Number 29, 1950

Jackson Pollock’s Number 29, 1950 brings an unusual kind of depth to his poured painting. Its support is glass, with paint, metal mesh, string, pieces of glass and pebbles attached to it. The National Gallery of Canada’s contribution to the 2002 AMICA catalogue identifies the work as No. 29, accession 15462, purchased in 1968. At 121.9 × 182.9 centimetres, it is a substantial horizontal object whose materials invite attention both to its surface and to what can be seen through it. The expanded steel named in that record belongs among the attached materials; glass carries the composition. ^[1]

That material distinction helps explain the painting’s peculiar presence. String and mesh give actual substance to a network that paint alone might suggest. Small solid objects occupy a support that can also admit a view beyond itself. Even the museum’s classification as a painting leaves room for questions about construction, attachment and the space around the object. ^[1]

A painting above a camera

The circumstances of making were equally unusual. The National Park Service’s landmark nomination locates the filming on the concrete foundation where Pollock and Lee Krasner’s barn had stood before its relocation in 1946. Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg made their film there in 1950. A wooden scaffold raised the sheet of glass while Namuth filmed from underneath. The old foundation consequently belongs to the history of this particular object as well as to the history of the property. It provided the setting for a change in the relationship between artist, painted surface and camera. ^[2]

The arrangement gave the camera access to an otherwise obstructed viewpoint. A canvas would have concealed the developing image from a cameraman below; the raised transparent support allowed the work to intervene between lens and painter. The filming apparatus therefore helped establish the physical conditions of the experiment. This place history also keeps the account grounded in a specific outdoor workspace at Springs. ^[2]

Pepe Karmel’s reconstruction distinguishes two compositions: Pollock wiped away the first, then arranged string, mesh, coloured glass and pebbles before painting the surviving version. Aluminium paint flowed through a hole in a can; brush drips followed. Paint also fastened an orange glass rectangle through connecting spirals. The camera covered only part of the surface, leaving any initial representational imagery uncertain. Kirk Varnedoe places the glass filming late in 1950, while noting conflicting memories of its date. The catalogue describes enamel, oil and aluminium paint on quarter-inch glass. Namuth recalled having only one sheet, bought for ten dollars. ^[3]

The decision to preserve the result came later. Karmel’s note 16 relays Namuth’s account that the glass remained outside for weeks before Pollock took it into the studio and titled it. The voice-over, assembled from earlier statements and interviews, likewise requires interpretation. Neither the finished object nor Pollock’s recorded words supply a continuous account of its making. ^[3]

What starting again meant

For Krasner, the restart showed confidence. Speaking to B. H. Friedman in 1969, she used Pollock’s willingness to erase the first attempt and begin again as an example of his assurance. Her reading gives revision a positive place in the work: abandoning an initial result could accompany a conviction that another attempt was possible. It is a particularly useful recollection because she also acknowledged periods of uncertainty in his practice. ^[4]

Her later conversation with Barbara Rose, published in 1980, leaves the origin of the glass idea open. Krasner saw Pollock painting, but had not witnessed the initial suggestion attributed to Namuth. She herself associated the experiment with Duchamp. That association remains her interpretation. Rose, meanwhile, proposed that transparency realised a suspension of the image in space. Their exchange separates three different kinds of understanding: what a participant remembered, what she inferred, and what a critic found meaningful in the completed painting. ^[4]

Phyllis Tuchman returned to the documentary in her 2013 essay “Painting Pollock.” She stressed the uneven relationship between its spoken account and its images, and asked why the assembled objects in Number 29 were not discussed as collage. The question opens a useful way into the work. Calling it a collage directs attention to the things Pollock selected and attached, alongside the paint he applied. The objects introduce their own shapes and textures into the process. ^[5]

Tuchman also recalled a time when the narration circulated more easily than screenings of the film. An account encountered in print could therefore become familiar without its visual accompaniment. Her essay asks readers to consider how each medium frames the other. The red canvas discussed in her account is a separate, lost work; it must be kept distinct from the surviving glass painting. Her broader question about artists adapting to a camera remains a question, rather than proof that Pollock concealed a particular procedure. ^[5]

Looking through the object

Jenny Anger offers another approach in Four Metaphors of Modernism. She challenges the idea that transparency grants an entirely immediate encounter with Pollock’s painting. A real viewing situation contains surroundings: people and other objects can appear through the clear intervals. The glass does not transport the painting into an empty realm. It establishes a relationship with whatever occupies the space beyond it. ^[6]

This is a helpful distinction when thinking about the difference between a photograph and an object in a room. A photograph fixes one arrangement of painting and background. Anger’s argument asks us to imagine the changing circumstances of an encounter with the glass itself. Its transparent passages can connect the work with ordinary space while its attached materials assert their own presence. Her reading makes that coexistence central to the painting’s interest, without requiring a symbolic meaning for each pebble or strand of string. ^[6]

A life beyond the filming

Number 29 entered the museum exhibition record as an artwork in its own right. Sam Hunter’s 1956 MoMA catalogue lists it as a work from Krasner’s collection. Its catalogue entry places it among the paintings of 1950, alongside works including Lavender Mist and One. That placement gives the glass experiment a useful historical context: it belonged within a presentation of Pollock’s painting, even though its support and assembled materials made it unusual. ^[7]

The catalogue also directs readers to an illustration, giving the object a printed existence beyond the moving record of its creation. Its older materials description includes shells, whereas later cataloguing uses other terms. Those changing descriptions deserve to remain attached to their dates. The durable point is the work’s recognition as a retained, lent and catalogued painting, with a public history extending beyond the circumstances for which it was made. ^[7]

In 2013 the National Gallery of Canada brought the painting into a different conversation. Peter Trepanier’s brochure for Danse dans la neige: Françoise Sullivan, photo: Maurice Perron, held from 16 January to 26 April, compared the documentation of Sullivan’s outdoor dance with Namuth’s filming of Pollock. Its note recorded Number 29 and a film excerpt on view at that time. This was a historical installation, rather than a statement about present display. ^[8]

The comparison concerned performance and its surviving records. Sullivan’s dance was photographed by Perron and filmed by Jean Paul Riopelle; the film was lost, while the photographs survived. Pollock’s case offered another relationship between an action, its documentation and a surviving object. Trepanier’s curatorial parallel makes a valuable distinction: a record can preserve something of an event while becoming part of a new exhibition argument. It establishes no claim that Sullivan’s dance influenced Pollock. For Number 29, that later pairing opened another way to consider the painting’s relationship with the act that produced it. ^[8]