1

Jackson Pollock
Art as a Search for Meaning

Elizabeth L. Langhorne

This manuscript is the original English version of what was later translated by Karsten Harries and
published in a reworked German version as
JACKSON POLLOCK - KUNST ALS SINNSUCHE: Abstraktion, All-Over, Action Painting (Havel Verlag,
2013).
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For Karsten

Cover: Pollock, Untitled (Icarus), c. 1946. Gouache on cardboard, 23 7/8 x 18 7/8". Collection of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, Berlin.
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Jackson Pollock
Art as a Search for Meaning

Introduction: Spirit and Form

1. “What it is about”
2. Authenticity and Kitsch
3. Through Flames and Thorns to Ineluctable Flatness
4. In Search of the Spiritual in Art

Section I An American Dream

Chapter 1. “The Story of my Life”
1. Self-Portrait in a Bowl
2. American Meanings
3. Mother
4. Hopes for an Awakened Humanity
5. The Return of Quetzacoatl
6. “Il Duco”

Chapter 2. Jung or Picasso?

1. Desmoiselles d’Avignon
2. The Challenge of Guernica
3. The Artist and his Therapist
4. Art and the Task of Self-Integration

Chapter 3. Indian Allies

1. The Plumed Serpent
2. Totem War
3. A Strange Self-Portrait
4. The Artist as Shaman

Section II Alchemy
Chapter 4. Magic Mirror
1. Primitive Art and Picasso
2. Challenging Mondrian
3. The Spiritual in Art
4. The Three John Grahams
5. The Hermetic Tradition
6. Looking into the Magic Mirror
7. What Graham could See

Chapter 5. Girl before a Mirror Revisited

1. Another Girl before another Mirror
2. The Golden Flower
3. A Stage for Visual Thinking
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4. “I am Nature”

Chapter 6. Surrealist Narratives

1. Dreams of the Androgyne
2. A New Myth?
3. Astral Light

Chapter 7. Stenographic Figure

1. Mondrian’s Nod
2. Automatism
3. Miro
4. Magic Numbers

Chapter 8. Alchemy of Pouring I

1. The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle
2. The Story of the Dagger
3. Alchemy as Painting
4. Collage
5. Pouring
6. The Contract

Section III The Quest

Chapter 9. The Beast
1. She-Wolf
2. Guardians of the Secret
3. Wounded Animal
4. Pasiphae
5, Mythmaking

Chapter 10. Success and Night Journey

1. Mural
2. Aesthetics
3. The Image
4. Night Series

Chapter 11. Totem Lessons or Rites of Renewal

1. Words of Praise
2. Return of the Bird Man
3. "Offering of Smoke"
4. Challenging Freud
5. Totem Mother
6. Totem Lesson II

Chapter 12. Line, Paint, and Abstraction

1. Kandinsky
2. Engravings
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3. Rhythmic Currents
4. Towards a Non-Figurative Art
5. The Dynamic of Line
6. Paint and Abstraction
7. “I choose to veil”
8. Non-Objectivity

Chapter 13. Development of the Foetus

1. Marriage
2. The Child Proceeds
3. The Little King
4. The White Angel

Chapter 14. The Key

1. The Key
2. Waterbull
3. Going Abstract

Section IV The Labyrinth

Chapter 15. The Blue Unconscious
1. The Blue Unconscious
2. The Wedding of Line and Paint
3. Gooey Materiality
4. “That’s for Clem”
5. Shimmering Substance
6. The Rebirth of Painting

Chapter 16. The Alchemy of Pouring II

1. Pouring
2. “technique is the result of a need”
3. The Role of the Image
4. In a New Key
5. Structure
6. Lucifer

Chapter 17. “The effort of the dance”

1. Possibilities
2. The Sublime
3. Binding Freedom
4. Cut-Out: a new image of Man?

Chapter 18. Into the Labyrinth

1. Arabesque
2. Enamel
3. Yet another key
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4. Infinite Labyrinths

Chapter 19. The Dance

1. Musicality
2. The Crisis of the Easel Picture
3. Mimesis
4. The Erotic Dance

Chapter 20. Nature and the Museum

1. The Model
2. Mies van der Rohe’s Museum for a Small City 1942
3. Painting as Architecture
4. A “Dream of Space”
5. False consciousness?
6. A Social Contract

Chapter 21. The One and the All

1. Fame
2. The Role of Nature
3. One

Chapter 22. Homecoming

1. Art for Art’s Sake
2. Action Painter?
3. “It”
4. Mythic Illustrator?

Chapter 23. An Audience

1. The Church Project
2. Art and Life
3. Life
4. Films

Chapter 24. Portrait and a Dream.

1. Portrait and a Dream
2. Black and White: Human Pathos
3. “Womb with a built-in tomb”
4. Bassesse

Chapter 25. Search

1. Blue Poles. Aesthetics?
2. Easter and the Totem. Dream of renewal
3. Undertow of death
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4. A modern tragedy
5. Search

Chapter 26. Epilogue

Image Credits
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Introduction
Spirit and Form

1. “What it is about”
Lee Krasner tells how on a windy winter's night in 1942, she and Jackson Pollock
were walking their friend, the painter John Graham, home to his studio on Greenwich
Avenue. They were practically blown into a short figure in an overcoat down to his ankles
whom Graham embraced and introduced as Frederick Kiesler. In turn Pollock was
introduced as "the greatest painter in America." Kiesler in mock obeisance made a slow,
elaborate bow to the ground, rose and asked, "In North or South America?"1 Graham was
not altogether wrong. By now Pollock’s place in the canon of great artists is secure. But
just what makes him deserving of that place remains a question. How are we to understand
the significance of this art?
Just this question was raised in a dinner conversation around 1953. The painter
Nicholas Carone was pressing Pollock, "People understand the painting -- talk about the
technique, the dripping, the splattering, the automatism and all that, but who really knows
the picture, the content? … Well, who? Greenberg?" Pollock replied, "No. He doesn't
know what it is about. There's only one man who really knows what it's about, John
Graham."2 The challenge presented by this remark is apparent, given the way Clement
Greenberg’s criticism has shaped and in large measure continues to shape the discussion
of Pollock’s art, even when critics resist it. But if Greenberg did not know what his art was
about, what did Pollock think he was up to? What did Graham, this Russian expatriate,
painter, connoisseur, theorist, vocal advocate of modernist painting understand that
Greenberg didn’t? His book of aphorisms System and Dialectics of Art (1937) had an
underground following among his young friends in the New York art world, a group that
included Stuart Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, Lee Krasner, David Smith, Mark Rothko,
Adolph Gottlieb, and also Jackson Pollock. There Graham pronounced abstract painting
"the highest and most difficult form of painting." 3 He oracled, "Creation is the production
of new authentic values by delving into the memories of immemorial past and expressing
them in terms of pure form (in space and matter) in order to project them into the clarities
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of the future."4 The pure forms of an abstract art were to produce new values for a destitute
world. But where were such values to originate?
For an answer Graham looked to the unconscious. “The unconscious mind is the
creative factor and source and the storehouse of power and of all knowledge, past and
future. The conscious mind is but a critical factor and clearing house.” 5 Graham points to
primitive art and to Picasso, who is said to possess “the same ease of access to the
unconscious as have primitive artists -- plus a conscious intelligence.”6 Mysticism is said
to be provide another means of access. Graham called himself a magus, and in 1943 began
to sign his canvases not Graham, but "Ioannus Magus Servus Domini.”7 Eventually this
interest in esoteric ideas was to lead Graham away from abstraction: thus while in 1937 he
claimed that "culture as a process is the evolution of form," later he would proclaim
symbolic images to be a "secret, sacred language … in adoration, evocation, conjuration
of this world's forces or spirits." 8 But even in System and Dialectics of Art Graham had
been heading in this direction: "the highest power humanity has ever developed is the
power of vision, divination, evocation … power creative, power advancing directly from
point to point without the tedious procedure of logical argumentation, the power of the
unconscious organized." 9 Given such imperious impatience with logic, it’s easy to see why
sober art historians find it difficult to take Graham’s magical approach to abstract art
seriously, preferring to look elsewhere for the true significance of Pollock’s art.

2. Authenticity and Kitsch

How much more satisfactory Clement Greenberg’s approach to abstract art had to
seem. In a series of articles written for The Nation and then for Partisan Review (1939-
1955), Greenberg told a story about abstract art in which Pollock’s art came to be hailed as
the cutting edge. Old academies that clung to techniques of realistic imitation failed to
recognize and address the important issues of the day. For Greenberg the enemy was
kitsch, “the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture,” mass-produced for
sale to the newly urbanized masses of Western Europe and America who, having lost
contact with their old folk cultures, now demanded at least some form of culture: “popular,
commercial art and literature with their chromotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads,
slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc.,
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etc.” While the formal aspects of high culture had earlier demanded reflection of its
audience, what such art offered was pre-packaged, cultural pabulum. “Kitsch,” Greenberg
railed, “is vicarious experience and faked sensations. … Kitsch is the epitome of all that
is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers
except their money -- not even their time.” What could resist this growing wave of kitsch,
which threatened to become “the first universal culture ever beheld”?10 In 1939 Greenberg
concluded that the only authentic art capable of speaking in its own voice and of resisting
banality or fakery would have to be abstract.
Building on foundations laid by Lessing in his Laokoon (1766), Greenberg wrote
“It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided
with all that was unique in the nature of its medium." 11 This process tended toward
abstraction. Greenberg understood such exploration as demanded by aesthetics, the
philosophical inquiry into the essence of art and beauty that came into being with the
Enlightenment. Sculpture was to affirm its three-dimensionality; painting, to discover what
was unique to it, had to divest itself of the three-dimensional sculptural illusion. Was such
illusion not the basis of realistic imitation and “literary” narrative in art, which so easily
could lead to kitsch? Purely aesthetic values now provided the criteria by which painting
was to be judged. As Greenberg was to put it in “Modernist Painting”: "It was the stressing
… of the ineluctable flatness of the support that remained most fundamental in the
processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism." 12
Pollock’s art is given its own place, and a splendid place it is, within this account.
In the shallow spatial tensions of Cubist painting Greenberg located a challenge to such
young American painters as Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, and
Jackson Pollock. “The first problem these young Americans seemed to share was that of
loosening up the relatively delimited illusion of shallow depth that the three master Cubists
-- Picasso, Braque, Leger -- had adhered to since the closing out of Synthetic Cubism.”13
Already by February 1947, just before the abstract poured paintings, Greenberg thought
that Pollock had successfully met this formal challenge: "As is the case with almost all
post-cubist painting of any real originality, it is the tension inherent in the constructed,
recreated flatness of the surface that produces the strength of his art." 14 In the January 1948
review of the first poured paintings, he speaks of: “style, harmony, and the inevitability of
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[their] logic. The combination of all three of these latter qualities … reminds one of
Picasso’s and Braque’s masterpieces of the 1912-15 phase of cubism.”15 In 1961 he
elaborated: “I do not think it exaggerated to say that Pollock's 1946-1950 manner really
took up Analytical Cubism from the point at which Picasso and Braque had left it when, in
their collages of 1912 and 1913, they drew back from the utter abstractness for which
Analytical Cubism seemed headed. There is a curious logic in the fact that it was only at
this same point in his own stylistic evolution that Pollock himself became consistently and
utterly abstract.”16
Greenberg’s account does not fail to appreciate the emotional power of Pollock’s
paintings: “Pollock’s superiority to his contemporaries in this country lies in his ability to
create a genuinely violent and extravagant art without losing stylistic control. His emotion
starts out pictorially; it does not have to be castrated and translated in order to be put into
a picture.”17 Aesthetic transposition of emotion is complete. Upon occasion Greenberg
might chide Pollock for metaphysical pretensions. In his February 1, 1947 review, while
asserting that Pollock, as a master of "recreated flatness," is the equal of the great European
painter Dubuffet, Greenberg yet qualifies such praise: "where the Americans mean
mysticism, Dubuffet means matter, material, sensation, the all too empirical and immediate
world -- and the refusal to be taken in by anything coming from outside it. Dubuffet's
monochrome means a state of mind, not a secret insight into the absolute; his positivism
accounts for the superior largeness of his art.” A positivist approach to material is judged
superior, as is the leaving behind of literary subject matter.
Greenberg senses a similar intention in Pollock. "Pollock has gone beyond the
stage where he needs to make his poetry explicit in ideographs.” Greenberg does not deny
that this art speaks to us, even if what it has to say remains, as it should, elusive. “What he
invents instead has perhaps, in its very abstractness and absence of assignable definition, a
more reverberating meaning.” Content is present; Pollock, not Dubuffet, has “more to say
in the end.”18 We are left to wonder just how Greenberg would have us understand this
“more” to which positivism apparently cannot do justice. But about his opinion there could
be no doubt: in his February 19, 1949 review of Pollock’s second exhibition of poured
paintings Greenberg called Pollock “one of the major painters of our time.” 19 Pollock had
to be satisfied with Greenberg’s criticism!
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Only in his last major assessment of Pollock’s achievement within the larger
context of a general assessment of “‘American-Type’ Painting,” written a year before
Pollock’s death in 1956, did Greenberg announce a shift in allegiance to the color-field art
of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. Still he called “one of the most
important and original painters of our time -- perhaps the most original of all painters under
fifty-five, if not the best.”20 Pollock was 43. With this judgment Greenberg remained true
to the rigor of his aesthetic convictions: he had often criticized Pollock for his deficiency
as a colorist and his dependence on his draftsmanship in black and white in order to
maintain pictorial tension.21 In the 1955 essay he points to Pollock’s monumental abstract
paintings of 1950 as the peak of his achievement precisely because he had managed there
to pulverize such contrasts. Reversing his earlier approval of the 1951-52 paintings where
Pollock had reintroduced figuration into his art, Greenberg now wrote: “as if in violent
repentance he [Pollock] did a set of paintings in black line on unprimed canvas.” 22
Aesthetic logic left the “repentant” Pollock out in the cold, where we are left to ask: why
such repentance?

3. Through Flames and Thorns to Ineluctable Flatness

Even some 50 years later the force of Greenberg’s aesthetic logic was manifest in
the orchestration of the 1998 retrospective of Pollock’s art at the Museum of Modern Art.
"Bringing together so many different pictures from Pollock's glory years" is "perhaps the
biggest accomplishment of the retrospective," Kimmelman wrote in the New York
Times.23 Seeing in a cluster of 1950 paintings "the great museum moment," Paul Richards
in The Washington Post wrote, with some justice, that the curators Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe
Karmel "so constructed their display that you have had to climb through the mud and
flames and thorns of Pollock's urgent early visions to get here …." 24 The dazzle of the
1947-50 paintings is made to appear miraculous. In the accompanying catalogue,
addressing the movement from image to abstraction as Pollock entered his mature phase,
Karmel writes that Pollock's "early work derives with almost painful obviousness from
Picasso and Miro … but, astonishingly, within a few years he had discovered a way to go
beyond his masters." 25 Varnedoe links such discovery to an "escape from iconic
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symbolism."26 The conviction remains, as Greenberg first put it in 1947, that “a more
reverberating meaning” is to be found in the more abstract works of 1947-50.
In the writings of Michael Fried Greenberg’s aesthetic machinery gained new force.
Greenberg had long been interested in that “optical illusion” at which Analytic Cubism had
arrived in its destruction of academic shading and perspective and which he saw Pollock
as recouping in 1947-50 in a practice now “consistently and utterly abstract." 27 In 1965
Fried celebrated this utter abstraction, which transforms such a painting into a
homogeneous field that takes its leave from all recognizable objects. To distinguish it
"from the structural, essentially tactile pictorial field of previous modernist pointing from
cubism to de Kooning and even Hans Hofmann," Fried called such painting "optical,"
because it was addressed "to eyesight alone." 28 This places Pollock securely in a history
of modernist painting that emphasizes the turn to the eye to be found already in the art of
Manet and the Impressionists. 29
As one might expect, such a modernist aesthetics, which would have art culminate
in optical purity, provoked resistance: the tactile presence of Pollock’s paint is too
obstrusive. One forceful exponent of this is Rosalind Krauss. In The Optical Unconscious
(1993) she provides an "alternative reading that could undo the 'dominant' one from
within."30 Finding Greenberg’s and Fried’s notion of opticality impossibly pure, she
focused on the materiality of Pollock’s fields of paint. For Krauss, the visual logic that
governed Greenberg’s modernist analysis served to repress a fundamental fact about
Pollock’s abstract paintings of 1947-50. They had been created, as had certainly been
noted at the time, by the startlingly novel technique of pouring paint down onto canvases
positioned horizontally on the floor of his studio. Pollock’s willful rotation of the pictorial
axis from vertical to horizontal, she argues, opened up horizontality as a new “medium” in
art at large, and thus produced artistic progeny. 31 This willful rotation she sees as
subverting Greenberg’s modernist aesthetics, indeed any healthy future for modernist easel
painting.32 Pollock’s “low materialism” leads not to paint atomized into an optical purity,
but to paint that asserts its substantial materiality, its propensity to lose formal
differentiation, and thus its expressive capacity to deal with the body and its desires. 33
Pollock’s poured lines are not “angelic,” Greenberg’s phrase, so much as avalanches of
matter, that cancel figuration and bury any underlying structure. 34 Caught “in a battle of
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hatred and envy” with his mentor Picasso, Pollock strikes out at Picasso's figure, moving
from figure to non-figure, his vengeful weapon the formless nature of automatism. 35 Thus
Pollock's pictorial legacy becomes an "erotics" whose "body will never be reconstituted,
whole."36 But such a negative interpretation of Pollock’s embrace of the materiality of
paint fails to do justice to its spiritual significance.
The material aspects of Pollock’s poured painting continue to receive attention in
the writings of T. J. Clark, but here with the intention of expanding rather than subverting
Greenberg’s modernist aesthetics, at the same time recovering something of the passion of
the young Greenberg’s Marxist, more precisely Troskyite, pathos, so evident in “Avant-
Garde and Kitsch.” Here Greenberg did want to preserve at least a trace of art’s former
meaning. Clark embraces Greenberg’s material positivism. “… it seems to me that Pollock
would have understood -- and in large measure responded to -- the accompanying stress in
Greenberg’s criticism, on painting as a form of positivism, and modernism as materialist
deep down.”37 Here materialism is not a “low materialism,” rather a positivist materialism
in tension with Pollock’s “Gothic-ness.”38 Through “Gothic-ness” Clark broaches once
again the question of content and authenticity in art. Any artist is to be commended for
striving, in a world ever more riddled with kitsch, “to register,” in Greenberg’s words,
“what the artist makes of himself and his experience in the world.”39 In Pollock’s case this
entails qualities Greenberg “rightly found in Pollock’s painting in 1946 and 1947 -- the
‘Gothic-ness, paranoia and resentment,’ the ‘morbid’ atmosphere, the wish to be ‘wild and
extravagant’ ….”40 But however much Clark might admire some of Pollock’s early
paintings as among the best of the twentieth century, he does not endorse this “Gothic-
ness.” Rather with a vehemence that matches that of Varnedoe and Karmel, he writes of
Pollock’s early figuration: “The attempt to remake them ‘out of the unconscious’ had led,
as it often did, to amateur theatricals, portentous, overstuffed, and overwrought.…
Abstract painting was a way out of the mess.”41 What Clark failed to see was that abstract
painting here did not so much offer a way out of this mess, as it transposed this earlier work
into a new, more abstract, key.
Making distinctions Greenberg had not been forced to make, Clark warns us that
even abstract painting is not immune to kitsch. The titles of Pollock’s first poured paintings
in 1947, Watery Paths, Enchanted Forest, and of the last poured paintings in 1950,
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Lavender Mist, One, Autumn Rhythm, may indeed suggest the nature kitsch that Clark
finds lurking there, out of which the abstract works seem to arise and into which they later
settle.42 For Clark, at any rate, today such a sense of oneness with and fulfillment in nature
is kitsch.43 In this modern scientific world positivism, not some occult metaphysics, reigns,
and to pretend otherwise is simply false consciousness. Clark deems Pollock at his most
authentic when he either despairs of plenitude and creates such “dissonant” works as the
Cut-Outs44 or in the face of despair creates his most “wild and extravagant” works in 1948
and 1949.45 Brilliant and complex in his mark-making, Pollock here pushes to escape
nature altogether toward non-nature, to escape figuration or the body toward script, “a
script none of us has read before” that speaks of “a new order of experience.” 46 If
authenticity is to prevail, Pollock’s material skeins must speak of something beyond nature,
beyond what we know, even if that something in the end turns out to be nothing. 47 It’s
either this or kitsch. The more effectively they counter the threat of kitsch, the more they
are rendered mute. It is not surprising therefore that the last chapter on an individual artist
in Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism should have been
given to Pollock, who once again is made to mark the end of the story of modern painting.
Clark suspected kitsch whenever a modern artist embraced nature. But must we
accept Clark’s understanding of the relationship of art to nature? As I will show, the
relationship of Pollock’s art to nature is much more ambiguous, and Clark fails to do justice
to that ambiguity when he says the art teeters all too often on the edge of kitsch. It would
be more accurate to say that such work manages to touch the sacred.
Clark, too, forces us to question the presupposition that authentic art today must be
for art’s sake. For the idea to which Clark bids a sad farewell is the socialist dream of a
free society that he, like the young Greenberg, takes to have fired modernist art. For that
dream, he suggests, our capitalist world no longer has room. But does the socialist dream
and its failure offer the key to Pollock’s project and its sad end? What is the relationship
of the failure of that dream to the pursuit of art for art’s sake? Has modern painting, as
Clark suggests, really come to an end? 48 And if so, in just what sense? Pollock’s art
especially raises such questions. In this context Pollock’s claim that Graham, not
Greenberg, had an insight into his art becomes significant. It invites us to rethink the future
of art in very different terms.
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4. In Search of the Spiritual in Art

Needed is an alternate reading that can undo the dominant modernist one, not “from
within,” but from without, challenging its presuppositions. Graham’s “hocus-pocus” or
“kookiness” does indeed make it too easy to dismiss him. But while Graham himself might
have been “kooky” -- I shall return to him in a later chapter -- he points to and draws on a
stream in art that pre-existed the aesthetic approach embraced by Greenberg and has never
quite disappeared. Art here refuses to surrender what Hegel considered its highest
vocation: to “bring home to consciousness and express spiritual truths of widest range.” 49
In this sense I want to call this second stream “spiritual.” In the past this spiritual tradition
had first of all tied art to religion. And if we have now left behind gods, maybe even God,
must we not still address these deepest interests, which include dreams of happiness, what
people hope for and fear, sex, love, and death? Does the rise of modern rationalism, and
the claim that reason alone is the way to truth and the good life, force art to renounce such
service and to serve only art? Or is there perhaps, precisely because of that rationalism and
positivism endorsed by Clark, a need for art to reclaim what Hegel once called its “highest
vocation”? Wassily Kandinsky lamented that “The nightmare of materialism, which turned
life into an evil, senseless game, is not yet passed; it still darkens the awakening soul.” 50
In response to this nightmare, he laid out in his manifesto Concerning the Spiritual in Art
his hopes for a rediscovery of the spiritual through art, whether through realistic or abstract
forms.
Such a return to spirituality, Greenberg and others might well protest, invites a
return to kitsch, a false return to a past that lies behind us, return to Christianity and other
religions, to primitive culture, to nature. Pollock was pursued by thoughts of all three. But
isn’t this dimension of Pollock incompatible with modernism and modernity? With the
Enlightenment the old master narrative died, as reason was put in the place of God. To put
anything else in His place is to erect some golden calf. Greenberg’s and Clark’s aversion
to kitsch is supported by a fear of a side of ourselves that we have learned, for good reasons,
to be suspicious of. Kitsch as false consciousness is but one step away from the golden
calf. Jung, to whose psychology and archetypal symbols Pollock owed a great deal,
became tainted with Nazism. Should art, however tangentially, serve such masters?
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Greenberg and others had good reason to be suspicious of a spirituality all too often
entangled with false consciousness. But I do want to question whether positivism can claim
to govern the values of art.
This book attempts to show that Pollock’s art challenges many of the
presuppositions that have been brought to bear on it -- and on art. Painting with Pollock
was not just creating works of art, but a struggle to seize and communicate “spiritual truths
of the widest range.” This struggle and its difficulty become the real content of this art. In
it, they become image.
Pollock’s remark that Graham was the only one to understand the poured paintings
places them in the context of his quest for meaning. Even the abstract poured paintings,
those works which seem most amenable to Greenberg’s aesthetic approach, are not, as
Greenberg recognized, without meaning, possess indeed a profoundly “reverberating
meaning.” One teenager at the 1998 Pollock retrospective at MOMA called them
“awesome.” What did she respond to? A viewer often begins looking for figures, anything
recognizable around which one might begin to weave an explanation. Sometimes Pollock
himself rewards such a viewer with, for instance, hand imprints stretching out of the web
in the upper corners of Number 1A, 1948. A human presence one exclaims! But one does
not even need such literal clues to experience the poured paintings as hieroglyphs, their
hidden meaning still to be deciphered. Nor does one need Karmel’s recent proof of
figurative images underlying two of Pollock’s poured paintings, revealed by high-tech
analysis of films of Pollock creating the poured paintings.51 The taut energies, the sudden
turns, a lyrical release, a puddling, all these we experience as human markings. They have
not just presence, but mean. But what do they mean?
Interpretation of the reverberating meaning of these paintings necessitates a turn to
context. The most important context is Pollock’s own evolving quest for meaning,
available first of all in the progress of his art production. The titles that Pollock himself
gave the figurative paintings are first pointers: Moon Woman 1942, Moon Woman Cuts
the Circle 1943, Totem Lesson I 1944, Totem Lesson II 1945. We respond to such titles
as to fragments of a story, one that Pollock seems to be telling himself. Close attention to
Pollock’s imagery as it occurs in a given painting, as it develops from canvas to canvas,
and as it is explored in related drawings, reveals the vocabulary of his art. Even private
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doodles deserve attention, as little things, footnotes, asides, often provide clues to one’s
larger concerns. The figurative images Pollock created before he turned in 1947 to the
abstract poured paintings invite the question: is there anything in the figurative work that
allowed for or demanded this turn? And what in the poured paintings allowed for or
demanded the return to figuration in 1951-52?
The relevant context here is provided not just by what is present to the eye.
Pollock’s artistic quest for meaning intertwines with the story of his life, which is also the
story of a continuing and often desperate attempt to make sense of that life. Unable to
accept the authority of some public master narrative, such as the Christian story that once
held whole societies together, Pollock confronts the peculiarly modern and perhaps
impossible challenge of having to generate his own narrative, as he searches for meaning
and thus seeks to heal himself. Such a search never takes place in a vacuum. As Michael
Leja recognized in Reframing Abstract Expressionism, the artist understands himself and
his search as itself dependent on the society of which he is part and which has helped to
make him who he is.52 Here the larger artistic, as well as the cultural, social, and political
contexts become important: his mother, the Depression, the muralism of the Mexican
Marxists, theosophy, the crisis of World War II, the art of Picasso, Jungian psychology,
American Indian art and beliefs, Oriental wisdom, the art of John Graham, Surrealist
narratives, the criticism of Clement Greenberg, the art of Paalen and Hayter, the non-
objective art of Mondrian and Kandinsky, the natural surroundings of his home in The
Springs, and most importantly, Lee Krasner, the moon woman. Much of the work of
recovering this context has been undertaken by O’Connor, Friedman, Landau, Polcari,
Rushing, Leja, Naifeh and Smith, and most recently by Karmel, Storr, and Jones among
others. What has not been done is to show how these different contexts cohere in an art
that continues to challenge us because it challenges key presuppositions, not just of the still
prevailing understanding of art, but also of our spiritual situation. Pollock was right.
Graham did have a better understanding of what most deeply concerned him than
Greenberg and those who followed him. The story of Pollock’s quest is a story of the artist
in search of himself. It is also a story of the quest for authenticity in a disenchanted world.
 19

Section I An American Dream

Chapter 1
“The Story of my Life”

1. Self-Portrait in a Bowl

Fig. 1.1. "Story of my Life", CR 925, c. 1939. Enamel on Limoges porcelain bowl.
Diameter 11 1/8 ", depth 5".

