In the late 1940s Jackson Pollock developed a revolutionary form of Abstract Expressionism by dripping, pouring, and splashing paint onto large-scale canvases. Pollock emphasized the expressive power of the artist’s gestures, materials, and tools, often applying paint with sticks, trowels, and palette knives instead of brushes. He also challenged the concept of easel painting by working on canvases placed either on the floor or fixed to a wall. With no apparent beginning or end, top or bottom, his paintings imply an extension of his art beyond the edges of the canvas, engulfing the viewer. Among the last great purely abstract paintings Pollock made before his untimely death in 1956, Greyed Rainbow is a quintessential example of action painting. The paint application ranges from thick chunks squeezed directly from a tube to thin, meandering lines poured from a container with a small hole or squirted from a baster. The work is predominantly black, white, gray, and silver; in the bottom third of the canvas, however, Pollock thinly concealed orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. The title of the work presumably refers to these grayed sections of hidden color.
Date
Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.
Rudolph Arnheim, “Accident and the Necessity of Art,” “Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism” 16, 1 (September 1957), fig. 4 (ill.), as “Grayed Rainbow.”
Frank O’Hara, “Jackson Pollock,” Great American Artists (George Braziller, 1959), pl. 81 (ill.).
Bryan Robertson, “Jackson Pollock” (Harry N. Abrams, 1960), p. 96, pl. 167 (ill.), as “Grayed Rainbow.”
“Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago” (Art Institute of Chicago, 1961), pp. 359, as “Grayed Rainbow,” 391 (ill.).
David M. Robb and J. J. Garrison, “Art in the Western World,” 4th ed. (Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 635–36, 637, fig. 545 (ill.), as “Grayed Rainbow.”
Faber Birren, “History of Color in Painting” (Reinhold Publishing, 1965), p. 360, pl. 15-20 (ill.).
René Huyghe, ed., “Larousse Encyclopedia of Modern Art” (Prometheus Press, 1965), fig. 816 (ill.), as “Grayed Rainbow.”
“Instituto de Arte de Chicago,” El mundo de los museos (Madrid: Editorial Codex, 1967), pp. 16 (ill.), 84–85 (color ill.).
Francis V. O’Connor, “Jackson Pollock,” exh. cat. (Museum of Modern Art, 1967), p. 69, as “Grayed Rainbow.”
“72nd American Exhibition,” exh. cat. (Art Institute of Chicago, 1976), fig. A (ill.), as “Grayed Rainbow.”
William Rubin, “Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition, Part II,” “Artforum” 5, 7 (March 1967), pp. 30–31 (ill.), repr. in Pepe Karmel, ed., “Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles and Reviews” (Museum of Modern Art/Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 137.
B. H. Friedman, “Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible” (McGraw-Hill, 1972), p. 206, as “Grayed Rainbow.”
“Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago” 70, 1 (January/February 1976), p. 18 (ill.).
Francis V. O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, eds., “Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works” (Yale University Press, 1978), vol. 1, pl. 42 (color ill.); vol. 2, cat. 370 (ill.).
Franz Schulze, “Society for Contemporary Art: 1940-1980” (Art Institute of Chicago/Congress Printing Company, 1980), frontispiece (color ill., detail), pp. 26, 35–36, 50 (ill.), as “Grayed Rainbow.”
“Jackson Pollock,” exh. cat. (Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1982), pp. 206–207 (color ill.), 303–04 (photo).
Simon Wilson, “Review: Jackson Pollock at the Beauborg,” “Burlington Magazine” 124, 950 (May 1982), p. 321.
George H. Roeder, Jr., “What Have Modernists Looked At? Experiential Roots of Twentieth-Century American Painting,” “American Quarterly” 39, 1 (Spring 1987), p. 77 (ill.), as “Grayed Rainbow.”
James N. Wood and Katharine C. Lee, “Master Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago” (Art Institute of Chicago/New York Graphic Society Books and Little, Brown and Company, 1988), p. 149 (color ill.), as “Grayed Rainbow”; 2nd ed., James N. Wood (Art Institute of Chicago/Hudson Hills Press, 1999), p. 149 (color ill.).
Ellen G. Landau, “Jackson Pollock” (Harry N. Abrams, 1989), pp. 223, 230 (color ill.).
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, “Jackson Pollock: An American Saga” (Clarkson N. Potter/Crown Publishers, 1989), pp. 716, 731.
Claude Cernuschi, “Jackson Pollock: Meaning and Significance” (Icon Editions, 1992), pp. 194–95, 200, fig. 82 (ill.).
Susanne Rother, “Der Regenbogen: eine malereigeschichtliche Studie” (Böhlau, 1992), p. 130, fig. 35 (color ill.).
James N. Wood, “Treasures of 19th- and 20th-Century Painting: The Art Institute of Chicago (Abbeville Press, 1993), p. 302 (color ill.), as “Grayed Rainbow.”
Jonathan Fineberg, “Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being” (Prentice Hall, 1995), p. 98, as “Grayed Rainbow”; 2nd ed. (Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 98, as “Grayed Rainbow.”
Madeleine Grynsztejn and Dave Hickey, About Place: Recent Art of the Americas, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1995), 37, fig. 28 (ill.), as “Grayed Rainbow.”
Larry Smolucha, “The Visual Arts Companion” (Prentice Hall, 1996), fig. 1.8 (ill.).
James N. Wood and Teri J. Edelstein, “The Art Institute of Chicago: Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture” (Hudson Hills Press, 1996), p. 103 (color ill.).
James Elkins, “Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis” (Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 13, 15, fig. 5 (ill.), as “Grayed Rainbow.”
“Society for Contemporary Art: 1940–2000, 60th Anniversary” (Society for Contemporary Art/JNL Graphic Design, 2000), p. 4, as “Grayed Rainbow,” pp. 82–83 (color ill.).
James T. Valliere, “Interview with Clement Greenberg,” March 20, 1968, printed in Helen A. Harrison, ed., “Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock” (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 255.
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, “Jackson Pollock: New Oils,” February 1–27, 1954, no cat.
Art Institute of Chicago, “61st American Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture,” October 21–December 5, 1954, cat. 122, as “Grayed Rainbow.”
Art Institute of Chicago, “15th Annual Society for Contemporary American Art Exhibition,” April 27–May 30, 1955, no cat.
Art Institute of Chicago, Two Centuries of American Art, 1750-1950, Oct. 1, 1959–Jan. 10, 1960, no cat.
Art Institute of Chicago, “26th Annual Society for Contemporary American Art Exhibition,” April 8–May 10, 1966, no cat.
Sold, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, to the Art Institute, 1955.
Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.
