Number 28, 1951

Jackson Pollock’s Number 28, 1951 brings dense colour into a year associated with his black paintings. Christie’s catalogues this oil painting on canvas as 76.5 × 137.4 cm, catalogue raisonné number 346, with dated signatures on the lower edge, stretcher and reverse. ^[1]

The year matters especially here. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns a different Number 28, painted in 1950, measuring 172.9 × 266.2 cm. Its medium is oil-modified alkyd resin on canvas; its accession number is 2006.32.51, and it entered the museum through the Newman collection gift in 2006. The Met describes an apparent beginning in black and ochre, subsequently covered by further applications. That history belongs to the larger, earlier canvas. Keeping the two paintings distinct allows each surface to tell its own story: a shared number does not establish a shared composition, scale or recipe for paint. ^[2]

Colour within a changing year

A useful companion is Echo: Number 25, 1951. MoMA describes that painting’s economy in relation to the expansive, multidirectional activity of One: Number 31, 1950. Its account draws attention to the upper-left eye and to the way suggestions of bodies and faces enter the black paintings. This makes the change in 1951 more interesting than a simple subtraction of colour. For the coloured Number 28, that companion work establishes the alternative Pollock was exploring in the same year: a painting with fewer layers, more exposed canvas and more readily emerging figures. ^[3]

Lee Krasner remembered the black paintings as a deliberate choice. In her 1969 interview with B. H. Friedman, she rejected a shortage of coloured paint as an explanation and connected the works with drawings she had known for years. Her practical recollections are equally revealing. Pollock used basting syringes as well as sticks and worn brushes, controlling both the flow of liquid and the movement of his hand. Working on long stretches of canvas also allowed him to decide where a painting ended, which way it faced, and whether adjoining passages should remain together. Krasner sometimes joined these discussions, while the final decisions remained his. These memories concern the broader practice around the black paintings; they provide a sense of active selection and revision without establishing the precise sequence used for Number 28. ^[4]

A surface built through paint

Christie’s places Number 28 late in 1951, describing thick grey applications, yellow, red and blue beneath unifying white flashes. The pale marks sit across a crowded accumulation, giving the eye a way to gather the competing movements into a coherent whole. It proposes basting-syringe application and a possible black beginning subsequently covered: hypotheses, without a reported technical test. Frank Stella, quoted there from Working Space, links its rhythm and spatial ambiguity with Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie. ^[1]

The distinction between a painting’s apparent depth and its physical making is especially useful with Pollock. James Coddington’s conservation account describes brushwork in Number 28, 1950: Pollock mixed fresh black passages into underlying white, making them appear to pass in and out of earlier layers. That finding concerns the Met painting. It demonstrates, however, why a woven appearance cannot by itself tell us how a surface was produced. In his discussion of Echo, Coddington identifies brushed passages alongside poured or probably baster-applied paint. The tools could coexist, each offering a different relation between hand, liquid and support. Such variety makes the distinction between an observed mark and an account of its making essential. A fluid line may belong to a surface that also contains deliberate intervention with a brush. ^[5]

Density and the later paintings

Kirk Varnedoe’s account of the period places markedly different paintings beside one another. He compares the relatively restricted earth colours of Autumn Rhythm and One with the more crowded colour and varied directional emphases of Blue Poles. In the later work, he also distinguishes the brush-painted Easter and the Totem from the combination of upright brushwork and poured enamel in Portrait and a Dream. Such comparisons offer a useful setting for Number 28: changes in colour, density and method could produce several directions at once. They need not be arranged into a single departure from abstraction or an uninterrupted return to it. Pollock’s June 7, 1951 letter to Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon, quoted by Varnedoe, already acknowledged earlier images reappearing in his black painting. ^[6]

A painting with a public history

Francis V. O’Connor’s 1967 MoMA catalogue lists Number 28, 1951 as entry 65, an oil painting belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Maremont of Winnetka, Illinois. Its designation “N.Y. only” places a useful limit on the exhibition history: inclusion in the New York presentation does not mean this canvas accompanied every stage of the travelling retrospective. Its title, year and lender identify a distinct work selected for the retrospective. In the acknowledgments, MoMA described the retrospective as its largest devoted to an American artist, crediting Krasner and the lenders for making it possible. Number 28 thus appeared within an ambitious institutional survey, bringing this canvas into a wider public account of Pollock’s achievement. The Maremont name records the lender at this moment in its public life. ^[7]

Christie’s 2012 provenance runs through New Gallery, Heinz Berggruen, the Maremonts and Harold and Hester Diamond to David Pincus. It lists Manhasset and Paris exhibitions in 1952. The estate sale establishes historical ownership; the present private owner is unconfirmed. ^[1]

The Pincus sale and its reception

The painting attracted renewed attention when the Pincus estate brought it to auction in May 2012. Reporting for Reuters the following day, Chris Michaud identified Number 28, 1951 as a work from the Philadelphia collector’s holdings and gave its result as approximately $23 million. It more than doubled Pollock’s previous auction record. The Pincus collection’s contribution to that evening’s sale totalled about $175 million, placing this canvas within a major dispersal of a private collection. The coverage placed Number 28 in two connected stories: the dispersal of Pincus’s collection and a new price benchmark for Pollock at auction. This particular canvas carried both histories into the news. ^[8]

Artnet’s Art Market Watch supplied a more pointed response. Its report gave the result as $23,042,500, including the auction-house commission, against an estimate of $20–30 million. The writer also singled out Number 28 as the finest Pollock to reach auction during the preceding fifteen years. That judgment belongs to the sale’s contemporary reception: it expresses how highly the report’s author rated this particular opportunity to see a Pollock on the market. The scope matters. The comparison concerns works offered at auction, rather than every painting in museums and private collections. Alongside the sale result, it records an enthusiastic critical response to this canvas, six decades after its making. ^[9]