{"id":73976,"date":"2025-09-19T19:54:16","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T19:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/73976\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T19:54:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T19:54:16","slug":"scientists-crack-the-secret-behind-jackson-pollocks-vivid-blue-in-his-most-famous-drip-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/73976\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Crack the Secret Behind Jackson Pollock\u2019s Vivid Blue in His Most Famous Drip Painting"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" <\/a>Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948<\/p>\n

Jackson Pollock\u2019s Number 1A, 1948 is a thunderstorm of paint. White fog hovers between black skeins. Pink and red sparks burst through. And at the heart of this vast nine-foot canvas is a glowing, almost electric blue.<\/p>\n

No one could say exactly where that blue pigment came from. Now, with a little help from lasers and chemistry, scientists have finally cracked the mystery.<\/p>\n

A Pigment With a Secret History<\/p>\n

Researchers from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Stanford University scraped tiny samples of the blue paint and fired lasers at them. They used Raman spectroscopy, a technique that makes molecules vibrate in ways that produce a unique chemical \u201cfingerprint.\u201d<\/p>\n

The results showed that Pollock had used manganese blue, a synthetic pigment first made in 1907 and sold commercially starting in the 1930s. The pigment is famous for its clear blue, a result of how it manipulates light. It absorbs both green and violet wavelengths, leaving behind a radiant turquoise unlike anything found in nature.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really interesting to understand where some striking color comes from on a molecular level,\u201d said study co-author Edward Solomon of Stanford University during an interview with the Associated Press.<\/p>\n

\"Jackson <\/a>Jackson Pollock, action painting
<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile Pollock was not aware of the underlying excited-state exchange interactions that produce manganese blue\u2019s unique hue,\u201d the authors wrote in a paper published in\u00a0Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/a>, \u201cthey nonetheless created the color that he intuitively chose to create the dynamic contrast and depth of Number 1A\u201d (Artnet).<\/p>\n

For artists, manganese blue was once a staple. For builders, it was a trendy additive in pool cement. By the 1990s, though, it disappeared from the market due to environmental concerns.<\/p>\n

Science Meets Action Painting<\/p>\n

\"Laser <\/a>In this photo provided by researchers, lasers are used to determine a chemical fingerprint of samples of the blue paint from the Jackson Pollock painting \u201cNumber 1A, 1948\u201d in Stanford, Calif. Credit: Alexander Heyer \/ AP.<\/p>\n

The new study is the first confirmed proof of Pollock\u2019s use of this pigment.<\/p>\n

Previous research had suggested the turquoise on Number 1A might be manganese blue, but no one had matched it directly to the canvas before. \u201cI\u2019m pretty convinced that it could be manganese blue,\u201d said<\/a> Rutgers University\u2019s Gene Hall, who has studied Pollock\u2019s paintings but wasn\u2019t part of the new research. <\/p>\n

Pollock painted in layers, often pouring directly from the can instead of mixing colors on a palette. This left behind raw material for scientists to sample decades later. \u201cI actually see a lot of similarities between the way that we worked and the way that Jackson Pollock worked on the painting,\u201d said MoMA conservation scientist Abed Haddad, a co-author of the study.<\/p>\n

Conservators now know exactly what pigment sits on the surface of Number 1A, and that knowledge helps them understand how it might age under light, heat, or humidity. \u201cThis knowledge can be critical for developing effective strategies for display,\u201d Haddad told Artnet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A Notable Artist<\/p>\n

\"Jackson <\/a>Jackson Pollock,\u00a0One: Number 31\u00a0(1950) on display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Credit: MOMA.<\/p>\n

Pollock bent over his work, circled it, stalked it, and flung paint until the canvas became a map of his own choreography. The title itself, \u201cNumber 1A,\u201d is slyly misleading. Pollock didn\u2019t assign numbers in neat chronological order. He added letters, revised names, and kept things ambiguous. <\/p>\n

The choice was deliberate. By refusing to give narrative titles, he denied us easy interpretations. As art historian Steven Zucker put it, Pollock wanted to \u201cleave the field open in a sense, so that there is room for interpretation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stand close to the painting and you\u2019ll notice details that reveal his technical bravado. A thin bead of white arcs across the canvas, squeezed in one continuous gesture from a punctured paint tube. Black handprints appear in the upper right, as if it were a paleolithic cave painting where ancient people pressed their palms against rock walls. Pollock never confirmed that he had cave art in mind, but the resonance is hard to ignore. It\u2019s as if he collapsed millennia of human mark-making into a single surface \u2014 stone age hands meeting atomic age abstraction.<\/p>\n

The Method in Apparent Chaos<\/p>\n

Pollock\u2019s abstract paintings may seem overly abstract and chaotic, but the artist once dismissed the idea that his paintings were random. He insisted they were methodical, each drip and swirl a deliberate move. Look up close and you can sense this control. The viscosity of the paint, the way skeins overlap without blending, the precision of drips that stop just short of pooling \u2014 none of this is accidental. He understood paint like a physicist understands fluids. He knew how it would spatter, how gravity would pull it, how its thickness would affect its trail. As Zucker noted, \u201cHe was a real master of paint that was being dripped, that was being splattered, that was being flung.\u201d<\/p>\n

This tension \u2014 between apparent disorder and hidden mastery \u2014 was what shook the art world in 1948. Pollock\u2019s contemporaries said he \u201cbroke the ice.\u201d He invented not just a new style, but a new category: action painting. The real art happened in the act itself, in the risk of pouring, flinging, and moving in sync with the canvas on the floor. When understood in this key, Pollock\u2019s work suddenly makes a lot more sense, even to prosaic people like me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948 Jackson Pollock\u2019s Number 1A, 1948 is a thunderstorm of paint. White fog hovers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73977,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[267],"tags":[365,362,363,364,28976,366,18,117,19,17,42130,38555,1520],"class_list":{"0":"post-73976","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-blue","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-ireland","18":"tag-jackson-pollock","19":"tag-paintings","20":"tag-pigment"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}