Number 7, 1952

In Jackson Pollock’s Number 7, 1952, a head emerges through the movement of paint. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes an outsized, uneven oval, turned into three-quarter view, its energy pressed against the canvas edges. The painting measures 134.9 × 101.6 cm and is made with enamel and oil on canvas. ^[1]

A head made from movement

The Met’s acquisition essay of 1988 places this painting among the black-and-white works of 1951–52 in which recognisable bodies became conspicuous again. Its description leaves the head’s identity open. What matters to that account is the way a figure becomes legible through the same energetic application associated with Pollock’s abstraction. A head can be present without the paint settling into the continuous outline or carefully modelled features of a conventional portrait. Recognition and the activity of the marks remain bound together. ^[2]

The essay also recalls Lee Krasner’s account of imagery appearing in Pollock’s work and subsequently being veiled. This makes the exposed figure an artistic choice, rather than evidence that he had suddenly discovered representation. The distinction is useful when looking at Number 7: the question becomes how much of an image survives and how openly it addresses us. The entry describes a broader range of pouring implements, but provides no tool-by-tool reconstruction of this particular head. ^[2]

Drawing with paint

Kirk Varnedoe’s 1998 account traces the black paintings through Pollock’s drawings on Japanese paper and his subsequent expansion of black enamel onto canvas. In a June 1951 letter discussed there, Pollock welcomed the return of earlier imagery and anticipated that the work would unsettle people who thought his method easy to imitate. The renewed figures belonged to an ongoing exploration of what a poured line could carry. They also complicated expectations established by the densely interwoven abstractions of the preceding years. A comparison with Echo keeps the continuing importance of black line in view across the two years. ^[3]

That shift acquired a commercial setting. Varnedoe describes the effort devoted to presenting the black paintings at Betty Parsons’s gallery, followed by Pollock’s move to Sidney Janis in spring 1952. Janis encouraged descriptive titles as an aid to viewers. Number 7 retains the numbered designation through which we meet it today. The story helps explain the pressures surrounding these paintings: artistic change, public recognition and the practical work of selling pictures developed alongside one another. ^[3]

Bernice Rose offers another way into this change in her study Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting. She argues that the open intervals of the black-and-white works take on a function familiar from drawing: the uncovered field supplies light. This is a relationship between marks and the spaces they leave available to the eye. It invites attention to how a line gathers force through the area around it, as well as through its own thickness or direction. ^[4]

Applied as a general framework, Rose’s argument makes the head a meeting between painted form and surrounding space. Following the figure does not require treating everything outside it as empty or secondary. Those intervals help the figure become readable; attention can move between a head and the distribution of marks across a flat surface. Rose’s account concerns pictorial experience, and supplies no material diagnosis of the preparation or absorbency of this particular canvas. ^[4]

Pollock’s interview with William Wright, recorded in late 1950, gives a valuable account of the decisions involved in his method. He described increasing control over flowing paint through experience and compared the directness of painting to drawing. His phrase “I deny the accident” expresses how strongly he resisted an account based on indiscriminate splashing. He also acknowledged beginning with a general conception rather than a fully predetermined image. Control and discovery could therefore operate together as the picture developed. He described proceeding directly, without turning a preparatory drawing or colour sketch into a finished painting. ^[5]

The same interview encourages viewers to let a painting offer its own experience before imposing an expected subject. For Number 7, that advice leaves room both for recognition and for uncertainty. A head gives the eye a point of entry, while the paint remains an event to follow. These comments precede this canvas and describe Pollock’s wider practice; they help frame its possibilities without supplying a transcript of the occasion on which he made it. ^[5]

Traces of the studio

The Met identifies footprints at the upper right as evidence of working on the floor and approaching from different directions. Its account also mentions yellow and dark red splashes, possibly deposited during work on an adjacent canvas. That possibility adds a sense of shared working space, while leaving their exact origin unresolved. The museum contrasts this head’s compressed force with the expansiveness of Number 28, 1950. ^[1]

Was the sitter Jane Smith?

Eileen Costello identifies Number 7 as a portrait of Jane Smith, wife of Pollock’s friend Tony Smith, in her 2012 exhibition essay. She places the painting within the friendship between the two households, recalling the proximity of Jane’s and Pollock’s birthdays and their shared celebrations. Where the Met’s descriptions concentrate on an unnamed head, Costello supplies a personal identity. These accounts give readers different levels of identification without establishing a documented disagreement between their authors. ^[6]

Costello also relates that Pollock wished to give Jane Blue Poles, which she declined as too large and valuable. Her note cites Tony’s letter to Jane of 28 May 1952. She proposes that the portrait may have been a consolation. The proposed connection makes an intriguing story, but its tentative status matters: the letter is reported through Costello, and the portrait’s motive remains her suggestion. Jane’s identification can inform a reading without requiring certainty about why the canvas was painted. ^[6]

A painting with a public history

Francis V. O’Connor’s 1967 catalogue records Number 7, 1952 in the artist’s estate and includes it as entry 70 in the retrospective checklist. That historical record helps anchor the painting within Pollock’s work before its later museum acquisition. His chronology also describes the twelve paintings shown at Janis in November 1952, an exhibition bringing black-and-white work into proximity with substantial colour paintings, including Convergence and Blue Poles. ^[7]

The contemporary responses gathered by O’Connor show critics attending to several directions at once. James Fitzsimmons discussed the large new canvases, while Howard Devree noted both brilliant colour and black-and-white examples. Their responses describe the exhibition as a whole. They place the head’s year within a period of varied production, allowing its concentrated figurative presence to stand alongside the expansive colour work. Pollock’s black paintings and renewed colour experiments need to be understood together when considering what 1952 made possible. ^[7]

Number 7 entered the Metropolitan’s collection in 1987, purchased through the Emilio Azcarraga Gift in honour of William S. Lieberman. Its accession number is 1987.92: a useful identifier for a painting whose numerical title alone tells us little about the particular object. ^[1]