What Did Jackson Pollock Hope to Accomplish With This Dizzying Drip Painting, Which Just Sold for a Record-Breaking $181 Million?

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor Add as preferred source A detail from Jackson Pollock s Number 7A, 1948 Christie's Jackson Pollock stretched an 11-foot-long canvas across the floor of his barn on Long Island. His process would not involve careful brush strokes—or even an easel. Instead, the Abstract Expressionist flung paint through the air, creating dramatic black swirls. This artwork, completed at the peak of Pollock’s career, is known as Number 7A, 1948. A year later, when Life magazine profiled the artist, the headline asked, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” While critics may debate Pollock’s legacy, his artworks are undeniably some of the most lucrative on the market. When Christie’s recently announced that Number 7A, 1948—the largest of Pollock’s drip paintings still in private hands—was going on sale, the estimated price was $100 million, nearly $40 million higher than the artist’s previous auction record. “If you’re serious about painting, and if you’re serious about 20th-century art, this is your painting,” Tobias Meyer, a former Sotheby’s auctioneer who helped organize the sale, told Vanity Fair’s Nate Freeman earlier this month. “It’s just a question of: Are you rich enough or not?” When the auction began on May 18, several rich-enough buyers engaged in an intense bidding war, with the price going up “mostly in increments of $1 million,” according to the New York Times. When the bidding reached $154 million, a new buyer emerged, prompting gasps from the audience. After just seven minutes, the hammer came down at $157 million—or $181.2 million with fees—making Number 7A, 1948 the most expensive Pollock ever sold at auction. “It is with this work that Pollock finally frees himself from the shackles of conventional easel painting and produces one of the first truly abstract paintings in the history of art,” according to the lot essay. “In Number 7A, 1948 we witness the reinvention of painting, opening the door to a pure form of expression suitable for the modern postwar world.” Born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912, Pollock began painting in earnest when he moved to New York City in 1930. His early influences ranged from Thomas Hart Benton’s Regionalism to Mexican muralists, and he was particularly inspired by Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, which he saw in 1939. Quick fact: Jackson Pollock’s early career Before he became famous, the artist worked for the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, providing him with financial stability as he honed his style. That same year, Pollock started Jungian psychoanalysis while seeking treatment for alcoholism. Through these sessions, as well as a burgeoning interest in Surrealism, he developed a fascination with investigating the subconscious. He was also drawn to automatism, an artistic technique that involved surrendering conscious control of the creative process. “I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them,” Pollock once said. “ It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age—the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio—in the old technique.” The artist started experimenting with drip painting in the 1940s, using tools like brush handles and sticks to fling paint onto the canvas. Rather than a controlled act mediated by a carefully trained hand, painting became a physical process guided by unconscious instincts. Pollock created works that reflected the movements of the artist’s body, a style known as action painting. Pollock painted Number 7A, 1948 when he was 36. Measuring roughly 11 by 3 feet, the rectangular canvas is dominated by black paint. But it also includes small specks of red, “which Pollock sometimes used to heighten the sense of drama,” per the lot essay. “Number 7A, 1948’s sophisticated progression of drips, pours, swoops and pools of black paint is evidence of the genius for which Pollock is globally celebrated,” the essay continues. “In the 20th century, it was Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne who took tentative steps toward what became known as abstraction, but it is only in the paintings of Pollock that we finally see a completely new and unrestrained form of painting.” Pollock’s previous auction record was set by Number 17, 1951, which sold for roughly $61 million in 2021. He now joins an exclusive group of artists with works worth more than $100 million—among others, Leonardo da Vinci, Gustav Klimt, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso. Number 7A, 1948 was previously owned by S.I. Newhouse, the former chairman of Condé Nast, who died in 2017. He purchased the piece for an undisclosed amount in 2000. In the Christie’s catalog, Meyer, a longtime adviser to the Newhouse family, describes the day the media magnate decided to buy it. “We sat on the windowsill, and he looked at the transparency and exhaled loudly,” Meyer writes. “Then he handed it back and said, ‘I’ll take it.’ I looked at him and asked, ‘Don’t you want [to] see it first?’” Newhouse replied that he’

What Did Jackson Pollock Hope to Accomplish With This Dizzying Drip Painting, Which Just Sold for a Record-Breaking $181 Million?

Key takeaways

More in publications