In 1939 Pollock gave a painted ceramic bowl (CR 925, c. 1939) to Thomas A.
Dillon, a friend he had made while he was at a hospital being treated for alcoholism. He
told him that the work was "the story of my life" (fig. 1.1),53 suggesting that the bowl fits
in the tradition of self-portrayals of the artist as a young man. But this is certainly not a
 20

traditional self-portrait, such as the haunted Self-Portrait that Pollock did around 1930-33
(fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2. Untitled (Self-Portrait), c. 1930-33. Oil on gesso ground on canvas, mounted
on composition board, 7 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

Rather we are presented with a narrative that has its center in the image of a foetal baby
cupped in flames, which floats above a seascape with a sailboat and a nude figure in the
foreground. A male figure on the right stretches his bow towards two distant galloping
yellow and grey horses at the top. On the left of the bowl’s interior a seated woman bows
her head above the recumbent nude. Around the outside rim horses gallop endlessly.
If this is a sort of self-portrait, it would seem to show the artist at sea in more than
one sense. Two years earlier, when Pollock was 25, he had begun psychiatric treatment
for alcoholism with Dr. Ruth Fox. 54 That spring his infatuation with a lovely young
folksinger, Becky Tarwater, led to a proposal of marriage, which she delicately rejected, 55
precipitating a drunken binge. Such self-obliterating binges continued. In the spring of
1938, when he requested a leave of absence from the Federal Art Project of the Works
Project Administration, a Roosevelt New Deal program of which he had been a part since
August 1935, to go on a sketching trip with his teacher Thomas Hart Benton, he was
terminated instead for "continued absence." That June, at his own request, he entered the
Westchester Division of New York Hospital, known as Bloomingdale's, for treatment of
acute alcoholism. It was here that he met Thomas Dillon.
 21

As part of his therapy, he also hammered out bas-relief figures on a copper plaque
in a circular design. The theme Pollock told his doctor, the Freudian psychiatrist Dr. Wall,
was "the cycle of man" (fig. 1.3). As in the painted ceramic bowl, a child is at the center
of the design, this time held by a nude couple; to the right an adolescent figure with arm
outstretched moves away from the family. On the rim of the plaque he completed the cycle,
“moving away from infancy and parents,” with four scenes, depicting, as Dr. Wall
describes it, "mating, the chaos of life and death at top, man
helping another to the left, and death at the base. I can hear him talking now as he pondered
this out."56 In a spiraling design Pollock depicted the universal flow of life -- with which
he, however, was experiencing difficulty.

Fig. 1.3. The Cycle of Life, 1938. Oxidized copper plaque, diameter 18 ". Collection John P. Axelrod,
Boston.
 22

Striking are the ways in which the more personal and private “story of my life”
deviates from “the cycle of man.” Now the images speak of his own progression through
life, his dreams, hopes, and fears. Referring to the three notebooks of drawings that Pollock
made as he was breaking free from his teacher Benton (Sketchbooks I and II date from c.
late 1937-39, Sketchbook III from c. 1936-39),57 Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife, later was to
say: “For me all of Jackson’s work grows from this period; I see no more sharp breaks, but
rather a continuing development of the same themes and obsessions.”58 In “the story of
my life” bowl Pollock attempts to take stock of these themes and obsessions. But what is
the significance of the central image: a foetus in flames?
Jackson was born January 28, 1912 in Cody, Wyoming -- the last of a family of
five boys. But a few weeks after his birth, Roy and Stella Pollock undertook the first of
nine moves made before Jackson’s sixteenth birthday. The oldest boy Charles recalled,
"My mother was the restless one. She was always looking for greener pastures." 59 After
an unsuccessful effort to settle in San Diego, the Pollock family established itself in August
1913 in a small adobe house on their own twenty-acre plot of land six miles east of Phoenix
in Arizona. Roy, an introspective, serious man, thrived as a farmer. His sons later
described him as "a craftsman of the soil" 60 with a strong belief in the "higher power of
nature."61 Jay remembered that at the sight of a beautiful sunset, his father never failed to
"look up from his plow and stare until it was gone." 62 But the idyll was not to last: in 1917,
when stiff competition made it ever harder to succeed as a dairy and produce farmer, Stella
made up her mind that the family should sell the farm and seek a better living and better
education for her boys elsewhere.63 Against his wishes and better judgment, Roy
capitulated. Frank's, the third of the sons, assessment: "It was the end of my dad." 64 He
tried fruit tree farming in Chico, California, and when that failed due in part to the rising
Depression, Stella and Roy sold the farm at a loss. Deciding to start over yet once more, 65
they moved to the grim environment of Janesville, California, located on the eastern slopes
of the Sierra Nevada, clad in tall pines and in winter often snowbound.66 There, with clear
title to only a few extra acres of sheep grazing land and a few cherry trees, they bought the
heavily mortgaged hotel, the Diamond Mountain Inn. Stella did most of the work, cooking
 23

and tending to the crews of surveyors who passed through. The father, reduced to tending
his few acres, had become increasingly alienated from his family, had taken to drinking
too much, and finally, by the spring of 1921, left Janesville with a group of surveyors. Jack
was just nine. Roy maintained contact with the family and occasionally visited, but he
never lived with them again. In his sons' eyes the father remained blameless. 67
Roy had seen work on the Phoenix farm as a way of making men of his boys. His
father, Frank remembered, "was a no-nonsense man, stern but just. He didn't have any
trouble with us kids. We were well behaved, had our own chores …." 68 When the boys
walked to the fields, they walked in order of age, Roy in front with the horse, Charles next
with the plow, Frank with a hoe, Sande with a shovel, and Jack "tagging along behind
without the dignity of even a shovel over his shoulder."69 Unlike his brothers, Jack, who
was to remain his mother’s “baby,” was never required to work.
A big-boned motherly woman, Stella Pollock dominated her house, cooking,
baking prolifically, sewing. As she had done with each of her sons, she dressed Jack in
handmade lace blouses and gowns, but knowing that Jack was her last, kept him "in
petticoats and lace" until well past his third birthday. 70 Stella did not offer her sons much
physical affection. But she over-mothered and indulged them, only seeing the best and
never criticizing.71 And she was especially fond of her “baby” Jack, 72 who in turn, even
after an afternoon's absence, would invariably ask, "Did you miss me, Mother?"73 Sande,
who had undertaken the role of his younger brother’s keeper, saw the roots of Jackson’s
problems as his "Mother in particular and family in general." 74
In 1924 what remained of the Pollock family settled in the prosperous citrus
community of Riverside, sixty miles east of Los Angeles. Charles, the oldest boy, had left
for art school in Los Angeles in 1921, where he had found Jay a job. While Frank put his
mind to finishing high school, even being elected senior class president, the two youngest
boys, Sande and Jack, were given free rein by their mother. Often skipping school to go
both sketching and rabbit hunting, they start to live out their cowboy fantasies of macho
mastery. Though neither ever owned a horse or saddle -- Jack was afraid of horses and
never learned to ride --, they bought wide-brimmed cowboy hats, buck-skin jackets, and
cowboy boots, borrowed a six-shooter and holster, and took each other's picture. In Sande's
 24

twelve-dollar Model T he and Jack began to make forays into the dry, rocky mountain
wilderness, the Mojave Desert, and occasionally to their father's cabin and road camp.
Once Sande graduated from Riverside High School and took a job in Los Angeles,
Stella and Jack also made the move in 1928 to Los Angeles. There Jack began his erratic
career at Manual Arts High. In the orbit of his art teacher Frederic John de St. Vrain
Schwankovsky, he began to nurture artistic ambitions, though from the start his skills were
deficient. Originality, he argued with Manuel Tolegian and Philip Goldstein (the future
Philip Guston), who were also in the inner circle of Schwankovsky’s disciples, did not
depend on having mastered anatomy or linear perspective. 75 Uncertainty about his own
future did not shake his swaggering self-confidence -- to impress his English teacher and
friends he called himself Hugo Pollock after Victor Hugo.76 To Charles, who had left for
New York City in 1926 to study with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League, he
wrote in January 1930 of his confusion: "my drawing i will tell you frankly is rotten it
seems to lack freedom and rhythem (sic) it is cold and lifeless. it isn't worth the postage
to send it … altho i feel i will make an artist of some kind i have never proven to myself
nor any body else that i have it in me." 77 Schwankovsky had piqued his interest in
theosophy, which urged the evolution of a new spirituality, seeking the creation of a
Universal Brotherhood. Having heard Krishnamurti, the theosophical guru and friend of
Schwankovsky, speak, Jackson toyed with thoughts of following the master to his camps
in India and Holland.78 But his family, especially Charles, reinforced his commitment to
art and school. In September 1930 he made his decision to follow in the footsteps of
Charles to study painting with Benton at the Art Students League in New York.

2. American Meanings
We are given one image of the fledgling artist by his teacher: Benton had used him
as a model for the harmonica player in the music making group in the lower left hand corner
of Arts of the West, one of the Whitney Museum of Art Library panels, a major mural
commission that Benton executed in 1932 (fig. 1.4).79 Pollock did in fact play the Jews
harp in the "hillbilly" band that met at Benton's home on Monday evenings. Coming from
a working, rural, western background, he was in a very real sense a product and part of the
very America that Benton was mythologizing in his murals.
 25

Fig. 1.4. Thomas Hart Benton, Arts of the West, 1932. Tempera with oil glaze, 7' 10" x 13' 3". New Britain
Museum of American Art, New Britain. Connecticut. Harriet Russell Stanley Fund.

In l930 when Pollock arrived in New York to study with the celebrated painter, 80
Benton was working on the first of the three major mural commissions that occupied him
amid much publicity through l933: for the New School for Social Research (l930-31), the
Whitney Museum of Art Library (l932), and the State of Indiana Exhibit at the Century of
Progress International Exhibition, Chicago (l933). 81 Pollock thought Benton "the foremost
American painter today," praising him in a letter to his father for having "lifted art from
the stuffy studio into the world and happenings about him, which has a common meaning
for the masses."82 Benton himself wrote that in painting "the scenes, behaviours and
mythologies of American life"83 he wanted "to make pictures, the imagery of which would
carry unmistakably American meanings for Americans and for as many of them as
possible."84 Benton’s great-uncle, Senator Thomas Hart Benton from Missouri, had
supported Manifest Destiny for the republican yeoman moving out across the expanding
frontier, and his father, as a U. S. congressman, supported progressive reform to preserve
republican values in face of the excesses of the Gilded Age. 85 Disillusioned with politics
as the vehicle of social regeneration, Benton found in artistic modernism, in his case a
conflation of synchromist rhythms, cinematic montage, and baroque dynamism, a vehicle
 26

capable of carrying and renewing American republican values for the masses. 86 At the
New School where his theme was America Today, he celebrated the energetic production
of the American worker that, he hoped, would generate, even in the midst of Depression,
the birth of a new America rid of speculative capitalism. He painted typical scenes in the
daily life of working men and women: The South, The Changing West, City Activities,
Mining, Steel. At the Whitney Museum of American Art he pictured America at play: The
Arts of Life in America. He chose not the fine, but the popular arts, such as gospel singing
in the South, hillbilly bands and bronco busting in the West. Such folk culture could, he
proposed, unite the American people and thus strengthen their fight against corporate
hegemony and the alienation of modern life. 87 In his version of modernist art Benton
exaggerated contours and syncopated and compressed two- and three-dimensional spatial
rhythms in an effort to capture the restless energy of American life. The vigor of Benton's
style answered to his optimism, to his belief in industrial and cultural progress: American
history was the ever-new frontier, opening up, in Frederick Jackson Turner's phrase, in
"perennial rebirth." 88
In the fabric of "American meanings" that Benton depicts in his murals of the early
l93O's we find his student Jackson Pollock seemingly at home. As his fellow students
recognized, a special bond existed between Jackson and Benton from the start. 89 From
Missouri, Benton was "the western artist." He drank, swore, fought: a "man's man"; 90 and
he held up the ideal of art as a man's activity, a welcome characterization to Jackson, given
his own father's doubts about the son’s commitment to art and about art as a means of
making a living. As Jackson put it to his brother Charles, "Dad ... thinks I'm just a bum." 91
Even though Jackson had difficulty with conventional drawing, a handicap in Benton's
class, which emphasized drawing from the human figure, his "intense interest," the
ambition to be a great artist, was what mattered most according to Benton, and "that
[Jackson] had."92 Benton appointed him monitor for his mural class in the fall of 1932.
Axel Horn, a member of the class, recalls that there was in it an "in" group, partly
westerners, that spent time with Benton outside of class, modeling for his mural and
playing in the hillbilly band. Jackson was part of this "in" group. Proud of being a
westerner, he wore his cowboy boots and hat in New York, "a perfect prototype of the man
 27

from the West. Rugged, shy, socially awkward, inarticulate …." 93 But was the shy Jews
harp-playing cowboy the real Pollock?
Benton was to be Pollock’s teacher for two and a half of the three years of his
official art school training -- he was to remain under Benton's sway until around l937-38.
In much of his early work, the watercolors, lithographs, and oil paintings that he produced
between l934 and l938, he settled on Bentonesque, that is American regionalist, 94 and for
Pollock most often rural, subject matter: Farm Workers, Cotton Pickers, Going West. But
that Benton’s “American meanings” could not encompass Pollock’s own concerns is
suggested in Going West (fig. 1.5): wearing a Stetson hat, a man rides one of the five mules
that pull two covered wagons along a mountain road; the procession winds its way around
cone-shaped mountains past a rickety store and a windmill.

Fig. 1.5. Going West, c. 1934-38. Oil on gesso on composition board. 15 1/8 x 20 7/8". National Collection
of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C.

The moody poetry of this landscape is to be found not so much in the painting of Benton
or other American Regionalists, as in the rhythms and chiaroscuro of the moonlit, cloud-
streaked skies of the nineteenth century American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. In l944
Pollock acknowledged: "The only American master who interests me is Ryder."95 Here
the silvery light of the full moon glistens on the top of the distant hills and on the backs of
 28

the line driver and his mule team, whitening the silhouette of the storefront and the
windmill. Pollock was not so much painting "the mythologies" of the American people, as
beginning to tell his own story. The motif of the line driver, mule team, and covered wagon
is taken from a photograph of Cody, Wyoming that his mother Stella had kept, the only
visual documentation of his birthplace that Jackson owned.96 The suffocating intimacy of
this moonlit scene is underscored by the oval created by the rhythmic curve of the mountain
road and the dark arc of the clouds above. The latter can even be seen as the hair of a
woman, associated with the moon, whose brow and nose are outlined by the mountains
below. With its female presence presiding over the man's westward journey, this scene
also evokes his parents’ westward moves.
In the spring of 1938 Jackson was still trying to emulate his extroverted teacher,
deciding to join him on a sketching trip to gather motifs. Instead he ended up in a hospital.
The stark contrast between “American meanings” and Jackson’s hang-ups bring us back to
the bowl, where the latter are very much in evidence. Moving from the central fiery foetus,
the rhythm of the composition descends through the curve of a lone sailboat to the larger
scene of a lone human at sea. That scene recalls the Ryderesque seascapes Pollock had
done in response to his vacations on Martha's Vineyard as a guest of the Bentons in the
summers between l931 and l937 -- six survive, among them T.P.'s Boat in Menemsha Pond
(fig. 1.6).

Fig. 1.6. T.P.'s Boat in Menemsha Pond, c. 1934. Oil on cardboard mounted on masonite, 4 5/8 x 6 3/8".
The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut. Gift of Thomas Hart Benton.
 29

T.P. was the Bentons’ son, for whom Jackson had been babysitting ever since 1931, when
T.P. was four.97 In the painting Jackson presents on the right T.P.’s boat, a splendid image
of free sailing in protected waters, on the left edge a dark and threatened sailboat on the
open sea. The overarching rhythms with which the world of land, sea, sail, and sky seen
from a bird's eye perspective is depicted, transform the little roughly 4 x 6 inch surface into
a paean to the joy of sailing. But, as in Going West, the sky contains hallucinatory images
of higher forces. The long, dark blue cloud extends itself into a crescent grasp around the
red orb of the sun, a threat amplified by the white jaws of a larger cloud directed at the tip
of the lone dark sailboat. Benton encouraged Jackson in his new vein. After Jackson's
visit to Martha's Vineyard in the spring of 1934, Benton wrote him, "I think the little
sketches you left around here are magnificent. Your color is rich and beautiful. You've
the stuff old kid -- all you have to do is keep it up …."98 Benton was aware of Jackson’s
insecurities and "blocs" concerning, not just drawing and painting, but also sexual activity.
Yet in private he and his wife insisted that Pollock was a “genius.” 99
At least with the young T.P. Jackson could imagine himself as all conquering. To
the enthralled boy Jackson told endless adventures of an imaginary boy-hero, "Jack Sass,"
who lived in a world of "wild stallions, shadowy white wolves, lost gold mines, and
mysterious unattended campfires," and "explored, solved, or conquered all these mysteries.
Jack Sass was, of course," Benton recalled in his autobiography, "Jack Pollock without the
frustrations."100 He observed that Pollock's “Western boyhood had given him a penchant
for all the spooky mythology of the West," the stuff of the tales of Jack Sass.101
Something of that “stuff” appears in the bowl telling “the story of my life.” Its
rhythm leads us from the sea scene up and to the male on the right. His position and pose
resemble the adolescent in “the cycle of man” plaque. With arm outstretched, moving
away from family towards independence, the male here takes on all the color of “Jack
Sass.” Genie-like, he rises up to hunt the galloping horses with the beautiful flowing tails,
much as Jack and his brother Sande experienced them when guided by Red, a road crew
worker like their father, in a mustang hunt in the summer of 1926. Jack was fourteen. The
hunt engraved itself in his memory. 102 Sande, Jack, two friends, and their guide Red
 30

camped at a ridge above a watering hole and descended at first light to the narrow draw
that served as a gateway to the hole where the mustangs would come to drink. From their
hidden positions they opened fire. The mustangs stampeded, roaring and bursting through
the draw, a few feet away from Sande and Jack. "We killed a few," Robert Cooter, one of
the friends, recalls mournfully. "We just walked off and left them. They were beautiful
horses, and I can't believe we could just shoot them and walk off. But we did. And I'm
ashamed of it to this day." 103 In the bowl’s romanticized evocation of the hunt, Pollock
depicts the man, not with a gun, but with bow and arrow in pursuit of the wild horses, the
embodiment of the beauty and energy of an as yet untamed nature. 104 Pollock’s
relationship to this nature is ambivalent. On the inside of the bowl the horses are hunted,
even if only with bow and arrow; on the outside of the bowl they gallop endlessly free.

3. Mother
The male figure’s yearning gesture and the galloping horses on the top of the bowl’s
inside design lead to the seated woman on the left. Here the rhythm is broken. Rather than
single-mindedly completing the circular loop of the design, it is channeled through the
woman’s flowing, fiery hair back to the foetus in the center. As a result woman seems
strangely distant in the composition: the seated woman asleep, while the extended sensual
nude below her is only visible from the back, her face buried in her hands, turned toward
the rim, both women inaccessible to the male’s yearning energy. We already know of
Pollock’s sexual “blocs,” his ineffectual proposal to Becky Tarwater. The strange
representation of the relation between woman and foetus makes one wonder about
Jackson’s relationship to his mother.
That in the l930's Jackson’s depiction of a negative dominating woman refers most
immediately to his mother is suggested by a small but powerful canvas, Woman c. l930-33
(fig. 1.7), roughly of the same time as his troubled Self-Portrait. A grotesque image of a
large nude woman with pendulous breast, splayed legs, wearing high heel shoes, is flanked
by three smaller skeleton-like figures to each side. The similarity of the image to a family
photograph (fig. 1.8) showing Mrs. Leroy Pollock, Jackson's mother, surrounded by her
husband and her five boys (Jackson to the extreme lower right), suggests that Pollock is
portraying his ambivalent feelings about his mother and her relationship to his family.105
 31

L: Fig. 1.7. Woman, c. 1930-33. Oil on the rough side of masonite, masonite 14 1/8x 10 1/2". Nagoshima
Museum, Kagoshima City.
R: Fig. 1.8. Pollock family at Chico 1917. Left to right: Sanford LeRoy, Charles Cecil, LeRoy, Stella,
Frank Leslie, Marvin Jay, Paul Jackson. Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, NY.

More than a nurturer, she becomes a force of death, making skeletons of all the men in her
life, including his father. "That old womb with a built-in tomb": thus Pollock years later
referred to his own (and every) mom. 106
In response to the maternal aspect of the seated woman in the bowl, one might well
ask: where in this “story of my life” is the father? Is Roy Pollock totally absent? Perhaps
the male figure yearning after the horses in part refers to Roy’s own thwarted relationship
to the land, to his wife, and to his sons, who all turned to art in one way or another, despite
his desire to have his boys become men doing a man’s work. Jackson addressed that desire
when, to justify his choice of art as a means of making a living, he wrote his father in
February 1932, "And when I say artist I don't mean it in the narrow sense of the word --
but the man who is building things -- creating molding the earth -- whether it be plains of
the west -- or the iron ore of Penn. Its all a big game of construction -- some with a brush
-- some with a shovel -- some chose a pen. … There are to be some mural jobs for the
new radio city which is under construction -- that's the new artist's job to construct with the
carpenter -- the mason."107 Here he invokes the ambition of both Benton and the Mexican
muralists to paint art for the benefit of the people on a large and public scale. For himself,
however, he suggests here a different direction: "Sculptoring I think tho is my medium. I'll
never be satisfied until I'm able to mould a mountain of stone, with the aid of a jack
 32

hammer, to fit my will." 108 The father had once worked as a stone mason.109 The young
Jackson now proposed to follow his example, imposing his will on matter. In the fall of
l930 Pollock had briefly studied sculpture with the stone carver Ahron Ben-Shmuel at
Greenwich House, a settlement house in Greenwich Village; in early l933, after Benton
had departed for Indiana, Jackson returned to Ben-Shmuel.110 When he heard in February
1933 that his father was seriously ill, he was able to write him that he had joined a class in
stone carving and to reiterate the seriousness of his commitment to art. It was shortly after
his father's death on March 5, that he decided to devote himself full time to stone carving. 111
From Ben-Shmuel, a thirty-year old sculptor who had assisted William Zorach and
had a reputation as an exaggeratedly masculine, tough and foul-mouthed man, Jackson
learned of the theories of Zorach and Flannagan, who denounced the traditional division
between sculptor and carver and insisted that the authentic sculptor worked directly with
his material. True sculptors, Ben-Shmuel argued, were engaged in a process of discovery,
"persistently searching in their own minds, [bringing] forth in three-dimensions their
personal and peculiar mental entrails."112 Reuben Kadish, a young Los Angeles artist
whom Pollock had first met in the summer of 1931, and who had helped Jackson fish a big
sandstone boulder from the Los Angeles river bed when Jackson was home visiting in the
summer of 1934, remembers his approach to stone: “Jack had a way of making magic out
of things. When he saw something interesting, it was created strictly for him as an artist.
… it [the boulder] took on a lot of importance; the shape appealed to him. It was a job
getting it out of the river and up the bank, but we got it into the car finally. Then we took
it to their backyard and it sat there. He was entranced by it, and each time he came back
he thought he would do something with it.”113 The magical possibilities of matter would
remain, for Pollock, tantalizing. But the only sculpture of his that survives from this period
is a four-inch tall stone mask, CR 1042: a man's face with his eyes closed (fig. 1.9).114 It
has the look of a death mask of the now irrevocably absent father.
 33

Fig. 1.9. Untitled, CR 1042, c. 1930-33. Stone, 4 x 2 7/8 x 2 3/4in. Collection Jason McCoy, NY.

