In the spring of 1951, immediately following the solo exhibition where the artist first unveiled his now iconic allover drip paintings, Jackson Pollock embarked upon a stylistically coherent group of thirty-three canvases which have collectively been designated as the Black Pourings, or Black Paintings. These paintings mark a period of audacious courage in Jackson Pollock’s acclaimed career; they are the products of an artist unwilling to repeat himself, intent on pushing forward against obstacles and hindrances. The earlier monumental paintings, with their lyrical webs of subtle coloring, had reached the heights of their abstraction the previous year. With the emergence of the Black Paintings, multi-colored harmonies were exchanged for the deepest black and unprimed linen, and decorative coloring gave way to hard edged draftsmanship. Complex layered veils of dripped and splattered paint were pulled back to reveal a skeletal armature. And in perhaps his most astonishing move, Pollock allowed hints of figuration to break through the pure abstraction. Just when the colored abstractions had reached full fruition, Pollock boldly decided to innovate, rather than recycle the theme. Of the approximately 20 Black Paintings, almost all are in the most esteemed private or museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Chronologically situated at the absolute apex of this critical moment of stylistic examination and reassessment in Pollock’s career, Number 17, 1951 epitomizes this desire to consolidate lessons learned and to extend his praxis. The present work is further distinguished by its extraordinary provenance: while originally acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from Sidney Janis Gallery in 1952, the Jackson Pollock Estate then exchanged the present work for Autumn Rhythm in 1957; notably, the present work was the first painting by Pollock the Met acquired, bespeaking its seminal importance within Pollock’s radical oeuvre. Number 17, 1951 was later acquired by esteemed collector S.I. Newhouse, who assembled one of the foremost art collections of the Twentieth Century, before entering the Macklowe Collection in 1999.
Right: Exhibition Poster and Guest Book at the Exhibition Jackson Pollock at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, 1951
As with Pollock’s earlier drip paintings, Number 17, 1951 remains an index of process, recording the lacy movements and pools of hesitation in enamel applied across the canvas. In the Black Paintings, however, Pollock focused and refined his technique, stripping away the delicate finery to show an austere interior. Rolling out large sections of canvas across the floor of his barn studio, Pollock worked in the manner of an Oriental scroll painter, moving around all sides of the canvas and creating a continuous cycle of quasi-figurative forms with only small spaces left in between. The elegant control of line which remained largely hidden in the layers of previous works is on display here, as Pollock used a kitchen baster as a fountain pen, moving from drip to pool to calligraphic arabesque seemingly at a whim. Sticks and dried brushes, meanwhile, moved paint into the hollows of the hard canvas texture like a drypoint etching. Once the vast composition was complete, Pollock and Lee Krasner, his wife and fellow painter, spent hours deciding how to group and crop the scroll-like final product into individual paintings. His creative process in these paintings was as wholly automatic as it had been in his allover abstractions of the previous years, and thus he perceived pictures such as Number 17, 1951 not as a disruption to his development, but rather as a continuation of his enduring aesthetic and conceptual practice.
Comparable Paintings from 1951 in Museum Collections
Most essential to the Black Paintings is the re-emergence of hinting to figuration. Pollock refused to subscribe to abstraction as a dogmatic imperative, as many critics of the time did. Instead, he sought a space between figuration and literal abstraction in order to advance his work. The critic John Ashbery would later say, “In Pollock’s case it is as though he would question and transform the basis of his art as it had been realized in major drip paintings like Number 1, 1949 and Lavender Mist. Like de Kooning, he had reached a point where literal abstraction was no longer satisfactory. For abstraction is not just substituting ‘non-objective’ shapes for illusionistic ones; it implies holding up to the light everything that happens around us, substituting that reality for the false, wooden, two-dimensional idea of reality that is constantly trying to get itself recognized as the authentic one.” (John Ashbery, “Black Pollock,” Art News 68, No. 1, March, 1969, p. 66)
Image ©1991 Hans Namuth Estate, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography
Art © 2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Hints of figuration are embedded within the present work as Pollock’s expressionist swirls and drips of paint seem at intervals to resolve themselves into compositional forms. Unrestricted flowing black slips elegantly in and out of abstraction, oscillating between pooling pigment and impossibly thin and staccato dashes and scrapes. Unlike his allover drip paintings, the bare canvas of Number 17, 1951 possesses a strong compositional presence, acting as the ultimate contrast for Pollock’s impassioned gestures. The resulting visual experience is endlessly fascinating, with our eye encouraged to travel freely through the forest of pigment created by Pollock’s looping lines, which variously seem to burst forth from and soak into the canvas surface. In Number 17, 1951 we witness again Pollock's continual pursuit of the technique and style that best expressed his innate aesthetic instinct of the moment; from the early figurative drawings, to the grand mythical works such as The She-Wolf, 1943, through to the groundbreaking formal language of monumental drip paintings like Autumn Rhythm, 1950 and the sophistication of the Black Paintings.
Image © Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Art © 2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In the same year of the present work’s execution, renowned critic Clement Greenberg distilled the essential aspects of Pollock’s new style thus: “The references to the human form in Pollock’s latest paintings are symptoms of a new phase but not of a reversal of direction. Like some older masters of our time he develops according to a double rhythm in which each beat harks back to the one before the last. Thus anatomical motifs and compositional schemes sketched out in his first and less abstract phase are in this third one clarified and realized… Even so, the change is not as great as it might seem. Line and the contrast of dark and light became the essential factors for Pollock in his second phase. Now he has them carry the picture without the aid of color and makes their interplay clearer and more graphic. The more explicit structure of the new work reveals much that was implicit in the preceding phase and should convince anyone that this artist is much, much more than a grandiose decorator.” (Clement Greenberg, “Jackson Pollock’s New Style,” Harper’s Bazaar 85, No. 2883, February 1952) Greenberg, a great champion of Pollock’s, thus recognized works such as Number 17, 1951 as epitomizing the fundamentals of the artist’s inimitable conceptual and aesthetic project and irrefutably proving his unmatched significance to the development of twentieth century art.
