The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jackson Pollock · Number 11, 1952, as first shown; the title Blue Poles given later, and both used by the gallery that holds it · enamel and aluminium paint, with glass, on canvas, about 2.1 by 4.9 metres · one horizontal field of poured black, white, orange, yellow and silver, crossed by eight long blue bars, each leaning, at uneven intervals · painted at Springs, East Hampton, on Long Island, 1952 · National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, since 1973 · the unit scored is the single canvas as it hangs, whole, with nothing replaced · the painter’s documented words quoted only where they are certain
Mode
Painting as the record of the act that made it, with a measure laid across the record: the poured all-over field and eight standing bars in one surface
Mythos
Chaos and the act of ordering it, built in the relation of field and poles; totems, masts and dancers evoked in the poles and brought by the viewer
Phase
1952, five years after the first poured paintings and a year after the black pourings of 1951, as the painter’s standing and health were both failing
Presentation
Enamel and aluminium paint, with glass, poured onto canvas laid on the floor, about 2.1 by 4.9 metres, a ratio of about one to two and a third; hung horizontally at standing height
Register
From the finest silver skein to pools and blue bars the full height of the canvas; grandeur and turbulence, heat against a cold blue, a surface that flickers as the viewer moves
Scale
One canvas, about ten square metres, five colours and a blue, eight poles; no world beyond the surface
Governing Proposition
A canvas nearly five metres wide, laid on a barn floor and covered with poured enamel in black, white, orange and yellow and with the silver of aluminium paint, glass caught in its surface, is crossed by eight long blue bars, each leaning off the vertical, set at uneven intervals, with the pour running across them in places. The wager of the canvas is that a measure can be laid on a field whose principle was that no part should dominate, and that neither will win: that the poured field and the standing poles, impulse and order, can hold in one surface as one painting.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The visitor in Canberra meets a field about 2.1 metres high and 4.9 wide, some ten square metres, hung horizontally at standing height and wider than the eye can take in from close. Over a dense poured surface of black, white, orange, yellow and the silver of aluminium paint run eight long blue bars, each leaning off the vertical, set across the width at uneven intervals. From across the room the bars read first, a slow procession of leaning presences. At a few metres the colour takes over, a weave of orange and yellow under black and white. Close to, the bars become stained lengths sunk in the field, and the field breaks into skein, pool and fragment of glass.
The gallery records the medium as enamel and aluminium paint, with glass, on canvas, and each of the three does work. The enamels are commercial paints, fluid enough to pour and to pool. The aluminium is the silver, and it catches the light and loses it as the viewer moves, so that the surface flickers at the scale of the whole and again at the scale of the skein. The glass is in the paint. The proportion is about one to two and a third. There is no figure, no ground and no centre; there are five colours and a blue. The blue is deep and cold, and it is set against the hottest colours on the canvas, hotter than those of the classic pours, while the bars cross the field from bottom to top.
It was first shown as Number 11, 1952. The title Blue Poles came later, and the gallery that holds it uses both. The poles are not thrown, as the field is, but pressed and dragged, and in places the poured skeins run across them, so that they lie inside the field rather than on it. That relation, a measure set in a field of impulse and bound into it, is what the canvas is. The unit scored here is the single painting as it hangs: one canvas, whole. Nothing of it is known to have been replaced or dispersed, and nothing stands in place of an original.
Movement II
The canvas was painted in 1952 at Springs, East Hampton, on Long Island, with the canvas on the floor of the barn the painter used as a studio, worked from four sides. Five years earlier, in his statement “My Painting” in Possibilities, he had written of working with the canvas on the floor, that there he could “literally be in the painting”, and that this was “akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West”. The words describe the method and were written before this canvas existed. They are its context, not its evidence, and no axis rests on them.
