If Jackson Pollock’s “Number 10” in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (FLLAC) doesn’t remind you of anything, that’s okay. Named to avoid the narrative connotations of titles, Pollock’s drip painting liberates itself from representational elements.
“‘Number 10’ is one of the gems of our 20th-century works,” said Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator of the FLLAC Mary-Kay Lombino. Vassar has had the piece since 1994, when it was donated from the collection of the late Katherine Sanford Deutsch ’40. “It is one of the very first works that could be considered one of Pollock’s all-over splatter paintings,” Lombino said.
Pollock shifted paradigms when he pioneered the spontaneous action movement of abstract expressionism. “The abstract expressionists of the post-World War II New York School brought American art into the forefront for the first time,” explained Lombino. Along with artists like Willem De Kooning, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler and Elaine De Kooning, Pollock was able to drift the focus of the art world from Europe to the United States.
The year 1950 was a turning point for Pollock, as he made the crucial decision to lay his canvas on the floor for painting that year and completed 50 paintings in this manner, including “Number 10.”
“When you’re working on the floor, there’s no top or bottom. You can walk around the painting and work with it that way,” said Lombino. This technique allows the painter to forego conventions involving the semblances of representational configurations in paintings, like figures and the presence of land.
Pollock used to say that his drip paintings were a product of his unconscious. “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting,” Pollock wrote about his unique abstract expressionist style in 1947 in an article published in cultural magazine Possibilities. Pollock’s work during those years was improvisational, but scientists today have discovered patterns in the way his movements led to the dripping and spraying of paint. After some hotly contested Pollock artwork emerged from garage sales and attics, they have created a computer program that uses fractals to detect whether or not a painting is a true Pollock.
The complexities of “Number 10” conjure images for students to ponder. The viscous overlapping lines and their perfect random spacing seem controlled by the canvas, roped in but not playing the part of representing objects. The piece has no up or down, it exists in space and then, as the canvas ends, does not.
Pollock’s aesthetic of movement is a distinctive one. Rebecca Goldsmith ’12 reflected, “It reminds me of a pogo-stick.”
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