Posted on 05/19/2026 7:38:27 AM PDT by BenLurkin
A Jackson Pollock artwork, described as one of history's "first truly abstract paintings", has sold at auction for $181m (£135m) in New York.
Number 7A, 1948, which went under the hammer at the renowned Christie's auction house on Monday, smashed the previous record for the most a work by the late American artist has taken at auction.
Christie's called Number 7A, 1948, which depicts black drips of paint with touches of red on a huge canvas spanning more than three metres, a key piece of art history.
"It is with this work that Pollock finally frees himself from the shackles of conventional easel painting and produces one of the first truly abstract paintings in the history of art," it wrote in its description of the piece online.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
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The drop cloth I have used for the last 30 years of painting my walls has more artistic value.
It is a gullibility test.
LMAO! Perfect.
The CIA sponsored him with a goal of demoralizing he Soviets. Turned out they demoralized America.
If it is truly abstract art, then what is it meant to be an abstraction of?
Actually. Hunter’s paintings show more skill and creativity than this garbage.
I dont get it- van gogh yeah, but not pollock paintings. Yeah, they do show a fo4m of understanding about composition, bu5 beyond that basic art painciple 8n his paintings, what is there? Certainly not color, tone, contrast etc (there is a bi5 of contrast ie black on white, but no complex contrast)
There was a girl who did these kind of drip paintings, BUT she usee many colors to great effect, and created almost surreal worlds with the carefully dripped splotches. They were actually very inter3sting paintings.
Rothko paintings look simplistic, but when viewed up close, they show some really neat blending and subtle shifts in color that are something to behold it is said. They almost look childish at first, but study8ng the technique shows they are anything but. Many many thin layers 5o allow under layers to show through and subtly change the color and an advanced understanding of color.
I just dont get pollok paintings at all
I feel the same way about the stuff I see at craft fairs all the time - if I can easily figure out how they did it, it (as you said) ain't art.
Insanity.
So what you are saying is that Hunter Biden has better poop?
Jackson Pollock used a revolutionary “drip technique”—often called action painting—to create his multimillion-dollar masterpieces. By laying large, unstretched canvases on his studio floor, he dripped, poured, and flung industrial paint using sticks, trowels, and stiffened brushes, allowing him to work from all sides and incorporate his entire body into the artwork.
Pollock’s method was deeply physical, described as a dance-like, energetic, and rhythmic movement where he would walk around and enter the canvas, making the process of creation as important as the finished work.
Instead of using traditional artist oil paint, he used liquid household enamel and metallic paints, allowing them to flow and form complex networks of colors.
He abandoned traditional focal points, covering the entire canvas with intricate webs of paint that avoided any specific top or bottom, giving a sense of rhythmic continuity.
While his work appears accidental, Pollock maintained control over the paint’s flow by manipulating its viscosity and the speed of his gestures, arguing that his technique was deliberate, not accidental.
By abandoning the easel and paintbrush, Pollock revolutionized American art in the late 1940s and early 1950s, creating iconic works such as Number 5, 1948, which has sold for over $140 million.
Like all those 'Mattress Firm' stores.
Nobody needs that many damned mattresses.
Precisely.
Looks like my overly damp basement wall…
Looks like the inside of my toilet bowl when my IBS hits.
True story. In my sixth grade class at elementary school I made a painting similar to this using different colors. For whatever reason my teacher liked it so much she wanted to buy it. I sold it for a dollar believing I had truly ripped her off. Later on in my yearbook one of my friends wrote : ‘Sell some more yuck for a buck!’
Or... Is it instead, the rug that he spilt his paint on while painting this masterpiece?
Yea, but I bet you can’t make a giant chrome spoon like the paid millions for in Spain.
Correct. It is crap. I actually went to a museum here a few years back and they had a big 8-foot by 12-foot white canvas on the wall. No paint, no anything and the asking price was $500k. I got looks from all around when after standing there for several minutes looking at it, I turned to my son and said in a not quiet voice, “that is bullshit, not art”. Next to it was a bunch of FedEx boxes that had been pulled from a garbage can and randomly torn apart and glued back to together. They only wanted $25K for that crap.
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