The Golden Rectangle and No. 5, 1948, Jackson Pollock

Successive Golden Rectangles dividing a Golden Rectangle into squares (the No. 5, 1948, Jackson Pollock).

No. 5, 1948 is an abstract painting by Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956), an American painter known for his contributions to the abstract expressionist movement. The painting was done on an 8' x 4' sheet of fiberboard, with thick amounts of brown and yellow paint drizzled on top of it, forming a nest-like appearance. Studies by Taylor, Micolich and Jonas have explored the nature of Pollock's technique and have determined that some of these works display the properties of mathematical fractals; and that the works become more fractal-like chronologically through Pollock's career. They even go on to speculate that on some level, Pollock may have been aware of the nature of chaotic motion, and was attempting to form what he perceived as a perfect representation of mathematical chaos - more than ten years before Chaos Theory itself was discovered. Even though some experts have pointed to the possibility that he (Pollock) could have simply been imitating popular theories of the time in order to give his paintings a depth not previously seen.

List of most expensive paintings
In November 2006 Pollock's "No. 5, 1948" became the world's most expensive painting, when it was sold privately to an undisclosed buyer for the sum of $140 million. The previous owner was film and music-producer David Geffen. It is rumored that the current owner is a German businessman and art collector.

A golden rectangle is a rectangle whose side lengths are in the golden ratio, one-to-phi, that is, approximately 1:1.618. A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle, that is, with the same proportions as the first. Square removal can be repeated infinitely, which leads to an approximation of the golden or Fibonacci spiral.

Fibonacci numbers (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34...) are a sequence of numbers named after Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci. The first number of the sequence is 0, the second number is 1, and each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers of the sequence itself.

See also: Jackson Pollock: Action Painting. by MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art.
“I have extraordinary experience of these structures. Drawing on that experience, I do believe that Pollocks are geometry fractal." Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals.