The huge painting “Number 1a” by Jackson Pollockfrom 1948, since then the secret of the blue pigment has hidden: in fact, over the years several studies have identified the red and yellow pigments that are part of its main palette, while The vibrant blue of the painting has long remained indefinite. This until the famous “action painting”, currently exposed to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was not exposed to spectroscopic light.
Even just by observing the “number 1a” you can immediately notice details that make the Pollock painting unmistakable: the typical style of the “drip” paintingThat is, flow from above, the imprints of the artist’s hands at the top right, or even the “title -non -title” represented by a simple number -habit that the artist Lee Krasen, his wife, explained to be a way to make the observers concentrate only on painting -, and not least the vibrant colors that have always intrigued scholars and art enthusiasts.
The study published in the US magazine Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has established that This blue is a synthetic pigment Vibrant known as “Manganese blue”. To identify the exact origin of the pigment, the researchers took fragments of blue painting and used laser used to spread the light and measure the vibration of the painting molecules. This provided them A unique chemical imprint for colorwhich identified just as “Blue of Manganese”: it is the first confirmed test of the use of this specific blue by Pollock.
This pigment has often been used by artists (as well as for color the cement of the swimming pools) because it is equipped with high stability in light, temperature and humidity. In the 90s, however, it was gradually eliminated for environmental and safety reasons: the eaten of barium, this is the scientific name of the pigment, is in fact toxic (by inhalation), which is why it has been replaced by new industrial compounds that produce the same color.
