Lavender Mist (Number 1, 1950)

The subtractive test meets an all-over field differently from a composed one. Take away the dark web and the field has no skeleton and no depth. Take away the pale and there is no mist, and the lavender of the name cannot form. Take away the aluminium and the surface loses the glint that keeps it shifting as the viewer moves. Each layer is indispensable. The scale is compelled: the field must be larger than the eye’s span at the distance the body stands, or it becomes a pattern seen whole. But at the level of the single skein the test is passed too easily: a given loop, here or a hand’s width over, could be otherwise without loss. Necessity of the whole, much less of the part.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Disclosure through image counts as fully as disclosure in words, and three propositions can be stated and hold. A picture can be the record of an act in time and still be one image: every line is the trace of the arm’s speed and the paint’s weight, and the whole reads at once. Order does not require a centre: equilibrium is reached with no focus and no hierarchy, every part of the field equal to every other. And control and abandon are one act: the pours read as free and are never out of hand, as the painter told Time in four words, “NO CHAOS DAMN IT”. These are propositions about making and perceiving, not about a human life outside the studio, and much of what the canvas gives is a state, the haze its name gives, which ranks below a meaning.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Elevation is real and sustained rather than recurrent. At the distance of a few steps the dark web dissolves and the field becomes light: a pale, warm haze with a cold metallic glint in it and no edge the eye can settle on. Closer, it becomes energy: lines thrown, pooled and flicked, crossing at every scale from a thread to a stripe, so that the eye keeps travelling and never arrives. The two distances alternate as the viewer moves, and the alternation is the rising. It is lyrical and vast at once, a cloud or a nebula without being either; it has no terror, and its grandeur is of extent, not of weight. What holds it below the top is frequency: an all-over field has no summits to recur, and the height is one height held, not a height reached again and again.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Pollock had built myth into his canvases of the early 1940s, the guardians, the she-wolf, Pasiphaë, the totem. By 1950 the figures were gone from the surface, or, as has been reported and cannot be shown, veiled under the pour; what is veiled is not on the canvas to be scored. What the canvas carries is evoked. The rite of the floor, the painter moving round and into the canvas as the sand painters of the American Southwest worked, which he himself invoked, made the painting and is not legible in it. The cosmos, the web and the mist of creation are brought by the viewer. Little on the surface is built as archetype, and the particular stays wholly particular, acquiring little beyond its own act.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The inheritance: the easel picture, brush on upright canvas, figure on ground, the composed rectangle with a centre and a frame, which Cubism and Mondrian had flattened but not abandoned; nearer, Surrealist automatism, the poured experiments of the Siqueiros workshop of 1936, which Pollock attended, Ernst’s swinging can, and the small all-over pourings of Janet Sobel. The departure: the canvas on the floor, the brush lifted off the surface, house enamels and aluminium paint, a field with no centre and no edge, the image as the trace of the whole body. The stake was public: the method drew ridicule in the press, and the painter’s standing rested on it. Held below the top because this canvas does not make the swerve; it perfects one made in 1947. It is the turn at its most assured, not the turn.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Would another form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. Paint it with a brush and the line becomes drawing, deliberate and of the wrist; the work would know composition, not an act. Make it small and the field becomes an object seen whole, a pattern, and the body’s scale and the eye’s loss of edge go with it. Give it a centre and the equality of every part, which is its knowledge of order, is gone. Remove the layering and the depth without perspective goes too, dark behind pale and dark in front of it. Held a step below the top because the form completes a method the painter had found and practised for three years, and part of what this canvas knows, the method already knew.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Evidence over promise: seventy-six years of return, and the terms reversed more than once. Greenberg read the poured field as optical, a flatness for the eye. Rosenberg’s action painting, though it did not name him, made the canvas the arena of an act. Kaprow, two years after the painter’s death, read it as the door to environment and event. Later critics turned it horizontal, base and bodily, and others measured its textures and claimed a fractal order, a claim that remains disputed. The questions stay open: whether the field is seen or performed, whether chance or control governs it, what any veiling hid, whether the lavender belongs to the canvas or to its name, whether the haze is landscape. Held below the top because most of these questions belong to the poured paintings as a group and to the method, not to this canvas alone.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is painting in New York and Europe at mid century, Abstract Expressionism in its decade. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a painting is: from a composed image to a field without hierarchy, from a made picture to the trace of an act, from the easel to the floor; this canvas, with Autumn Rhythm and One: Number 31, 1950 of the same year, is that reorganisation at full scale and full command. The discount: the reach belongs to the poured paintings as a body, and much of it was carried by Hans Namuth’s images of the painter at work rather than by any single canvas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Frankenthaler’s stained canvas and the colour field painting of Louis and Noland; Kaprow’s happenings, and through them performance; Gutai in Japan; the all-over and process work of the 1960s; and New York’s claim to the centre of painting.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole, one canvas, unaltered after the painter so far as is known, the image legible in full at seventy-six years. Presence: shown in the year it was painted and now held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington; wide, but not the widest, since the poured canvases in New York are seen and reproduced at least as much, and fame lifts the figure little. Fabric: commercial enamels and aluminium paint are materials no painter of the earlier centuries trusted, and their ageing is less known than oil’s; no damage to this canvas is known, so no more than the general risk is charged. The surface is fixed to nothing of its moment. It stands at the foot of what its age allows, the fabric’s open question holding it there.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of poured paint on a large field, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing everywhere. Viscosity: the line’s weight is governed by how thin the paint was and how fast the arm moved, from hair-thin threads to pooled skeins, and it is governed, not suffered, across three metres. Colour: the key holds edge to edge, the haze made by the eye mixing at a distance, with the aluminium as a cold counter-light. Density: even without monotony, the field neither clotting into a centre nor failing at the margins. The costs: the range of mark is narrower than a brush allows, and puddles in places sit as accident rather than decision. The command is complete within a method whose range is narrow by its nature.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: a hair-thin line thrown across the field at speed, and a pool where the paint fell thick and stood. They obey one law, the trace of the painter’s body on the surface: the line is the body’s motion carried by the paint without contact, the pool is where the hand slowed, and both are records of one presence. Every other element is that law at another speed or weight: the spatter where the hand snapped, the glint where aluminium caught. There is no figure, no edge, no second kind of image. The range runs from dark to pale and from line to stain, and nothing contradicts the law. But narrowness is not coherence: one law of mark governs one kind of field, and the axis is held for its size.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The orders held are few: the body, in the trace of the arm; consciousness, in the act of making and in the viewer’s eye kept travelling; the natural order, as process and as weather, the mist, the growth and dispersal of a field, a word the name supplies and the canvas does not state; and the cosmic, evoked only, a nebula no one painted. They are integrated, one trace read four ways. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person but the maker’s hand, no family, no labour beyond the labour of painting, no state, no history. The war and the bomb that some critics brought to the poured paintings are outside the canvas. The figure describes the form.

Score: 6.4 / 10