Sea Change

Jackson Pollock’s Sea Change contains an earlier painting within a later one. Begun in 1946 and reworked in 1947, it combines brushed colour, poured paint and gravel. Seattle Art Museum catalogues the canvas as artist and commercial oil paint with gravel, measuring 147 × 112.1 centimetres, accession 58.55. ^[1]

The change matters because it happened within an existing composition. Kirk Varnedoe grouped Sea Change, Full Fathom Five and Galaxy among works in which pouring became a final layer over previously developed paintings. In his account, these pictures complicate any effortless progression from the thick, worked surfaces of 1946 to the poured canvases of the following year. They bring different procedures into the same object. The earlier painting supplies something to respond to; the later paint transforms relationships already established. This helps explain the work’s place in Pollock’s painting: an encounter between methods that acquired new possibilities through their combination. ^[2]

A painting made through revision

According to Seattle Art Museum, Pollock began with vivid blues and pinks brushed onto an easel painting. In 1947 he put it on the floor, scattered gravel and added dripped aluminium and glossy black house paint. Parts of the earlier composition remained; other passages were covered. Finally, carefully placed colour squeezed from tubes balanced the forms. Those preserved passages give the earlier picture a continuing role within the completed work. Keeping, covering and adjusting were all parts of its making. ^[1]

Pollock’s contemporary statement My Painting helps explain that responsiveness. Published in Possibilities in winter 1947–48, it describes working near a painting on a hard wall or floor, moving around it and coming to understand it through a period of acquaintance. His short declaration, “I have no fears about making changes,” places revision inside the process. In his later interview with William Wright, dated late 1950 in the reprinted transcript, Pollock also connected freedom of movement with learned control over flowing paint. These are general statements about his practice, rather than a diary of Sea Change. They nevertheless allow time, experience and judgement into an account too easily reduced to an uninterrupted burst of activity. ^[3]

Paint that keeps its substance

Shimmering Substance, dated 1946, offers a useful comparison for the continued importance of direct contact. MoMA describes paint squeezed from the tube and then manipulated into open loops, possibly with a palette knife or a finger. The museum keeps that choice of implement uncertain. The work belongs to the Sounds in the Grass group and is catalogued as oil on canvas. Its texture arises from the handling of paint itself. It presents a related problem—how colour can become a substantial, worked surface—with its own materials and means. ^[4]

Full Fathom Five, from 1947, makes another comparison possible. MoMA records a brush-and-palette-knife underlayer, embedded objects and a later application of poured paint. Its catalogue names nails, tacks, buttons, a key, coins, cigarettes and matches among the inclusions. The museum’s account also traces a move from easel to floor. The resemblance lies in the joining of built paint and later flowing lines, while the listed objects give Full Fathom Five a distinct material identity. Each inclusion retains a history as an everyday object, even when partly obscured by paint. MoMA reports that a neighbour suggested Full Fathom Five’s Shakespearean title. ^[5]

The surface can also be considered through the difference between actual relief and the space suggested to the eye. Bernice Rose’s Drawing into Painting offers a broader account of Pollock’s optical effects: colour, tonal relationships, reflective materials and the intervals within linear networks can make space seem to fluctuate. In her reading, physical paint and perceived atmosphere continually interact. A line can remain attached to a material surface while contributing to a much less tangible sense of depth or light. Her account encourages attention to two experiences at once: the substance of the painting and the movement that colour and line can suggest. ^[6]

What the title opens up

Sea Change and Full Fathom Five draw their phrases from the same song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In Act 1, scene 2, Ariel sings invisibly to Ferdinand, who hears the song as a remembrance of his drowned father. Bones become coral; eyes become pearls. What appears to have been lost undergoes a transformation into another substance. The song gives change a strange continuity: the former body persists through the new things it has become. ^[7]

That literary association invites thoughts of transformation, survival and altered identity. The song itself moves between material images and an unseen voice: Ferdinand listens, wonders where the music comes from and recognises something personal within it. A title taken from that moment can open several associations while leaving the painted forms free of fixed roles. Its suggestion of change is available without treating the canvas as an illustration of the play. ^[7]

Its first viewers disagreed

Sea Change appeared in Pollock’s January 1948 exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery. Robert M. Coates’s review of 17 January, reproduced in Francis V. O’Connor’s catalogue, shows how responses could vary within one show. Coates found tremendous energy in Pollock’s painting but worried about communication between artist and spectator. He dismissed several canvases, including Cathedral and Reflection of the Big Dipper, while explicitly liking Full Fathom Five and Sea Change. His response was selective, with sympathy for some paintings coexisting with difficulty elsewhere. ^[8]

Clement Greenberg made a different selection. As Pepe Karmel notes, Greenberg’s Nation review of 24 January 1948 praised Cathedral and Enchanted Forest but left the quality of Sea Change and Full Fathom Five undecided. Karmel contrasts that hesitation with the poetic suggestion Coates found in these works. The reversal is revealing. Two critics could look at the same new group and find their strongest examples in different places. Recognition of Pollock’s importance did not settle the value of each canvas in advance. Sea Change entered public life as a painting to be judged, with its own successes and difficulties, rather than as an already agreed illustration of a historic breakthrough. ^[9]

Its exhibition life soon extended beyond New York. Elizabeth Levine and Anna Indych’s chronology includes Sea Change among the works from Peggy Guggenheim’s collection shown at the Museo Correr in Venice in summer 1950. The painting’s international circulation therefore belongs to its early history, alongside those divided responses at Parsons. ^[2]

Seattle’s provenance traces it from the artist through Art of This Century and Guggenheim’s collection to her 1958 gift. The museum had already exhibited it in Contemporary Trends in International Art in 1955, before it entered the collection. ^[1]

A surface with a later history

Conservation adds another kind of time to the painting. Seattle Art Museum’s September 2017 account revisited Nicholas Dorman’s work on Sea Change in 2014. It describes the difficulty of removing a varnish applied during the 1970s from a surface crowded with rocks and textures. Dorman called it “a brutal swab shredder.” The museum explained that the varnish would have changed colour over time and affected the experience of the work. ^[10]

That account brings the painting’s material irregularities into unusually practical focus. A raised surface affects how a conservator can work across it; a coating affects how a viewer encounters it. Conservation consequently bears on colour and perception as well as the physical care of an object. The historical report is valuable precisely because it identifies these particular problems. It does not make the surface a transparent record untouched by time, or turn treatment into the recovery of a single spontaneous moment. ^[10]