Sea Change (rotated)

Chaos seems to rule this canvas at first, with tangled black lines whipping across the surface and splashes of blue, orange, and pink peeking through the tangle. The thick, crusty texture catches the light in surprising ways, and that roughness is no accident. Jackson Pollock, the American painter behind this piece, mixed small pebbles right into his paint. He was famous for laying his canvas flat on the floor and dripping, pouring, and flinging paint across it, a method he called "action painting." He wanted to feel like he was inside the work, moving around all four sides as if the whole thing were a kind of dance.

Beneath these wild layers hides a secret. Pollock started with a more ordinary picture on this canvas, then poured his signature drips over the top, mostly covering what came before. The title "Sea Change" came from the critic Clement Greenberg, who borrowed the phrase from Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and its line about something turning "into something rich and strange." That name fits perfectly for a painting that reinvented itself one layer at a time, becoming something entirely different from where it began.