4. Hopes for an Awakened Humanity

Much as Jackson liked to sculpt, 115 he found that "the material was resisting him
horribly."116 Sometime in the fall of 1933 he returned to the more malleable materiality of
paint. But, as we have seen, Benton’s “American meanings” failed to touch the pitch and
intensity of Pollock’s emotional turmoil. The politically passionate art of the Mexican
muralists he found more engaging.
Pollock had been aware of their work before he came to New York. By 1933 Los
Tres Grandes, as the three great Mexican muralists, Siqueiros, Rivera, and Orozco, were
called, were well known. From l922 through l925 they had belonged to the Syndicate of
Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, organized in Mexico by Siqueiros. As
Marxists seeking revolutionary reform, they wished to lead the Mexican proletariat to an
awareness of their national destiny. They celebrated the history of their Indian, colonial,
and revolutionary past and the ideals of revolution in giant murals on public walls. The
Syndicate was dissolved in l925 and as a result of new pressures by the government the
three came to the United States: Orozco first in 1927, Rivera in 1930, Siqueiros in 1932.117
The publicity that surrounded Los Tres Grandes was mostly due to their frequent blatant
depiction of Marxist ideas and criticism of American capitalism. Benton welcomed their
engagement. "I saw in the Mexican effort a profound and much needed redirection of art
towards its ancient humanistic functions. The Mexican concern with publicly significant
 34

meanings and with the pageant of Mexican national life corresponded perfectly with what
I had in mind for art in the U.S."118
Pollock first heard of Rivera while attending communist meetings in l929, shortly
after he had been expelled for the first time from Manual Arts High in Los Angeles. In the
summer of 1929 Charles had alerted Jackson to specific articles on Rivera and Orozco. At
the time Pollock found only the one on Rivera, commenting "I certainly admire his
work."119 In this article, titled "The Revolution in Painting," Rivera described the artist as
a worker among other workers, giving the proletariat "an epic form of art to aid its
organization and express its struggle in social reconstruction." 120 Although associated with
Trotsky, Rivera was formally the most conservative of the three Mexican muralists, his
vaguely Symbolist and Cubist forms resolving into a variant of Neo-Classicism. For
Jackson though in the early 1930s, as Lehman, one of his Manual Arts friends, remembers,
“Modern art … was Diego Rivera.”121 In 1932 Rivera received a commission for a mural
in the new radio city, Rockefeller Center, but a furor broke out in l933 when it was
discovered that he had turned the specified theme "New Frontiers" into a critique of
capitalist society and had even included a portrait of Lenin. Amid much publicity Rivera
was ordered to desist; six months later the partially painted mural was destroyed.
Meanwhile Rivera, at the New Worker's School on W.14th St., proceeded to paint a
Marxist Portrait of America in twenty-one moveable fresco panels. Pollock saw Rivera at
work on these panels in the summer of l933. 122
Pollock’s interest in mural painting must have been reinforced, and his ambition
aroused, when his old high school friend Phil Guston arrived in New York in the winter of
1935-36, flush with his recent successes, to camp out for several weeks on the floor of his
and Sande’s studio and to talk of art.123 Guston and Reuben Kadish, working together, had
just completed two major murals: one in Mexico, the other at a Sanatorium in Duarte,
California, outside of Los Angeles. The first depicted The Workers Struggle for Liberty
1934-35 (also known as Triumph of Good Over Evil or The Struggle Against War and
Fascism) in the socially engaged manner of the Mexicans. 124 Indeed it was through
Siqueiros that they had obtained the commission, Kadish having assisted the Mexican in
Los Angeles in 1932 on several outdoor murals. Kadish, along with Sande Pollock, who
was then still in California, had also helped Siqueiros install his Tropical Man.125 In
 35

Mexico, Kadish and Guston, in an impressive achievement for two young artists, covered
1024 square feet of walls in the old summer palace of the Emperor Maximilian in Morelia
outside Mexico City. Using large scale figures they symbolized the forces of repression
during the Spanish Inquisition on the left and at the hands of the contemporary Ku Klux
Klan and Nazism on the right, the forces of Communism coming to the rescue in the distant
upper right.126
Despite the political passion they shared with the Mexican muralists, Guston and
Kadish, as Guston related to Jackson and Sande, were critical of the Mexicans: Rivera was
out for commercial success; Guston praised the plasticity of Orozco’s forms, but rejected
his expressionism.127 Somewhat surprising is the fact that they were more impressed by
the art of Lorser Feitelson, their teacher in Los Angeles, than by the Mexicans’ art. To
Feitelson, Kadish wrote: “After having seen the works of the so called masters of the
‘Mexican Renaissance’ and met and spoken to the very masters themselves, we can
evaluate your value to painting even with clearer heads than ever before. In true
earnestness we say, that you are the master over them all.” 128 In May 1935 when back in
Los Angeles Kadish and Guston participated in the second Post Surrealist exhibition in the
Stanley Rose Gallery.129 Post Surrealism was the name given by Lorser Feitelson and his
wife Helen Lundeberg to their form of magic realism based in de Chirico’s metaphysical
painting, given a psychological turn. Psychological meaning was to emerge from their
marriage of classicizing forms with a cinema-inspired storytelling, the viewer constructing
meaning in wrestling with the enigma of the symbolic figures. 130
What Guston and Kadish admired in Feitelson finds expression in their second
mural. In Physical Growth of Man 1935-36 (fig. 10), done for the Duarte Sanatorium, they
display the Post Surrealist penchant for universal themes and “the scheme of all things” --
content that Jackson, who was soon to do his own “cycle of man” plaque and “story of my
life” bowl, would find intriguing. 131 On the right panel a nude male figure is shown
suspended upside down, his face veiled, an egg broken beneath, a serpent-like creature
lurking in the lower right, while on the left panel a standing female holds in her hand a
dove, as from a large conch shell, positioned at her lower torso, steps forth a new born male
child. But while the stories of growth that his friends were exploring were more exciting
 36

to Pollock than Benton’s narratives, he found their Post Surrealist approach to meaning too
cerebral; and while Guston rejected Orozco’s expressionism, Jackson was drawn to it.

L: Fig. 1.10. Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish, Physical Growth of Man, 1935. Fresco Mural, Left panel,
1935, City of Hope Mural, Duarte, California.
R: Fig. 1.11. José Clemente Orozco, Prometheus, 1930. Fresco mural, Central panel 20' x 28.5', West
panel (Zeus, Hera, and Io) 15.5' x 7', East panel (Centaurs) 15.5' x 7'., Pomona College, Claremont,
California.

In the mid-1930's Jackson had a large reproduction of Orozco's Prometheus mural

(fig. 1.11) tacked up on his studio walls and often called it, even in later life, "the greatest
painting done in modern times."132 He and Guston, encouraged by Schwankovsky, had
gone out to Pomona College in Claremont to see Orozco at work on the mural. And just
before Jackson made his decision to leave California to study art with Benton in New York,
he drove out with Charles to see the recently completed Prometheus.133 Prometheus, the
Titan who formed the human race from earth and stole fire from heaven for their benefit,
is the archetypal solitary creator, the creative genius who replaces the old gods. On the left
side panel of his mural Orozco depicts the gods whom Prometheus has defied, Zeus, Hera
and Io; on the right panel Chaos and the Monsters, the latter half human, half beast, dragged
down by serpents; the central panel is given to the heroic figure of Prometheus, creative
man, towering above a motley humanity, as he grapples with the flames to bring the gift of
fire down to a humanity that may yet remain indifferent to it. Emily Hamblen, admired by
 37

Orozco, had in a 1929 essay in Creative Art related his work to Nietzsche, making it easy
to understand Orozco’s Prometheus in the image of Nietzsche's: the exceptional man and
culture creator.134 The straining body of Prometheus, both kneeling and braced, as he opens
himself up to the divine fire, embodies the conflicting forces that surrounds his titanic
struggle: the downward pull of passion and the earth, and the upward striving of spiritual
aspiration, manifest at the microcosmic level within humanity, and at the macrocosmic
level as the forces of chaos drag downwards on the right, and on the left the old gods Zeus
and Hera look upwards marveling at Prometheus’ efforts. In an article Pollock had in his
library at his death, "Orozco and Mexican Painting" in the 1931 Creative Art, Alma Reed,
Orozco’s New York dealer, emphasized the universality of Orozco's art, its archetypal
rightness, and emotional strength. 135
When Jackson first arrived in New York, he attended a number of dinners at the
Bentons’ home when Orozco was a guest.136 Benton and Orozco were both starting work
on murals on different floors of the New School. 137 Whereas Benton chose to depict the
production of the American worker, Orozco depicted the revolutionary unrest smoldering
in the non-industrial world. He showed the peoples of Mexico, Russia and India, and their
revolutionary leaders Puerto, Lenin, and Gandhi. Ideals of universality were celebrated in
the Table of Brotherhood, showing persons of different race and nationality gathered
around a common table, and The Universal Family. Below the latter he painted the artist,
alongside the scientist and the worker, playing his part in the construction of a new
universal order.

5. The Return of Quetzacoatl

In the early summer of 1936 Jackson, Sande, and Guston (whom the Pollock
brothers had persuaded to come to live in New York to take advantage of the new WPA),
along with two other friends, drove up to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire
to see Orozco’s latest mural cycle in the Baker Library.138 Started in l932 and completed
in l934, it covers the history of American civilization (fig. 1.12). The cycle was to become
important to Pollock.
The Pre-Columbian era is represented by the legend of Quetzalcoatl, the chief deity
of the pre-colonial people in Mexico, the bringer of the arts, crafts, and civilization in
 38

general, with whose coming human sacrifice gives way to the Pre-Columbian golden age.
When they were in Mexico, Guston and Kadish had visited the great Aztec Temple of
Quetzalcoatl outside of Mexico City, now depicted on the west wall in the Dartmouth
mural.139 The mural next tells of the departure of Quetzalcoatl, who, when renounced by
his people, leaves on a raft of serpents, prophesying return. The white man's colonial
culture commences on the east wall with Cortez and the cross, is dominated by the machine,
and ends in the last three panels with an indictment of the intellectual, political, and
spiritual life of modern society. Orozco's sweeping narrative concludes with an image of
aborted birth, a skeletal foetus, in Gods of the Modern World and, to counter this, an image
of fierce spiritual defiance in Modern Migration of the Spirit.

Fig. 1.12a and b. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization, 1932-34. Fresco mural, Panels
4-8 (Aztec Warriors, The Coming of Quetzalcoatl, The Pre-Columbian Golden Age, The Departure of
Quetzalcoatl, The Prophecy) and 13-17 (Cortez and the Cross, The Machine, Anglo-America, Hispano-
America, Gods of the Modern World). Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Commissioned
by the Trustees of Dartmouth College.

Rather than embrace the image of defiance, Jackson in his sketchbook chose to
respond to the foetal imagery in Gods of the Modern World, deepening the negative charge
of this already negative image in a private way. xx. The large skeletal figure at the bottom
of the drawing CR 477r (fig.1.13), found in Pollock’s Sketchbook III, is generally
acknowledged to derive from Orozco’s panel where an academically gowned skeleton acts
 39

as midwife to a skeleton prostrate on a bed of books, the foetus, too, a skeleton, already
wearing a mortar board (fig. 1.14).140

L: Fig. 1.13. CR 477r, c. 1936-39. Pencil and brown crayon on paper, 14 x 10".
R: Fig. 1:14. José Clemente Orozco, Gods of the Modern World, Panel 17 of The Epic of American
Civilization, 1932-34, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.

Both the skeleton, now in a kneeling position, and the skeletal foetus, appear in the Pollock,
but while Orozco comments on the sterility of academic knowledge, Pollock elaborates the
theme of death and aborted birth in a personal fantasy. The skeletal foetus is accompanied
by a snake in the womb; the skeleton kneels before a pair of fleshy legs out of which rise
only a cross and other skeletal figures. If at Pomona snakes drag down female centaurs, in
Pollock’s drawing the snake appears in the womb. And if the cross in Orozco's The Modern
Migration of the Spirit (fig. 1.15) is shown at the feet of a defiant Christ, who holds the axe
with which he has cut down his own cross, Pollock shows the cross dominating the scene.

Fig. 1.15. José Clemente Orozco, Modern Migration of the Spirit, Panel 21 of The Epic of American
Civilization, 1932-34. Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.
 40

Death, even at the moment of birth, is Pollock's theme. Why such negativity? The
emotional turmoil precipitated by Sande’s marriage in the summer of 1936, as well as
Guston’s engagement, seems to have activated his most impotent feelings. 141 The image
of the skeletal foetus and the snake in the womb one can understand at least in part in terms
of Jackson's fantasies about his own birth as "a blue baby," the umbilical cord wrapped
around his neck, nearly strangled at birth. 142
By the time of “the story of my life” bowl Jackson was able to transform such
negative fantasies into an image with a positive charge. From the woman now flows, as if
in a strange image of birth, the fiery foetus. The flames cradling it evoke the fire that plays
such an important role in Orozco’s next three mural cycles painted between l936-39 in
Guadalajara, Mexico for the University auditorium, the Government Palace stairway, and
the Chapel of the Orphanage. 143 Testifying to their general impact, Sande reported to
Charles in early l939 that he "saw some photos of Orozco's Guadalajara frescoes. Christ
what a brutal, powerful piece of painting. I think it would be safe to say that he is the only
really vital, living painter." 144 Jackson probably shared this opinion. As late as around
l940-41, he strongly identified with Orozco. 145
In the Government Palace Orozco conjures up the revolutionary spirit of Mexico in
the gigantic image of Father Hildalgo, who launched the Independence movement in 1810.
Dominating the baroque stairwell he holds a fiery torch above the seething masses. In the
Guadalajara Orphanage chapel the architecture of the baroque church carries the narrative
of a great mural cycle dealing with the origin and history of the Americas. Beginning with
pre-conquest scenes of Aztec gods and human sacrifice in the crossing, the cycle continues
with the post-conquest history of Mexico in the nave, the four figures symbolizing the
Revolution in the pendentives of the Dome, representations of the occupations in the drum,
and culminating in the four allegorical male nudes symbolizing the elements in the Dome
(fig. 1.16).
 41

Fig. 1:16. José Clemente Orozco, Man of Fire, 1938-39. Fresco, Dome of Hospicio Cabañas,
Guadalajara, Mexico.

Here, in the portrayal of Earth, Air, Water and Fire, we arrive at Orozco's climactic
representation of the aspirations of humanity, as the flaming symbol of Fire spirals upward
in dramatic perspective. Pollock responded to this image in another bowl done around
1939 (CR 924). Dr. Wall, to whom Pollock gave the bowl, titled it, interpreting what
Pollock told him at the time, "The Flight of Man," showing a human figure rising towards
a central light.146 In “the story of my life” bowl, however, Orozco’s man on fire becomes
a foetus on fire. The flames cradling it evoke not only Orozco's elemental fire, but the
creative fire of Prometheus. Seen as an image referring to Pollock himself, the fire-
encircled foetus becomes a symbol of his Promethean aspirations.
How far has Pollock gotten, beyond symbolic projections of private fantasies, with
his grand artistic ambitions? An answer is given by a striking oil painting entitled The
Flame (fig.1.6), dated between 1934 and 1938.

Fig. 1:17. Flame, c. 1934-38. Oil on the smooth side of masonite, 20 x 30". The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Enid A. Haupt Fund, 1980.
 42

Pollock's training in Benton's form analysis has been recognized as influencing the formal
organization of his later abstract paintings. 147 So it is only to be expected that it should
already inform his earliest experiments in abstraction. The Flame shows the same abstract
flickering pattern of lights and shadows that Pollock explored in his studies of El Greco's
drapery, for instance CR 434r, c. 1937-39 (fig. 1.17). In this study he was applying the
contrapuntal rhythmic principle, known to Benton’s class as “the hollow and the hump,” 148
referring to the movement and counter-movement found in convexities and concavities,
whether located in muscle movement, drapery, or the structural arrangements that build a
work of art.149

Fig. 1.18. CR434r, c. late 1937-39. Pencil and color pencil on paper, 13 7/8 x 16 7/8". The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.

In the lower right of CR 434r he even copied a Benton diagram illustrating his teacher's
system for arranging volumes in space around a central axis or pole. 150 Benton
acknowledged Pollock's quick grasp of "the contrapuntal logic of occidental form
construction …. In his analytical work he got things out of proportion but found the
essential rhythms. At one time I used one of his rough analytical diagrams as an example
for my class to show that it was not a copy that we were looking for, even a cubistic copy,
but a plastic idea."151 The Flame transforms the abstract flickering pattern into a field of
 43

leaping red, white, black and yellow tongues of paint, composed in a rhythmic diamond
structure orchestrated around the central yellow flame.

6. “Il Duco”
If Benton's theories of form introduced Pollock to a pictorial structural system, in
The Flame we meet with a very different interest in exploring raw paint and its possibilities
for subjective expression. While there is a hint of a form being consumed by the flame, it
is more the energy of fire itself that Pollock attempts to convey with his dancing tongues
of paint. Here it was the third of Los Tres Grandes, Siqueiros, who strengthened an interest
in the materiality of paint that had already been awakened by Ryder. 152
In April l936 Pollock joined Siqueiros’ New York Experimental Workshop held at
5 West 14th. St.. Pollock had met Siqueiros in Los Angeles in 1932, when home for the
summer he had gone with Kadish to meet the painter and to view his just completed mural
Meeting in the Street at the Chouinard Art School. The mural shows an orator haranguing
a worker audience. But of more interest to Pollock than the mural's subject would seem to
have been its placement and execution: on an exterior wall and painted with spray guns on
cement, instead of traditional fresco. 153 Even as he dismissed Siqueiros, saying to Kadish,
"Orozco is the real artist, and his Prometheus is the real thing to look at," 154 Pollock was
attracted to Siqueiros's experiments with painting techniques and joined his workshop in
l936. This time the two men formed an instant bond; "each felt the other's intensity,"
Kadish recalls.155 Jackson, along with Sande and Lehman, assisted Siqueiros in painting
floats for a May Day parade, and was exposed to his conviction that revolutionary art was
not just a matter of content or theme, but a problem of form and material. 156 "We want to
produce an art which will be physically capable of serving the public through its material
form."157 In the workshop Siqueiros carried out exhaustive experiments with modern
materials and tools. He turned to the hardware store for spray guns, silicons, asbestos
panels, a liberating antidote to the formulas and techniques of Renaissance mural
painting.158 Siqueiros became known as "Il Duco," after the industrial paint manufactured
by the Dupont Company whose tradename was Duco, the Italian article pitting the leftist
artist leader, who had come to New York primarily to represent Mexico in the 1936 anti-
 44

fascist American Artists Congress, against “Il Duce,” the fascist dictator. 159 Later Jackson
would use that same paint in making some of his poured paintings.
Siqueiros also wanted to develop the subjective elements in artistic creativity. 160 In
a way recalling Leonardo, he experimented with preparing panels by splattering and
dripping on them so that the abstractly patterned underpainting would suggest figurative
imagery. Working with artistic materials was thus to lead to a discovery of meaning.
Sometimes the final image remained highly abstract, as in Collective Suicide 1936 (fig.
18).161

Fig. 1.19. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Collective Suicide, 1936. Enamel on wood with applied sections,
49" x 6'. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Kadish remembers the excitement, "You can't imagine how appealing this experience was
to young people, how different it was from what we'd run across in art school, in life
drawing. [Siqueiros] was overturning the whole idea that the only thing worthwhile in art
was what was being represented, the whole neo-classical ideal, the whole Greco-Roman
tradition.”162 The Post Surrealists had looked for a new subjectivity but in the viewer’s
response to Renaissance forms. Now this subjective freedom was to be located in the
process of art-making. For Jackson this was doubly liberating, as he had never possessed
the drawing skill of Guston, Kadish or Lehman. Jackson always wanted to be number one
at whatever he undertook, even when he and Lehman, newly arrived in New York in
September 1935, toured the recently opened Frick Gallery and other museums -- to copy
 45

the masters.163 Now Siqueiros’ experiments offered Jackson a way around his difficulty in
drawing. Horn remembers that during a visit to his apartment Jackson laid a canvas on the
floor and tried to duplicate Siqueiros' technique by dripping paint across it. 164
While no work of Pollock's can be directly linked to his time in the workshop, the
highly abstract, untransformed aspect of the painting medium, oil, in such a work as Overall
Composition, c. l934-38, very likely owes something to such experiments, as do the
painterly aspects of The Flame.165 The latter painting would seem to have held a very
personal significance for Pollock. Kadish recalls visiting Pollock's apartment sometime in
the late l930's and noticing a badly burned mattress out on the sidewalk, which, to his
amazement, he discovered to be Pollock's.166 Pollock described how a cigarette he had
been smoking when he fell asleep had ignited the mattress and he awoke to discover
himself engulfed in flames. He called the experience visionary. Whether or not it was
triggered by this event, The Flame is most certainly an image associated with Pollock's
own understanding of the artist, not as an artist-worker, but as an artist-visionary struggling
with fire. The Flame was his own version of the Promethean fire. 167 As his instrument to
fight fascism, its importance to him is indicated by his subsequent inclusion of it in Artists
for Victory, an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1942, as America
entered World War II.
Siqueiros left New York in late 1936 to enlist in the fight against fascism in Spain.
Pollock then was struggling with private monsters, a would-be visionary seeking to seize
the Promethean fire, dreaming of those who would accept his fiery gift, jealous of other
artists and their achievements. Such jealousy is at least suggested by his behavior at the
farewell party thrown for Siqueiros, who had especially asked that Jackson attend the party.
Sande discovered Jackson and Siqueiros, both drunk, under a table, "silently attempting to
choke the other into unconsciousness, Jack in a wild exhilarated effort and Siqueiros in a
desperate attempt to save himself." 168 Sande, who disentangled Jackson and Siqueiros,
was worried enough about Jackson's "emotional instability" and drinking to get him to
begin psychiatric treatment. As we have seen, he began such treatment in January 1937.
Two years later, as “the story of my life” bowl shows, he still had not discovered
what he was searching for, had not found himself, even as he was convinced of his artistic
vocation. Looking back on Pollock's journey in art, Lee Krasner said that more than
 46

anything it could be described as "a quest."169 The character of that quest announces itself
in the bowl’s symbolic images: the baby cupped in flames as would-be Promethean artist;
the 'woman' as mother, perhaps as muse, asleep; the lone figure in a sailboat at sea
embarking on an uncertain voyage; the man on the right rising to follow the call of the
hunt, striving to master the forces of nature, even while dreaming to embrace the maternal
genetrix. In 1939 Pollock remained uncertain of both goal and means, shadowed by fears
and longings that required clearer expression before they could be confronted and the quest
advanced.
 47

Chapter 2
Jung or Picasso?

1. Demoiselles d’Avignon

Fig. 2.1. Birth, c. 1941. Oil on canvas, 46 x 21 3/4". Tate Gallery, London.

By 1940 Pollock, so uncertain of his quest in the “story of my life” bowl, is ready
to challenge Picasso in a painting that he titles Birth (fig. 2.1).170 He directs his challenge
to Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907, a painting that, he later told Lee Krasner, had been
important to him (fig. 2. 2).171 When it was exhibited in the Picasso retrospective held at
the Museum of Modern Art from November 1939 through February 1940, Alfred Barr
 48

hailed it as “the masterpiece of Picasso’s Negro Period” and “the first cubist picture ….
Together with Matisse’s Joie de Vivre of the same year it marks the beginning of a new
period in the history of modern art.”172

Fig. 2. 2. Pablo Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907. Oil on canvas, 96 x 92". The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.

As Matisse precipitated a revolution in the use of color, Picasso, inspired by the non-
naturalistic freedom and expressive power of African art, initiated a revolution in figuration
and pictorial space. In his confrontation with Picasso Pollock pointedly replaces the
abstract features of the African mask, cupped in the hand of the squatting woman in the
lower right hand corner of the Demoiselles, with his own motifs. In the lower left of Birth
we find a similarly bent leg and in the lower right a hand with upraised fingers.173 These
fingers seem to release or give birth to forms that bubble their way up the canvas. Three-
quarters the way up, amid amorphous forms, a spiraling mask-like motif, containing a
striking black-dotted red disc and a larger circular red area, both encapsulated in a yet larger
white crescent shape tinged with gray, arrests the eye. The title Birth is suggestive. But
just what is being born? The fiery Promethean foetus in the “story of my life” bowl has
here evolved into a striking, hermetic motif. Much as the African mask helped to
inaugurate Cubism, this motif helps to inaugurate something new in Pollock’s art. No
longer Bentonesque, Birth, with its rising abstract rhythms, is modernist, decidedly flat.
 49

This modernism means to challenge Picasso, as Picasso’s brothel becomes in the Pollock
painting a scene of birth. We sense a rival vision.
John Graham found Birth sufficiently compelling to choose it as Pollock’s entry in
an exhibition he organized for the McMillen Gallery held in January - February 1942.
American and French Painting boldly juxtaposed the work of American artists, the better
known Stuart Davis and Walt Kuhn, and the unknown young artists Willem de Kooning,
Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, with works of the French Masters Picasso, Matisse,
Braque, and others. This was not only Pollock’s first major public showing, but one that
invited comparison with the French avant-garde.
The exhibition of Birth marks the beginning of Pollock’s agon with Picasso, which
helped to define his artistic identity. "There's no question,” Lee Krasner remembers, “that
he admired Picasso and at the same time competed with him, wanted to go past him. Even
before we lived in East Hampton, I remember one time I heard something fall and then
Jackson yelling, 'God damn it, that guy missed nothing!' I went to see what had happened.
Jackson was sitting, staring; and on the floor, where he had thrown it, was a book of
Picasso's work."174 Pollock was to continue to measure his achievement by Picasso’s.

2. The challenge of Guernica

Picasso and his art, however, were nowhere in sight when Pollock worked on “the
story of my life” bowl. What had happened to suddenly make him both main rival and
hero? Picasso's works had been consistently exhibited in the New York galleries in the
1930's. His most stunning achievement of the decade, Guernica (fig. 2.3), and the related
study drawings were shown in New York at the Valentine gallery in early 1939. This
mural painting (1937) responded to the German bombing of the Basque village of
Guernica in 1937, protesting the brutal destruction of war and the fascist aggression
responsible for it. The American Artists Congress sponsored its New York showing in
order to raise funds for Spanish refugees from fascism, which by 1939 had triumphed in
Spain. That same year Germany invaded Poland and Russia attacked Finland. America
would not enter World War II until Pearl Harbor, December 1941. Guernica was first of
all the image of Europe's descent into barbarism.
 50

Fig. 2.3. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937. Oil on canvas, 11'6" x 25'8". Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain.

Guernica also showed a way beyond what had been a dilemma for many American
artists in the thirties, "suspended between the poles of socially significant painting and the
great modern tradition of abstraction." 175 Robert Motherwell pointed out the tension
between its moral-political and aesthetic dimensions: "Guernica hangs in an uneasy
equilibrium between now disappearing social values, i. e. moral indignation at the character
of modern life -- what Mondrian called the tragic, as opposed to the eternal and the formal,
the aesthetics of the papier collé."176 When Pollock and Lee Krasner first met in late 1941
this very tension was a bone of contention. She too had been bowled over when she first
saw Guernica in 1939 -- "it knocked me right out of the room." She had to circle the block
"four or five times" before she returned for a second look.177 Already committed to
modernist painting (she was a student of Hans Hofmann), she began at this point to paint
Picassoid paintings with flat color and thick black lines. Lee and Jackson both admired
Guernica, but Lee distinguished the formal from the moral and psychological properties,
which she dismissed. Jackson refused to separate the two. 178 His friend Guston, when he
first heard of the Guernica bombing, registered his response in Bombardment 1937-38 (fig.
2.4), as yet uninformed by Picasso’s rendition, with all the moral fervor of his and Kadish’s
anti-fascist The Workers Struggle for Liberty. In its circular composition Guston’s
expected Post Surrealist imagery is galvanized by a plasticity and emotion learned from
Orozco: the male in a gas mask lunging to the right, the mother and child to the left, while
the planes’ bombs strike to the heart of the composition. It is not surprising therefore,
 51

given the discussions he must have had with his friend, that Jackson found Guernica's moral
dimension inescapable. But while Guston understood this dimension first of all in political
terms of struggle with fascism, Guernica for Pollock held a more private significance.

Fig. 2.4. Philip Guston, Bombardment, 1937-38. Oil on Masonite, 42" diameter. Philadelphia
Museum of Art. Gift of Musa and Tom Mayer, 2011.

Something of the nature of Pollock's interest in Guernica is documented in a body of

83 drawings that he gave his Jungian analyst Dr. Henderson during the course of their
meetings from early 1939 through the summer of 1940 to assist with the therapy. Most of
these were sketches related to work in progress; others Pollock referred to as "doodles."179
About one-fifth are directly influenced by Guernica.
Picasso painted Guernica in the Synthetic Cubist style that he had developed between
1912 and 1923 and expanded around 1924 with biomorphic Surrealist forms, with which
he now fashioned his cast of characters. A dying horse and a fallen warrior dominate the
scene of destruction, while an enigmatic bull presides on the far left, and a chorus of
stricken women, three on the right, a mother and a dead child on the left, frame the
composition. Most striking are the two animals used to convey the emotions and forces of
the human drama. Pollock already had rich associations with these animals, explored for
instance in the skeletal bull in Landscape with Rider II CR 6 (1933) and the horses of the
"story of my life" bowl.180 Particularly striking in the Henderson drawings are Pollock’s
responses to Guernica’s central image, the stricken horse impaled on a spear and the fallen
warrior to the side. In CR 548 (fig. 2.5) he reiterates Picasso’s theme of destruction: a
 52

horse's head and a man's head with hand appended, suspended, as if destroyed by the
violent knifing of a wooden limb.

