Greyed Rainbow

This is a very large painting, about six feet tall and eight feet wide, made with oil paint on linen, a woven cloth often used instead of cotton canvas. At first it looks like a dense web of paint with no single subject. There is no obvious figure, landscape or object. Black, white, gray and silver dominate the surface, and lines cross it in every direction. Your eye moves around rather than settling in one spot. The painting is abstract, which means it shows no recognizable scene. It is about paint and movement itself.

Look closely at how the paint was put down, because it varies a great deal across the surface. In some places you will see thick chunks of paint that were squeezed straight from a tube, standing up from the cloth. In other places, look for thin, wandering lines that seem to meander like threads. Now move your eye to the bottom third of the painting. Under a thin covering of gray, there are hidden colors: orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Look for faint traces of them showing through.

Jackson Pollock made this painting in 1953, near the end of his life. He died in 1956. Since the late 1940s he had been dripping, pouring and splashing paint onto large canvases. He often skipped the brush and used sticks, trowels and palette knives. The thin lines here were poured from a container with a small hole in it, or squirted from a baster, which is a kitchen tool like a large dropper. He also worked with the canvas laid on the floor or fixed to a wall, not standing on an easel.

Greyed Rainbow is among the last great purely abstract paintings Pollock made. It is considered a quintessential example of action painting, a way of working where the artist's physical gestures become the subject. The painting has no clear beginning or end, and no obvious top or bottom. It suggests that it continues beyond its edges and surrounds the person looking. The title most likely refers to the covered colors of a rainbow. Spend a little longer at the lower part of the painting, and see how much color you can find beneath the gray.