Posted by Some movies fascinate us for a set of totally different reasons. It can be the plot, the cast, the surprising ending, or the action. The Accountant, the 2016 film with Ben Affleck, has all the elements above. Still, people got caught by one single detail that discloses the beauty of the plot: the painting by Jackson Pollock the protagonist hides in his van. Let’s discover what it is and what are the other paintings in the movie.
You can watch the official trailer for The Accountant here on Youtube.
What’s the Pollock painting in The Accountant movie, and how much is it worth?
The painting owned by the protagonist in the movie The Accountant is called Free Form and was painted by Jackson Pollock in 1946. You can watch it below.
Free Form is considered the first “drip” painting by Jackson Pollock, the debut of the creative style that will become Pollock’s artistic trademark. It’s exposed at New York’s MoMa: you can find the page dedicated to this painting on their official website.
In the movie, the painting has a considerable role: the protagonist, the accountant, considers it the most precious thing he owns, and he doesn’t want to sell it. How much is that painting worth? It’s hard to answer this question: as we know, paintings that made the history of art like this one are sold in prestigious auctions, and the price is mainly driven by how much the buyers want to own that painting. Pollock’s Free Form is not for sale. But to have a reference, in 2006, another painting by Jackson Pollock, No. 5, 1948, was sold for the record-breaking price of $140 million. Considering that Free Form is more significant as the first painting he made with this style (and years have passed since 2006), the painting we see in The Accountant could be worth more than $150 million.
Pollock’s drip painting technique, which he developed during the late 1940s and early 1950s, had a significant impact on the art world. His innovative approach challenged traditional notions of painting and opened new avenues for artistic experimentation and self-expression. You can discover more about him in the article below.
Two other paintings have an important role in The Accountant: one is Woman with a Parasol and Small Child on a Sunlit Hillside, painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1874-76, exposed at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (here is the official page); the other one is A Friend in Need, one of the paintings commissioned to Cassius Marcellus Coolidge in the early 1900s as part of the Dogs Playing Poker series (you can watch it here on Wikipedia).
The paintings owned by the accountant represent a value only the protagonist (and a few others) can understand. He received them as a form of payment, but they obviously have a personal significance for the protagonist: it’s one of the reason why he would probably never sell his Pollock.