By 1952 the poured method was five years old. The canvases of 1947 to 1950 had left the easel, the brushed contour and the composed centre for an all-over field in which no part outranked another: the most famous new manner in American painting, and the manner that had made him. In 1951 came the black pourings, and colour went out. This canvas brings it back at full heat, as does Convergence, its nearest companion, painted the same year and now in Buffalo. The field here is the classic field grown congested, denser and more layered, thick in places, with orange, yellow and silver among the black and white; and into it come the poles.
The poles put the all-over doctrine at risk. A field whose principle was that nothing should dominate is given eight bars that do: a rhythmic structure, repeated, rigid where the field is free. The turn came when the painter’s standing and his health were both failing, and it was taken against his own system more than against a tradition. Part of it is a return, to structure, and through the standing bars to the figure he had veiled since the mythic paintings of the early 1940s. A story printed in 1973 held that the canvas was begun on a night with other painters; it was disputed by those involved and by Lee Krasner, it is not settled, and nothing here turns on it. Whatever was done within the making belongs to the work, and the canvas as it stands, the poles and the pours that cross them, is by every account the painter’s.
Movement III
The poles pass the subtractive test. There are eight, at intervals that are uneven but not random, leaning in a sequence that reads from left to right as a measure. Take one away and the measure breaks. Take all of them away and what remains is another painting, a field without a beat. They are spaced and leaned across nearly five metres to make that measure, and sunk in the field where the pour crosses them; the work knows the relation of measure and impulse only because both lie in one surface, bound by the skeins that run over the bars. Make the canvas a third of the size and the field becomes a pattern. Take away the aluminium and the surface stops moving with the viewer.
The field is harder to defend. A poured surface resists the removal of any one skein, because no skein is a part, but that is not the same as each part being required: a hand’s width of the congested middle could be otherwise without loss, and the painter’s practice was to cut his edges after painting, so that the bounds were chosen rather than compelled. The command of the pour is plain. A skein thins and thickens as the hand moves, without contour and without accident left as accident, and the orange, yellow, white, black and silver are laid in an order that keeps the field from collapsing into brown. The costs are plain too. The surface is more congested than the classic pours of 1950, and some passages, worked layer over layer, are overworked to a dull density that shows a search not always resolved.
Take the two most distant things on the canvas, a fine silver skein near an edge and a blue pole crossing the full height, and they mostly obey one law: paint as the trace of an act laid on a flat field. The skein is a thrown act and the pole a pressed and dragged one, both of the same enamels and in the same plane. The range under that law is wide, from the finest line to pools and bars, from black to silver to the hottest colour, from the fast mark to the slow. The standing question is the poles themselves. They are a second kind of mark, rigid and repeated where the field is free, and in places they read as a second law laid over the first, sitting on the field as a later decision rather than growing from it.
Movement IV
In the same statement of 1947 the painter wrote: “The painting has a life of its own.” The canvas bears out one sense of it. The skeins, the pools and the glass are traces of a body moving round a canvas on the floor, and what they disclose is making as an event, not as a depiction; that proposition belongs to the poured method, and this canvas carries it rather than first uncovering it. What is particular to this canvas is the second thing it brings into the open: that turbulence and measure can stand in one field without either winning. The poles do not tame the pour, and the pour does not swallow the poles. Beyond those two, much of what the canvas gives is a state, energy, density, a kind of pressure, and the second proposition is felt more than compelled.
The elevation is real and comes again and again. It comes by scale, the viewer inside the field before seeing its edges; in the poles, which read from far off as a procession and from close as stained bars; in the light, as the aluminium catches and loses it; and in colour, the deep blue against orange and yellow. It is the abstract sublime of the American 1950s, grandeur and turbulence, not delight. And it is broken where the field is most congested, where the density closes the surface rather than opening it and the transport stops at paint.
The painter came to the pour from the totems, the guardians and the Pasiphaë of the early 1940s, and the poles bring that world back veiled: eight standing presences, leaning, in a row, read by many as totems, masts or dancers. The canvas never makes them figures, and that reading is brought by the viewer and by the painter’s history. What the canvas builds is one structure, the primordial field and the measure set upon it, chaos and the act of ordering it, which is the oldest of cosmogonic patterns and is here load-bearing, since the painting is that relation. The painter in the painting, as the sand painter is in his, is method, not image. The particular stays particular: a canvas on a barn floor on Long Island, with glass in it. It holds the body, consciousness, the natural order as energy and growth, a ritual order in evocation, and that cosmic one; family, state, history, story and any named person are absent.
