No. 5, 1948
An eight-by-four-foot piece of fiberboard covered with a dense web of dripped and splattered paint in yellow, brown, white, and black — the product of Pollock's "drip technique," in which he laid the canvas on the floor and moved around and over it, dripping paint from sticks and hardened brushes. The resulting pattern has no visible focal point, no hierarchy of gesture, and no representational content. It is pure process made visible.
No. 5, 1948 is the defining example of Abstract Expressionism and the most famous product of the movement that shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York after World War II. It sold for $140 million in 2006, briefly making it the most expensive painting ever sold. Pollock's working method — performance and physical immersion in the act of painting — established the precedent for all subsequent art that treated process as content.
Pollock developed his drip technique in Springs, Long Island, in 1947-1948, as New York was establishing itself as the capital of Western art following the displacement of the Parisian avant-garde by World War II. The CIA covertly funded the exhibition of Abstract Expressionism internationally during the Cold War as evidence of American cultural freedom contrasting with Soviet socialist realism.