Number 9, 1949

Jackson Pollock’s Number 9, 1949 is an upright oil painting in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. The museum records its measurements as 44¼ × 34 inches, a little over a metre high, with the accession number 1967.15 and the credit “Gift of Tony Smith.” Its upright proportions give it a different physical presence from a painting that stretches across a whole wall. A viewer can take in its boundaries while attending to the relationships within them. Keeping the year attached to its title also matters: the number alone is an incomplete name for this particular painting. The museum’s record fixes the object behind that apparently simple title. ^[1]

Colour, line and light

Wadsworth curator Patricia Hickson offers a particularly inviting account of its surface. Writing in 2015, she describes layers of multicoloured, threadlike drips enlivened by silvery loops. She stresses the painting’s modest size alongside its capacity to absorb attention. Her description suggests a useful way to begin: follow the different kinds of line, then let their accumulation come back into view. The silvery passages are part of a larger coloured structure, so attending only to their brightness would leave much of the painting’s activity unexplored. ^[2]

The art historian Bernice Rose gives this interplay a broader setting in her study of Pollock’s drawing and painting. She argues that colour in his poured works can operate simultaneously as hue and as tone: a particular colour also participates in the painting’s organisation of light and dark. She connects the impression of shimmering space to contrasts, the intervals within a network of lines, and the way silver can seem to dissolve into atmosphere. This is a general interpretation of Pollock, rather than a material analysis of Number 9. It helps explain why looking at a dense abstract surface need not be the same as reading a flat diagram. The eye can move between the paint’s physical presence and a less tangible sense of space. Rose’s emphasis on sensation also gives viewers something more exact to consider than assigning a fixed emotion to a colour. Her account makes light an active relationship within the painting, dependent on how its parts are perceived together. ^[3]

Freedom and attention

Pollock’s own words make the encounter less mysterious. In his interview with William Wright, dated late 1950 in the published transcript, he asked viewers to receive what a painting offered without arriving with a predetermined subject to find. He also explained that experience allowed him considerable control over flowing paint. He could have a general idea of where he was going while leaving the emerging work open. These statements describe his practice broadly; they are not a record of the day he painted Number 9. Together, however, they offer a helpful balance between freedom and attention. Fluid paint could allow decisions to develop during painting, while the finished result remained the important thing. For a reader approaching this canvas, that shifts attention towards what its lines and colours accomplish together. The question becomes how movement has taken a durable form, and how that form continues to occupy the eye. Pollock’s account of technique leaves room for discovery by the painter and the viewer alike. ^[4]

A painting in Tony Smith’s collection

The donor’s name opens another route into the work. In her study of Pollock and Tony Smith, Eileen Costello places Number 9 among the paintings owned by the Smiths. Their collection also included Pollock’s Number 24, 1951, Barnett Newman’s Onement II, Clyfford Still’s Number 5 and Mark Rothko’s No. 19. That company gives the painting a setting among several artists’ approaches to abstraction. Its early life in a collection was part of a wider artistic conversation, rather than an isolated encounter with one celebrated painter. Costello discusses these holdings while considering the greater recognition given to painting than to sculpture in postwar New York. Her example concerns two small Pollock plasters that Jane Smith kept boxed in a closet for twenty years after moving in 1983. The episode illuminates the differing reputations of the objects the Smiths valued; it does not describe the storage history of this canvas. ^[5]

From New York to Paris

Number 9 also participated in Pollock’s public history abroad. Francis V. O’Connor’s exhibition chronology lists it in the Betty Parsons Gallery’s November–December 1949 solo exhibition. It subsequently appeared in American Vanguard Art for Paris at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, from 26 December 1951 to 5 January 1952. The selection travelled to Galerie de France as Regards sur la peinture américaine, shown from 26 February to 15 March 1952. Both stages included two Pollocks called Number 9: one dated 1949, the other 1951. Their coexistence makes the year essential to following the painting’s travels. The Paris presentation placed Pollock alongside de Kooning, Motherwell, Mark Tobey and a broad selection of other American painters. That setting encouraged comparison between different approaches, instead of treating his work as an entirely separate phenomenon. This was a group exhibition, distinct from Pollock’s overlapping solo show at Studio Paul Facchetti. The modest Hartford canvas therefore belongs to the story of American abstraction’s European presentation as well as its later museum life. ^[6]

New conversations in the museum

A later exhibition changed the company again. The 2010 Monet and Abstraction presentation at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza included Number 9 in its chapter on brushstroke and gesture. The museum brought late Monet into dialogue with Pollock, Lee Krasner, de Kooning and Cy Twombly. Its text connected these artists through visual movement and through the relationship between substantial paint and fluid gesture. Monet’s The Japanese Bridge and Water-Lilies appeared in this framework alongside Pollock’s canvas and Krasner’s The Springs. The comparison offers a way of thinking across different subjects and generations: what happens when marks become compelling presences in their own right, and when a surface unsettles familiar spatial expectations? This was a curatorial proposition made in 2010, rather than evidence of a particular Monet painting determining Pollock’s method. For readers interested in Pollock’s paintings, it widens the conversation from the mechanics of pouring to the visual experience those mechanics can produce. ^[7]

Hickson’s 2015 account returned the work to Smith’s company. She identified it as one of seven Abstract Expressionist paintings he donated in 1967, following his first solo museum exhibition the previous year, curated by Sam Wagstaff. In the installation she described, the gift shared a gallery with small Smith sculptures, while his large Amaryllis was visible outside through a window. This historical arrangement let the painting meet both the collection Smith assembled and the sculpture he made. It gave the donor a visible artistic presence around the gift. ^[2]