I'm Miranda Escobar. I'm Class of 2019 in Yale College, and I'm an intern in the Modern and Contemporary Department.

So we are looking at "Number 13A: Arabesque." It's by Jackson Pollock, and it's from 1948. When you look at this canvas, you see these really intricate swirling webs of paint covering it. The painting has this really expansive size. It stretches across the wall of the gallery, and it almost feels like you're being absorbed into the canvas. It's taking over your point of view. Pollock is playing with shadow and light really interestingly here. The background is covered in this dark brown henna stain. And then, on top of it, he's layered a black paint as well as a darker gray. And that contrasts really interestingly with this bright white swirling color on top of it. It's really popping out at us.

Jackson Pollock is one of the founding artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement in postwar New York City. This is representative of his mature style, which was the drip paintings. What he would do is, he'd lay his canvas out in the floor of his Long Island barn. He wouldn't paint on an easel. He would stand directly over the painting, and he would fling paint across it. Sometimes he would pour directly from the can, or he'd take a wooden stick and just throw it at the canvas. And he creates these images that really reflect the energy and dynamism that he approached his painting with. That's why a lot of the time he's referred to as an action painter, because he had this revolutionary approach in which he engaged his entire body in the act of painting. He's often characterized as a painter of impulse, like he almost lets chance or automatism take control of the painting.

But I think when you look at this work, you can actually see that he did have a lot of control and that this was in many ways a very calculated process for him. One good example is if you look at the edges, he often stays within the frame of the painting. There are a few instances where he goes outside, but for the most part, it's really contained within the painting's frame. And I think that points to the sense that he had a very particular way that he planned to do this. It wasn't just, kind of, throwing paint all over the place, but rather he has this contained imagery. And I think it also begs the question of whether this image of impulse was maybe an illusion that he worked really hard to create.

The title was most likely given by one of Pollock's friends. He did not like titling his paintings with these kinds of descriptive titles. Traditionally he would call them "Number 1A," "Number 13B," whatever. So this one's "Number 13A." But his dealer at the time, Betty Parsons, said that they would be a lot easier to sell if they had descriptive titles rather than just numbers. A lot of the time, he would get some friends in the studio and asked them, what does this make you think of? And so this one got the title "Arabesque," which I think is really fitting. An arabesque is a traditional ballet form. It's when a ballerina stands on one leg with another leg extended behind her. The arabesque is not particularly dynamic, but it does relate to the act of dance. The word kind of has this very lyrical, poetic quality, even if you don't know what it means. I think that it evokes that act of dance, even if this doesn't necessarily look like a solid pose of a ballerina.