Full Fathom Five

Jackson Pollock’s Full Fathom Five brings everyday objects into the body of a painting. MoMA records nails, tacks, buttons, a key, coins, cigarettes and matches among its materials. Painted in 1947, it measures 129.2 × 76.5 cm (50 7/8 × 30 1/8 inches). ^[1] The painting belongs to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where it entered as Peggy Guggenheim’s gift in 1952, accession 186.1952. ^[2]

MoMA conservators James Coddington and Jennifer Hickey describe poured and splattered paint veiling earlier brushwork. They identify artist oils in many passages, including some fluid tendrils. A line’s appearance alone does not establish that it came from a can of house paint. ^[3]

From the easel to the floor

MoMA’s 2017 teaching account describes a definite change of working position. Pollock began on an easel, built paint with a brush and palette knife, and embedded objects. He then moved the canvas to the floor and dripped black and silver enamels across it. The museum calls the resulting distribution of marks an allover composition: activity extends throughout the painted field. Many inclusions are obscured, contributing to the painting’s encrusted density. ^[2]

In “My Painting,” published in Possibilities in winter 1947–48, Pollock explained that the floor and a hard support gave him greater ease and access from four sides. He favoured sticks, knives, trowels, fluid paint and impasto. After working, he needed time to recognise what had emerged and remained willing to alter or destroy an image. Making and reassessment belonged together. ^[4]

Kirk Varnedoe’s 1998 essay describes alternating oil paint and poured silver or black enamel, followed by squeezed or brushed yellow-orange and mustard at the upper right, responding to a black loop. Outward-pointing tacks give the surface physical relief. He also reports x-rays suggesting an initial upright figure. This remains a qualified technical interpretation. His account describes abstraction developing through covering and adjustment, with contact application continuing alongside pouring. ^[5]

What the materials can tell us

The museum’s catalogue medium, “oil on canvas,” and its teaching discussion of enamel describe different aspects of the object. Coddington and Hickey describe black and aluminium pours crossing thick white brushwork, while much of the paint is artist oil. Their comparison with One: Number 31, 1950 identifies a later shift towards industrial paints, with only rare yellow artist oil in that much larger work. They also emphasise exposed canvas and greater openness in One. The same family of liquid gestures could produce a compact, built-up surface or an expansive composition with intervals of bare support. ^[3]

Francesca Rosi and colleagues’ 2020 chapter adds a specific finding for Full Fathom Five: dark blue and dark orange alkyd paints alongside artists’ oils and oleoresin house paints. They report earlier sampling research; the result describes tested passages, not every paint in the canvas. Their methodological warning is explicit: tiny samples and single-point measurements cannot fully represent a complex painting. The same chapter confirms alkyd in orange in Eyes in the Heat (1946), while treating alkyd in black and yellow in Untitled 1946 as possible. ^[6]

The distinction between paint types has a history of its own. Research at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection examined eleven paintings dated between 1942 and 1947. Its findings pushed the identified use of alkyd binders back to 1946, with orange in Eyes in the Heat. Glossy and matte black alkyds were also identified in Alchemy and Enchanted Forest. These results concern named colours and paintings. They help explain the wider experimentation around Full Fathom Five, but do not supply a chemical recipe for it. They also discourage treating 1947 as a single instant when Pollock exchanged every conventional paint for a new industrial material. The development involved choices among paints and ways of applying them. ^[7]

Embedded matter invites another comparison with Alchemy. The Venice museum’s conservation account describes that painting’s combination of oil colours, enamel and alkyd material with string, sand and small stones, arranged in a complex relief of thick paint, lumps, splashes and drips. Its cleaning required attention to a surface whose depth was part of its appearance. That account helps clarify why added matter deserves attention as part of a painting’s structure. Such inclusions can make the painted surface physically uneven and bring quite different substances into close relation. The particular inventory still matters: Alchemy’s materials should not be transferred to Full Fathom Five, whose key, coins and other objects belong to its own documented construction. ^[8]

A title from Ariel’s song

According to MoMA, a neighbour suggested the title from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The museum does not identify that neighbour. ^[2]

In Act 1, scene 2, Ariel enters invisibly with Ferdinand and sings. Ferdinand is already grieving for his father and wondering where the music comes from. Ariel’s next song begins:

Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes.

The song continues by imagining a “sea change” into “something rich and strange.” Ferdinand hears it as a remembrance of his drowned father and believes the sound has a supernatural source. Its force comes from transformation: what seems lost is described as becoming another substance, with bones and eyes reimagined as coral and pearls. This is an enchanted account offered to a grieving listener, rather than a detached report of a body beneath the water. ^[9]

The neighbour’s suggestion invites a reading of material transformation without establishing an original intention to illustrate Ariel’s song or making each object a symbol. ^{[2] [9]}

The phrase also connects the title to Sea Change, another painting dated 1947. Seattle Art Museum describes that work as a composition begun with a brush on an easel in 1946, then placed on the floor and transformed with gravel, aluminium paint and glossy black house paint. Technical examination showed that Pollock retained selected passages, covered others and balanced the result with precisely placed colour squeezed from a tube. Its history provides a close parallel for painting through revision. The shared Shakespearean vocabulary offers a further association, but is insufficient evidence for calling the two canvases a planned series. Each has a distinct material history, and the Seattle account belongs specifically to Sea Change. ^{[10] [9]}

Density and breathing space

Enchanted Forest, also from 1947, makes a useful comparison because it changes the balance between line and interval. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection records its dimensions as 221.3 × 114.6 cm, considerably taller and wider than Full Fathom Five. The museum describes large white passages among moving lines and a restricted palette of gold, black, red and white. Its account stresses a line that constitutes form itself, carrying the eye from one passage into another without a commanding centre. This helps explain how an allover picture can remain varied. Looking across its field involves following changing relationships, including the intervals through which lines pass. In comparing the two works, consider how much weight belongs to the spaces between the marks and how much belongs to material accumulation. The larger format and more open construction of Enchanted Forest show that Pollock’s new method already accommodated different pictorial demands within the same year. ^[11]

Pollock later told William Wright that experience enabled him to regulate paint flow and work with a general direction without a fully preconceived picture. This complements his earlier account of recognising and changing a painting. Institutional accounts differ on the interview’s recording and broadcast history. ^[4]

From Parsons to MoMA

Full Fathom Five belonged to the group of poured paintings Pollock developed in 1947. It appeared in his first Betty Parsons Gallery exhibition, held from 5 to 23 January 1948, alongside works including Alchemy, Cathedral, Enchanted Forest, Lucifer and Sea Change. In summer 1950 it travelled to the Museo Correr in Venice for an exhibition drawn from Peggy Guggenheim’s collection. These two settings locate it within both the first presentation of the new paintings and their expanding European exhibition life. ^[5] Guggenheim’s 1952 gift then brought this particular canvas into MoMA’s collection. ^[2]

The response to the Parsons exhibition also rewards specificity. In a review published in The New Yorker on 17 January 1948, Robert M. Coates struggled with several of the paintings. He thought communication between artist and viewer could fail, and found Lucifer, Reflection of the Big Dipper and Cathedral difficult to accept. Yet he liked Full Fathom Five, drawing attention to the crust of green and white beneath black swirls. He also responded favourably to Sea Change. His distinctions show a critic judging individual results within the new manner, rather than accepting or rejecting every poured canvas together. They give an early historical counterpart to a useful way of approaching this painting now: attend to its particular layers, colours and density, and allow its differences from neighbouring works to become part of the encounter. ^[12]