Number 32, 1950

Jackson Pollock’s Number 32, 1950 gives black paint an immense field in which to work. The canvas measures 269 × 457.5 cm, more than four and a half metres across, and belongs to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. Its museum record identifies Duco lacquer paint on canvas; Duco names a commercial brand, which by itself does not establish the paint’s binder chemistry. ^[1]

Kirk Varnedoe placed its forceful black drawing beside the denser curves of One: Number 31, 1950 and the more open, articulated rhythms of Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950. Their shared method permits different decisions about the weight and spacing of marks, changing the space each painting creates. ^[2]

Black paint and open space

James Coddington’s technical account draws attention to repeated black applications that accumulate into hard, glossy patches and puddles. These deposits can appear to recede into the composition, giving physically substantial paint an unexpected suggestion of depth. The exposed intervals matter alongside those concentrations: openness allows a dense black passage to register with particular force. Following the distinction between deposited material and apparent depth makes the surface more interesting than a general description of tangled lines would suggest. ^[3]

Bernice Rose described Number 32 as among Pollock’s most spare and open poured paintings. She connected that experience with the enlarged language of drawing in his black canvases of 1951. Her distinction between size and scale helps explain the connection. Size is a canvas’s measurable extent; scale concerns how its marks and intervals establish relationships within that extent and with the person looking. Enlarging a drawing does not automatically produce a new scale. In Rose’s account, the bodily requirements of pouring across a larger area changed the structure of the marks themselves. Read through this argument, Number 32 brings the intimacy of following a line into a field too large to take in as one small gesture. Its openness makes that relationship especially legible: the distance between marks participates in the drawing. The comparison with 1951 illuminates an existing possibility in this 1950 painting. ^[4]

The chronological relationship also complicates its number. Charles Stuckey explains that Number 32 preceded Number 31, which preceded Number 30. Reading those titles as a sequence of production would reverse the order of these three works. The numbers identify paintings without providing a reliable timetable for their making. They also withhold the sort of subject a descriptive title might supply, encouraging attention to differences between paintings. The spare black work belongs within the same period as the large, differently organised canvases beside which it is usually discussed. Its relation to the subsequent black paintings becomes more useful when understood as an opening within Pollock’s practice, rather than the last item in a numbered march toward a new style. ^[5]

What the camera can establish

A photograph can show an artist performing the appearance of work. Varnedoe records that Rudolph Burckhardt photographed Pollock simulating work on the already completed Number 32 earlier in the summer of 1950. A posed episode has documentary value, but it cannot establish the sequence in which that canvas received its paint. This specific instance needs to be distinguished from photographs recording actual work. ^[2]

The argument about that sequence remains open. William Rubin treated Number 32 as a single-layer work with an abstract beginning. His statement appears in a note to his 1967 essay, revised in 1999. ^[6]

Pepe Karmel proposed a different possibility: an initial figurative drawing followed by another campaign of black lines and splashes. His analogy was with Number 27, 1950, whose development Hans Namuth filmed. In that footage Number 32 appears already finished on the studio wall. Karmel’s reconstruction is a hypothesis derived from another painting’s process; it supplies no independent technical proof of concealed figures in Number 32. ^[2]

In B. H. Friedman’s 1969 interview, it was Friedman who proposed that this painting’s open spaces anticipated the 1951 black works. Lee Krasner did not endorse a single causal explanation. She called the turn to black and white a conscious decision and rejected a shortage of coloured paint as its cause. Her answer preserves artistic choice while leaving its precise motive unresolved. ^[6]

The first audience

The Betty Parsons exhibition ran from 28 November to 16 December 1950 and brought Number 32 together with One and Autumn Rhythm. Francis V. O’Connor’s historical account records 32 paintings, including the work on glass numbered 29. It also preserves sharply divided reviews. Some critics welcomed the paintings’ energy and intricate surfaces; others questioned whether their patterns offered sufficient organisation or content. The editorial staff of Art News nevertheless placed the exhibition among its three outstanding solo shows. Large scale and an unfamiliar method did not dictate one response. Growing recognition left room for sustained disagreement about what counted as pictorial substance. ^[7]

Robert M. Coates’s review of 9 December recognised variety in the show, contrasting the emphatic black of Number 32 with Number 27 and the delicate Number 1. He criticised overelaboration in Numbers 30 and 31. His qualified response distinguished individual paintings within a controversial practice. ^[6]

From New York to Düsseldorf

The painting might once have entered MoMA. Varnedoe and Karmel recount William Rubin’s 1958 proposal to buy it from Pollock’s estate as a promised gift to the museum. Negotiations continued into January 1959; one proposed arrangement involved buying Blue Poles and exchanging it for Number 32. Krasner was also occupied with an important commission of her own. The negotiations failed, and the proposed exchange never took place. ^[3]

The owning museum lists Pollock’s possession in 1950–56, Krasner’s in 1956–64, and Marlborough-Gerson Gallery with an uncertain starting date before 1964. A Westdeutscher Rundfunk donation funded the 1964 acquisition. The object is inventory 1006, O’Connor/Thaw 274, with its number, year and Pollock’s name recorded on the reverse. Its frame measures 274 × 462.8 × 6.2 cm; those dimensions describe the surrounding object, separately from the canvas. ^[1]

The acquisition belonged to the early growth of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. Its institutional history identifies Werner Schmalenbach as founding director in 1961 and recalls Number 32’s appearance at documenta II in Kassel. The painting entered the collection in 1964; in 1965 the young collection opened to the public at Schloss Jägerhof. These dates distinguish the purchase of the canvas from the opening of the institution’s display. The work became part of the way a German museum presented international modern art to its audience. The museum’s account connects an exhibition appearance, an acquisition and a public opening, giving this passage into a European collection a concrete setting. ^[8]

The Kunstsammlung’s Rethinking: Dialogue offers a further way of approaching this history. It relates Pollock’s work to abstract Surrealism and uses a juxtaposition with Gerhard Richter to explore artistic exchange between Europe and America. Within that curatorial argument, paintings can carry ideas across borders and later become models for other artists. The museum also describes Number 32 through music and dance. That language is useful as a metaphor for rhythm: intervals, concentrations and changes of emphasis can be felt across a painting without resolving into a depicted scene. The text supplies no exact recording or archival account establishing what Pollock heard while making this canvas. Its musical analogy therefore remains a way of interpreting the work. It invites attention to relationships among marks while leaving their particular history of making open to the evidence that survives. ^[9]