Fig. 2.5. Untitled, CR 548, c. 1939-40. Colored pencil on paper, 15 x 10 7/8". Private collection.

Violence dominates the scene and partially eclipses the big orange-red disc in the
background. But more important for the future of his art than this straightforward response
to images of pain and death are those doodles in which he explorers different scenarios and
meanings for the man and his horse. To Fritz Bultman, who became a friend in early 1942,
Pollock described how impressed he was with Picasso's active development of the images
related to the masterpiece, a practice of which he, too, was to become a master.181
Rudolf Arnheim has described this process as "visual thinking.” One condition of
such visual thinking is that "every perceived property or object be taken to be symbolic.
… When objects are related to each other by location, shape, or color, that relationship is
never merely optical or physical, but is always to be understood as an existential tie in the
deeper sense."182 Thus Picasso was experimenting with "variations of meaning" when he
tried out different attitudes for the horse as victim: "with its head and neck bent down it
was entirely a victim among victims … With its head turned upward, it performed the
outcry of despair, appeal, and accusation." 183 An instance of Pollock’s interest in the
Guernica images and of his own visual thinking occurs in the lower right-hand corner of
CR 521r (fig. 2.6). There he depicts a collapsing horse that is very close to one of Picasso's
studies for Guernica (fig. 2.7); but in his version of the horse the body of a man is flung
 53

over its back and the horse's attitude more protesting than stricken.

L: Fig. 2.6. Untitled, CR 521r, c. 1939-40. Pencil on paper, 14 x 11". Museum of Art, Rhode Island School
of Design.
R: Fig. 2.7. Picasso. Horse. May 1, 1937 (5). Pencil. 8 ¼ x 10 ½", study for Guernica.

Fig. 2.8. Untitled, CR 521v, c. 1939-40. Red and orange pencil on paper, 14 x 11". Museum of Art, Rhode
Island School of Design.
 54

On the reverse of the sheet (fig. 2.8) Pollock pursues the theme of a human figure
attempting to mount and ride a horse. In the upper right hand corner a figure is shown
approaching the whinnying horse; just below we see a figure balanced astride the horse;
dominating the lower right hand corner a skeletal figure rides a galloping horse just below
a sun disc and crescent moon, between them a serpent. While the man in the bowl telling
the story of his life was stretched out in pursuit of the horses, the human, though skeletal,
now actually manages to ride the galloping horse. By allowing the human figure to ride
the horse, Pollock appears to negate the theme of destruction. But is it only man turned
into a skeleton, as in Orozco’s representation of academic knowledge at Dartmouth, who
achieves a semblance of control?

3. The Artist and his Therapist

Pollock had been released from Bloomingdale’s in September 1938. In early 1939,
still drinking and depressed, he had another breakdown. For help Sande turned to Helen
Marot, a woman in her seventies, who had become Jackson’s friend and confidante in the
early 1930s.184 A social activist whose hopes for reshaping existing institutions at the end
of the World War I led her to write Creative Impulse in Industry (1918), Marot became
disillusioned by government suppression of the left and turned in 1919-22 from politics to
psychology, as many did in her generation. 185 In psychology "her bible," as her friend
Lewis Mumford put it, became Sir Charles Scott Sherrington's The Integrative Action of
the Nervous System.186 Marot argued that impulses were the physiological building blocks
of all human behaviour and that the true purpose of education was to isolate and restructure
those blocks in a way that ensured continued "growth and development." 187 To Jackson
she became a surrogate mother figure, who did not even turn him away when he would
sometimes storm into her home after midnight to talk. She had already helped direct
Jackson to his first psychiatric treatment in 1937 and arrange for his stay at Bloomingdale's.
Now she asked her friend Cary Baynes, who had translated Jung’s Two Essays on
Analytical Psychology (1928) and Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) and was married
to the prominent British Jungian analyst Helton Godwin Baynes, to refer Pollock to a
doctor.188 Baynes suggested Joseph Henderson, who had undergone analysis with Jung in
 55

Zurich in 1929 and at age thirty-five was back in New York struggling to establish himself
in a city already overfilled with German analysts. Intrigued with the opportunity of
working with an artist, he agreed to see Jackson free of charge. 189
When Pollock first came to Dr. Henderson, he found it almost impossible to
communicate his feelings. "He seemed,” Henderson recalled, “preoccupied with his inner
thoughts and feelings and with his alcoholism. He just didn't talk much; he was a doer, not
a talker. When he did talk, he talked very well."190 But even then Pollock spoke only of
the most superficial aspects of his life. Finally Pollock himself suggested that he bring in
his drawings. Henderson found them fascinating; they even brought him “strongly into a
state of counter-transference …." 191 And well they might: Pollock’s process of
manipulating images to explore meaning, his visual thinking, had to seem an example of
that “active fantasy” central to the Jungian understanding of psychotherapy.
Pollock’s own earlier exposure to the Jungian notion of “active fantasy” is evident in
a notation on a page (CR 469r) of Sketchbook III, the one in which he registered his first
responses to Orozco. There beneath a slender phallic form and beside a biomorphic cluster
he wrote "passive fantasy/ active fantasy."192 According to Jung “passive fantasy" is "an
irruption of unconscious contents into consciousness," while "active fantasies are the
product of intuition, i.e., they are evoked by an attitude directed to the perception of
unconscious contents, as a result of which the libido immediately invests all the elements
emerging from the unconscious and, by association with parallel material, brings them into
clear focus in visual form. … Whereas passive fantasy not infrequently bears a morbid
stamp or at least shows some trace of abnormality, active fantasy is one of the highest
forms of psychic activity.”193 By joining unconscious to conscious forces, such fantasy
expresses and may even help create a person’s individuality. “Active fantasy” is said to be
“the chief mark of the artistic mentality.” 194 No doubt, the weight given by Jungians to
active fantasy and to the artist appealed to Pollock, and built upon what he already knew
from his friends of the Post Surrealist psychological approach to imagery. 195
Whether Pollock actually read Psychological Types in which Jung developed the
notion of active fantasy is doubtful. As he once remarked, “You don’t got to read all the
time to know books. I can read by sensing a book – I get what it’s saying. Saves time,
too.”196 Conversations with Marot, and indeed with his friends, may have been all he
 56

needed. But that he had become aware of the principles of Jungian psychology is shown
by Henderson’s observation that Pollock already knew these at the beginning of his
analysis.197 Pollock confided to Lee Krasner how much his sessions with Henderson had
meant to him198 and when Henderson left New York for California at the end of the summer
of 1940, he was referred to another Jungian, this time a woman, Dr. Violet de Laszlo, whom
he continued to see into 1943. Pollock acknowledged the importance of these early
encounters with Jung and his disciples just a few months before his death: "when you're
painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. We're all of us influenced
by Freud, I guess. I've been a Jungian for a long time."199
In Pollock’s drawings Henderson could observe active fantasy at work. "He brought
me a few of the drawings each time in the first year of his treatment, and I commented
upon them spontaneously, without establishing any psychotherapeutic rules. Most of my
comments centered around the nature of the archetypal symbolism in his drawings. I never
could get on a more personal level with him, until after he stopped bringing the
drawings."200 Henderson thus did not treat Pollock's personal symptoms, his alcoholism -
- he himself wondered at this later. 201 Rather he responded to Pollock's imagery as
primordial. The “counter-transference” was “to the archetypal material he produced." 202
Henderson also reacted to the drawings as examples of Pollock's progress as a painter. "I
felt this to be his most reliable form of identity and I encouraged him to develop this
talent."203 He remarked that he had treated Pollock not as a sick individual, “but as an artist
in the process of finding his career. The treatment, therefore, was vocational rather than
therapeutic." 204
The Jungian understanding of an artist was certainly very different from the young
Pollock’s or the Mexicans’ Marxist idea of a worker among other workers, giving the
proletariat "an epic form of art to aid its organization and express its struggle in social
reconstruction."205 Jung, too, saw the artist as making a contribution to society –- but had
a very different understanding of the problem that needed addressing. Jung held that in
healthy societies archetypal symbols arising from a collective unconscious gain a conscious
form in myth and religion. The excessive rationality of modern man had made it necessary
to generate new living symbols, whether for individuals or society at large. In 1933 Jung
wrote of this dilemma in Modern Man in Search of a Soul. With greater urgency he spoke
 57

of it in 1938 in his Yale lectures, published as Psychology and Religion.206 It is up to

certain extraordinary individuals, such as yogis practicing a disciplined psychological
culture, or artists, to open doors to the unconscious, to activate the primordial images and
the flow of living archetypal symbols. 207
In December 1939 the Jungians of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York,
Henderson among them, read papers on "The Psychological Aspects of the War."
Messianic statements such as "we know that a new redeeming hero principle must presently
be born out of the darkest corner of the collective unconscious" let us understand the
distrust that arose during and after World War II of a thinking that seemed to partake of
the dangerous mythmaking tendencies of fascism. 208 The Jungians, to be sure, felt unjustly
accused: "We who are devoted to seeking individuation naturally hate totalitarianism." 209
Introversion was itself given a social significance. As M. Esther Harding stated: "we dare
not repress the emotions that are aroused. If we cannot live them creatively in the outer
world, then we must introvert them so that they may be transformed and in their turn cause
a transformation within ourselves. And so perhaps our task as neutrals is to permit the
inner struggle to take place in us, for the sake of humanity, as well as for our dire
necessity." 210 It is hardly surprising that Pollock should have been receptive to this call for
a transformative movement of introversion, which carried with it the danger of burying
oneself in one’s own dreams and fantasies.
What archetypes would Dr. Henderson see in Pollock’s imagery? 211 We have
already seen that Pollock’s visual thinking led him in a series of doodles to the fantasy of
resuscitating and riding the Guernica horse. Henderson did discuss a number of other
drawings said to be by an anonymous patient in his book Thresholds of Initiation (1967)
and in an unpublished paper, written in 1968, which he presented to several analytical
psychology meetings.212 Though no doubt clarified over the years, this written record
probably reflects the tenor of Henderson’s responses to the drawings at the time of the
therapy. The drawings “seemed to demonstrate phases of his sickness and they were
followed by others showing a gradual development during therapy into a healthier
condition, a psychological reintegration, which allowed him to recover to a considerable
extent during the next two years." 213 He recalls indicating to Pollock what he considered
"unhealthy" or "healthy" signs. 214
 58

In Thresholds of Initiation he points to the strong vertical axis to be found in a

number of the drawings, and to the symbolism associated with height and depth: spirit and
sex. His comment, "In one of these, the symbol for spirit appeared as unreal or death-
dealing, whereas sex appeared as a devouring monster," could well be a description of CR
531 (fig. 2.9).215 There a central triangular being, flanked by wooden horses, strikes down
with its arrow towards a humanoid figure lying below, engulfed by a coiling serpent.

L: Fig. 2.9. Untitled, CR 531, c. 1939-40. Colored pencil, crayon, ink, ink wash, 14 x 11 in.
Collection of Janina Galler, M.D., Brookline, Massachusetts.
R: Fig. 2.10. Untitled, CR 527, c. 1939-40. Pencil and colored pencil on paper, 14 x 11 in.
Collection of Phyllis and David Adelson, Brookline, Massachusetts.

CR 527 (fig. 2.10), in which vertical axis and snake-like movement are again
prominent, is taken by Henderson to indicate progress toward cure:
The center of upper three quarters of the page is occupied by a huge unfinished
human skeleton, without tibia or bones of the feet, drawn in red crayon, with an
enormous human face at the top ... The spinal column is indicated by a straight line
with a curved sinuous line embracing it. The whole figure is gracefully represented
in spite of its distortion, and an effect of living movement is produced. In this case
the vertical design suggests that a dead human symbol is coming to life in
accordance with a snakelike movement in the median plane. 216
 59

Citing other drawings in the collection in which "the dead, rigid, or crushed forms are
trying to come to life," Henderson goes on to point out the archetypal dimension: "this
theme demonstrates the fact that psychologically he was at this time undergoing some sort
of transformation in accordance with the archetypal image of death leading to rebirth." 217
Henderson makes much of the drawing CR 555 (fig. 2.11) as an example of
Pollock’s psychic growth, seeing in it an impressive combination of the vertical
dimension and a strong central design.

Fig. 2.11. Untitled, CR 555, c. 1939-40. Crayon and colored pencil on grey paper, 12 1/4 x 18 3/4".
Collection Phyllis and David Adelson, Brookline, Massachusetts.

The oval shaped area in the center with its plant symbol suggests that the principle
of psychic growth or development is the central meaning of the pole (phallus) which
is therefore not only a sexual symbol (if at all) but represents the primitive
conception of the axis mundi which stands for the strength of tribal identity and by
analogy is the new ego-strength the patient is hoping to attain. 218
Specifying the nature of Pollock's psychological growth, he sees the pole "providing the
vertical dimension of the identity as a centering and growing process …." 219
In the upper part of the drawing the small hands of the strong man stretch upward and
outward to a ghostly female torso flanked by a bull and by a horse all rendered in yellow.
Weak and tentative, they offer no response to the outstretched hands.
 60

… the upper part of the drawing shows a continuing split and a probable state of
deprivation on the upper, human personal level of his life. Those pathetic upper
limbs reaching upward toward an unfeeling, purely schematic, female torso must
denote a problem left unsolved and perhaps insoluble, a frustrated longing for the
all-giving mother. He had suffered from isolation and extreme emotional
deprivation in early childhood and this had not yet been adequately compensated.
We can only conjecture whether this need was satisfied in his later marriage and
personal relationships.220
Henderson was struck by the manner in which the strong vertical axis (sex-spirit) is
transected by the horizontal axis on which Pollock has polarized the male-female conflict
that was plaguing his life. While Henderson doubted Pollock's capacity for "a higher
integration of his conscious spiritual identity as a man capable of maturing in the second
half of life" -- he felt the drawing indicated "that he [Pollock] could integrate the first part
of his life and develop his creative potential …. " 221
In response to Henderson's comments, Pollock was basically silent. "He did not
have free associations, nor did he wish to discuss his own reactions to my comments." 222
What did they mean to him? Henderson’s talk of a death-birth sequence and of mandaloid
forms as representing psychic integration no doubt helped feed his active fantasy. And
these ideas were reiterated by Dr. de Laszlo, his second Jungian analyst, who recalls that
she explained to him the concept of rebirth in order "to help give him hope and confidence"
and the meaning of the mandala as "interrelating formerly fragmented parts of the
psyche."223

4. Art and the Task of Self-Integration

Henderson’s readiness to see Pollock’s images as archetypal and welling up from the
artist’s unconscious may strike us as naive. Such naiveté is suggested by the mandaloid
motif in CR 521v (see fig. 2.8), which is suspiciously like the mandala illustrated in Plate
V of Jung’s Integration of the Personality (fig. 2.12): both are circles, containing within
them four smaller circles, and associated with serpents below.
 61

Fig. 2.12. C. G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1939), Plate V.

Pollock would naturally have been attracted to the five plates in The Integration of the
Personality found in the second chapter, "A Study in the Process of Individuation," a
sequence of images done by one of Jung's patients, that is, as Jung himself points out, a
succinct demonstration of the often prolonged process of symbol formation at the core of
his understanding of the process of individuation. 224 Opposite Plate V at the top of the
page he would have read, “ … evil, the serpent, is a necessary part of the process of growth.
The dark part must be brought completely above the horizon, so that life can go on; and
the serpent raised to the sky [referring to the winged serpent in Plate IV] illustrates this
truth."225 The strangely rising serpent in the Guernica horse fantasy would seem to be not
so much an unconscious image as Pollock’s response to Jungian symbols that then get
embroiled in his visual thinking, a complex flux of unconscious forces and conscious
efforts.
That Pollock quite self-consciously struggled with the concept of individuation as a
goal of Jungian therapy and the mandala as an image of self-integration is evident in CR
556 (c. 1939-40) (fig. 2.13), his one explicitly Jungian diagram.
 62

Fig. 2.13. Untitled, CR 556, c. 1939-40. Pencil and charcoal pencil on paper, 5 1/4 x 8 in., irregular.
Location unknown.

Fig. 2.14. "Crucifixion", CR 940, c. 1939-40. Gouache on paper, 21 1/2 x 15 1/2".

Marisa del Re Gallery, New York, New York.

This was done as a study for the untitled gouache CR 940 (c. 1939-40) (fig. 2.14), a
crucifixion scene, which was his parting gift to Henderson. The study has the feel of a
final take-home exam: “Using Jungian symbols, assess your own psychic state at the end
of your therapy.” The symbols he uses all derive from the page opposite Plate V of The
Integration of the Personality. There Jung rehearses the four psychic functions, the
alignment of functions with symbolic colors, and the significance of the number 4 and
 63

chapter 24'fourness' as referring to the totality of psychic structure. In the study Pollock
writes down the four functions of the total psyche as defined by Jung: intuition, feeling,
sensation, and thinking. With each of these he associates a color -- yellow, red, green
(black was crossed out), and blue, respectively -- and then aligns each function and color
with an image. Yellow, significantly, and its associated function of intuition are placed in
the image of crucifixion in both the study and the gouache.
He was still drinking, a personal mess. Even in July 1941 Sande could list Jackson’s
ongoing symptoms to Charles: “irresponsibility, depressive mania (Dad), over intensity
and alchol [sic] are some of the more obvious ones. Self destruction, too. On the credit
side we have his Art which if he allows to grow, will, I am convinced, come to great
importance.”226 Henderson had been important. Every week for a year and a half he
provided a captive but fascinated audience for Pollock’s probings, his “doodles.” And he
gave him a basic “tutorial” in Jungian archetypes, structures and symbols, reinforcing
Pollock’s inclination to active fantasy, helping him, as Henderson realized, to pursue his
creative potential, there being two sides to this, his human and his artistic potential.
What Henderson probably did not realize was the degree to which Pollock had
already been attracted by and responded to the art of others that contained the symbols,
themes, and structures that so fascinated the therapist. One need only think of Orozco’s
Prometheus: there serpents drag down centaurs in the Chaos panel, as Prometheus strives
upward on the central vertical axis of the main panel. “The story of my life” bowl in which
Pollock had pictured his hopes for himself as Promethean artist, a foetus cupped in flames
at the center of a four-part design, can count as mandaloid. Henderson’s interest in the
vertical axis and in centered design as organizing structures with psychological import
would certainly have clarified Pollock’s own awareness of the significance of such designs.
But when Henderson, in his enthusiasm for archetypes, encouraged Pollock to draw
mandala designs, he encountered, as he recalls, "the strongest possible resistance at first.
As a true son of Picasso, Pollock felt bound to uphold the dogma of the contemporary art
world of his time. … He fought me tooth and nail."227 As such resistance shows, Picasso
mattered to Pollock first of all, not because he allowed him to sort out his psychological
problems, but as an artistic challenge --and here Demoiselles d'Avignon proved more
important than Guernica. Pollock had no intention of becoming an illustrator of Jungian
 64

ideas, rather he was out to meet Picasso on artistic turf. What Pollock absorbed from
Henderson would manifest itself in ways that neither he nor Henderson could anticipate.
 65

Chapter 3
Indian Allies

1. The Plumed Serpent

The origin of the mask-like motif in Birth (fig. 3.1) which replaced Picasso’s
African mask in Demoiselles d’Avignon can be identified; it is the American Indian
plumed serpent associated with the Aztec God Quetzalcoatl, a rattlesnake equipped with
the feathers of the holy bird Quetzal. Not that I disagree with a number of scholars when
they point to an Eskimo shaman's mask, that John Graham had chosen as the frontispiece
for a 1937 article "Primitive Art and Picasso" to dramatize their shared metamorphic
imagination, as a source of the mask forms in Birth.228 Pollock’s motifs are always
multivalent. But that the second and most defined of the masks refers quite explicitly to
the plumed serpent is supported by CR 521r (see fig. 2.6), a sheet of doodles that has
already given us some insight into Pollock’s appropriation of Picasso’s visual thinking.
The motif in the upper left of the sheet within a rectangular framed sketch, which suggests
a playful projection of a possible painting (fig. 3.2), shows a large serpent surrounding in
its middle a coiling circular form, like a snake embryo with four feather-like appendages,
which might also be seen as the snake’s rattles. This circular form reappears in Birth,
where the center of the circular form in the drawing becomes the small, but striking dotted
red disc, resembling an eye, in the canvas. Occupying the round medallion in the drawing's
upper center we see two eyes and two snakes. The left grouping, less easy to read, suggests
a profile with nose and eye: feathers rise from the snake. The right snake suggests with its
scale-like feathers a possible source for Pollock's interest in this fantastic animal: Orozco's
serpent with feathers, symbol of Quetzalcoatl, its head depicted at the base of the Aztec
Warriors panel at Dartmouth, 1932-34 (fig. 3.3).229 The variation of the plumed serpent
that makes its way from CR 521r into the mask in Birth, that is the coiling circular motif
at which we first looked, seems related to a southeast American Indian stone disc incised
with two coiling plumed serpents (fig. 3.4), illustrated in George Vaillant's Indian Arts in
North America, 1939. Pollock was to see the disc itself in early 1941 in the exhibition
"Indian Art of the United States" at the
 66

L: Fig. 3.1. Birth, c. 1941, detail. Oil on canvas, 46 x 21 3/4". Tate Gallery, London.
R: Fig. 3.2. Untitled, CR 521r, c. 1939-40, detail. Pencil on paper, 14 x 11". Museum of Art, Rhode Island
School of Design.

L: Fig. 3.3. José Clemente Orozco, Aztec Warriors, panel 4 of The Epic of American Civilization, 1932-34.
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College.
R: Fig. 3.4. Stone Disc from Mississipp incised with plumed serpent, in Indian Art of the US (New York,
MOMA, 1941) p. 87. (LI818), The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Museum of Modern Art.230 The catalogue notes the relationship of the motif to
Quetzalcoatl; it also explains that the stone disc was believed to have been a palette,
because traces of red and white paint had been found on similar discs. No doubt this fact
 67

helped to make the disc attractive to Pollock and may help explain why he emphasizes red
and white in depicting the mask in Birth.
In CR 521r, to the right of the embryonic plumed serpent that reappears in the mask
in Birth, Pollock positioned a small-scale man leading a horse. This man with his horse is
dwarfed by and hails the rising plumed serpent -- as if to say that Picasso’s imagery, linked
to Europe’s crisis, should make way for Quetzalcoatl, the great American Indian god of
Pre-Columbian civilization. At Dartmouth Orozco had dramatized the sterility that the
European conquerors with their technologies of war, Puritan homilies, and capitalist greed
had brought to those they colonized, and the need for a “modern migration of the spirit.”
Certainly the legend of Quetzalcoatl, dominating the first half of Orozco's mural epic, calls
for his return. In CR 521r Pollock, too, seems to dream of such a return. The reappearance
of this symbol of Quetzalcoatl in Birth sharpens Pollock’s challenge –- the tired symbols
and traditions of Europe should give way to an ancient but decidedly American tradition
in a “modern migration of the spirit.”
In a 1932 press release Orozco spoke of the significance of the renewal of this
American Indian symbol: "The American continental races are now becoming aware of
their own personality as it emerges from the two cultural currents, the indigenous and the
European. The great American myth of Quetzalcoatl is a living one, embracing both
elements and pointing clearly by its prophetic nature, to the responsibility shared equally
by the two Americas of creating here an authentic American civilization." 231 Kadish
recalled that at the time he and his friends “were looking … for something that had as much
kinship to us as African art did for cubism … we were trying to do a similar thing, trying
to establish some kind of pride." 232 The belief that the vitality and spirituality of Indian
life, as embodied in its art, could make a positive contribution to the America of the future,
even to a specifically American national identity, is part of a trend in American intellectual
life that gained strength throughout the 1930s. 233
Beginning with the “Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts” held at the Grand Central
Art Galleries in late 1931, a year after Pollock’s arrival in New York, awareness of Native
American civilizations as a spiritual and aesthetic resource grew exponentially. The
Museum of Modern Art pioneered, at least in the United States, the large-scale exhibition
of primitive art as art. The first such exhibition was a 1933 showing of Aztec, Incan, and
 68

Mayan art. In 1934 the Museum mounted a show of Pre-Columbian art and justified its
interest in primitive cultures with the title "American Sources of Modern Art." This was
followed by an exhibition of African art in 1935, Prehistoric art in 1937, and “Twenty
Centuries of Mexican Art” in 1940. The last allowed Pollock to watch Orozco paint the
mural Dive Bomber and Tank, confirming his conviction that the Mexican muralists had
already generated an innovative modernist style out of indigenous roots. The magic to be
found in Mexican art could lead, Nicolas Calas wrote in his review of the exhibition, to a
“new form of art which will enable us to solve some of the major cultural problems of the
twentieth century.”234 Such hopes were reconfirmed by the exhibition "Indian Art of the
United States" at the Museum of Modern Art in January 22-April 27, 1941. In René
d’Harnoncourt’s foreword to the exhibition catalogue, to which Eleanor Roosevelt signed
her name, he contrasts such hope with the shadow of the spreading war: “At this time, when
America is reviewing its cultural resources, this book and the exhibit on which it is based
open up to us age-old sources of ideas and forms that have never been fully appreciated.”
The past and present American Indian tradition “constitutes part of the artistic and spiritual
wealth of this country,” and has “a contribution to make toward the America of the
future.”235
Pollock had easy access to this tradition in his own treasure trove of Smithsonian
volumes; twelve were in his library at the time of his death. 236 He started buying them in
the early 1930s. Published in the 1890's and early 1900's they contained some of the
earliest anthropological papers on the culture of the Indian tribes. Detailed descriptions of
myths and accompanying rituals, pottery, calendar and numerical systems were illustrated
with magnificent color plates of ritual paraphernalia, ceremonial seating diagrams, sand
paintings, pottery designs, etc. Alfonso Ossorio, who met Pollock in 1949, remembers his
surprise when Pollock pulled them out from under his bed to show his friend.237 According
to Fritz Bultman, the strongest, most poignant fact of Indian life to Pollock was that "people
living close to nature found nature in themselves rather than nature as a motif." 238
The great anthropological collections in New York City fed Pollock’s imagination.
In the 1930s he visited the Museum of the American Indian up on 125th Street, and after
1943 on several occasions with Peggy Guggenheim.239 Alfonso Ossorio remembers
Pollock’s familiarity with the collections of the American Museum of Natural History,
 69

which was and remains a startling treasure house of primitive culture, where large hushed
tribal culture halls with dramatic displays effected, as one writer has put it, "an urgent
visual and experiential indoctrination into the power and mystery of all 'pre-civilized'
societies."240 Here Pollock found," as Bultman put it, "very positive images." 241 Both
Kadish and Bultman remember making these forays with Pollock. 242
Pollock brought to these visits his own memories. As an eight year old in Janesville
he had a brush with the power of American Indian ceremonial. 243 The local Indians, the
Wadatkut, gathered in front of the Diamond Mountain Inn in the spring of 1920 on their
way to the annual Bear Dance held at the Indian burial grounds near Janesville. His brother
Frank recalls how he, Jack, and Sande “followed them out to the burial grounds in the
mountains and listened to the chanting in the pine trees." 244 From their hiding spot they
witnessed the dance of a Indian man, dressed in a bear skin, dancing at first in the circle of
his tribesmen, and then drawing them into the circle, in which all danced and chanted.
There were also memories of being cared for, when Stella was ill, by an Indian woman
named Nora Jack, who beguiled the young Pollock boys with local Indian legends. 245
Pollock idealized the American Indian. Tony Smith, with whom he would become close
in 1948, recalls that Pollock "was very proud of the fact that he knew the Indians of the
Southwest. That's the way he put it, he knew the West as it really was … Jackson was also
quite aware of Mexico -- he would allude to Mexico and the Southwest with a knowledge,
which struck me as being romantic as he obviously thought life in those areas was more
authentic than life is here [the East]." 246
Such conviction was no doubt reinforced by his sessions with Henderson, who as a
medical student, “obsessed” with Indian art and rituals, had visited the Zuni and Sia tribes
to see the corn dances, and the Hopis to see the famous snake initiation rite. 247 Observing
the ritual and initiatory aspects of Pollock's drawing of human and animal figures in
distorted or dismembered conditions, he comments: "This was not merely the
disassociation of schizophrenia, though he was frequently close to it. It has seemed to me
a parallel with similar states of mind virtually induced among tribal societies or in
shamanistic trance states. In this light the patient appears to have been in a state similar to
the novice in a tribal initiation rite during which he is ritually dismembered at the onset
with an ordeal whose goal is to change him from a boy into a man." 248 Henderson
 70

understood totemism, that is the marking of a human group by identification with an

animal, plant, or some other natural phenomenon, as a function of death-rebirth in initiation
rites, even saying that an initiate can experience rebirth as his totem animal.249 It is hard
to imagine that such material did not figure in his sessions with Pollock. The plumed
serpent in which the mask motif in Birth has its origin can be understood as such a totem
animal, not just a totem of the Americas, but also a personal totem. 250

2. Totem War
Pollock’s interest in totemism, which will become explicit in the titles of his
paintings Totem Lesson I 1944 and Totem Lesson II 1945, is already present in drawings
around 1939-40. In CR 554 (fig. 3.5) a totem pole configuration shows a serpent rising
towards a bird -- between the schematic heads of a bull and a horse, the animals used by
Picasso in Guernica.

