Number 27, 1950

Jackson Pollock’s Number 27, 1950 gathers a remarkable variety of paint marks into one continuous field. In the Whitney Museum of American Art’s account, pools of black lie beneath ochre and pink lines, with white, bronze and silver forming a dense linear network. That description gives a useful way into the painting: follow the differences between broad areas of paint and the narrower strands crossing them. The apparent intricacy involves changes of colour and thickness as well as the accumulated paths of movement. ^[1]

The Whitney identifies its canvas as oil, enamel and aluminum paint, measuring 124.6 × 269.4 centimetres, with accession number 53.12 and the credit line Purchase. Its width is more than twice its height. The museum describes the finished composition as extending evenly over the surface, with separate figurative elements dissolved into the whole. Its account joins an interest in the marks themselves to the movement involved in making them. Both matter to an encounter with this long, densely worked canvas. ^[1]

Among the paintings of 1950

Number 27 belonged to Pollock’s exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, from 28 November to 16 December 1950. Francis V. O’Connor’s 1967 catalogue records thirty-two paintings in that show, including the works later widely known as Lavender Mist, Autumn Rhythm and One, together with Number 29 on glass. The numbered title placed this canvas within a substantial exhibition whose range exceeded a single painting size or support. O’Connor also lists the Whitney as its owner in 1967. ^[2]

The reviews collected in that chronology convey a divided response to the exhibition. Robert Goodnough praised Pollock’s discipline and expressive energy; Howard Devree questioned whether the work’s activity supplied sufficient content. Those were assessments of the show, rather than individual verdicts on Number 27. They nevertheless clarify the challenge it shared with its neighbours: how could dispersed lines and patches hold attention, and what kind of experience could their relationships offer? The argument concerned the organisation of painting as much as the unusual means of putting paint on canvas. ^[2]

A changing beginning

Pepe Karmel’s reconstruction of Hans Namuth’s black-and-white film identifies the canvas as Number 27 through details surviving near its edges. In his account, Pollock begins with figures at the end that becomes the right side. At the opposite end, Karmel tentatively recognises a female dog or wolf. The animal and human configurations have different local orientations. The early arrangement consists of distinct pictographic groups, rather than the unified field of the completed work. ^[3]

Karmel then describes black paint discharged in wrist-flicked splats. Their placement accents existing marks while their collective rhythm reduces the figures’ legibility. Broad white applications follow, apparently covering much of the earlier drawing. The film ends at that point; subsequent colour campaigns belong to the painting’s further development. Karmel’s sequence makes revision central to this particular work. Its irregular blots can be carefully placed, and an early figure can serve a painting that eventually directs attention elsewhere. The filmed episode records only part of that transformation. ^[3]

Letting an image change

Pollock’s own account of working offers a useful companion to that sequence. In “My Painting,” published in Possibilities in winter 1947–48, he explained his preference for unstretched canvas against a hard wall or floor. The floor gave him proximity and access from four sides. He also described a period of becoming acquainted with what he had made, followed by a willingness to alter or destroy an image. Recognition and revision belonged within the process. ^[4]

Lee Krasner later supplied another perspective. Speaking to B. H. Friedman in 1969, she remembered seeing abstract paintings develop from recognisable imagery and recalled asking why Pollock continued beyond an exposed image. His answer concerned veiling it. Her recollection supports an understanding of transformation as a choice, while remaining a broader studio memory, rather than a diary of Number 27. These statements connect freedom in beginning with judgement about what should survive. ^[4]

Line beyond the figure

Bernice Rose’s Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting offers a way to understand what such changes can achieve. She traces a continuing exchange between the figure, more expansive spatial arrangements and line acting independently of description. In her account, marks woven between figures and distributed across a surface can reorganise the whole composition. A line’s contribution then includes its relation to other marks, beyond its ability to identify a body or object. ^[5]

Rose discusses Out of the Web among Pollock’s experiments with integrating figures and an overall arrangement. This wider framework helps articulate the question raised by Number 27: what happens when attention shifts from separately readable forms to connections across a painting? The result need not be understood as a puzzle awaiting the recovery of its first image. Line can acquire another task as it moves through the work, carrying rhythm and linking passages that once belonged to separate configurations. ^[5]

Which way should it hang?

T. J. Clark records that Number 27 was shown vertically in the 1950 Parsons exhibition, the orientation Pollock settled on for that occasion. Clark explicitly leaves the proposed explanation of saving wall space open to debate. The historical installation establishes a particular choice, without establishing why it was made. A painting’s public life includes such decisions about its relation to a room and to the bodies standing before it. ^[6]

Clark also treats Number 27 as an unusually revealing example of the removal of intermediate, recognisably human-scaled configurations. He distinguishes it from paintings whose final tracery achieves unity without literally eliminating figurative shapes. His argument therefore gives this canvas a specific place within Pollock’s varied practice. Changing its orientation can alter the viewer’s encounter with that organisation; it does not make the arrangement arbitrary. The documented vertical hanging and the familiar horizontal presentation invite attention to how a long painted field addresses its surroundings. ^[6]

The edge of the painted field

Michael Schreyach begins his essay “Pollock’s Formalist Spaces” with a small material feature of Number 27: a blue selvage thread near the right edge. He describes it running close to the canvas fold and distinguishes its modest visibility at close range from the larger painted activity. Selvage belongs to the manufacture of the cloth. In Schreyach’s interpretation, its presence helps distinguish the object’s physical boundary from the sense of a pictorial field generated by the painting. ^[7]

That distinction supplies another scale of attention alongside the broad rhythms and recovered stages. A canvas has definite limits, even when the activity of its marks encourages the eye to keep moving. Schreyach’s reading asks how those material limits become meaningful within the picture. It directs attention to the meeting of paint and support, where the sense of an expansive field encounters the finite object carrying it. The edge becomes part of the experience of the painting, as consequential in its quiet way as the accumulated activity within it. ^[7]