No. 5, 1948

Seen up close, No. 5, 1948 offers no resting center: thick umbers at the perimeter frame a continuous lattice where black and gunmetal lines knot and unspool, while quick ribbons of yellow streak diagonally across the field. Silvery filaments—likely aluminum paint—catch the light and slip over darker strata, confirming a stepwise choreography of layers. This centerless saturation enacts what Clement Greenberg praised as an all‑over order that suppresses hierarchy yet heightens optical unity; every inch is equally activated, so meaning resides in the pictorial system itself rather than in depicted objects ³. At the same time, the painting operates exactly as Harold Rosenberg proposed: the canvas is an arena in which to act. The arcing lines register Pollock’s swings of the arm and wrist, but the evenness of the filaments and their avoidance of big droplets show controlled flow rather than accident. Fluid‑mechanics studies confirm that Pollock managed paint speeds and heights to keep strands coherent, negotiating between chance and intention. In No. 5, 1948 the long, taut whips of yellow that cross from lower left to upper right, and the looping gray cords that skim just above them, document a series of decisions about tempo, viscosity, and direction—decisions that become the work’s content ²⁵. Pollock’s procedure also transforms the picture plane into a temporal record. You can read the layers: darker, thicker black and umber form a matted substrate; over this, lighter grays and silvers weave a cooler mesh; last, sharper yellow and rusty red punctuation puncture the web. The eye tracks these episodes like measures in music, so the painting is less an image of something than a lived sequence of gestures. That is why viewers often sense both anxiety and exuberance here: the density at the center compresses energy while the elastic yellow arcs release it outward. The work thus mirrors postwar uncertainty—not by symbol but by structure—while asserting a will to create order from turbulence ¹²⁴. Scholars have noted that vestiges of figuration sometimes persist in Pollock’s late‑1940s matrices. In No. 5, 1948, however, any head‑ or body‑like hints dissolve before they settle, reinforcing the painting’s commitment to process over iconography. What remains legible are material facts: enamel and aluminum on fiberboard; the large 8‑by‑4‑foot scale that demands bodily movement; the floor‑based method developed in Springs, New York. Even the work’s biography intensifies its meaning: damaged in delivery and then reworked, No. 5, 1948 literally embodies revision by action, folding contingency into its final surface ⁴⁶⁷. As a landmark of Abstract Expressionism, the painting consolidates multiple breakthroughs at once: all‑over composition, action as subject, and a modern industrial palette that mixes earthy umbers with metallic grays. Its influence is twofold—formal and methodological. Formally, it validates the entire surface as field; methodologically, it legitimizes process as narrative. In No. 5, 1948, Pollock shows that a painting can mean by how it is made, and that is precisely why the work continues to anchor debates about authorship, control, and the limits of pictorial representation ²³⁴⁵.