Fig. 3.5. Untitled, CR 554, c. 1939-40. Crayon and colored pencil on gray paper, 12 1/2 x 18 5/8".
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David Brillembourg, New York, New York.

In Head (fig. 3.6), a small canvas that Pollock painted around 1938-41, we also see a snake
rising up, this time through the bull’s head, which resembles Picasso's Head of a Bull (fig.
3.7). Pollock's Head resembles the Picasso in the human aspect of the bull's face, in the
look of troubled ferocity, and, more precisely, in the flaring nostrils and splayed thick-
lipped mouth. But Pollock’s plumed serpent imagery seeps into his face: on closer
inspection the right half of the face is seen to be dominated by a striated creature that
 71

mounts in snake-like fashion, with a bird-like head and triangular beak. The head is the
eye of the larger beast.

L: Fig. 3.6. Head, c. 1938-41. Oil on canvas, 16 x 15 3/4". Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna, Portugal, Berardo
Collection.
R: Fig. 3.7. Pablo Picasso, Head of Bull-Man, 20 May 1937. Pencil and gouache, 9 1/4 x 11 1/2".

This bird-snake is a variant of the plumed serpent. Pollock's totem animal is pitted against
Picasso's totem animal, the minotaur with its bull head. 251 Picasso had found in the
minotaur a personal symbol, much as he had earlier identified with the harlequin figure.
Once he commented that minotaurs were always to be found on the shores of the
Mediterranean. Its European identity is dramatized as it presides, in all its bestial mystery
as bull, over the scene of war-torn agony in Guernica. We're already aware of the very
personal meaning that the plumed serpent held for Pollock. The clash of totem animals in
Head represents thus both a clash of individuals and a clash of cultures.
In an article titled "Minotaur" (1940) written in response to the "Picasso Postscript
Exhibition," Henderson had criticized Picasso's minotaur image, this ancient symbol of the
blind impetuosity of man's emotional life as an overwhelming obstacle to true intellectual
and emotional expression.252 Was Pollock’s plumed serpent a more authentic expression?
Bird of c. 1941 (fig. 3.8) shows us another facet of Pollock’s totem war with Picasso.
 72

Fig. 3.8. Bird, c. 1941. Oil and sand on canvas, 27 1/2 x 24 ". The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Lee Krasner in memory of Jackson Pollock, 1980.

The circular plumed serpent motif here appears in a more elaborate and mysterious context.
Dominating the middle register, it is placed above two Indian heads joined by a yellow
coil, and below a single eye. These motifs are framed by the large gray wings, the scrawny
legs, and the faintly suggested head of the titular image. Already in Head a third eye, that
has some of the force of a singular eye atop the central vertical axis, is less an attribute of
the minotaur than an intimation of a bird's profiled head, beak to the left, dominating the
composition, an extension of the presence of the plumed serpent. In Bird the bestial
minotaur of Head vanishes to be replaced by the implied bird whose most striking feature
is its eye, the eye of an elevated, spiritual consciousness. That Pollock conceived of Bird
in terms of the serpent rising to the one or third eye is confirmed by what looks like a sketch
for a possible canvas located in the upper right of a related drawing, CR 581v, c. 1939-42
(fig. 3.9). There the serpent rises up from the lower register, with its several heads, between
the feathered wings in the middle register, and towards the single eye of the humanoid head
dominating the top of the motif.
 73

Fig. 3.9. Untitled, CR 581v, c. 1939-42. Pen and brown ink with elements of blue ink, 13 x 10 3/8 in.
Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett.

In the canvas a movement upward along the axis is already implicit in the plumed serpent
image, rising. The addition of outstretched wings, legs below, and the implication of the
head of a bird around the eye above generates a complete image of a bird and draws our
awareness up the vertical axis. If the spiraling coil between the two heads on the bottom
register is seen as a serpent, the metamorphosis of imagery is even more complete: snake
becomes plumed serpent, becomes bird. Once this upward impulse is recognized, one sees
that Pollock amplifies it in a number of ways, most dramatically as a movement from the
black ground of the lower register to the white ground of the upper register, from darkness
to light.
What are we to make of the two heads in the bottom register? The head on the left
would seem to be female, that on the right male. 253 With their flattened features and in
their compositional arrangement, these heads resemble those to either side of the foetal
child in the "Story of my Life" bowl (see fig. 1.1). This resemblance suggests the parental
nature of the female and male heads in Bird and confirms the foetal aspect of the plumed
serpent, first proclaimed in Birth. The foetus cupped in flames has become the plumed
serpent, at once the serpent rising and the Aztec god of arts and crafts, also a prehistoric
American Indian palette. We sense Pollock's efforts to project a sense of himself as an
artist. Painting here is a way of articulating his own vocation as a painter in an American
tradition continuing and challenging Picasso's modernism.
 74

L: Fig. 3.10. Untitled, CR 589, c. 1941-42. India ink and crayon on watercolor paper, 13 x 10 1/4".
Location unknown.
R: Fig. 3.11. Untitled, CR 590, c. 1941-42. India ink, watercolor, and crayon on watercolor paper, 13 x 10
1/4 ". Location unknown.

How did Pollock happen to light upon the bird as an image of creative and spiritual
aspiration? It seems likely that the features of Bird coalesced in Pollock's imagination
sometime after his visits to “Indian Art of the United States.” Two sketches, CR 589 c.
1941-42 (fig. 3.10) and CR 590 c. 1941-42 (fig. 3.11), dating from the time of his
excursions to the exhibition and which he gave to his analyst Dr. de Laszlo, 254 already
contain the striking axial structure that he will develop in Bird and around which he
arranges in these studies his early meditations on the relationship of humanoid and
landscape forms, whether focused on the phallus placed between the incipient parental
heads of Bird or on the lone and feathered eye. In the exhibition bird imagery abounds.
He not only rediscovered there the pre-historic Indian stone disc palette incised with the
plumed serpent motif, but at the front door was greeted by a thirty foot high totem pole in
bright red and blue colors surmounted by a carved raven.255 The plumed serpent and the
totemic bird both make their way into Bird. Equally important would seem to have been
an ancient mural from Awatori, Arizona (fig. 12), one of eight reproduced for the Museum
by Hopi artists and illustrated in the exhibition catalogue.256
 75

Fig. 3.12. Hopi Kiva Mural, Awatori, Arizona, in Indian Art of the US (New York, MOMA, 1941) n.p. 23.
(LI817), The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Bird resembles the mural illustrated in the Museum catalogue in its avian imagery and in
its symmetrical tiered design. The middle register of the mural, too, is dominated by a
central circular area, marked by feathers at its extremities. 257 In Indian lore birds and
feathers are the ubiquitous means by which man can communicate with the spirit world.
To the Hopi they serve as conveyors to the supernatural powers of petitions for rain and
the growth of crops.258
The drama of the Hopi composition is reinforced by its setting. Originally the
murals were found on the walls of underground ceremonial kivas, small and low chambers
with light entering only through a hole in the center of the ceiling. The replicas were placed
in a setting patterned after the original. 259 In Bird Pollock seems to have appropriated not
only much of the kiva mural's imagery and design, principally the central circular feathered
area with wings attached and the converging of forms on the central vertical axis, but also
its meaning as an image that connects what is buried below with a realm of light and spirit
above in an invocation of fertility and growth.
Pollock's use of sand mixed in with paint in Bird would appear to owe a debt to the
sandpainting created by Navajo sandpainters at the Museum during the course of the
exhibition (fig. 3.13). Violet de Laszlo remembers how absorbed he was in their work. 260
Their presence dramatized the continuing vitality of this most influential of American
Indian pictorial art forms and the role of sandpaintings in ritual practices. The symbolic
images of the paintings tell the Navajo myths, and are felt by the Indians to actualize the
presence of the gods. As noted by Douglas and d'Harnoncourt in the catalogue, these potent
 76

images are used in healing ceremonies and only a medicine man or shaman can paint
them.261

Fig. 3.13. Photograph of Navajo sandpainters at Museum of Modern Art. 1941. Navajo Indians executing
sand painting, March 26, 1941, during the exhibition "Indian Art of the United States," The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. January 22, 1941 through April 27, 1941.

Pollock could have learned this also from the installations at the American Museum
of Natural History. That he spent some time on the diorama of a Navajo Medicine Lodge
is shown by his repetition of the mandala design of the ceremonial sand painting from the
Night Chant as a motif in the upper right of CR 595 (c. 1939-42) (fig. 3.14).262 This
drawing also demonstrates interest in the healing power of symbolic narratives. We are
first struck by the “x”ed out image of the rising coiling serpent at the bottom of the
drawing’s central vertical axis, flanked to either side by an image of crucifixion on the
right, and rattled serpents on the left. Our attention is next drawn towards a central foetal
image, connected by an umbilical cord to the head of a feathered Indian, and to the upper
register, with disc-crescent and spiraling configurations. The narrative rises from an image
of suffering to images associated by Pollock with cosmic unity, the sun disc-moon crescent,
and with elevated spiritual consciousness, the eye. 263 Pollock here associates this healing
narrative with the Indian, though he has not yet fixed upon the plumed serpent and bird
imagery of Bird, where the joining of male and female Indian heads in the lower register
and the metamorphosis of plumed serpent into bird imply a story of union, birth, and raised
consciousness.
 77

Fig. 3.14. Untitled, CR 595, c. 1939-42. Black ink and watercolor on paper, 13 1/16 x 10 3/8".

The Jungian perception of much of this material as archetypal created a heady

atmosphere in which the collective and the personal, the ancient and the modern all
intermingle.264 Bird has been understood as a challenge to both Picasso and to fascism.
As Donald Gordon has pointed out, it can be viewed as a willful inversion and resuscitation
of Picasso's castrated cock in Girl with Cock 1938 (fig. 3.15), illustrated in the catalogue
of the 1939 exhibition.265

Fig. 3.15. Pablo Picasso, Girl with Cock [Frau mit Hahn ], February 15, 1938. Oil on canvas, 44 7/8" x 46
1/2". Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Sammlung Steegmann since 1998.
 78

Insofar as the helpless bird in Girl with Cock was widely viewed in the New York art
world as an image of helpless humanity succumbing to fascism, Pollock's resuscitated bird
might also be construed as another expression, along with Birth, of the rising force of the
American totemic plumed serpent, now given wings and placed in the context of his own
Bird.266
If to Henderson Pollock had protested that he would not draw mandalas just for the
sake of mandalas, that he would fight Picasso as a modern artist, now his experience of the
aesthetic and ritual power of American Indian art overpowered paltry illustrations of
mandaloid designs in Jungian texts, which were subsumed in the plumed serpent and bird
images of American Indian ritual invocations of the spirits, fertility and growth. Pollock
thus moved from denuded archetype to full-bodied art –- a totemic and shamanic art that
will inform his challenge to Picasso.

3. A Strange Self-Portrait

Fig. 3.16. Naked Man, c. 1941. Oil on plywood, 50 x 24". Private Collection.

Pollock’s fascination with the plumed serpent and bird imagery is also evident in
Naked Man c. 1941 (fig. 3.16). A bold black line loops off the shoulder of the standing
 79

body of a youthful muscular man and winds into the coils of an unusual circular facial
mask that recalls the mask-like form in Birth. Here the mask projects the image of one eye
locked into a yellow crescent shape and intimates the presence of a bird's head and beak
facing left. The man holds a more traditional primitive mask with his right hand. Lee
Krasner remembers that Pollock associated Naked Man with "a witch doctor-like figure, a
male nude with a bird's head (or bird mask)." 267 Witch doctor is of course a popular
appellation for the medicine man or shaman, a visionary healer, who in most cultures is
associated with a bird.
Pollock's friends, Reuben Kadish, Fritz Bultman, Tony Smith recall his interest in
shamans and shamanism, 268 where once again a significant source for this interest were
installations at the American Museum of Natural History, not only the diorama of the
Navajo Medicine Lodge, but also, in the Indians of the North Pacific Coast Hall, the model
of a Haida shaman's grave box (fig. 3.17), containing the shaman's body, surmounted by a
bird with outstretched wings. The imagery, the tiered arrangement, the theme of death and
resurrection, undoubtedly had some influence on Bird. Even more pointed is the
identification of a shaman with a bird in another Haida model of a shaman with raven
symbols, in effect a bird-man (fig. 3.18).269

L: Fig. 3.17. Haida shaman's grave box, Museum of Natural History, NY, NY, handbook illustration,
1934/reprt 1972, p. 119.
R: Fig. 3.18. Haida model of a shaman with raven symbols. Museum of Natural History, NY, NY,
handbook illustration, 1934/reprt 1972, p.118.
 80

Pollock’s interest in shamanism is suggested by an extraordinary detail of Naked

Man: in the painting a bold black line strikes across his left hand, the tip of the index finger
is shown severed. For Pollock this stroke must have held a special significance. When he
was eleven years old, playing in the barnyard of the farm outside of Phoenix, Arizona, he
tried to break a branch with an ax without succeeding. Another boy offered to cut it for
him; Jackson, surrendering the ax, placed the branch on top of the woodpile and pointed to
the spot where he wanted it cut. When the ax fell, a third of Jackson's right index finger
was severed from his hand. He ran inside the house to his mother, who sewed up the wound
and applied some sugar to help it heal. 270 Pollock was self-conscious about the injury.
Later, whenever he was photographed, he almost always switched his cigarette from his
right hand to his left and concealed the maimed hand in a pocket or at his side or behind
his back.
When telling the story of the accident as a young art student, he embellished it with
all the élan of Jack Sass: right after the accident, before he could react, a buck rooster
galloped up and swallowed the severed finger. 271 James Dorsey in one of Pollock's
Smithsonian volumes notes that the Sioux in pursuit of vision or dream cut off the first
joints of their fingers to offer them in sacrifice. 272 The prominent black line across the tip
of the index finger in Naked Man is not only an early intimation of Pollock's later
preoccupation with suffering leading to vision, but an emblem of Pollock's self-
identification as a shaman: the man takes on the identity of a bird man, symbol of a
repossessed identity.
To Tony Smith Pollock recounted the ordeals that an American Indian must undergo
in order to become a warrior and the dream or vision that would appear to him, if he was
meant to become a shaman or an artist, and not a warrior -- the dream-vision of a devil
woman, a woman of two natures.273 The eye-moon crescent motif, that is the yellow
crescent moon cupping the singular eye, in Naked Man can be taken as an intimation of
the dream-vision of the devil woman. A moon woman comes to play a leading role in
Pollock's art in 1942 and 1943, in Moon Woman 1942, Moon Woman Cuts The Circle
1943, and she is for Pollock a devil woman, a woman of two natures, as the great animal
paintings of 1943 reveal. The rich imagery of Pollock's identification with a shaman
appears in a drawing CR 560 c. 1939-42 (fig. 19), which shows a man clothed in the
 81

skeleton of a bird, holding a crescent moon in one hand and a sun sphere in the other. A
horse gallops to the side, a coiling snake lies below and a bird flies above. In the lower
right of the drawing two small feathered Indian figures are shown hailing the cosmic unity
of sun and moon. Declared psychologically unfit to serve in the armed forces in April
1941, Pollock may well have seized on such accounts of shamanic vision to tell himself
justifying stories of his own vocation. The shaman's symbols are in fact those of Pollock's
own art, past and future, suggesting that this drawing, like Naked Man, is in effect a self-
portrait.274

Fig. 3.19. Untitled, CR 560, c. 1939-42. Colored pencil on paper, 14 x 11".

4. The Artist as Shaman

Pollock’s Promethean artistic ambition, still foetal in “the story of my life” bowl,
finds a focus in his new identity as shaman-artist: the hand of the Naked Man grasps the
feathered mask at a point of fiery orange, sending streamers of orange paint up the left edge
of the canvas, the fiery color dramatizing the sun aspect of the shaman’s head. Such fire
streams across the framing rectangular panels that serve as backdrop to the naked man.
Pollock had always experienced a fire within, a fierce but wildly erratic sense of his creative
 82

potential. To Charles he had written in January 1930: “my mind blazes up with some
illusion for a couple of weeks then it smoalters down to a bit of nothing." 275 And while in
Benton’s classes he had enormous difficulty in drawing the human figure, he yet could
confide, while drinking with his fellow League student Joe Delaney: "Joe, you know I am
great."276 In the identity of a shaman-artist he found a pointer that such greatness would
not lie in the traditional arena of Western art. Frustrated there, he had to create a new
language in order to prove to himself that he was indeed “great.”
Bird, Naked Man, and Birth are in what was for Pollock a new style. Visual
thinking and metamorphic imagination, previously confined to doodles, now command
whole canvases. A vertical axis helps to organize all three paintings. What he learned
from Picasso about the active development of imagery and explored in the drawings he
gave to Henderson now bears fruit. The central position of the plumed serpent on the
vertical axis in Bird speaks to the symbol’s integrative meaning, mediating between the
snake below and the implied visionary bird above; its transposition in Naked Man into a
bird-man mask at the top of the vertical axis, now presented as the fully fleshed body of a
man, speaks of visionary consciousness.277 The buoyant position of the plumed serpent
motif three-quarters the way up the axis in Birth speaks to the “birth” of the plumed serpent
and the consciousness that accompanies it.
All three canvases manifest a flatness and awareness of the two-dimensional
pictorial surface new to Pollock’s art and most pronounced in Bird. Is this flatness simply
the result of a rather crude effort to learn from Picasso’s Cubist space? Are the jagged
rhythms in Birth but Bentonesque contrapuntal rhythms arranged around a central vertical
pole now run through the wringer of Picasso’s shallow buckling reduction of three-
dimensional space in the Demoiselles d’ Avignon? Picasso’s Cubist space does inform
Pollock’s new flatness. But so does the distinctive symbolism of American Indian space
and the very different flatness of Navajo sand paintings. Pollock’s desire to challenge
Picasso is already clear. But how can he challenge him formally?
The disjunction between the naturalistic figure of the youthful six-toed shaman and
the abstract mask he wears in Naked Man is striking, and instructive. Pollock once asserted
to Bultman that the way to break the connection to representation was the subjective dream
vision.278 The naked man’s mask, coming from the world of the dream vision, constitutes
 83

such a break –- away from naturalistic figuration to abstract symbolic figuration. When
Picasso uses African ritual facial masks, he takes over their power to abstract and fragment
the naturalistic human face, but presupposes, even as he sets out to shatter it, the framework
of western illusionistic painting. The shaman’s mask, on the other hand, proposes a
different kind of abstraction, rooted not in naturalism, but in the world of the dream-vision,
that is in the world of the imagination, intuition, the unconscious: the shaman’s world. 279
Pollock’s awareness of this distinction is suggested by the way his Naked Man
echoes Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse 1906, exhibited, along with Girl with Cock and the
Demoiselles, at “The Masterpieces of Picasso” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941. That
the stance of Pollock’s standing naked man so closely echoes that of Picasso’s boy suggests
that he looked carefully at this masterwork created just before Picasso took the step to
abstraction in the Demoiselles. Picasso’s boy commands the horse, not with reins (there
are none), but with spatial elisions learned from Cézanne. Pollock's man, instead of leading
a horse, reaches for the feathered mask and wears a bird-mask. “Move aside, Picasso!” his
shaman seems to say. At the “Indian Art of the United States” exhibition Pollock witnessed
a practice of painting that provided him with breathing space and room enough in which to
begin to discover his own voice. American Indian art gave Pollock something more
important than a set of symbols, snakes, birds and plumed serpents. It showed him another
approach to the pictorial plane. Pollock himself suggested what this art meant to him:
I have always been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian
art. The Indians have the true painter's approach in their capacity to get hold of
appropriate images, and in their understanding of what constitutes painterly
subject-matter. Their color is essentially Western, their vision has the basic
universality of all real art. Some people find reference to American Indian art
and calligraphy in parts of my pictures. That wasn't intentional; probably was the
result of early memories and enthusiasms.280
Bird is the canvas in which one can most clearly sense these "early memories and
enthusiasms."
Initially one might be tempted to see Bird as a Synthetic Cubist canvas of opaque
colored planes and some biomorphic shapes arranged in a rectilinear composition -- but it
is more than this. It partakes of the nature of American Indian art where symbolic
 84

significance depends not only on imagery, but also on spatial organization and color.
Instead of breaking the surface plane with linear perspective to generate the illusion of
three-dimensional space, the Indian artist works with the two-dimensional surface, dividing
it symmetrically with vertical and horizontal axes to generate a strong sense of center, left-
right, up-down, all of which have symbolic associations (see fig. 3.12 and fig. 3.13).281
This space is unbounded. There is no containing edge or boundary that frames the
composition of the Indian sand painting that Pollock saw at the Museum of Modern Art in
1941, other than the edge of the sand box that had to be constructed in the museum. In
actual practice this unbounded space was co-extensive with the earth. And the center that
is the black square marks the axis mundi that establishes besides the four cardinal directions
of the earth, the above and the below of the earth, that is the six directions of the universe.
This axis mundi is not some already fixed pole, but is where ever it is marked to be. It
travels with man wherever he is. This moving center promised a freedom beyond the prison
of Renaissance perspective. Pollock’s deep attraction to the space of American Indian art
would find its own expression in the poured paintings of 1947-50.
At this point of engagement with this new space, he is able to embrace or articulate
only so much of his dream of freedom. In Bird he uses a striking two-dimensional spatial
organization, centralized and axial, which also has symbolic associations. To be sure, the
world symbolized in Bird is not primarily that of cultural myth, but of a more private
import. Down-up, left-right, center are associated with sex-spirit, female-male, integration,
respectively. This framework mingles with the down-up, left-right, center of the human
body, also with the Jungian notion of a centralized mandaloid structure symbolizing the
aspects and integration of the self. The pictorial structure in Bird thus reflects both body
structure and psychic structure and becomes the vehicle of their projection on to a two-
dimensional surface. Moreover, whole areas of the pictorial surface have a specific
significance. In Bird this is most clear in the differently colored grounds -- black bottom,
white top. Here, as in American Indian art, color symbolism is at work. As described in
the Smithsonian volumes, the latter associates, for instance, white with omniscience and
the consecrated.282 Pollock's associations are more broadly psychological: white, is
associated with the light of a higher, black with the darkness of a lower consciousness. But
to describe the painting in terms of such simple oppositions is misleading. What I called
 85

the white ground of the upper half presents itself as a rectangular canvas held by the wings
of the bird, linking this higher consciousness to the creation of art, intimating already what
was to become Pollock's Magic Mirror.
In the quoted passage Pollock distances himself from American Indian art, claiming
that his references to it in his pictures "wasn't intentional." His chief aim in the early 1940s
was to challenge the art of Picasso. And he was not the only one to draw on American
Indian art to help him mount that challenge. Those artists known as Indian Space painters,
among them Pollock’s close friend Peter Busa (Pollock was Busa’s best man in 1943),
quite self-consciously sought “to equal or even surpass Picasso’s Cubism by developing a
new pictorial space … inspired by Native … art from both Americas.” 283 Their paintings
were characterized by flat, all-over designs that balanced organic and geometric forms,
Native pictography and the vitality of a line in space. While not indifferent to the idea that
tribal art could provide access to the unconscious mind, Indian Space painters were more
interested in the idea that the structure, as opposed to the process, of primitive art might
“describe in a universal way man’s perception of his environment.” 284
While Busa and the other Indian Space painters pursued these ideas in their art into
the later forties, in Bird Pollock begins to explore how that American Indian axial structure
could support process, increasingly manifest in metamorphic linear rhythms and a new
painterly sensitivity. In Bird the theme of metamorphosis is orchestrated along the vertical
axis. But there images illustrate the theme more than they embody it; their metamorphic
potential is constrained by a diagrammatic rigidity. In Birth the metamorphic potential is
unleashed. There the shift, from bottom to top, from the ambiguous forms of the
amorphous masks to the more defined features of the plumed serpent being born, is
orchestrated with interlocking arcing and spiraling rhythms, which play across the entire
canvas, as curves in the releasing hand and bent leg start off the rhythm that then mounts
up in looping lines. Linear rhythms suggest a jagged and bubbling release in a process of
birth. In a related study CR 594 (c. 1941-42) (fig. 3.20) Pollock further specifies the
symbolic significance of these rhythms, as he here threads the vertical pile of metamorphic
forms with the long linear sweep of a rising winged serpent.
 86

Fig. 3.20. Untitled, CR 594, c. 1941-42. India ink and watercolor on watercolor paper, 13 x 10 1/4".

