackson Pollock