Movement V
The canvas was shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1952 and again in 1954, and spent the next two decades in private hands, shown only from time to time. In those years the painter’s influence ran through Kaprow, through the stain painters and through the reaction against him, but it ran through other canvases. The pour that moved the field belonged to 1947 to 1950 and had been absorbed before this canvas was shown. What this canvas added, the re-entry of structure into the all-over field, was a real possibility opened, at mural scale, in one of the last full statements of the poured field.
In 1973 a new national gallery in Canberra, now the National Gallery of Australia, bought it for 1.3 million Australian dollars, on the recommendation of its founding director, James Mollison, and with the approval of the Whitlam government: then a record price for a modern American painting. It became the best known painting in Australia and a lasting argument about public money and art. That is presence, and it is credited only slightly as reach. It has been on view in Canberra since, in the building opened in 1982, and lent abroad only on occasion: fifty-three years in one national collection, wide in its presence in Australia and narrower worldwide than a canvas in New York or Paris. Fame and price are presence, not proof, and lift no axis.
The paints were commercial enamel and aluminium, with glass, not made for permanence. No failure is known, and only the general risk is charged; the treatment history cannot be stated here, and no alteration of the image is known. The questions have not closed in seventy-four years: whether the poles are the culmination of the all-over or its retreat, figure or structure; how the canvas was begun; how it stands to Convergence and to the black pourings before it; whether the turbulence is controlled or merely survived. From across the room the eight poles still lean in their uneven measure, and from close they are still sunk in the pour.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites in two places. The poles: eight, at intervals uneven but not random, leaning in a sequence that reads from left to right as a measure. Take one away and the measure breaks; take all away and what remains is another painting, a field without a beat. The poles are required. The field is harder. A poured surface resists the removal of any one skein because no skein is a part, but that is not the same as each part being required: a hand’s width of the congested middle could be otherwise without loss, and the painter’s practice of cutting his edges after painting made the bounds chosen rather than compelled. Some passages, worked layer over layer, are thick and muddied in a way that reads as search. Required at the scale of the poles and their relation to the field; less so at the scale of the skein.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Credited through the image. Two things can be stated, and they hold. A painting can be the record of the act that made it: the skeins, the pools and the glass in the paint are traces of a body moving round a canvas on the floor, and the canvas discloses making as an event, not as a depiction; but that proposition is the poured method’s, and this canvas carries it rather than first uncovering it. And, particular to this canvas, turbulence and measure can stand in one field without either winning: the poles do not tame the pour, and the pour does not swallow the poles. That is a claim about order and impulse true of more than painting. Held below the gate because much of what the canvas gives is a state, energy, density, a kind of pressure, and a state ranks below a meaning; and because the second proposition is felt more than compelled.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Elevation is real and recurrent, and of one kind: grandeur and turbulence, the abstract sublime of the American 1950s, not delight. It comes first by scale, nearly five metres of field at standing height, wider than the eye takes in from close, so that the viewer is inside the painting before seeing its edges. It comes again in the poles, a slow procession of leaning presences from a distance and stained bars sunk in the field close to. It comes in the light: the aluminium catches and loses it as the viewer moves, and the surface flickers at the scale of the whole and of the skein. It comes in colour, the deep blue against orange and yellow, hotter than the classic pours. What holds it is congestion: in places the density closes the field rather than opening it, and the transport is broken by surface.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The painter came to the pour from the mythic painting of the early 1940s, the totems, the guardians, Pasiphaë, and the poles bring that world back veiled: eight standing presences in a row, leaning, read by many as totems, masts or dancers. That is evoked, not built. The canvas never makes them figures, and the reading is brought by the viewer and by the painter’s history. What is built is one structure: the primordial field and the measure set upon it, chaos and the act of ordering it, the oldest of cosmogonic patterns, and load-bearing here, since the painting is that relation. It lifts the canvas above the classic field, Autumn Rhythm at 7.4, which veils everything. The ritual element, the painter in the painting as the sand painter is in his, is method, not image. Built in one relation; evoked in the rest.