The Myth of the Drip: What Jackson Pollock’s Number 15, 1948 Doesn’t Say

There’s a particular hush that settles over a gallery when people stand in front of a Pollock. You can feel it, the reverence, the readiness to be impressed. The hush isn’t awe so much as expectation. The viewer is meant to feel something important, even if they don’t know what that something is. Number 15, 1948, housed quietly at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, carries that expectation like inherited gravity. It’s small, just over two feet by three, and painted not on canvas but on paper, enamel poured and flicked in black, white, and a few obedient dabs of red, yellow, and blue. The wall label calls it “full of energy and freedom.” That’s the kind of line museums use when they’re not sure what else to say.

Pollock once claimed that when he painted, he wasn’t aware of what he was doing. The painting, he said, “has a life of its own.” For decades, that quote has been treated like scripture, proof that genius can transcend intention. But if we take him at his word, if he truly wasn’t aware of what he was doing, then why should we be? Number 15, 1948, invites that heresy. Look at it without the frame of mythology—without the Life magazine spread that anointed him “the greatest living painter in America,” without Clement Greenberg’s essays, without the CIA’s cultural subsidies that turned Abstract Expressionism into Cold War proof of American freedom. You’re left with a piece of paper spattered with paint. The emperor, once again, is very gestural, but quite possibly unclothed.

Pollock’s technique, for all its supposed rebellion, is rooted in an old modernist hunger: to invent a language of marks that doesn’t need to represent anything. He abandoned the easel, laid his surface on the floor, and let enamel drip from brushes, sticks, and sometimes directly from the can. The gesture was dramatic enough to photograph. That mattered. In the post-war years, photography and film became accomplices to the myth; Hans Namuth’s 1950 photos of Pollock mid-pour are still the most persuasive works of art he ever produced. They make the painter look like a priest of motion, summoning creation from chaos. The trouble is that once the performance ended, the paintings themselves had to carry the weight of revelation, and many, like Number 15, 1948, simply can’t.

This one begins in darkness. A black ground first, then white enamel dripped onto the wet surface so that the pigments feather and bleed, softening into gray where they meet. A few primary colors come after, little stabs of red, yellow, and blue that keep the composition from flattening into monochrome. But the pattern never resolves. There is rhythm, yes, but no discovery, no shift of temperature or tone. The eye skims across a busy field and finds nothing to anchor to, no tension beyond the act of movement itself. For a painting that’s supposedly about freedom, it feels curiously trapped in its own technique, an experiment that has become a formula.

The art world mistook that formula for transcendence. Critics of the time, desperate to prove that New York could out-modern Paris, declared Pollock a revolutionary. In truth, he was a symptom of the moment’s insecurity. America needed its own avant-garde, something to erase the inferiority complex of provinciality. Pollock’s drips arrived as both product and proof: the U.S. could now export a culture as incomprehensible as Europe’s. Even the chaos was marketable. A new mythology took root, equating accident with authenticity, speed with sincerity, and opacity with depth.

It’s no coincidence that Number 15, 1948, is on paper. These smaller works were often studies, trials of motion before he scaled up to the grand gestures of One: Number 31 or Blue Poles. On paper, the enamel soaks into the fibers, bleeding slightly at the edges and softening what, in larger paintings, becomes a crust of hardened loops. The material's intimacy exposes the method's emptiness. Without monumental scale, there’s nowhere for the myth to hide. The surface doesn’t thunder; it whispers, and the whisper says: Is this really all?

There’s a generosity in admitting that maybe it is. Pollock’s contemporaries, Rothko, de Kooning, Newman, sought transcendence through color, form, or gesture, but at least they wrestled with imagery, with the threshold of meaning. Pollock removed even that struggle. His defenders call that purity; I see abdication. Art can be elusive, but it must still offer something to engage: a problem, a perception, an argument. Number 15, 1948, offers none. It’s less a dialogue than a shrug, an early sketch of the aesthetic nihilism that would later dominate galleries where blankness became bravery.

The longer you look, the more the painting seems to describe the conditions of its own making, a man circling a floor, searching for significance and mistaking movement for revelation. That’s not a crime; it’s just not transcendence. The real miracle came later, when museums, critics, and collectors managed to convince the public that such movements were messages, that raw gesture could substitute for thought. Pollock didn’t just drip paint; he dripped legitimacy over a void, and the void learned to sell tickets.

I don’t mean to mock the believers. Every age chooses its idols. Ours happen to value immediacy over meditation, spectacle over structure. Pollock anticipated that economy of attention long before social media gave it form. In that sense, Number 15, 1948, might be prophetic after all: a prototype of art as performance, meaning displaced by myth. When we admire it today, what we’re admiring isn’t the painting, it’s our capacity to be told it matters and to comply.

If there’s beauty here, it lies not in the paint but in the pause it provokes when you finally stop pretending to see what you’re supposed to see. In that moment of disbelief, you reclaim the one thing modern art tried hardest to take from you: discernment. Pollock’s drips are now seventy-seven years old, and they still test whether we dare to call emptiness by its name. Number 15, 1948, isn’t a portal into the unconscious or a dance of freedom. It’s the residue of motion, canonized by convenience, a relic of the moment when we decided that noise was enough.

1 Number 15, 1948 by Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956). Enamel on paper, 22 ¼ × 30 ½ in. (56.52 × 77.47 cm). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia. Modern and Contemporary Art Collection. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur S. Brinkley, Jr. Object Number 78.2. © Jackson Pollock / Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image reproduced under fair use for the purposes of scholarly criticism, review, and cultural commentary in accordance with 17 U.S.C. §107.