Black and White Polyptych

Jackson Pollock’s Black and White Polyptych, made around 1950, brings a sequence of five fields together on one long canvas. Its divisions give the movement of black paint a succession of beginnings. Bernice Rose described Pollock working across the strip in sequence, using its ruled boundaries as flexible guides. ^[1]

One canvas, several beginnings

The painting measures 60.9 × 203.2 centimetres, roughly two metres wide and only sixty centimetres high. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, listed it in its 2012 Pollock exhibition as Black and White Polyptych, circa 1950, oil on canvas, lent by Benesse Holdings. These proportions help explain why the work invites a reading along its length: its width offers room for successive passages within a comparatively shallow band. The approximate date also places it close to Pollock’s increasingly concentrated investigations of black line. ^[2]

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo’s 2015 annual report records the same dimensions, oil-on-canvas description and Benesse Holdings collection credit. These dated records establish a collection history, without identifying a permanent display location. ^[3]

MoMA’s 1980 catalogue described enamel on unprimed canvas. The later oil label reflects different cataloguing; the terminology alone cannot demonstrate a new chemical finding about the painting. ^{[1] [3]}

A useful comparison is MoMA’s Number 7, 1950. The museum explains that its narrow horizontal format directed Pollock’s movements from one end to the other. Its rust-orange ground and ribbons of black, white and yellow belong to that particular painting, but its format makes a broader point: the shape of a canvas could organise the painter’s actions. A long strip encouraged a different sequence of movements from the larger, squarer canvases he approached from four sides. The comparison makes the horizontal shape an active part of construction: proportions direct a succession of actions and give movement across the support a particular rhythm. ^[4]

Drawing with paint

Rose proposed that the polyptych might connect Pollock’s horizontal drawings on paper with his larger black canvases. She treated this sequence as a possibility, not an established chronology. Her account also explains why these works remain paintings: black paint spreads and stains into the fabric, alternating between matte and shiny passages. The mark carries the physical character of paint even when it suggests a drawn contour. Size and scale become separate questions: enlarging a support changes the bodily movement through which a line is made. ^[1]

Lee Krasner’s recollection gives another way to understand a painting assembled from successive fields. Interviewed by B. H. Friedman in 1969, she described Pollock laying out long stretches from rolls of canvas. Smaller black-and-white compositions could occupy a single strip before he considered where to cut it. Decisions about edges, orientation and grouping involved sustained editing; she sometimes joined those discussions, while the final choices remained his. She also remembered him retaining successive sections together, citing Portrait and a Dream as an example. This testimony describes a working practice rather than a witnessed account of this polyptych. It nevertheless makes the connected format intelligible: the boundary of an individual composition could itself be a decision reached through painting. A divided canvas need not be understood as several finished pictures accidentally sharing one support. ^[5]

What black line can suggest

The relationship between drawing and painting also complicates the distinction between abstraction and recognisable imagery. Discussing its Number 8, 1951, Black Flowing, the National Museum of Western Art identifies something resembling a four-legged creature, while cautioning that such forms need not illustrate a specific subject. Its account places the black-and-white works within Pollock’s continuing exploration of forming and dissolving images. That perspective offers a useful approach to the polyptych’s separate fields. A viewer can consider how a mark might suggest a contour without demanding that every passage resolve into a named figure. The question is what a black mark can do: register movement, organise an interval, or suggest a form that remains unstable. The wider story of Pollock’s drawings helps place these possibilities alongside his painted work. ^[6]

Contemporary responses show that this crossing of categories was already a subject of argument. Francis V. O’Connor’s 1967 catalogue reproduces reviews of Pollock’s November–December 1951 Betty Parsons exhibition. Howard Devree welcomed the greater suggestion of heads and figures. Fairfield Porter found the monochrome works closer to drawings through their restricted colour, yet closer to paintings through their breadth. Porter also welcomed Pollock’s willingness to move beyond an established manner. These reviews concern the exhibition as a whole, rather than this particular canvas, but they help recover the artistic stakes of the change. The black works could be understood as an expansion of what painting might contain. Their reception included curiosity and approval alongside debate about the change of direction; an account of simple, universal rejection would miss those differences. ^[7]

A painting among drawings

MoMA gave the polyptych a revealing setting in Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting, shown from 4 February to 16 March 1980. Bernice Rose selected eighty-five drawings and five paintings, including this work and Echo: Number 25, 1951. The imbalance in numbers served a clear purpose: paintings entered an exhibition centred on drawing to demonstrate an exchange between the two practices. The polyptych was therefore useful as more than an example of a monochrome period. Its place in the selection encouraged attention to a painter thinking through line and to drawing becoming a painted surface. The accompanying checklist recorded it in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Rock, San Francisco. That is a historical lender credit, preceding the later Benesse records. ^[8]

At Tate Liverpool’s Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots in 2015, critic Anna McNay drew attention to the precision of the five rectangles and reported that Pollock contained the paint without masking tape. Her account gives the divisions a practical significance: measured limits and energetic application could operate together. McNay also stated that the compositions were intended to be photographed for screenprints. That explanation remains her published account, rather than independent documentation identifying a particular original print edition. It should not collapse the distinction between this painted canvas and works on paper produced through printing. Her response nevertheless adds a useful emphasis to Rose’s earlier reading. The boundaries can be considered active constraints within which the paint moves, giving each interval its own concentration while preserving the sequence across the whole. The painting asks for attention to both those levels: the individual field and the connected strip. ^[9]