Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948 is a thunderstorm of paint. White fog hovers between black skeins. Pink and red sparks burst through. And at the heart of this vast nine-foot canvas is a glowing, almost electric blue.

No one could say exactly where that blue pigment came from. Now, with a little help from lasers and chemistry, scientists have finally cracked the mystery.

A Pigment With a Secret History

Researchers from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Stanford University scraped tiny samples of the blue paint and fired lasers at them. They used Raman spectroscopy, a technique that makes molecules vibrate in ways that produce a unique chemical “fingerprint.”

The results showed that Pollock had used manganese blue, a synthetic pigment first made in 1907 and sold commercially starting in the 1930s. The pigment is famous for its clear blue, a result of how it manipulates light. It absorbs both green and violet wavelengths, leaving behind a radiant turquoise unlike anything found in nature.

“It’s really interesting to understand where some striking color comes from on a molecular level,” said study co-author Edward Solomon of Stanford University during an interview with the Associated Press.

“While Pollock was not aware of the underlying excited-state exchange interactions that produce manganese blue’s unique hue,” the authors wrote in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “they nonetheless created the color that he intuitively chose to create the dynamic contrast and depth of Number 1A” (Artnet).

For artists, manganese blue was once a staple. For builders, it was a trendy additive in pool cement. By the 1990s, though, it disappeared from the market due to environmental concerns.

Science Meets Action Painting

The new study is the first confirmed proof of Pollock’s use of this pigment.

Previous research had suggested the turquoise on Number 1A might be manganese blue, but no one had matched it directly to the canvas before. “I’m pretty convinced that it could be manganese blue,” said Rutgers University’s Gene Hall, who has studied Pollock’s paintings but wasn’t part of the new research.

Pollock painted in layers, often pouring directly from the can instead of mixing colors on a palette. This left behind raw material for scientists to sample decades later. “I actually see a lot of similarities between the way that we worked and the way that Jackson Pollock worked on the painting,” said MoMA conservation scientist Abed Haddad, a co-author of the study.

Conservators now know exactly what pigment sits on the surface of Number 1A, and that knowledge helps them understand how it might age under light, heat, or humidity. “This knowledge can be critical for developing effective strategies for display,” Haddad told Artnet.

A Notable Artist

Pollock bent over his work, circled it, stalked it, and flung paint until the canvas became a map of his own choreography. The title itself, “Number 1A,” is slyly misleading. Pollock didn’t assign numbers in neat chronological order. He added letters, revised names, and kept things ambiguous.

The choice was deliberate. By refusing to give narrative titles, he denied us easy interpretations. As art historian Steven Zucker put it, Pollock wanted to “leave the field open in a sense, so that there is room for interpretation.”

Stand close to the painting and you’ll notice details that reveal his technical bravado. A thin bead of white arcs across the canvas, squeezed in one continuous gesture from a punctured paint tube. Black handprints appear in the upper right, as if it were a paleolithic cave painting where ancient people pressed their palms against rock walls. Pollock never confirmed that he had cave art in mind, but the resonance is hard to ignore. It’s as if he collapsed millennia of human mark-making into a single surface — stone age hands meeting atomic age abstraction.

The Method in Apparent Chaos

Pollock’s abstract paintings may seem overly abstract and chaotic, but the artist once dismissed the idea that his paintings were random. He insisted they were methodical, each drip and swirl a deliberate move. Look up close and you can sense this control. The viscosity of the paint, the way skeins overlap without blending, the precision of drips that stop just short of pooling — none of this is accidental. He understood paint like a physicist understands fluids. He knew how it would spatter, how gravity would pull it, how its thickness would affect its trail. As Zucker noted, “He was a real master of paint that was being dripped, that was being splattered, that was being flung.”

This tension — between apparent disorder and hidden mastery — was what shook the art world in 1948. Pollock’s contemporaries said he “broke the ice.” He invented not just a new style, but a new category: action painting. The real art happened in the act itself, in the risk of pouring, flinging, and moving in sync with the canvas on the floor. When understood in this key, Pollock’s work suddenly makes a lot more sense, even to prosaic people like me.