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance by 1952 is double: easel painting, which the pour had already left in 1947, and the painter’s own all-over manner of 1947 to 1950, the most famous new manner in American painting, which had made him. The canvas carries the first swerve, the pour and the canvas on the floor, among the century’s largest; it is credited but discounted, because it belongs to the method and was made by the earlier canvases, Autumn Rhythm at 9.3 among them. Its own turn is the second: after the black pourings of 1951, colour returns at full heat, and the poles impose a rhythmic structure on a field whose principle was that no part should dominate. That put the all-over doctrine at risk when the painter’s standing and health were both failing. Held below the top because part of the departure is a return, to structure and to figure, and the risk was taken against his own system more than against a tradition.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Nearly everything. Poured line is the knowledge: it is a trace of motion, and the work knows the body only because its marks are traces. The floor and the scale are the knowledge: a field one can walk round and be inside, which an easel canvas could not hold. The poles are the knowledge: a measure in a field of impulse, and the work knows the relation of the two only because both lie in one surface and the skeins that cross the poles bind them in. Make it a third of the size and the field becomes a pattern; take away the aluminium and the surface stops moving with the viewer. Held a step below the top because the integration of the poles is not complete everywhere: in places they sit on the field as a later decision rather than grow from it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise: seventy-four years of looking and argument. The canvas yields at three distances: the procession of poles from across the room, the weave of colour at a few metres, the skein, the pool and the glass close to. The questions stay open: whether the poles are the culmination of the all-over or its retreat; whether they are figure or structure; how the canvas was begun and by whose hands, which a story printed in 1973 put in dispute; how it stands to Convergence, its nearest companion of the same year, and to the black pourings before it; whether the turbulence is controlled or merely survived. Held below the higher figures because much of what is written about this canvas concerns its legend, its price and its purchase rather than the painting, and because the deepest questions about poured painting belong to the method and are answered as fully by the classic canvases.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Field: painting in New York in the early 1950s. Intrinsic force: high. The canvas is a full statement of the poured field at mural scale, among the last, and adds a reorganisation of its own, the re-entry of structure into the all-over, which is a real possibility opened. The discount: the reorganisation that moved the field, the pour itself, belongs to 1947 to 1950 and was absorbed before this canvas was shown. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1952 and again in 1954; in private hands through the 1950s and 1960s, when the painter’s influence ran through Kaprow, the stain painters and the reaction against him, but ran through other canvases; then in Canberra from 1973, far from the field it entered. Its largest reach lies outside painting: the purchase made it the best known painting in Australia and a lasting argument about public money and art. That is presence, and is credited only slightly.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole, one canvas, with no part known lost or replaced, and at seventy-four years it stands on the step from seventy years to two centuries, where a whole canvas usually holds 9.0 to 9.1. Presence: about twenty years in private hands with intermittent showing, then fifty-three years on view in one national collection, lent abroad only on occasion. Presence is wide in Australia and narrower worldwide than for a canvas in New York or Paris, and that holds it from the upper figure; fame and price are presence, not proof, and do not lift it. Fabric: commercial enamel and aluminium paint, with glass, not made for permanence; no failure is known, and only the general risk is charged. Its moment, the 1950s and the legend of the painter, has not stood between the canvas and its viewers. Held at the usual figure.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of poured paint at mural scale, to the same anchors as any medium, and the command is load-bearing. Line: thrown and poured paint controlled in weight and speed, so that a skein thins and thickens as the hand moves, without contour and without accident left as accident. Colour: orange, yellow, white, black and silver laid in an order that keeps the field from collapsing into brown, the blue of the poles held against the hottest colours on the canvas. Material: aluminium used for light, enamel for fluidity and pooling, glass and the body’s traces left in. Structure: the poles spaced and leaned to make a measure across nearly five metres, and sunk in the field where the pour crosses them. The costs: the surface is more congested than the classic pours of 1950, and some passages are overworked to a dull density that shows a search not always resolved. Narrower in range of mark than the painted figure, by design.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a fine silver skein near an edge and a blue pole crossing the full height. Do they obey one law? Mostly, yes. The law is paint as the trace of an act laid on a flat field: the skein is a thrown act, the pole a pressed and dragged one, both made of the same enamels, both lying in the same plane, and where the pour runs across the poles they sit inside the field, not on it. The range is wide: from the finest line to pools and bars, from black to silver to the hottest colour, from the fast mark to the slow. Narrowness is not coherence, and this field is not narrow. Held below the top by the standing question: the poles are a second kind of mark, rigid and repeated where the field is free, and in places they read as a second law laid over the first.