The symbolic imagery in Bird provides the poetic text for the growing musicality of his
line –- in Birth raucous but powerful.285
In both Bird and Birth Pollock differentiates his handling of the materiality of paint
with new found sensitivity. At first glance the surface of Bird appears flat, encrusted, even
obstinate. Looking again, we see that while the foetal plumed serpent is painted with a
particularly heavy crust of white paint, the wings to either side are in a thin liquid grey, the
contrast conveying the sensation of the effort of flight. The eye of elevated consciousness
is painted with a strikingly unsullied layer of sky blue, generating a sensation of lucid
clarity. The images do not just symbolize their meaning, but in the manner in which they
are painted incarnate it. The painting does not illustrate what has been previously thought
out. It is itself the material trace left by visual thinking.
 87

Bird is one of Pollock's earliest paintings to display such varied textural contrasts
and layering. The painterly differentiation found here is also found in Birth -- for example,
the disc of the plumed serpent slips from underneath a sharp crescent of thick white paint,
upward, and begins to move over the topmost disc, its blackness suggestive of the unknown
future. Joined to Pollock’s mastery of metamorphic linear rhythms, such painterly
sensitivity makes Birth a more complete and abstract expression of the serpent rising.
Unlike Picasso, always master of his pictorial tools, even as he proceeded to break
down and abstract naturalistic form, Pollock struggles with the materiality of his medium.
Paint resists him, as the material in sculpture once resisted him. But, precisely as “other,”
paint has the possibility of becoming a new partner. In his handling of line as well, he is
beginning to draw strength from that “continuous running battle between himself and his
tools,” of which Axel Horn spoke in describing Jackson’s relationship to drawing the
human figure.286 To be sure, now Pollock was beginning to invent a new language, in
which he did not have to draw the human figure: the sweep of an upward rising line and
varying densities of paint begin to carry his meaning.
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II Alchemy
Chapter 4
Magic Mirror

1. Primitive Art and Picasso

When John Graham introduced Pollock to Frederick Kiesler as the greatest painter
in America, he had already chosen Birth to be included in an exhibition meant to challenge
the European tradition. It was a perceptive choice.
It was Pollock who first sought out Graham, and not because he was, with Arshile
Gorky and Stuart Davis, one of the three spokesmen for a future for abstract art in America,
he and Gorky holding court at Romany Marie’s restaurant in Greenwich village: Pollock
still had a foot in the world of Benton’s American Regionalism, a bête noire for these
proselytizers of abstract art. Rather Pollock had read an article by Graham, “Picasso and
Primitive Art.” The article had so impressed him that quite uncharacteristically he wrote
its author a letter.287 Years later Pollock related that he also went to see Graham, because
"he knew something about art and I had to know him. I knocked on his door, told him I
had read his article and that he knew. He looked at me a long time, then just said, 'Come
in.'"288
In addition to being a painter, theorist and polemicist, Graham was an expert on
primitive art.289 Primitive artists, he thought, never seduced by the desire to imitate, always
responded to "the possibilities of the plain operating space,” which in pictorial art is two-
dimensional. The primitive artist understood what the modern painter, working in a
tradition shaped by Renaissance perspective, had once again come to understand. Such
understanding permitted "a persistent and spontaneous exercise of design and
composition." The primitive artist worked "freely within the pure form, shifting at will,
assembling and dissembling the character-feature of form.” Graham tied such freedom to
free access to the collective unconscious, "the creative factor and the source and the
storehouse of power and of all knowledge, past and future." Through their forms primitive
people "satisfied their particular totemism and exteriorized their prohibitions (taboos) in
order to understand them better, consequently to deal with them successfully." 290 In the
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abstract work of primitive artists Graham was thus discovering both a hermeneutic function
and an extraordinary wealth of two-dimensional forms.
Graham’s intuitions about the spontaneous, metamorphic, expressive properties of
primitive art led him to a new approach to abstraction, especially to the art of Picasso: "No
artist ever had greater vision or insight into the origin of plastic forms and their logical
destination than Picasso. … Picasso's painting has the same ease of access to the
unconscious as have primitive artists -- plus a conscious intelligence," where Graham
points not to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, where the influence of African sculpture is
obvious, but to the works from 1927 on, particularly those from 1930-33.291 Characteristic
of primitive art forms is interchangeability and conflation of different members of the
human body, and it is this metamorphic sensibility that Graham dramatized with his caption
describing the Eskimo mask that he had chosen as the frontispiece for his article. "There
is typical primitive insistence that nostril and eye are of the same origin and purpose. Two
similar orifices seem to say: two eyes and two nostrils." About Picasso's work he is less
specific. Phrases such as Picasso is "painting women in interlocking figures of eight"
evoke his use of a free metamorphic line to depict different anatomical parts. 292 More
suggestive is Graham's choice of illustrations, among them that masterpiece of Picasso's
metamorphic imagination, Girl Before A Mirror 1932 (see fig. 4.8), a painting that was
soon to preside over Pollock’s further entry into modernism.
Pollock and Graham first met no later than the late fall of 1940.293 Graham was 53,
Pollock 28. By November 1941, when Graham invited Pollock to exhibit at McMillen,
Pollock was a frequent visitor in Graham's studio at 54 Greenwich Avenue, filled with his
collection of African, Oceanic, and Melanesian objects, his Renaissance bronzes, Greek
and Egyptian statuettes, his extensive collection of mirrors and crystal balls. 294 To Kadish,
Pollock compared the crossing of Graham's threshold to entering a temple or sanctuary.
Kadish observed that Jackson's reverence for Graham matched that of a cult follower for
his guru.295 Their relationship would only cool in 1943 when the possessive Graham
thought Pollock was currying favor with the Surrealist circle in New York. 296 Pollock’s
own telling of the tale of their first encounter, their mutual recognition -- “he knew … come
in” -- hints at a secret knowledge difficult to articulate.
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At the time the future of abstraction in America was quite uncertain. In the 1930's
Hans Hofmann was perhaps the most influential teacher of modern abstract art in the U.S..
By comparison Graham, the other great proselytizer, had the aura of a charlatan. Hofmann
knew Picasso, Matisse, Delaunay, and Kandinsky, had run his own art school in Munich
between 1915-30, then via Berkeley, and the Art Students League, had opened his school
again in 1934 in New York, the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts at 52 West 9th St..
What he taught was not strictly Cubism. Rather his early personal contacts led to a
synthesis of Analytic and early Synthetic Cubism, Fauvism and Cézanne; he, too, stressed
the premise: "Pictorial space exists two-dimensionally."297 Asking his students to draw
from nature (fig. 4.1), from still-life, the figure, or the landscape, he described his special
notion of plasticity as "the transference of three-dimensional experience to two-
dimensions. A work of art is plastic when its pictorial message is integrated with the
picture plane and when nature is embodied in the qualities of the expression medium." 298
This would become the basis of Clement Greenberg's concept of modernism. He, too, for
a brief while was a Hofmann student, as was Lee Krasner (fig. 4.2).299

L: Fig. 4.1. Photo of Hans Hoffman in his Provincetown school, correcting a student's drawing.
R: Fig. 4.2. Lee Krasner, ca. 1940-43. Photo by Maurice Berezov.

Krasner had read Graham's System and Dialectics in Art in 1937 and was drawn to
its stress on abstraction and the subjective emotional quality of art. 300 She actually met
him only in the fall of 1941. Graham had immediately asked her to participate in the
upcoming McMillen exhibition. This was to lead to her first meeting Pollock. She was
surprised that she didn't know this young artist who was also being included in the
exhibition. In the thirties and early forties, she recalled, all the abstract artists in New York,
relatively few in number, knew each other. When she went over to meet Pollock, she was,
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as she put it, "overwhelmed, bowled over, that's when I saw all those marvelous
paintings." 301 "One work -- the painting he later titled Magic Mirror -- just about stunned
me. We talked about this painting and the others, and the conversation was totally easy
and marvelous.”302 In his work she recognized a living force, "the same sort of thing that
I responded to in Matisse, in Picasso, in Mondrian."303 At first, however, she argued with
him. She wanted to recruit him for Hofmann's school, wanted to teach him about Cubism,
wanted him to work from life. "[Lee] was trying to tell Jackson what he was doing, what
Cubism was, but Jackson was tuning her out …." 304 According to Busa, Pollock neither
understood Cubism, certainly not as taught by Hofmann, nor cared much for it. Eventually
Krasner was to be converted by Pollock. 305 By 1943 she would give up Hofmann's method
of working from nature and try to work "from inside" -- "the way Jackson did."306

2. Challenging Mondrian
As Pollock was experimenting with abstraction, Hofmann did not seem terribly
pertinent. He felt more challenged by the art of Mondrian, who, flushed out of his London
studio by the October 1940 bombings, lived and worked in New York from late 1940
through his death in February 1944. His non-objective canvases were much admired by
the younger American artists, including Lee Krasner, who, even as she remained a
Hofmann student, came under Mondrian's sway: "Mondrian at that point took over my
life."307 But that can hardly be said of Pollock, who did not take Cubism seriously enough
to have to work his way through it, as did Mondrian, who in the essay "True Vision of
Reality," accompanying his one-man show at the Valentine Dudensing Gallery in New
York (January-February 1942), explained his progress: "Gradually I became aware that
Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not
developing abstraction toward its ultimate goal, the expression of pure reality. I felt that
this reality can only be established through pure plastics.”308 The “pure plastics” of vertical
and horizontal, black and white, the primary colors could be brought into endlessly various
states of dynamic equilibrium, their dynamism speaking to the multiplicity and life of
reality, the equilibrium to its unity (fig. 4.3).
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Fig. 4.3. Mondrian. Composition with Red, Blue Yellow, 1937-42. Oil on canvas, 23.7 x 22".
Collection Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection.

The other side of this pursuit of pure reality, which to Mondrian meant also a pursuit
of the universal, was an interest in the spiritual, which had led him, too, to that theosophical
mysticism to which Graham and Pollock were attracted. 309 Still, Pollock would not have
been the only one to feel that Mondrian’s approach to abstraction shortchanged the
emotional and the subjective. As Bultman put it in speaking of Mondrian’s followers in
the American Abstract Artists group, "the abstract image, as personified by Harry
Holtzman and the American Abstract Artists, was a dry gulch. You had to -- it had to start
all over again." 310 Robert Motherwell went further in his criticism: "His [Mondrian's]
hypothesis holds that it is possible to fulfill the artist's function, which is the expression of
the felt quality of reality, with concrete color-spaces which contain no reference to the
external world." But then he had to conclude, "Mondrian failed, with his restricted means,
to express enough of the felt quality to deeply interest us."311 In a later article Motherwell
elaborated on what he meant by felt quality, when he defined the content of abstract
painting as "the feeling 'body-and-mind'," itself "the interaction of the animal self and the
external world," of id and super ego, of instinct and form.312 Mondrian himself remained
adamant in his rejection of such embodied subjectivity. For him "time and subjective
vision veil the true reality." 313
But if Pollock did not feel he had to work his way through Cubism, that he was
not altogether uninterested is suggested by a comment he later made to Tony Smith about
the importance of Mondrian's plus and minus compositions of 1913-15 to the poured
paintings.314 In 1936 one of these, Composition 10 in Black and White (fig. 4.4) was
exhibited in the "Cubism and Abstract Art" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and
illustrated in the catalogue; another Pier and Ocean 5 (Sea and Starry Sky) was shown in
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1942 at the Valentine Dudensing Gallery and subsequently bought by MOMA. In his
similarly shaped Interior with Figures (c. 1938-41) (fig. 4.5) Pollock seems to address
Mondrian's interplay of vertical and horizontal axes by impishly inserting rising serpent-
like figures into the fluxing structural grid, announcing his own interest in sexuality and a
transformative, not just pure, dynamism.

L: Fig. 4.4. Piet Mondrian, Composition No.10 (Pier and Ocean) 1915. Oil on canvas, 33 x 43".
Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, the Netherlands.
R: Fig. 4.5. Interior with Figures, c. 1938-41. Oil on canvas mounted on board, 13 3/4 x 19 1/4". Private
Collection, Boston.

Such an interpretation is supported by Bultman's recollectiom that with his balance of

polarities Pollock “was not challenging Picasso so much as Mondrian," using the pulsing
line of automatism to break the static surface and its rectangles. "He felt that through the
image we could break through to something new. … The image is the place to start and
then you go on from there and you break with representation. … he still felt Mondrian's
connection … to the representational world, because even though Mondrian was totally
abstract, he had come from the representational world." Image therefore cannot refer to
something observed in nature: Pollock wanted to come from "the world of the shaman,
the dream image.”315

3. The Spiritual in Art

Given Pollock’s spiritual leanings, one could have expected him to have been more
interested in the work of Wassily Kandinsky, the other giant of abstract, non-objective art,
who was just beginning to be recognized by the New York art world. In Concerning the
Spiritual in Art (1912) Kandinsky had written of a progression in art from “Impression,”
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defined as “A direct impression of nature, expressed in purely pictorial form,” to

“Improvisation,” defined as “A largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of inner
character, nonmaterial nature,” a kind of spirit dwelling in things, to “Composition,” “An
expression of a slowly formed inner feeling, tested and worked over repeatedly and almost
pedantically. … Reason, consciousness, purpose play an overwhelming part. But of
calculation nothing appears: only feeling” (see fig. 12.4).316 This echoes Graham’s
appreciation of primitive art and of Picasso, though without the overlay of the fabulous
reservoir of esoteric knowledge in a collective unconscious.317
In The Spiritual in Art Kandinsky welcomes the fact that “the number is increasing
of those men who put no trust in the methods of material science when it deals with
questions which have to do with ‘non-matter,’ or matter that is not accessible to our
senses.” Reality, he is convinced, transcends the reality that concerns socialism or science.
Art is to help us towards a more comprehensive and deeper understanding. Kandinsky's
interest in the spiritual in art joins with his interest in theosophy: “This society consists of
groups who seek to approach the problem of spirit by way of inner knowledge. Their
methods, in opposition to positivism, derive from an ancient wisdom, which have been
formulated with relative precision.”318 Although Kandinsky himself is too sober not to
remain skeptical faced with theosophist theorizing and with definite answers where, he
thinks, there should only be giant question marks, he yet finds there a light in the darkness
of the age, promising “deliverance to oppressed and gloomy hearts.” 319 The task of art is
to help dispel this darkness with works incarnating the spirit dwelling in things in the
material of paint.
None of Kandinsky’s statements were available to Pollock in the early 1940’s. But
Kandinsky’s art could be seen, along with work by others such as Klee, Arp, Moholy-
Nagy, and Delaunay, at Solomon Guggenheim’s Museum of Non-Objective Art (later the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) which had opened in 1939 at 24 East 54th St. in New
York. The Baroness Hilda Rebay, as Director, presided over the presentation of
Kandinsky’s non-objective canvases. In her introductory essay to the 1939 catalogue, “The
Power of Spiritual Rhythm,” she voiced Kandinsky’s ambitions in her own overblown way:
"Non-objective masterpieces are … alive with spiritual rhythm and organic with the cosmic
order which rules the universe. Beauty is their main attraction and all that matters to the
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layman … they develop intuition and joy through vision. The power of their electricity
influences everyone who lives with them. Their enjoyment only increases and never ends
once they have been felt." 320
Pollock at the time was not yet ready to respond to what Kandinsky had to teach
him about non-objective spatial rhythms. This begins to happen later, in 1944-45. Nor did
he and Krasner approve of the Baroness’s hanging of the “spiritualist diagrams” done by
Rudolph Bauer, a much less talented Kandinsky imitator, favored in the collection because
of the Baroness’ personal relationship with him. Indeed they were “appalled.” 321 Still,
when “dead broke” in April of 1943 and applying for a menial job at the Museum, which
he got, his application to the Baroness included under the heading of “biography” a quick
sketch of what he called "painting development." 322 In it he notes "past," which he
subdivides into "subjective realism" and "subjective abstract"; "present" he equates with
"subjective spacial -- reality/ non-objective/ spacial. intensity." For "extended present" he
projects, from "intensity," a "?" mark. Through repetition he points to his concern with
subjectivity, which in past art he associates with the external world, whether realistic or
abstracted. In his present art he makes a distinction, associating subjectivity with reality,
but a reality that is non-objective. While in his use of the word “non-objective” he may
have indeed been playing to the Baroness’s requirements (jobs were to go only to artists
who adhered to non-objective principles), 323 his sketch for “painting development” shows
him willing to place himself in the larger spiritual tradition for which Kandinsky stood.
This tradition he understood as having an open future.
If Pollock believed in a future for abstract art, the Museum of Modern Art seemed
less certain. When Alfred Barr presented the historical overview of “Cubism and Abstract
Art” at the Museum in 1936, it was presented as a European phenomenon, weighted to the
achievements of the years 1905-23. His two-page consideration of “The Younger
Generation” touched upon the work of only one American, Alexander Calder. Moreover,
the approach taken by Barr to abstract art was so purely aesthetic that Meyer Schapiro in
the pages of The Marxist Quarterly immediately argued against it. “To say then that
abstract painting is simply a reaction against the exhausted imitation of nature, or that it is
the discovery of an absolute or pure field of form is to overlook the positive character of
the art, its underlying energies and sources of movement.” 324 In this connection he notes
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that for some groups of modern artists, “The highest praise of their own work is to describe
it in the language of magic and fetishism. This new responsiveness to primitive art was
evidently more than aesthetic; a whole complex of longings, moral values and broad
conceptions of life were fulfilled in it.”325
The diagrammatic chart prepared by Barr for the jacket cover of the exhibition
catalogue has become the paradigmatic image for his understanding of the internal
aesthetic history of abstract art as it became reified in the installation of the exhibition
rooms at the Museum of Modern Art (fig. 4.6).

Fig. 4.6. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cover of the exhibition catalogue "Cubism and Abstract Art," The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, 1936, Offset, printed in color, 7 3/4 x 10 1/4"., Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 3.C.4,
The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

But the rectangular boxes with red lines leading from them announce outside phenomena
that impinge as “other” onto this internal narrative of art for art’s sake, for instance Negro
Sculpture having an impact on both Fauvism and Cubism.326 And if, as Schapiro suggests,
one considers the influence of Negro Sculpture in a broader context, for example that of
European colonialism, both political and subjective conditions surrounding the creation of
the Cubist style come to the fore. “American Indian Art” seems to me to deserve another
such box, with a red line drawn to Pollock as Abstract Expressionist 327 and so does the
“Hermetic Tradition” with which Graham acquainted Pollock.
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While, despite affinities, no proof exists that Graham read The Spiritual in Art, we
have ample proof of Graham’s engagement with the Hermetic tradition, and of his desire
to bring it to bear on the Cubist art of Picasso at the very time of his closest contact with
Pollock.328 In his 1936 assessment of the future of abstract art Barr noted the international
decline of geometrically based abstract art, concluding “The formal tradition of Gauguin,
Fauvism and Expressionism will probably dominate for some time to come the tradition of
Cézanne and Cubism.”329 What he could not have known is that Graham, who had spent
much of the 1920’s in Paris, an acquaintance and great admirer of Picasso, would map a
hermetic spiritual tradition onto Cubism, thereby giving it a surprising new life. Graham’s
Cubism, not Hofmann’s, would interest Pollock.

4. The Three John Grahams

There seem to be three John Grahams: the first emphasizes the modernist Picasso
as a sophisticated primitive artist, conscious of the unconscious; the second becomes
involved in a hermeticism that he applies to the modernist Picasso; the third gives up on
modernism and pursues hermetic interests in Renaissance form. Pollock’s Masqued Image
c. 1938-41 (fig. 4.7) responds to the first John Graham, the author of “Picasso and Primitive
Art,” illustrator and admirer of Picasso’s masterpiece Girl before a Mirror (fig. 4.8). At
least in the context of its installation at the Museum of Modern Art, its creative eroticism
acted as a pendant to Guernica’s confrontation with death and bestiality. Working on the
flat pictorial surface of late Synthetic Cubism, Picasso here uses metamorphic linear
rhythms to convey a young girl’s contemplation of her future maturity: as she gazes into a
mirror; her breasts swell like fruit, her arm takes on the suggestion of a phallus as it extends
towards the mirror, portending the fulfillment of her
sexuality. Evoking the mysteries of life and death, her half-formed reflected face has the
aura of a death mask enlivened by a form that suggests a sprouting plant. 330
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L: Fig. 4.7. Masqued Image, c.1938-41. Oil on canvas, 40 x 24 1/8". Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth.
Museum purchase made possible by a grant from The Burnett Foundation.
C: Fig. 4.8. Pablo Picasso, Girl before a Mirror, Boisgeloup, March 1932. Oil on canvas, 64 x 51 1/4".
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim.
R: Fig. 4.9. Upper figure human embryo, from Ecker. Lower figure that of a dog, from Bischoff , Figure 1
in Charles Darwin, The descent of man and selection in relation to sex (New York: Burt, 1874).

Pollock’s first explicit response to Girl before a Mirror is Masqued Image.331 The
large head in the lower left, one half of its face looking at the other, derives from the similar
double face in Girl before a Mirror. This is one of Pollock's first uses of a device often
used by Picasso to indicate psychological introspection. The double face in Masqued
Image seems somewhat frightened by a welter of motifs swirling upward and around it,
one of which stands out in the upper right hand corner: a volute shape, white with some
yellow, which seems to have come out of the white crescent just below and to the left.
Echoing the girl's reflected face, its shape resembles the foetus illustrated in his copy of
Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (fig. 4.9).332 Pollock's metamorphic imagery evokes
an embryo rather than a death mask. Using the x-ray quality of the Picasso canvas, in
which the solid surface of the body is dissolved to reveal internal anatomy, Pollock unifies
his pictorial surface with striations and dots, as with a translucent membrane. The
repetition of circular and curved shapes aspires to something like Picasso's rhythmic
metamorphic freedom.
In this Pollock was certainly supported by the conviction with which Graham spoke
up for Picasso and abstract art in the 1930s. But more attracted Pollock to Graham than
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the latter's proselytizing: an understanding of the significance of art that, while articulated
in terms of modern psychoanalysis, owed much to esoteric hermetic ideas. Pollock had
already been introduced to such ideas in high school by Frederic John de St. Vrain
Schwankovsky, who taught his students not only to appreciate Cézanne and Matisse, but
introduced them to theosophy, Eastern religion, Rosicrucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism,
yoga, reincarnation, karma, all in order to teach them "how to expand their
consciousnesses," to meet themselves. 333 After his first expulsion from Manual Arts High
in March 1929, for criticizing the school's overemphasis on sports, Jackson accompanied
Schwankovsky and Guston and another art student to Ojai for a week of Krishnamurti's
mass camp meetings.334 Kadish was later to call it "a good thing some of the early things
that Phil Guston and Jackson did were destroyed;" rather "like some Hare Krishna
illustrations," they were "not the kind of thing one regards as serious art."335 But if these
early efforts were destroyed, the spiritual impulses that had been awakened were to remain
with him. Later to Lee Krasner he would thus often speak of Krishnamurti. She recalls
that his mother and family were anti-religious, even "violently anti-religious," and that he
felt a loss there as he had strong religious impulses.336 We know the nature of
Krishnamurti's teachings when Pollock heard him, as his campfire talks at Ojai and
elsewhere are anthologized in a small book entitled Life in Freedom, whose message is
self-discovery and self-emancipation: "as the potter molds the clay to the delight of his
imagination, so can man mold his life through the desire of his heart. As the earthen vessels
are fashioned into beautiful or ugly forms, so life can be made beautiful or ugly according
to the purposes which you have established for yourself." 337 Such similes joining life and
art were undoubtedly reiterated and intensified by Schwankovsky: here lies the seed of
what, reinforced by Henderson, would later become a conviction. “Painting,” Pollock
thought, “is life itself (that is for those who practice it) and one advances as one grows and
experiences life –- it doesn’t exceed one’s experience.” 338
To Graham, too, the quest for self mattered more than the play of forms. By 1943,
he had indeed, in his own painting and in his pronouncements, denied Picasso, erasing his
name from System and Dialectics of Art, and turned back to the Renaissance. He still
believed in the artist as visionary and diviner, but no longer convinced that wisdom could
be brought forth from the immemorial past through the evolution of form, he turned to
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symbolic images as a "secret, sacred language … in adoration, evocation, conjuration of

this world's forces or spirits."339
Such hermeticism made its appearance in Graham’s work well before 1943, and in
such a fashion in Sun and Bird (c. 1941-42) (fig. 4.10)340 as to suggest, if perhaps not
influence on Pollock's growing symbolic awareness in Bird (c. 1941) (see fig. 3.8) and
Magic Mirror 1941, at least shared interests.341

L: Fig. 4.10. John Graham, Sun and Bird, c. 1941-42. Oil on canvas, 21 x 18 ". Allan Stone Collection,
Courtesy of the Allan Stone Gallery, New York.
R: Fig. 4.11. Alchemical illustration, in Minotaure, vol. 2, no. 8, 1936, p. 1.

Constance Graham remembers that at the time the two went together to the exhibition
"Indian Art of the United States."342 Pollock's Bird and Graham's Sun and Bird date from
that time. The two works bear a striking resemblance: in the presence of a bird with
outstretched wings, in the overall hieratic, symmetrical composition, and in the
differentiation between darkness and light. In the Graham the more immediately evident
bird is flanked by a sun disc on the left and a crescent moon on the right. Graham's interests
at the time were growing increasingly esoteric: theosophy, hatha yoga, tantric yoga,
numerology, systems of proportion derived from Pythagorean and Platonic sources,
alchemy, astrology.343 Sun and Bird reflects especially his preoccupation with the last two.
The likely source for its imagery is an illustration in Pierre Mabille's article "Notes Sur le
Symbolisme" in the 1936 Minotaure, featuring a bird with outspread wings located on a
central axis flanked by a crescent moon and a blazing sun (fig. 4.11).344 In this article
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Mabille pointed out the magical efficacy of the symbolic image, both for the ancients, who
used them in their hermetic texts and in religious and initiatory ceremonies, and for the
modern painter, who so often dreams of flying.

