Full Fathom Five

Full Fathom Five, painted in 1947, stands as one of Jackson Pollock's earliest and most complex drip paintings, marking a decisive break from conventional technique. Rather than applying paint with a brush, Pollock poured and dripped oil across the canvas laid flat on the floor, building up layer upon layer of tangled skeins in blacks, whites, greens, and silvery grays. What distinguishes this canvas from his other poured works is the deliberate embedding of real objects — nails, tacks, buttons, a key, coins, cigarettes, and matchsticks — into the still-wet surface, turning the painting into something closer to a physical record of the artist's studio life.\n\nThe title, borrowed from Ariel's song in Shakespeare's The Tempest describing a corpse transformed beneath the sea, hints at the painting's brooding, submarine atmosphere. The all-over web of marks creates a sense of infinite depth, as though the viewer is looking through fathoms of dark water. Gifted by Pollock's patron Peggy Guggenheim to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the painting measures approximately 129 by 76 centimeters. It remains one of MoMA's most studied works, having been the subject of a major conservation project that revealed extraordinary detail about Pollock's layering process and material choices.