Painting (Silver over Black, White, Yellow and Red)

Jackson Pollock’s Painting (Silver over Black, White, Yellow and Red) is a 1948 painting on paper mounted on canvas, measuring 61 × 80 cm. The Centre Pompidou identifies it as AM 1972-29, signed and dated at the lower left. Its catalogue raisonné number is 192 in volume II. ^[1]

Its title directs attention towards paint itself. The Musée national Picasso-Paris made this point when discussing the work in its exhibition Jackson Pollock: Les premières années (1934–1947), held from 15 October 2024 to 19 January 2025. Although the exhibition concentrated on the preceding years, this painting helped its final room show where those earlier experiments led. The accompanying guide describes grey, black, red and yellow lines extending across the surface in a network, with fine strands alternating with thicker accumulations and paint passing beyond the paper’s edges. That contrast gives the reader something more precise to follow than a general impression of tangled movement: differences of thickness and density matter within the apparent continuity. The guide places this development within exchanges involving Hans Hofmann and Janet Sobel, whose Milky Way was also included. It presents abstraction as emerging through research and artistic dialogue, allowing this relatively small sheet to carry the outcome of a much wider conversation. ^[2]

Silver, light and space

Silver can be understood as more than another item in a colour list. In Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting, Bernice Rose explores how Pollock’s colour can act simultaneously as hue and tone, producing a sense of light and space without describing a recognisable landscape. Her discussion of silver concerns its atmospheric behaviour and its place between stronger contrasts. She also explains how the eye shifts between the physical colours distributed across a surface and the optical effects their relationships create. This is a general account of Pollock’s work, rather than a material analysis of this particular sheet. Applied as a way of looking, it encourages attention to how a pale or reflective passage changes neighbouring dark marks, and how small openings in a network can suggest space beyond it. The painting’s named colours can therefore be approached through their relationships: the experience depends on their distribution and interaction, as well as on recognising each colour separately. ^[3]

Camille Morineau’s Pompidou commentary distinguishes the forearm and hand movements of paper works from the larger bodily movements of canvases. She argues that this sheet nevertheless evokes expansive space through its varied paint threads and density. ^[1]

The relationship between a small support and an expansive effect also belongs to a broader problem in Pollock’s poured painting. Kirk Varnedoe’s 1998 catalogue essay stresses the adjustments required when a related pictorial language operates across dramatically different dimensions. Wrist movements and gestures at the limit of an arm’s reach have to produce comparable relationships; paint must hold together as both fine thread and substantial strand. His argument gives scale an active role in making. A smaller painting involves a recalibration of movement, spacing and paint flow, even when its family resemblance to a larger work is strong. Varnedoe also warns that the convenient category of the drip period can obscure differences between individual paintings: their palettes, surfaces and relationships between centre and edge vary considerably. For this paper work, that is a useful invitation to stay with its particular proportions and density, while exploring the wider connections through Pollock’s drawings. ^[4]

Movement and decisions

Pollock’s own accounts connect physical freedom with decisions made during work. In “My Painting,” published in Possibilities in winter 1947–48, he explains the resistance offered by a hard surface, the proximity gained on the floor and the opportunity to work from four sides. He also describes coming to understand a painting during its development and being willing to alter or destroy an image. His phrase “give and take” captures that reciprocal process. In the interview with William Wright, dated late 1950 in the MoMA anthology, Pollock explains that experience enables considerable control over flowing paint, while distinguishing a general sense of direction from an exactly preconceived image. These statements describe his practice broadly. They help explain how directness and revision could coexist, without supplying a step-by-step account of how this particular painting was made. ^[5]

Technical research on other paintings makes that distinction valuable. In “No Chaos Damn It,” conservator James Coddington describes Pollock’s continuing use of direct contact alongside pouring. In Lavender Mist, for example, he discusses tube-applied paint subsequently manipulated at the surface. In Number 28, 1950, he identifies passages where a brush mixed newly poured black into underlying white, bringing separate applications into closer relationship. These are findings about those paintings, each with its own sequence of materials and interventions. They demonstrate how much can be lost when Pollock’s technique is reduced to paint falling through the air. They also show why the look of a line alone cannot establish an entire working procedure for another object. Reading Silver through bodily movement remains useful, while its precise sequence of application requires evidence specific to this sheet. ^[6]

A painting in French conversations

The Paris exhibition that helped establish the French discussion of Pollock took place at Studio Paul Facchetti from 7 to 31 March 1952. Francis V. O’Connor’s 1967 chronology identifies it as Pollock’s first solo exhibition in Paris and lists a work called Painting 1948. The title is sufficiently general to require care before equating that entry with a particular object. More securely documented is the exhibition’s critical framework: its catalogue included a translation of Alfonso Ossorio’s introduction to Pollock’s 1951 Parsons exhibition, alongside an essay by Michel Tapié. In the passage reprinted by O’Connor, Tapié understands the passage from titled, recognisable motifs to abstraction as a continuous development. He then considers the recent black-and-white paintings as a further intensification. The Paris audience was thus offered a career argument spanning different kinds of work, with abstraction connected to Pollock’s earlier painting. This helps explain the intellectual setting in which a work such as Silver could be discussed. ^[7]

Olivier Michelon’s Pompidou account places the painting within transatlantic exchange. Paul Facchetti acquired it in 1959; the museum purchased it in 1972, its first Pollock acquisition. Michelon describes its all-over organisation through a simultaneous sense of wholeness and fragmentation. ^[1]

A later French exhibition gave the same object another role. L’Informe: mode d’emploi, organised by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois at the Centre Pompidou from 22 May to 26 August 1996, included it in the section devoted to horizontality, alongside Full Fathom Five, Number 26 A, Black and White, and works by Marcel Duchamp, Cy Twombly and Kazuo Shiraga. The accompanying dossier challenges an account of painting addressed only to an upright spectator’s eyes. Its discussion of Pollock brings the floor and gravity back into the interpretation, then follows the importance of these conditions for later artists. This was a curatorial proposition about how modern art might be understood through material operations and the body. It gives the painting a history beyond its first moment of abstraction: the sheet became evidence in a continuing argument about what painting involves. The framework belongs to the 1996 exhibition; it does not establish that Pollock was illustrating the ideas of Georges Bataille that guided its curators. ^[8]