Score: 8.6 / 10
An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds five: the body, as the trace of a person moving round the canvas; consciousness, the act of painting as attention and abandon together; the natural order, as energy and growth, a field like weather or undergrowth; a ritual order, in the method and in the standing poles, present as evocation more than as structure; and a cosmic order, chaos and measure in one field. The first three and the last are integrated, one act seen four ways. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no labour beyond the trace of work, no state, no history, no story, no named person. The field is wide and holds little by design. The figure describes the form.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Living Form at 8.8, with The Swerve and The Made at 8.7. A canvas whole at seventy-four years, on view in one national collection for fifty-three of them, with no failure of its commercial paints known; a form in which the knowledge, a measure in a field of impulse, exists only as poured line and pressed bar in one surface at the body’s scale; a turn against the painter’s own all-over doctrine, colour returned after the black pourings and a structure laid across the field, taken as his standing and health failed; and a command of poured enamel and aluminium at mural scale that keeps five colours from collapsing into brown.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: the body, consciousness, the natural order, a ritual order and a cosmic order are held, four of them as one act seen four ways, and the family, labour beyond the trace of work, the state, history, story and any named person are absent. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 and The Unconcealment at 7.9: the totems are evoked and brought by the viewer, and what the canvas discloses beyond the poured method’s own proposition is felt more than compelled, much of it a state. Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 is held by a discount: the pour that moved the field belongs to the canvases of 1947 to 1950, and this canvas’s largest reach lies outside painting.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls short by a tenth, The Unconcealment at 7.9 by six tenths and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 by seven. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 7.8, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 99.9, an average of 8.325 that displays as 8.3, in Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, seven tenths short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as it hangs at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, in 2026 (enamel and aluminium paint, with glass, on canvas, about 2.1 by 4.9 metres, painted at Springs, East Hampton, in 1952), of how it was made and of its later history. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single painting as it hangs: one canvas, whole, with no part known to be lost, replaced or dispersed, so nothing stands in place of an original. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: the poured paintings of 1947 to 1950, the black pourings of 1951, Convergence (1952, Buffalo), its nearest companion, and the painter’s statements of 1947 and after, which are context. The painter’s words are quoted in three fragments that are certain, from his statement “My Painting” in Possibilities (1947), written five years before this canvas and given as words on the method, not as evidence of this painting; nothing else of his is quoted. Anything others did within the making belongs to the work: a story printed in 1973, that other painters had a hand in beginning the canvas, was disputed by those involved and by Lee Krasner and is stated as contested, and no axis turns on it. The price, the purchase and the argument that followed bear on reach and presence only. The treatment history cannot be stated here; no alteration of the image is known, and none is charged or credited. Facts and figures that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the gallery’s exact dimensions, where and when the later title was first used, the magazine that printed the story of 1973 and the painters it named, whether footprints are in the surface, the amount of glass, the order of the making and whether the poles were laid late and poured over, the number of layers and the intervals between the poles, the loans abroad, and the present condition and conservation record.