Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

By 1950 Jackson Pollock had spent about three years working on the floor of a barn in Springs, on Long Island, flinging and dripping house paint off sticks and hardened brushes onto unstretched canvas laid flat. This is one of the largest works from that stretch, roughly seven by ten feet of tangled black, white, russet and blue-grey. There is no lavender in it. The critic Clement Greenberg supplied the name Lavender Mist for the overall haze the colours make together. Look along the top edge and you find Pollock's own handprints pressed into the paint, a reminder that for all the talk of chance, a person stood over this and reached in. Within a few years the method that made him famous had also boxed him in, and he mostly stopped.