Number 34, 1949

Jackson Pollock’s Number 34, 1949 measures 22 × 30½ inches. Its 2012 exhibition caption describes oil and enamel on white paperboard mounted on Masonite and identifies the Edward W. Root Bequest at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, accession 57.206. This is a layered object: paperboard supports the painting, with Masonite behind it. ^[1]

A smaller field for line

The change of scale becomes tangible beside One: Number 31, 1950, which MoMA measures at 269.5 × 530.8 centimetres. More than five metres across, that canvas extends along a substantial stretch of wall. Number 34 occupies a space a viewer can take in much more closely. Reproductions that equalise their widths conceal this physical difference. ^[2]

Bernice Rose’s Drawing into Painting offers a useful way into the linear organisation of Pollock’s work around this time. She treats the painted network and its surrounding intervals as generators of space. Depth need not come from the familiar devices of a road receding towards a horizon or a modelled solid placed against a background. It can arise through the eye’s response to line, colour, ground and the openings between marks. This is Rose’s broader account of the 1947–50 paintings, rather than an inventory of Number 34. Applied as a question, it invites us to consider how a line moves attention through the whole rectangle, and how an interval participates in that movement. The ground becomes something to attend to alongside the painted tracks. Rose also connects the spatial effect with the artist’s choice of physical ground, making the support part of perception. A viewer can follow a route, return to an intersection and reconsider the relationship between what seems near and what seems farther away. ^[3]

Pollock’s own statements help connect that experience with composition. In “My Painting,” published in the winter of 1947–48, he described coming to understand a painting through working on it and being willing to alter or destroy an image. In his interview with William Wright, dated late 1950 in the MoMA anthology, he linked freedom of movement with an experienced ability to control flowing paint. Directness could coexist with judgement. These accounts make room for discovery, revision and decision within a single practice; they do not establish the particular sequence in which Number 34 was made. They also give the numerical title a useful context. In Berton Roueché’s 1950 interview, Lee Krasner explained that numbers encouraged attention to the painting itself. Her explanation leaves the viewer free to investigate relationships without first having to illustrate a named story. His emphasis falls on the resulting statement as well as the means. ^[4]

A painting that found a buyer

Number 34 belonged to a substantial public presentation of Pollock’s new work. Francis V. O’Connor’s 1967 chronology lists it in the Betty Parsons Gallery exhibition of 21 November–10 December 1949, comprising thirty-four works on paper and canvas. The same entry records Peter Blake’s model for a museum of Pollock’s art. Small paintings and architectural ambitions could thus enter the same exhibition conversation. The show’s contemporary reception also helps explain what was at stake. Carlyle Burrows responded to rhythmic line and colour while questioning repetition across a large display. Stuart Preston distinguished the effects of different formats, praising some relationships and finding others less convincing. Their comments address the exhibition and particular other paintings; they are not recorded verdicts on Number 34. What they establish is an active debate about organisation, variation and scale, with critics trying to describe the differing results of Pollock’s method. ^[5]

Susan Davidson’s study of Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons identifies Edward Wales Root as the purchaser of Number 34 in November 1949. She suggests that he may have wanted it as a companion to his Number 20, 1948. That possibility makes an appealing collecting story, while remaining a suggestion about Root’s intentions. Her account, based on gallery records, also places the sale within a stronger market than the familiar story of universal rejection allows: more than half the November exhibition sold, and almost all its works were comparatively small abstractions on paper. Root’s purchase belonged to this developing audience. The small format matters here in a second way, as part of the kind of work collectors were buying. Davidson’s findings establish neither unanimous enthusiasm nor an effortless career; they show a specific moment when experimental paintings attracted multiple purchasers, including a collector already interested in Pollock. ^[6]

The white surround

The frame adds another chapter to that collecting history. Writing in 2008, Suzanne Smeaton and Lisa Koenigsberg identified white mouldings around both Root Pollocks and discussed their plain, ungilded surrounds within modern American framing. White framing participated in the presentation of colour; simplicity still involved aesthetic choices. Their wider study notes that Root usually bought through dealers and retained many frames. From the collection’s variety, they infer that its framing largely preserves artists’ and dealers’ choices. This is a historical interpretation of the collection, rather than proof of who selected or made Number 34’s frame. It nevertheless brings the painting’s boundary into the discussion: the surround belongs to its history of being encountered as a complete object. ^[7]

Returning to exhibitions

The painting continued to travel beyond its collecting context. The museum’s Annual Report 2012–2013 records its loan to Jason McCoy Gallery, New York, for the Pollock exhibition of 5 November–14 December 2012. This is an object-specific record of the loan, connecting Utica’s painting with that centennial presentation. ^[8]

Stephanie Buhmann’s accompanying catalogue essay stresses material experimentation and continuing movement between abstraction and figuration, placing the poured paintings within a wider, exploratory practice. ^[1]

The Annual Report 2014–2015 subsequently lists Number 34 for Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots, naming Tate Liverpool and the Dallas Museum of Art in the 2015–16 itinerary. ^[9]

Dallas’s account explains the exhibition’s particular purpose. An introductory selection of drip paintings made between 1947 and 1950 gave audiences a basis for considering the black enamel paintings of 1951–53. The presentation brought together more than seventy paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, including thirty-one black paintings in Dallas. This arrangement made the earlier poured work a point of departure for examining another direction in Pollock’s practice. For Number 34, the loan therefore opened a further context: its 1949 vocabulary could be considered alongside subsequent changes in medium, imagery and the balance between drawing and painting. The exhibition asked audiences to connect familiar poured painting with work that remained less familiar, giving an established picture a different set of neighbours. ^[10]