Mural

Peggy Guggenheim's hallway

Peggy Guggenheim commissioned the painting in 1943 for the entrance of her New York townhouse. Her assistant Howard Putzel had pressed her to give Jackson Pollock a project large enough to use the force he saw in the smaller easel pictures. Pollock signed a gallery contract with her in July 1943 at $150 a month, with a settlement at the end of the year if his paintings sold.

Marcel Duchamp advised that it be painted on canvas rather than directly on the wall, so that it could be moved. Pollock wrote that the commission came with no strings as to what or how he painted it. He also wrote that he had torn out the partition between the front and middle rooms of his apartment to get the stretched canvas up.

The University of Iowa Museum of Art records that he stared at the blank canvas for weeks, told friends he was blocked, and then painted it in a single burst around New Year's Day of 1944. The canvas is dated 1943. The Getty's technical study later found that account cannot be right, and discredited the idea of one feverish night.

What the Getty found in the paint

Mural travelled from Iowa to the Getty in 2012 for technical study, conservation and cleaning, and was shown at the Getty Center from 11 March to 1 June 2014. Alan Phenix and Tom Learner established that the painting is virtually all artists' oil colour — thirteen different shades, used pure or mixed — on a stretched and primed canvas.

One material is not artists' paint. Pollock also used a cheap water-based casein house paint of the kind sold for walls, bought, Alan Phenix suggests, from the hardware store below his studio. He used it at several stages, possibly three or four times, to block in the light reserves between the darker forms.

The single largest surprise concerned the order of the layers. Thomas Hart Benton had taught that a long horizontal composition should begin with imaginary vertical poles acting as a skeleton, and it had always been assumed that Pollock laid those dark verticals down first. The analysis showed he began instead with bright lemon yellow, a strong colour that broke up the blank canvas without committing him to a dark start.

Painted standing up

Mural was made before Jackson Pollock began laying canvas on the floor, and the surface proves it. Drips run vertically from dozens of the dark strokes, long and straight, and gather in a dense fringe below the horizontal band at the bottom edge. Gravity pulled every one of them in the same direction, which only happens when the canvas is upright.

The marks themselves are brushed rather than poured. Bristle tracks are visible inside the wide black curves, the paint is dragged and scrubbed in the pale passages, and the edges of the teal strokes are combed rather than rounded. The later poured paintings have none of that.

The varnish and the sag

Two problems brought the painting to the Getty. It had been varnished in 1973 to protect it, but Jackson Pollock never varnished it, and the coating flattened the alternation of matte and gloss that the composition depends on. It had also sagged, apparently as early as 1947, because the original stretcher was not strong enough for the span.

Yvonne Szafran records that the cracked stretcher was replaced and the canvas lined, meaning a second fabric was glued to the back for strength. Lining locked the existing sag into the canvas. When it went back onto a rectangular stretcher, parts of the original tacking edges ended up exposed on the front, in the lower and right corners and in the upper centre.

Greenberg, and the road to Iowa

Clement Greenberg had written encouraging but qualified reviews of Jackson Pollock before he saw the painting installed. The University of Iowa Museum of Art records his account of the change: he took one look at it and thought that was great art, and knew Pollock was the greatest painter the country had produced. He advocated for Pollock through the rest of the 1940s.

Peggy Guggenheim closed her gallery in 1947 and returned to Europe with no room for a six-metre canvas in Venice. She wrote to Lester Longman, head of the University of Iowa's School of Art and Art History, on 3 October 1948, reminding him of her offer to give the painting if the university paid the freight from Yale. It was shipped to Iowa in October 1951 and accessioned in 1959.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Mural was painted standing up, on a stretched canvas six metres wide, four years before Jackson Pollock began working on the floor. Close view shows what that means in practice: brush hairs inside the black curves, drips falling straight down from them, and a lemon yellow that the Getty's analysis found beneath the dark verticals rather than above them.