5. The Hermetic Tradition

The hermetic tradition, which traced its origin back to the mythical Egyptian
Hermes Trismegistos and liked to present its teachings under the veil of enigma, allegory
and symbols, had declined with the rise of science and the triumph of the Enlightenment.
Partly due to the work of Eliphas Levi, it revived in intellectual and artistic circles in late
nineteenth century France and influenced especially Symbolist and then Surrealist Art. 345
Believing in a universe in which Spirit is present in every being and the macrocosm
corresponds to the microcosm, hermetic thought attempted to discover the hidden laws that
ruled the universe and thereby to accomplish the Great Work, the realization of Spirit in
matter.346
Such realization was the goal of the alchemist's Great Work, which sought to
transform base lead into gold. On one level this effort was a proto-chemistry; on another,
a psychological quest: as lead is transmuted into gold, so the soul is purified, dissolved and
crystallized anew, to reveal Spirit. Alchemy thus offered the modern painter a figure
illuminating his or her own work: as matter is transformed and turned into art, the self is
transformed and spiritualized. At the same time alchemy’s symbols provided the artist
with new subject matter, allegorical signs referring to self-transformation.
Today there is little serious interest in alchemy. It seems part of a past that no
longer has much to tell us heirs of the Enlightenment. Even more than astrology today it
seems to have a place on the intellectually suspect fringes of our modern world. This makes
it difficult for us to recognize and do justice to the widespread interest in alchemy in the
twentieth century, especially in the 1930’s. Pollock’s circle of friends provides a telling
example. Pollock certainly was aware of the WPA mural his friend Kadish painted in
December 1936 - August 1937 for a Chemistry Building in San Francisco: A Dissertation
on Alchemy (fig. 4.12). When Kadish did make it back to New York in the late 1930s,
taking over some of Sande’s old role as Jackson’s caretaker, they must also have discussed
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alchemy. Of interest here is the suggestion of an alchemist’s retort, into which a skeletal
figure places a bone, in Pollock's Panel A, c. 1934-38.347

Fig. 4.12. Reuben Kadish, A Dissertation on Alchemy, Dec. 1936-Aug. 1937. WPA mural, Woods Hall
annex, UC Extension/San Francisco State University.

Kadish’s approach to alchemy, appropriate to a Chemistry Building, was mostly as

a proto-science addressed to matter. Intent on transforming lead into gold, alchemy
addressed not just the soul, but base materials. The alchemical method, as Kadish’s middle
panel makes clear, is to discover forms within matter, breaking open the large egg, which
in alchemy stands for prima materia, the initial undifferentiated matter, to reveal the
geometrical forms within: the spiral, the cube, the sphere, the pyramid. The transformative
theme is easy to read because of the mirror symmetry of the tri-part composition. To the
upper right is the irregular sphere of inchoate matter; to the upper left the crystal. Below,
to the right, is the image of a broken, partial human, accompanied by the alchemical dragon
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of prima materia; to the left is an image of the now complete and accomplished alchemist,
a faceted diamond by his side.
That Kadish himself still stressed some of the Post Surrealist cosmic and
philosophic dimensions of his theme is evident in his depiction of the partial human figure
as a broken classical sculpture. In his earlier Post Surrealist work Untitled (Dr. Entozoan)
c. 1935 he had used such a broken statue to explore the failures of a classical culture for
which the doctor seeks remedies in primitive living organisms.348 In his Dissertation on
Alchemy Kadish presents the alchemist’s research as the vehicle by which man’s
understanding can encompass the fiery beginnings of the cosmos in the extreme upper right
of the composition to planetary order depicted in the upper left, and can progress from
death, see the human skull on the right, and its counterpart on the left, the large
reconstituted egg of the alchemist’s or “philosopher’s stone,” symbolic of full knowledge
of man and woman and their harmonic relationship to a higher order. To the right of the
egg Kadish depicts the joined hands of a man and a woman marking the center of a square,
inscribed within a triangle, itself inscribed within a larger square, which in turn is inscribed
within a circle that answers the arrow-tipped male sign of Mars, filled with amorphous
matter. Above the “philosophical geometry” on the left is the accomplished crystal.
Pollock was thus well prepared for Graham's seemingly so esoteric understanding
of alchemy as the very center of the magical powers of art. In Sun and Bird the bird's body
hovers over the oval egg of prima materia, in mystical alchemy understood as containing
the captive soul, the chaos apprehended in the alchemist's retort. 349 Sun and moon signify
the underlying division of all existence into opposite principles such as day-night, male-
female, spirit-matter, active-passive, fixed-changing. Graham's placement of the zodiac
sign capricorn over the moon and pisces on the face of the sun, reiterates the dynamic at
work in the play between opposites: capricorn marks the beginning of the process of
dissolution, here associated with the changing moon, while pisces denotes a final moment
which, for this very reason, contains within itself the beginning of the new cycle. The
phoenix, traditionally consecrated to the sun and here shown rising from the egg, speaks
of eternal life within continual death. Perhaps to emphasize this Graham titled his painting
Sun and Bird: its subject matter would seem to be rebirth in the work of self-transformation.
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The theme of birth may refer here, not just to Graham's rebirth as an adept in the
hermetic tradition, but also to Graham's re-entry into art. Although Graham had a
reputation as a painter both in Paris and New York in the late 1920's and early 1930's, 350
he had stopped painting in 1933, even as he continued his activities as collector,
connoisseur, and vocal advocate of modernist painting.351 Only around 1939 did he start
to paint again. In a drawing titled Universe (Literature of the Future) (fig. 4.13) he
diagrams his understanding of “art,” writ large, using the "philosophical geometry" of
alchemy: a circle penetrated by a downward pointing triangle, signifying the
interpenetration of spirit and matter. 352

Fig. 4.13. John Graham, Universe (Literature of the Future) recto, c. 1939. Mixed media, 11 ½ x 8".
Allan Stone Collection.

To his friends in New York he proclaimed in the late 1930s: there remains "no new way to
paint … except with some kind of ray." 353 In alchemy primordial spirit, when intercepted
by a material surface that then reflects and individualizes it, is referred to as a "ray." 354 Sun
and Bird is Graham's elaboration of his concern with the interception of spirit by matter.
Not surprising therefore that, struggling to find himself through art, Pollock should have
felt that here was an artist who, more than his intellectual friend Kadish, "knew."
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While in Sun and Bird Graham had depicted the adept's Great Work, two other
canvases by Graham, Bird Watcher 1941 (fig. 14) and Untitled 1942 speak to its central
and final achievement: the union of a heightened masculine spirituality with a purified
feminine matter, the androgyne, symbolized by the "conjunction" of sun and moon,
Sulphur and Quicksilver, or King and Queen. 355

L: Fig. 4.14. John Graham, Bird Watcher, 1941. Oil on canvas, 25 1⁄4 x 20 1⁄4". Indiana University Art
Museum.
R: Fig. 4.15. Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman (Dora), April 27, 1938. Pen and ink, gouache, and colored
chalk on paper, 30 x 22". Foundation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel.

To express this union Graham paints the female principle in Bird Watcher with a central
diamond eye, the diamond being the traditional alchemical image signifying the
philosopher's stone, or the union of matter and spirit: spiritualized matter. 356 As striking
as her diamond eye is the fact that she is a Picassoid woman, done in a late Synthetic
Cubist style, kin to Picasso's 1937 and 1938 female images, for instance Seated Woman,
April 27, 1938 (fig. 15).357 Graham here applies his pictorial alchemy to Picasso's
imagery of the 1930's.358 It seems likely that it was Graham, who, as early as 1941,
helped shape Pollock's response to Girl before a Mirror in Magic Mirror, and who in
1942 was to stimulate Pollock's increasingly mystical and alchemical approach to
Picasso's muse, evident in Moon Woman 1942 and Male and Female 1942.
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6. Looking into the Magic Mirror

Fig. 4.16. John Graham, Magic Mirror, 1941. Oil. granular filler, and glass on canvas, 46 x 32". Menil
Collection, Houston.

Magic Mirror 1941 (fig. 4.16), too, challenges Picasso, even as it begins to show a
path beyond him. Viewing the canvas we are at first confronted with an all-over field of
shimmering, opalescent, white paint in which scattered lines, red, black and yellow, seem
to move, in and out, variously placed on the surface or buried in the white, straight or
curved, their placement creating a gentle balance between stasis and movement. The only
image that stands out is the winged phallus at the top of the central vertical axis, 359 hovering
over the field of the canvas. This potent symbol, related to the ithyphallic bird-man of
Naked Man and Graham phalloi which we will shortly encounter, Pollock addresses to a
Picassoid woman whose presence one can just detect behind or beneath the field of
animated paint -- the title suggests Girl before a Mirror.360 This constitutes the first full-
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scale projection in Pollock's paintings of this theme onto the two-dimensional surface of
the canvas. New is the assertion of the third-dimension, a literalized third dimension,
created by the layering of female image, white paint, and the topmost linear definition of
the winged phallus.361 Pollock would seem to equate Picasso's muse with the thick crusty
surface that characterizes Girl before a Mirror. Presupposed is a heightened awareness of
the material means of art, so evident in Picasso’s late Cubist paintings.
In Magic Mirror Pollock reclaims the masculinity that at age twenty he had
associated with sculpture. Now, almost a decade later, he asserts command of the three-
dimensional materiality of paint with a new confidence. In a different medium, he was
beginning to make good on the artistic ambitions stated earlier to his father. But he has
become more aware of the need, not just to subdue matter "with the aid of a jack hammer,"
but to engage it in a kind of dialogue. The thoughts and feelings associated with the winged
phallus find expression in a linear impulse; those associated with the female muse in the
material field of thick paint. To support this more abstract play of line and paint, Pollock
relies on his new command of the vertical and literally three-dimensional axial structure of
a canvas. In the mid-section, echoing the alignment of the phallus, thick black lines on the
painting's topmost layer establish a predominant downward thrust on a diagonal from left
to right. These lines suggest an arm and hand that grasp the grainy sandy paint. Around a
striking red dot of paint, three-quarters the way up the central axis, a rotating pattern of red
and black lines first swings down, then around, up, and to the right, where a foetus
configuration floats, sketched in largely yellow lines. Eventually Pollock will be able to
project his here still schematic orchestration of movement, not just into lines animating the
varying thickness of paint, but into the pulses of poured paint. The sketchy representations
of a yellow foetus in Masqued Image and Magic Mirror will become the foetus of his future
art. "Foetus, ancestor of all forms and beasts at one and the same time, like a rosebud holds
in itself threat of all potentialities dormant but potent."362

7. What Graham could see

Because paint mattered more to Pollock than mere words or explicit symbolism, he
was able to incarnate spirit in matter in a way that eluded his guru. What prevented Graham
from mastering the kind of pictorial alchemy he gestured toward is shown by his Untitled
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(Artist Sweating Blood) c. 1942-43 (fig. 4.17), an explicitly hermetic and symbolic version
of Girl Before a Mirror, radically different from the terms of appreciation put forward in
the 1937 article "Primitive Art and Picasso," where he had spoken of the spontaneous play
of metamorphic form on the two-dimensional surface.

Fig. 4.17. John Graham, Untitled (Artist Sweating Blood), c. 1942-43. Oil on canvas, 29 ¾ x 23 ½".
Allan Stone Collection, New York.

Now Graham gives the contemplating woman an eye surrounded by a downward pointing
triangle, reminiscent of the alchemical geometry that symbolized his understanding of art
as an interpenetration of matter and spirit in Universe (Literature of the Future) discussed
above. The mirror-canvas at which the woman gazes reiterates this understanding: a
phallus hovers over the feminine vase. 363 By making Picasso’s androgynous puns explicit,
Graham once again defines art as the interpenetration of opposites projected in sexual
terms.
Graham had long-standing ideas about how this might be accomplished. In Untitled
we find him at the threshold that separates his newer convictions about the importance of
symbols and his older convictions about the spiritual potential of the abstract material of
paint, which linked him to the tradition in modern art that sought content in abstraction.
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That in 1941 Graham was still pushing himself in the direction of abstraction is evident in
Studio 1941, which Sidney Janis illustrated in his 1944 book Abstract and Surrealist Art in
America. In the accompanying statement made in 1942 Graham explains, "Studio is the
fifth of a series. It started with a realistic interior consisting of an old armchair with a little
lamb's hide thrown over its back, a green plant, a square antique mirror above the chair and
secretaire to the right. Every subsequent painting of this subject became a further
abstraction or summation of the phenomena observed." Even as Graham writes of pure
form, his forms remain, as is clear in Studio, surprisingly rooted in the external subject
matter. He is like an aviator having difficulty taking off. By 1943 he despaired of the
further evolution of form. Since Picasso "had done it all," he returned to symbolic
Renaissance figuration. The wounded Omphale 1943 (fig. 18) is quite characteristic.

Fig. 4.18. John Graham, Omphale, c.1943. Oil and graphite on paper, 18 ¾ x 12". Allan Stone Collection,
New York.

While Graham thus beat a retreat from his long standing convictions about the
power of abstraction to the domain of symbols, Pollock maintains an allegiance to both.
Already in Magic Mirror he had found a way of linking the evolution of symbols and the
evolution of form by finding abstract pictorial equivalents for his symbolic images. Crucial
here is that, unlike Graham, Pollock does not start his painting responding to external
reality, but by responding to his inner thoughts and feelings. These are deeply personal but
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also broadly human: erotic urges, still frustrated in “the story of my life” bowl, not yet
confronted in Bird, Naked Man, and Birth, where issues of self–identity as a male artist are
dominant. For these urges he finds first symbolic images, then abstract equivalents,
expressed in the language of line, paint, and axial structure. 364
If Graham found himself unable to create what he himself once demanded, he was
yet able to recognize and respect Pollock's ambitions, to rescue him from that debilitating
"crucifying sense of isolation" to which his analyst Henderson referred. 365 Willem de
Kooning claims that Graham discovered Pollock: "Of course he did. Who the hell picked
him out? The other critics came later, much later. Graham was a painter as well as a critic.
It was hard for other artists to see what Pollock was doing -- their work was so different
from his. It's hard to see something that's different from your work. But Graham could
see it." 366 He could recognize Pollock's symbols: sun and moon, bird, woman, and phallus,
the plumed serpent. Graham, too, admired Orozco's art sufficiently to illustrate two details
from the University dome at Guadalajara in his System and Dialectics of Art; he would
have recognized Pollock's involvement with the plumed serpent. 367 And while Graham
had little respect for the psychological art of the Surrealists, fulminating in his private
notebooks that "Surrealism is the bankruptcy of the imagination because the source of
Surrealists' inspiration is not the unconscious but the conscious as intellectual deliberate
mind," he honored those with a true access to the creative powers of the unconscious. 368
Enough in Pollock's confidence in 1941 to accompany him to one of his therapy sessions
with Dr. Violet de Laszlo, 369 Graham, "the lay analyst," later bragged to Hedda Sterne that
in helping Pollock he was more effective than Pollock's professional analyst. 370
But more important to Graham than the psychotherapeutic context of Pollock's
quest would have been its spiritual dimension. 371 In his notebook Graham wrote down this
advice to young painters and poets: "Do not try to understand anything literally. Try to
understand the hermetic meanings of the sayings of the great men." 372 Certainly he would
have reinforced Pollock's awareness of alchemy as a figure of the artistic quest. What
mattered most, however, was Graham's ability to recognize Pollock's qualities as an artist,
and to encourage his passionate challenge to Picasso. "The desire to create," Graham, as
Luciferian guide, had written in System and Dialectics of Art, "is a demoniac desire to rival
the first creator, the primeval father, the Sun, to challenge him desperately and in love as
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Satan and Prometheus did." 373 What Graham so evocatively wrote about, Pollock was on
his way to actually achieving.
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Chapter 5
Girl before a Mirror Revisited

1. Another Girl Before Another Mirror

Fig. 5.1. Male and Female, c. 1942. Oil on canvas, 6' 1". x 49". Philadelphia Museum of Art. Partial gift of
Mr. and Mrs. H. Gates Lloyd, 1974.

In Male and Female (fig. 5.1) we see the white rectangular panel of Magic Mirror
repeated and embedded in a more complex context. In this larger and more ambitious
canvas of the following year, the shimmering linear play within varying densities of paint
has exploded into abstract automatist painterly passages, in the upper left, along the entire
right hand panel, in the lower center, passages which T.J. Clark has called the “ur-form of
his later non-figurative pouring.”374 The vertical structure of Magic Mirror proliferates
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into an architecture of flat rectangular white and black planes. Like stage-flats arrayed left
and right of center, against what might be read as a flat blue ground, these planes pile up,
advancing from left to right: the white columnar panel on the left, from which jets
scumbled paint, the central and shorter white panel which I have likened to Magic Mirror,
below it variously differentiated black planes, which come to the fore in the long
“blackboard” marked by numbers on the right of the canvas. From between these stage-
flats emerge the protagonists of the title, male and female. But do they? A pink female
torso from stage right is impossible to overlook. But where is the male? To the left of
center another female torso in red, topped by a black head with starry yellow eyes, appears
to wait “off-stage,” constrained by the vertical of an implicit panel. Only the empty outline
of a nose and mouth “face” the protruding white orb. That this orb is part of the
conglomerate head to the right is suggested by the sharp yellow triangle marked by nostrils
and white starry eye. White, black, blue, red, yellow color notations, inflecting the all-over
whiteness of Magic Mirror, here help generate a bold and abstract excitement. With its
wild surround of painterly improvisation, confusion of symbolic images, proliferation of
panels, two of which, near the bottom, look like the framed sketches for possible paintings
that Pollock included in a number of the drawings that explored psychological and pictorial
problems, (see figs. 2.6 and 3.9), Male and Female almost seems to spin out of control --
but for the undifferentiated whiteness of the central rectangular panel that fixes our
attention with its three hieratic diamond shapes and the pink torso.
One can hardly begin a formal description of the canvas without getting entangled
in Pollock’s symbols. Each loosely sketched diamond thus contains flecks of paint, that
hint at something more. And the pink torso, too, is more than just a pink shape, means
something more. This something more helps drive Pollock’s abstraction. Was it Lee
Krasner, who, as we know, literally walked in front of Pollock’s magic mirror? If John
Graham as guru had helped Pollock to pictorially explore a relationship with Picasso’s
muse, Lee Krasner helped him to a more real relationship (fig. 5.2).
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Fig. 5.2. Lee Jackson and Jackson Pollock, The Springs, ca. 1949. Jackson Pollock Papers,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Photograph by Wilfrid
Zogbaum.

The still difficult relationship with his mother gradually became less pressing.
When Stella had first come to New York, testing the possibility of staying on indefinitely
-- she stayed from around May through August 1942 -- on the night before she was
scheduled to arrive Jackson had gone on a binge, landing himself, looking "awful", in
Bellevue Hospital. "Is this the best hotel you can find?" Lee said to him when he came to.
She had been instructed by Sande to get Jackson in shape in time to have dinner with his
mother that evening.375 So she knew of Jackson's drinking, although she could not at first
understand his extremely tense relationship with his mother; she found her "sweet, nice."
It took her a long time to realize why there was a problem. "I hadn't yet seen anything of
the dominating mother."376 When Sande, his wife, and new child moved out of Pollock’s
apartment at 46 E. 8th Street in September, taking Stella with them to Connecticut, Lee
moved in.
With Lee's presence, paint as an expression of erotic desires gave way to flesh and
blood. Could not the luscious torso in Male and Female simply be Jackson’s homage to
her? And the new energy released in the painterly passages, the vibrancy of colors and
contrasts, the plethora of private symbols at play around the central panel simply an
expression of their attraction? Not only did she support his efforts to get his career going,
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but she gave him the nurturing for which he had longed. "He was the important thing. I
couldn't do enough for him. He was not easy. But at the very beginning, he was accepting
of my encouragement, attention, and love."377 But it would be a mistake to understand the
pink torso as a literal representation of Krasner’s figure. This torso would seem to belong
with the conglomerate head of white orb and yellow triangular nose and eye and be
appended to the blackboard, which in this context would seem more male than female. The
torso is, however, more firmly part of the central panel that joins male and female,
appearing there as a pictorial representation or mirror image of the woman's red body. 378
What do the assembled symbols point to? And how do they help build a bridge to
abstraction? Consider once more the pink torso, mirroring its red counterpart. In another
of his 1942 canvases, Moon Woman (fig. 5.3), we spot a similar torso, two breasts outlined
in red to the right of the central black vertical line, two billowing and largely pink buttocks
to its left.

Fig. 5.3. The Moon Woman 1942. Oil, aluminum, enamel paint, and string on canvas, 45 1/8 x 87 1/8". The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
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No doubt this moon woman also refers to Lee Krasner, who shared Pollock’s intense
fascination with the moon, but she is kin to Picasso’s muse and answers to the hermetic
concerns that under the tutelage of John Graham preoccupied Pollock in 1942. Krasner
later remarked, Pollock "did a series around the moon. He had a mysterious involvement
with it, a Jungian thing." 379

2. The Golden Flower

In Girl Before a Mirror Picasso depicts the classic beauty of his young lover Marie-
Therese, as she gazes into the mirror contemplating her awakening sexuality. Pollock’s
moon woman is animated by her own self-searching discipline. This dual-headed woman
with a striking third eye looks not at a mirror reflection, but at a mass of heavily scumbled
yellow, white, green, black, pinky-green paint: her effort to “see” (she points to yet a fourth
eye), is focused on chaotic material. This yields, upon closer inspection, a flower. Its
yellow stem rests on a sort of shelf; its sunflower-like head is surrounded by the yellow
and white pigment. This "golden flower" hints at a sense of order distinctly "other" than
the classical order that still plays a role in Picasso's art. Is it the flower named in the title
of The Secret of the Golden Flower; A Chinese Book of Life? Dr. Henderson had shown
Pollock the mandalas illustrating this book of Chinese mystical alchemy and Taoist yoga.
The first two are of the Golden Flower, luminous, crystalline, "the most splendid of all
flowers.” A mandala that Henderson particularly called Pollock's attention to contains at
its center "a flower with a golden star." 380 As Jung explains this text in the accompanying
commentary, the materiality of each individual contains a latent spiritual dimension. The
goal is to control the flow of life-forces so that the dark material aspect transforms itself
into the light spiritual aspect, thereby creating the "golden flower" or "diamond-body."381
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Fig. 5.4. Untitled, CR 584r, c. 1939-42. Blue ink on paper, 13 1/8 x 10 3/8".

The juxtaposition in one of Pollock’s drawings of this period, CR 584r (fig. 5.4),
of a Buddha head with a diamond shape, the latter positioned along a vertical axis above a
caduceus-like serpent and below a disc-crescent motif, attests to his interest in Eastern
wisdom and healing. The Secret of the Golden Flower holds out the promise of spiritual
rebirth, figured by the union of male and female which issues in something new, a seed, a
foetus, a new man.382 The centrally placed diamonds in Male and Female that seem to spill
out of the panel invite interpretation as an ambiguous symbol, not just of sexual union, but
of such a foetus, a spiritual embryo of a new self. Pollock’s interest in The Secret is but
one more instance of his voracious consumption of images and texts that seemed to
illuminate his search for what he took to be a coherent self. 383 In his commentary Jung
equates the "diamond-body" with an individuated "self,"384 and the feminine material
anima, which starts to crystallize as it is brought into relationship with the masculine
spiritual animus, with the unconscious portion of every psyche, in a man his anima.385
Since a man tends to project his anima onto the world, especially the women in his life, 386
he needs to become conscious of it, if he is to achieve a psychologically healthy balance
between the conscious and unconscious forces. Jung presents the need to address the anima
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as a cultural challenge as well, given western man’s overemphasis on rationality as the

center of personality.387
Peter Busa recalls that when Pollock talked about his work, "he always talked about
it in psychoanalytic terms. He would relate a story. He would say, 'This is the apex,' and
'here is the relationship of the id to the superego,' and 'this is what the censor plays,' and
'this is the line of the orbit of the division' …. He would go into it like that." 388 If he had
to teach young artists to become painters, Pollock told Nicolas Carone, he would tell them
"to study Jung."389 In a letter to Charles, Pollock once tried to explain the distinction
between "anima" and "animus." As Busa remembers "he was thinking of incorporating
that in a painting." 390 Fragments of Eastern wisdom mediated by Jung became part of the
matrix that let Pollock chart the course of his quest.
In the early 1940's The Secret of the Golden Flower was circulating widely in Art
Student League circles.391 Why was this book of so much interest to artists? For one, it
spoke of a release of creative energy. 392 “The golden flower” should be understood to
signify not just the goal, spiritualized matter, but a way to the union of opposites: the
circulatory, transformative process, whereby consciousness or spirit continuously descends
into the chaos of unconscious matter, in order to awaken it and to give birth to a harmonious
union and balancing of opposites in an ongoing flux.393 How literal Pollock can be in his
understanding of this circulatory process is evident in a drawing related to Male and
Female, CR 635 (c. 1939-42) (fig. 5.5). He depicts male and female figures in explicit
sexual embrace; a diamond is contained within the belly of the woman, but is connected
by a bold line to the male's head, as they both gaze at the bird flying above, which is
attached to the man's eye as in a cartoon bubble. T. J. Clark finds this drawing “ludicrous.”
“Copulation in it is portrayed as an upright and basically ludicrous sacrifice, of dignity and
identity. Penetration is a laying of horizontal tracks, which seem to belong to neither party.
The man looks up from the melee toward the sky, and sees (in his mind’s eye, by the look
of it) a Miro-type airplane in flight. A kind of a ‘lie back/stand up and think of
England/transcendence’ scenario.”394 Anyone familiar with the “story” Pollock unfolds in
his drawings and paintings will see what Clark describes as “a Miro-type airplane” rather
as a strangely stylized bird, with the archetypal associations that Pollock so loved. Pollock,
as we have seen, identified with the bird-man as visionary shaman. In this drawing he
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appears to depict his understanding of the descent of male spirit, on a diagonal zig-zaging
from his eye down, into the female body to discover the diamond-body.395

Fig. 5.5. Untitled, CR 635, c. 1939-42. Pen and black ink with colored crayon on paper, 20 1/2 x 26 1/8".

The material literalness of T. J. Clark’s thinking about gender and sex in regard to
this drawing and to Male and Female (“It aims to get the unmentionable up front, and to
do a working diagram of it”) 396 takes us to important but contestable conclusions. That
“Gender, and more specifically sex, had been at the root of Pollock’s figuration from 1942
to 1947” has been appreciated by Clark, who does “not think that because Pollock’s sexual
mythology was embarrassing the part it played in his art was small, or simple.”397 But
perhaps because I am less easily embarrassed, I disagree with his conclusion: “The war
against line which Michael Fried rightly seized on as basic to Pollock’s abstraction was
rooted in a previous (maybe continuing) dream of gender writing itself to death. This again
is phantasy, in my view -- and profoundly a masculine one. Men always think they can
write their way to the woman inside the snorting bull or sleeping dog. And so have their
sadistic cake and eat it. The dream is futile and nasty.”398 That dream is indeed “futile and
nasty,” but, as I hope to show, it was not Pollock’s dream.
What Clark sees simply as “some kind of horror at sexual difference” 399 upon which
the early paintings turn (and I grant Pollock’s earlier sexual blocks and continuing fears)
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is also a symbolic expression of hopes for himself, for his relationship with Krasner, for a
different approach to creativity. His images are not to be taken too literally; as symbols
they point to something else. Even if these symbols continue to strike us as puerile or as
kitsch, especially in the hands of an in many ways naive Western artist, visual thinking
feeding on such ideas still can generate great art. Clark is generous in his assessment of
some of Pollock’s paintings of the early 1940’s, which he includes among the great
paintings of the twentieth century. The question then becomes: how do such ideas and
symbols figure in the genesis of such greatness?

