There Were Seven in Eight

There Were Seven in Eight holds figures and an enveloping network of lines in uneasy proximity. Jackson Pollock developed it over several months, according to the Museum of Modern Art, which dates the canvas to about 1945. Its collection record specifies oil, enamel and casein on canvas, measuring 109.2 × 259.1 centimetres. That combination of materials belongs to a work whose making involved sustained revision. ^[1]

An image behind the lines

MoMA's label for its 2015–16 collection survey describes a figurative beginning followed by superimposed black lines. Spread across the canvas, this network frustrates the establishment of a single focus. Snakes, eyes and faces remain intermittently discernible beneath it. The museum's account invites a shifting kind of attention: follow a line across the field, then notice an image that briefly gathers beneath it. The figures and the overall pattern compete for recognition, keeping the painting from settling into one readily grasped scene. ^[1]

The celebrated explanation, “I choose to veil the image,” comes through Lee Krasner's later recollection of Pollock's response to her question about this painting. Pepe Karmel traces the account in his 1998 essay, including William Rubin's subsequent clarification from Krasner. Reported in 1979, that clarification restricted the remark to There Were Seven in Eight; Krasner said it did not necessarily apply elsewhere, specifically excluding Autumn Rhythm and One. The distinction matters whenever a viewer wonders whether every poured Pollock conceals a previous figurative composition. It supplies no general rule. ^[2]

Bernice Rose approached the painting through the relationship between drawing and painting. In Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting she treats it as an instance of imagery becoming bound into line, pattern and shadow. Her accompanying note makes the physical action more specific: curving lines, drips and spatter partly cover an underlying figurative image that she describes as totemic. That description concerns the organisation of forms; it does not identify a particular deity, story or cultural source. Rose directs attention towards the way an image is transformed by the marks around and across it. A figure can remain present while losing its independence. Following the network, therefore, is already a way of attending to the imagery. The eye need not finish identifying a creature before responding to the line that interrupts its outline. ^[3]

Rose also records Rubin's objection to extending literal overpainting to the later nonobjective works. She nevertheless retained veiling as a useful poetic concept, with his agreement. Her distinction leaves room for an analogy between different paintings while keeping their actual construction separate. ^[3]

A prepared and revised surface

The painting's preparation received attention before its crowded surface took shape. James Coddington reports Eugena Ordonez's finding of two applications of ground, both probably applied by Pollock. They were virtually indistinguishable in material composition. Coddington connects this preparation with the painter's consideration of absorbency, opacity and colour. These underlying layers help us understand painting as a sequence of material decisions: the surface that receives a mark is itself prepared, and affects the character of subsequent paint. The qualification about authorship remains significant; the analysis supports two applications more firmly than it establishes who applied them. ^[4]

In MoMA's April 1980 acquisition announcement, the initial composition is described more specifically as a frieze of semi-abstract, totemic figures. A frieze suggests forms succeeding one another along the wide canvas. The text says Pollock returned some months later, adding extended arabesques with drips and spatters of liquid enamel. These additions connected the surface while making its underlying imagery less distinct. That account helps explain the work's tension: the lateral procession persists beneath a network that joins one part of the surface to another. The revision changed the way the whole painting could be read, as well as the visibility of individual figures. MoMA presented this change as an important stage in the development of Pollock's all-over painting. ^[5]

A 2020 technical chapter by Francesca Rosi and colleagues records oil identified through destructive analysis of this painting, alongside brushstrokes and dripped application. Its comparative table brings together earlier analytical findings and new non-invasive investigations. The authors explicitly limit the table to drying oils and oil-modified alkyds, leaving other ingredients outside its scope; the oil entry therefore remains compatible with a fuller medium description. ^[6]

A difficult painting in public

There Were Seven in Eight appeared in Pollock's second solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century, held from 19 March to 14 April 1945. Francis V. O'Connor's documentary chronology lists it among thirteen paintings, alongside gouaches and drawings. The contemporary responses he reproduces point in different directions. Howard Devree, writing in the New York Times on 25 March, found the title cryptic and the exhibition's emotional force insufficiently communicated. Clement Greenberg's Nation review of 7 April hailed Pollock's standing among his generation, while recognising the challenge of the densely packed oils and especially praising the two Totem Lessons. Greenberg's enthusiasm was a judgment on the exhibition and painter; it should not be converted into a specific endorsement of every canvas. The show brought opportunity and serious disagreement together, rather than producing one shared verdict. ^[7]

An anonymous Art News reviewer on 1 April made the difficulty of recognising forms central to the objection. The review described an elaborate network of white lines obscuring primary elements, and named The Night Dancer and There Were Seven in Eight as examples. It preferred Pollock's drawings to the densely worked oils. The objection is revealing because it treats the obstruction of an image as a failure of communication. What later discussion would explore as veiling was, for this writer, an excess of compositional intervention. The review also considered the effect laborious, complicating any assumption that Pollock's contemporaries invariably saw his paintings as spontaneous eruptions. The review's emphasis on white lines belongs to that historical response and its argument about compositional unity. Its vocabulary tells us how one contemporary writer assessed the relationship between the enclosing network and the partly obscured forms, giving the painting a specific place in the debates of its first audience. ^[8]

Later admiration for Pollock did not eliminate reservations about this particular work. Kirk Varnedoe compared it with Mural, considering it a reprise with more episodic rhythms and a more conventional narrative structure. He found its density comparatively cluttered. This is a critical comparison, not an account of a hidden story discovered beneath the paint. The comparison offers readers a question about rhythm and continuity across two ambitious horizontal compositions. ^[2]

The painting entered MoMA through purchase in 1980, following extended negotiations with Krasner. Varnedoe and Karmel's introduction to New Approaches distinguishes four purchases, including this canvas, from three gifts announced in the same acquisition. Its museum history thus joins Krasner's stewardship to the institution's effort to represent different phases of Pollock's work, including the years before the familiar poured canvases. ^[4]