Pollock’s Number 1a: Unveiling Secrets With Raman Spectroscopy

Making use of a technique called Raman spectroscopy to study the molecular makeup of the painting’s pigment, the paper’s 5 writers– from Stanford College, City University of New York, and MoMA’s preservation department– identified manganese blue, an artificial paint prominent in the 20th century before being terminated in the 1990s due to environmental issues associated with its manufacture.

Manganese Blue in Pollock’s Masterpiece

A vanished selection of manganese blue paint is among the lots of inextricable ingredients of Jackson Pollock’s 1948 masterpiece Number 1A, according to the authors of a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The almost nine-foot-wide canvas, splattered with paint that evokes an expansive holy ambience, is a mainstay in the bursting galleries of the Gallery of Modern Art in New York.

A description of the paper from PNAS distills the searching for into fascinating if inscrutable terms: “Excited-state exchange communications produce multiple absorption features that filter nonblue light. This highlights the ability of molecular inorganic pigments to leverage ligand field effects to produce several visible absorption features and lattice electrostatics to adjust the shade.”

Conservation Insights from Pigment Analysis

The exploration stands to help conservation initiatives around a painting that will hopefully be the resource of further study for a very long time. As MoMA conservation researcher Abed Haddad toldArtnet News: “It provides understandings into the development of the artist’s method and to contextualize the work within the body of work and recognize trends in the manufacture and use of certain colorants with time. This knowledge can be critical for establishing reliable techniques for display, given that numerous pigments are delicate to environmental elements such as extreme light, ultraviolet radiation, and changes in humidity.”

“It’s really interesting to understand where some striking shade comes from on a molecular level,” Stanford chemist Edward Solomon informed the Associated Press. Musicians use the striking shade to which he referred; it is utilized also in various other applications, including tinting concrete for pool.