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Painting in the Round

This article considers Mural in tandem with Jackson Pollock’s collaborations with the architects Peter Blake, Marcel Breuer, and Tony Smith. The aim is to show how this commission for Peggy Guggenheim freed the artist to engage with an eclectic European legacy, one that included émigré artists as diverse as Piet Mondrian, Frederick Kiesler, and Hans Richter, who variously troubled ideas about medium specificity in order to establish space as an expansive force-field defined by something other than enclosure. The text is organized around three specific works: Mural (1943) and the consequences of the Getty’s decision to give the painting a subtly shaped stretcher; Mural on Indian Red Ground (1950) installed at Breuer’s Geller House I, the only other architectural commission that Pollock ever realized; and Number 29, 1950 (1950), an experiment in painting on glass that the artist created while being filmed by Hans Namuth. Together, these works show how Pollock came to understand painting’s status as a wall and the conditions governing its installation in the kind of open plan, glass architecture popularized by Mies van der Rohe in the United States at mid-century.