3. A Stage for Visual Thinking

In Male and Female such ideas become springboards that helped Pollock reach
toward an altogether new art. Once again Girl before a Mirror is a point of reference. If
Pollock transposes Picasso’s muse into a yogic/Jungian key in Moon Woman, he here
replaces the symbol of the golden flower with that of the diamond and presents the effort
to attain the diamond-body as an expression of male desire. If eye lashes and red breasts
signal a female presence on the left, it is possible to see the right hand figure as more clearly
female, her voluptuous pink torso topped by the conglomerate head of which the larger
white orb, inscribed in it the lunar crescent, is a part. But this “moon woman” presents
itself also as an emanation of the male “blackboard.” The central panel belongs with this
androgynous figure.
A small red sun disk seems to answer, almost tentatively, to the much larger lunar
orb that confronts it. Such tentativeness continues in the way the figure on the left presents
only the outline of a nose and mouth to the mysterious orb. On the other hand, the figures
are framed by passages communicating sexual excitement. One such passage in the upper
right issues from the ambiguously gendered lunar head. More scumbled paint cascades
down the far right hand panel, helping to generate a circulatory rhythm of erotic excitement.
Masculinity is most exuberantly conveyed by the white phallic column, which spews forth
jets of scumbled, seemingly chaotic, paint, generating further excitement as particularly
vivid passages descend down the left edge, arcing towards another such passage just below
the yellow and red pubic triangle. The diamonds placed on the central white panel linking
male and female speak to the desired union of opposites.
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The Jungian and yogic symbols with which Pollock explores his thoughts and
feelings about the relations of male and female, whatever their final validity, were grist for
Pollock’s pictorial mill. As his friend Kamrowski commented, Pollock was "using Jungian
imagery as a device" to come up with an original style.400 The symbols serve as a bridge
to exciting pictorial effects, especially noticeable when comparing Magic Mirror with its
updated version in Male and Female. In the second we encounter a complication of
structure, a greater wildness and range in the play of shapes, color, lines, automatist effects,
and sensations of movement. Whereas in Magic Mirror the union of male and female
opposites was implied in the entirety of the animated white paint of the pictorial surface,
in Male and Female the integrative white "canvas" or "magic mirror" is placed in the middle
of a larger composition, in which the upright symbolic male and female principles are now
placed to either side. These are further subdivided. Can one say that the personnage on
the left becomes both red breasted female and explosively phallic animus, the personnage
on the right both male black blackboard and pink anima? Following the logic of such
differentiation, an initial division of three becomes that of five, even of seven upright
panels. The up and down of the vertical axis is complicated as well. The elevated cosmic
symbolism of moon and sun dominate the top portion of the central panel of the canvas; in
the predominately black unconscious portion below we encounter the scumbled instinctual
energies associated with the moon woman’s lower yellow triangle, this time not an attribute
of her head, but of her sex.
Busa’s earlier cited recollection of how Pollock told a psychoanalytic story to
describe the structure of one of his works, suggests that the canvas provided him with a
stage for his visual thinking. Playing with symbols and their shapes and colors Pollock
explores what he thinks and feels. Should the “female” torso on the left be red in
association with the sun disc? Should the sun disc be large or small beside the moon orb?
The associations seem endless, as do the accompanying abstract pictorial possibilities,
especially when such associations spring from emotional intricacies and unconscious
intuitions having to do with relations between male and female. Consider for instance the
upward trajectory of the long yellow line through the white phallic column exploding in
the upper left of the canvas, or the truncation of movement from left to right as the straight
black edge of the head on the left blocks access to the moon woman, but for the outline of
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nose and mouth. We experience the splattering and scumbling as grounded in visual
thinking, its strategic placement as meaningful, if ambiguous. And equally motivated in
its placement is the thickness and stasis of paint.
The striking white panel in the center of Male and Female reads as a painting within
a painting. It is characterized by the flat thick paint of late Synthetic Cubism, "the thickness
of white" as Pollock wrote on CR 697, a drawing of c. 1943, a material field unshaped and
unstructured except for its edges, symbolic diamonds, and female torso. Pollock’s pictorial
logic lets us understand the thick materiality of the pictorial field itself as representing the
most fundamental "female" realm that the artist proposes to transform by discovering
within it a circulatory play of opposites. The architectonic structure of this putative canvas,
with its vertical and horizontal axes, its in-out axis, the last latent in the thickness of the
painted field, remains to be more thoroughly differentiated, transformed, and finally
unified by a more spontaneous pictorial action. For the time being these energies swirl
around the edges of the central "canvas," figuring a still only hoped for art. The materiality
of paint here looks forward, not to a base materialism, but to an alchemical, i.e. pictorial,
spiritualization of matter. This is Pollock’s dream, a way to abstraction radically different
from that taken by Cubism.

4. "I am Nature"
Male and Female can be understood as a challenge to Picasso.
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Fig. 5.6. Pablo Picasso, Painter and Model, Paris, 1928. Oil on canvas, 51 x 64". The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection.

In Painter and Model 1928 Picasso, too, probes the nature of creativity in terms of male
and female figures (fig. 5.6). Here, too, the figures are placed to either side of a central
white "canvas." The comparison allows us to distinguish between Picasso's and Pollock's
understanding of pictorial creativity. Picasso's art remains rooted in the split between
subject and object that marks the Renaissance optical paradigm of painting as a "window
looking out on the world." But the depicted artist and the three-eyed model are both
represented in an angular Cubist style, while on his canvas the artist transforms the model’s
face into a naturalistic classical profile. The canvas here is the arena where the artist exerts
aesthetic mastery in a creative act of artistic metamorphosis, where the natural beauty of
the model on the canvas contrasts with the artificial reality represented, calling into
question the meaning of artifice and reality.
Pollock's formulation of art in Male and Female is of a different order. The central
"canvas" is presented not as a surface on which the male artist works his transformations
of the female model but as a field to be animated. Such animation is the work of an
erotically charged imagination. That Pollock’s understanding of art was indeed very
different from that of Picasso is indicated in two accounts of encounters with Hans
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Hofmann in the early 1940's. When Lee Krasner first introduced Hofmann to Pollock in
1942, Hofmann is said to have reacted at once to the paintings, "You do not work from
nature." "I am nature," Pollock replied, implying that the images in his 1942 paintings
were not derived from nature, but products of himself as part of nature. 401 In a similar vein,
Fritz Bultman recalls an intense and ongoing dialogue between Hofmann and Pollock the
summer of 1944 in Provincetown. One evening Pollock was "trying to get across to Hans
Hofmann his concept of the image: that you could paint from nature, which Hans was
doing, but that if you painted out of yourself you created an image larger than a landscape.
Hans disagreed with him in principle, and finally in talking about the origin of the image,
Jackson said, "I am nature."402 When Pollock made this statement is not crucial. He had
been supported by this conviction ever since around 1941. That conviction is easily
misunderstood: "People think he means he's God." To counter this misconception, Krasner
explained: "He means he's total. He's undivided. He's one with nature, instead of 'That's
nature over there, and I'm here.'"403
Later she was to elaborate: "I think this statement ["I am nature"] articulates an
important difference between French painting and what followed. It breaks once and for
all the concept that was more or less present in Cubist derived painting, that one sits and
observes nature that is out there. Rather, it claims a oneness." 404 In Painter and Model
Picasso depicts the male artist reacting to the female model, exterior to himself, to "nature
that is out there," imaginatively transforming her in his act of creation. Even John Graham
was caught up in this dichotomy between the artist and external reality.405 Pollock's
statement "I am nature," on the other hand, reflects a belief in "a oneness" between inner
and outer worlds. The split between subject and object no longer exists. This, to be sure,
raises the question: once unmoored from the tension between subject and object around
which the Renaissance paradigm of art is built, does the artist simply get caught in the
subjective? Does not the belief in "a oneness" between inner and outer worlds simply lead
the individual to lose him or herself in the inner world? Pollock, who found it difficult to
make his way in the outer world, was drawn to stories about the spiritual dimension of all
creation, linking the inner and the outer: American Indian animism, the Hermetic tradition
with its iridescent overlay of alchemy, Chinese wisdom, and Jungian psychology all
seemed to gesture in the same direction. They all challenged the Western dualism of mind
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and body, were predicated on the universal presence of an invisible spirit in material
bodies. But while they all promise a path through the personal to the universal, is the
cultivation of dream-visions, quests for the diamond-body, simply an invitation to further
self-isolation and to a private hermetic art that loses its audience, especially in a society
that does not credit such things?
Meaning in life is discovered in interactions with the world around us, with others.
Attempts to discover “the other” in the self may block such discovery. The Jungian story,
for instance, locates “the other” within the self. Attention to the anima, the woman within,
is meant to help open a patient up to the real other: the world, nature, a real woman.
Pollock’s conviction, we know, was that art is life. He believed in the healing efficacy of
art. But for a person already afraid of the real, “the woman within” might become a trap.
Is the eroticism that animates Pollock’s Male and Female other-directed, or is it
narcissistic? Given the ongoing turmoil in his life, one has to accept the ongoing tension
between fantasy and reality in his art. How this tension will play itself out remains to be
seen.
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Chapter 6
Surrealist Narratives

1. Dreams of the Androgyne

The Surrealist culture that began to flourish in New York City in 1941-42 was
fertile soil for Pollock's growing enterprise. 406 Sometimes wildly imaginative, at times
almost pedantic, it exhorted the artist to follow the hermetic way. Moreover the youngest
and most innovative member of the Surrealist circle, Roberto Sebastian Matta Echaurren,
with whom Pollock was to come into contact in the winter of 1942-43, was pushing for
both psychological and formal experimentation on the borders of abstraction. The older
generation, André Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and the rich, enthusiastic,
sympathetic gallery owner who gave them refuge and showed their work during the war,
Peggy Guggenheim, were all on the lookout for new talent. In Pollock they found not only
a troubled visionary, but an artist able to build on the work of Picasso and Miro. He was,
as Motherwell put it, "one of the younger generation's chances."407
In Male and Female Pollock was thus not only exploring a new relationship with
his muse-lover, but responding to the vision of art and its content projected by the artists
around him. In the face of growing despair and spreading world war the Surrealists called
for a spiritual revolution. In an interview published in View in November 1941, shortly
after his arrival in the United States, André Breton spoke of the "closed rationalism which
is killing the world." "This is so true, the 'giving up' so general, despair so great, that many
ask -- I am assured that in this sense a strong current exists in America -- if the salvation
of man does not demand his 'disintellectualization' for the sake of a revaluation of his prime
instincts. It is certain that as far as faith, honor and ideals are concerned, one sees
everywhere today the survival of the sign of the signified thing. Faith, ideals, honor ask to
be reestablished on new bases: in the meantime all the rags which don't even cling to the
body anymore ought to be shaken. In this respect surrealism will never find a more
favorable period for its program which is to render to man the concrete empire of his
function: the plunge in the diving bell of automation, the conquest of the irrational." Breton
offered hope: "A new spirit will be born from the present war …. I think we must learn to
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read with and look through the eyes of Eros -- Eros who, in time to come, will have the
task of reestablishing that equilibrium briefly broken for the benefit of death." 408
Ever since Plato eros has been understood as a desire for the whole. As such, eros
strives for a reconciliation of opposites, a healing of the rifts that rend our existence,
including that of male and female. 409 In the late 1941 and early 1942 issues of View the
Surrealists offer two symbols for such a reconciliation that resurface in Pollock's Male and
Female: the crystal and the male-female androgyne. Drawn from the world of magic and
mysticism, both symbols have long histories in the earlier Surrealist tradition. In the May
1934 Minotaure André Breton had thus published in the article "La Beauté sera convulsive"
his famous "eulogy of the crystal" as embodying the "surreal" absolute, 410 while in the
Spring 1938 Minotaure Albert Bequin devotes an article to "L'Androgyne," noting its
presence in Greek orphism, gnosticism, alchemy, and Jakob Boehme. 411 Invoking these
symbols of eros in the early years of World War II, the Surrealists emphasized their
importance to the future of which they dreamed. 412 But how was one to embark on the
quest for a renewed eros? The not unexpected all-too-male-centered answer: through the
female muse. Nicholas Calas in "And her body became enormous luminous and splendid,"
in the April 1942 View, speaks directly to the need for a new companion for men's
dreams.413 He recognizes that Picasso in the late 1930's portraits of Dora Maar, at which
Graham and Pollock were both looking, "does give the woman a new soul," but "she only
has the merit to fit into his conception of a world whose growth we have watched for over
a period of years." Max Ernst's muse he finds much more inspiring: "It is not the woman
who fits into Max Ernst's cosmos, for his world only comes into existence with the
Woman." This woman is "la femme cent têtes," "the hundred-headless woman" of whom
Ernst himself wrote in the November 1941 View.414 One of her most imposing appearances
is in The Robing of the Bride 1940 (fig. 6.1).
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Fig. 6.1. Max Ernst, Attirement of the Bride, 1940. Oil on canvas, 51 x38". The Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

There her nude "headless" body is crowned with a magnificent and mysterious bird's head
and feathered cloak. Confronted with the painting, Pollock would have found himself in
much the same situation as the present day viewer, when looking at one of his works from
the early 1940’s, such as Male and Female. Titles suggests a narrative, but we can make
out only so much by attending to what we see in the canvas, whether hints of male and
female entities in Pollock’s case, or striking juxtapositions of bird and woman in Ernst’s.
While the paintings do not provide narratives, they demand narratives. Recent research
reveals the extent to which Ernst’s own narrative informs The Robing of the Bride, in fact
a complex linking of psychoanalysis and alchemy not unlike that arrived at by Jung, but
based on thinkers predating him. 415 Using the symbolic appellations for the two major
characters in Ernst's mythology to further describe the painting, one might say of the central
figure that the body of “the hundred-headless woman” unites with the head of Ernst's alter
ego, Loplop the Bird Superior, to create an androgynous creature uniting sexual opposites,
its androgyny signaled by the small, and here sad, homunculus in the lower right hand
corner of the canvas. Pollock's known fascination with the canvas, 416 it hung in Peggy
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Guggenheim's gallery when it opened in October 1942, may help to account for the like
manner in which his own muse, the moon woman, is joined to the male personage under
the aegis of the bird in CR 635, a study for Male and Female.
But while Ernst’s esoteric symbolism speaks to the concerns Pollock wrestled with,
Ernst’s approach to painting, still rooted in the Renaissance, could hardly have excited
him.417 This is supported by his response to John Bernard Myers, who had asked him how
much the Surrealist movement had affected him: "The only person who really did get
through to me was Masson."418 Already schooled in alchemical symbolism by Kadish and
Graham, Pollock seems to have been attracted not only to some of Masson’s paintings, but
also to his numbered and scripted alchemical narratives presented in serial or cartoon
fashion. Among Surrealist artists, Masson most schematically outlines the role of the
woman as vehicle and source in a search for higher awareness. Male and Female is thus
close in content and imagery to Masson's frontispiece to Mythology of Being 1939, which
together with three drawings of the suite was exhibited in the Willard Gallery in New York
February 17 - March 14, 1942 (fig. 6.2).419 It depicts a male and female couple embracing,
blending together, to form the arm that draws the bow, given female attributes, aimed at
the jagged diamond topping the vertical axis of the composition.
According to Masson’s alchemical narrative the path to possession of the diamond
leads through the woman. To possess the diamond, as the male figure clearly does by plate
VIII of Mythology of Being, "When the arrow of existence reaches its goal: Life!" (fig. 7),
the male must first spring free from the female as he does in plate II, "Up surges birth --
open break" (fig. 6.3). But in plate III, "You carry the weight of Narcissus -- Frost and
mortal mirror,” he is shown weighed down by narcissism, and in plate IV, "Prisoner of the
mirror -- Transfiguring your death," by awareness of death. Plate V, " Your being in
anguish -- returns to the mother" (fig. 6.4), shows him returning to the mother, to be born
again as a lonely bird-man in plate VI, "This lonely eagle is you -- Left in the abyss of
nothingness" (fig. 6.5). In plate VII, "You burst from your vein stone -- You become a
dancing god" (fig. 6.6), he finally confronts the female as a she-beast and thus grasps the
diamond of Life.
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L: Fig. 6.2. Andre Masson, Mythology of Being, 1939. Frontispiece to illustrated book, Wittenborn and
Company edition, New York, 1942, 18.5 x14.6".
R: Fig. 6.3. Andre Masson. Mythology of Being, plate II: "Up surges birth - open break."

L: Fig. 6.4. Andre Masson. Mythology of Being, plate V: " Your being in anguish - returns to the mother."
R: Fig. 6.5. Andre Masson. Mythology of Being, plate VI: "This lonely eagle is you."

L: Fig. 6.6. Andre Masson. Mythology of Being, plate VII: "You burst from your vein stone - You become
a dancing god."
R: Fig. 6.7. Andre Masson. Mythology of Being, plate VIII: "When the arrow of existence reaches its goal:
Life!"
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I relate this mythology because it bears on Pollock's understanding of his own quest which
also aims at the diamond. The splendors of consciousness that await the man who gains
possession of this diamond Masson further reveals in four drawings accompanied by
captions, entitled Emblematic Man, March 1940, and published in VVV June 1942.420 The
Emblematic man has a diamond head; luminous worlds exist within and through him; he
desires “the one and the many”; he is “mirror of the universe.” Masson later revealed that
the diamond head of the emblematic man was "the philosopher's stone." 421
When questioned about Pollock's work before 1943, Matta replied, "My feeling
was that it was very Masson."422 The relationship between Male and Female and the
frontispiece of Mythology of Being is a case in point. The degree to which Pollock was
attracted to Masson’s serial symbolic narratives accompanied by text raises a number of
questions: first, whether art does not reduce here to illustration of an alchemical quest
story? How do Masson’s drawings with their images and forms advance the narrative in a
process of visual thinking? Masson’s suite, despite the sophisticated emblematic tension
between image and text, leaves the questions open. There is another danger. If the project
of art is a quest with a certain ending, here the grasping of the diamond, what happens to
art-making when the diamond has been seized and the story comes to an end? Does the
artist live happily ever after, as male and female do in countless fairy tales? A third danger
finds a focus in Masson’s title: “Mythology of Being.” This narrative is not just a myth, a
story pertaining to origins, whether of the world, or humanity, or art, or a particular flower
-- one thinks of the myth of Narcissus. Rather it is a mythology of being, an inquiry into
the myth of being. Instead of a philosopher’s ontology, we get an artist’s mythology.
Should such inquiry be the role of an artist? Does this ask too much of art?

2. A New Myth?
Masson's imaginative journeys through myth were very much part of explorations
that in the late 1930's had begun to preoccupy a circle of intellectuals in Paris centered
around George Bataille and Roger Caillois. Their efforts in turn provoked the response of
the Surrealists in their early years in America, as they argued for or against the need for a
new myth in the pages of View and VVV. Pollock read these magazines, as did the other
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artists with whom he was then associated. Robert Motherwell, a new friend made in 1942,
even wrote an article for VVV.423
These explorations have one root in "Le College de Sociologie," which Bataille and
Caillois founded in 1936, a sort of free university in the Latin Quarter, which proposed to
study all manifestations of the sacred. Ideas on shamanism, coronation ceremonies, the
ambiguity of the sacred, death, secret societies in the time of German romanticism, were
discussed.424 Acephale, a review proposed by Bataille and published from 1936-1939,
expressed the more hermetic impulses of those associated with the College, promoted the
Nietzschean idea of the will to power, and accompanied it with their favorite mythic
images, for instance, the Crucified One, Vulcan, the Sacred Dagger, Dionysius, and of
course Acephalus, a headless man holding a dagger in one hand and a flaming heart in the
other.425 The headless man is he who, no longer alienated by reason, participates
absolutely, the man we can not become until our reason has been shattered.
The Manifesto for a Sacred Sociology proposed a collectivist dimension to their
researches. They desired to build on knowledge of individual psychology to "rediscover
the primordial aspirations and conflicts of the individual state transposed to the social scale
…. The ambition that the community thus formed will go beyond its initial plan, will pass
from the will for knowledge to the will for power, become the nucleus of a vaster
conspiracy -- the deliberate calculation that this body may find a soul." This manifesto
first appeared in English in Vertical 1941, edited by Eugene Jolas.426 This same issue also
published the Verticalist Manifesto, calling for a reconstitution of "the myth of continuous
ascent as being the myth underlying mankind's ceaseless aspirations towards the liberation
of the soul."427 In light of the malevolent triumphs of fascism drawing on similar
collectivist impulses and of Hitler’s claim to a myth for the twentieth century, 428 the
ambition to create a new myth eventually was resoundingly rejected by many of the
intellectuals involved, but not before it had provoked heated discussion among Surrealist
poets and painters.
In "The Legendary Life of Max Ernst: Preceded by a brief discussion on the need
for a New Myth" published in View April 1942, André Breton, after warning the reader
against the College of Sociology and its "resort to a controlled idolatry," proceeds to ask:
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Why should one refuse to seek among the poets and artists of today for what
has always been found, from far off, among their precursors, why should
not their evolution translate into a decipherable code what ought to be, what
will be? … You see, I cannot grant you that mythology is only the recital of
the acts of the dead: I who speak to you have lived to see disengaged from
the banal transcription of his deeds the life of one of my dearest friends,
Max Ernst. Here the eye witness I could be yields voluntarily to the adept:
I consider the work of Max Ernst pregnant with facts destined to be realized
on the plane of reality.429
Max Ernst himself cultivated this mythmaking stance. On a page illustrated with his
astrological chart, the images of a bird, and a wildly disheveled half naked shaman, Ernst
begins: "The 2nd of April (1891) at 9:45 a.m. Max Ernst had his first contact with the
sensible world, when he came out of the egg which his mother had laid in an eagle's nest
and which the bird had brooded for seven years."430 He ends: "(1914) Max Ernst died the
1st of August 1914. He resuscitated the 11th of November 1918 as a young man aspiring
to become a magician and to find the myth of his time. Now and then he consulted the
eagle who had hatched the egg of his pre-natal life. You may find the bird's advices in his
work. (1941) The bird followed the plane which brought Max to this country on the 14th
of July and built his nest in a cloud on the East River."431 Pollock must have been startled
by the degree to which his own very personal and hard won achievement of 1941 could be
seen to approximate the birdman identity and shamanic ambition of the celebrated Max
Ernst.
In the next issue of View (May 1942) Harold Rosenberg's "Breton -- a Dialogue"
speaks to the pros and cons of the mythmaking impulse as espoused by Breton. In a
dialogue between Hem, Rem, and Shem, whom Rosenberg identifies as left-wing
intellectuals, Hem, nearest to Breton in position, is in favor of a new myth. "Our struggle
is to find a liberating myth to oppose to the enslaving myth of the fascists and to the
emptiness and petty insincerity of the liberals." 432 He goes on to propose a process of
initiation: "To step out of the self, to be ready to die, to feel the death of the past and of
one's own ego as the basic fact, is to become part of something larger, of a totality. This
totality can only be a myth. For it is not judged by its truth, but by its effectiveness in
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promoting revolutionary behaviour." 433 Rem, a Marxist, opposes the myth. "The working
class will realize its fraternity through the painful negation of myths … everywhere the
workers experience that cutting off of the positive flow of life from the old sources, that
nearness of death, that revelation that the existing gods are shams, which make the surge
of a spirit of communion and renewal inevitable. This initiation needs no rite; it needs an
absence of rites." "Never has there been an initiation rite by which one became simply a
man. Not a Cherokee, not a Jew, not a Freemason, or a Stormtrooper, but just a human
being."434 Shem, the scientist, simply says "Better get rid of these mystifications -- myths,
initiations, rites, both positive and negative -- and devote yourselves to the science of
practical politics, to everyday affairs: the military victory of the democratic nations today,
social reforms tomorrow and the day after."435
In this dialogue the fundamental question of whether the artist should be involved
at all in mythmaking is dramatized as the struggle to find a liberating myth. Will what
would be a liberating myth be revealed as just a golden calf, another enslaving myth? Into
this dialogue let me introduce Clem [Greenberg] as a friend of Rem. The Marxist Clem
also opposes any modern myth as pernicious kitsch. Rejecting Hem’s exaggerated claims
for the artist as mythmaker, Clem sees the artist as a creator of pure and difficult form, who
will maintain authenticity in expression and will lead us away from kitsch, refusing to be
compromised by a world of commodities. To myth he opposes aesthetic rigor as a last
refuge of culture.
If invited to the table, young Robert Motherwell would have presented yet another
and middle position between myth and aesthetics. By offering his own version of what he
called the Surrealists' "Celtic fairy tale," Motherwell dramatizes the Surrealist
programmatic myth and points to its twofold weakness, its refusal to engage both the real
world and aesthetic decision-making.
Everything in the conscious world is held to be contaminating, as when the
hero in search of the fabulous princess, in a Celtic fairy tale, must never
permit himself to be touched, whether by a leaf, an insect, or anything from
the external world, as he flies through the forests on his magic horse. If he
were touched by the world, his quest would immediately come to a
disastrous end. Even where the hero arrives at the Princess's castle, he must
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jump from his flying horse through a window without touching the window-
frame. He does in the end reach the Princess, and after resting with her
seven days and nights, wherein she never opens her eyes, she gives birth to
a young god. The Surrealist conception of the journey into the unconscious
is of some such hero's task. Automatism is the dark forest through which
the path runs. The fundamental criticism of automatism is that the
unconscious cannot be directed, that it presents none of the possible choices
which, when taken, constitute any expression's form."436
But even as he fulminates against the sterility of the Surrealists' conception of the journey
into the unconscious, Motherwell dramatizes the outline of the hero myth, a journey,
culminating in sexual union, generating a new birth. While Pollock will convert this myth
into powerful formal expression, Motherwell's Celtic fairy tale shadows this achievement
with questions about its relationship to reality.
If Pollock did not completely absorb the Surrealists' mythic paradigm through
reading the pages of View and VVV, he certainly did not miss it when presented with all
the élan of the Surrealists' genius for publicity in "The First Papers of Surrealism"
exhibition, organized by Andre Breton and held at Reid Mansion in New York City in
October 1942. The exhibition title alluded to the immigration papers of the Surrealists
newly arrived in America. Marcel Duchamp strung a mile of string in a labyrinthine web
through which the spectator had to make his or her way to the canvases. The invocation
of the Greek myth of the labyrinth and the minotaur was unmistakable, whether the string
alluded to the labyrinthine web of the psyche or Ariadne's thread which guided the hero
Theseus out again to the light of day. The catalogue designed by Duchamp was a splendid
production. Each artist had attached to his name some photograph attesting to his
masculine persona, usually a primitive shaman-like person, and on the same page a
reproduction of a painting exemplifying his conception of the female muse, whether Miro's
Seated Woman 1932, showing a woman under the spell of the moon; or Ernst's Le
Surrealisme et la Peinture 1942 showing an amorphous female beast, part snake part bird,
nurturing its young; or a painting more generally exemplifying the nature of the Surrealist
enterprise. In the case of Masson his primitive Eskimo persona is accompanied by
Meditation sur une feuille de chêne 1942, an invocation of the muse as the realm of nature.
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The dimensions and stepping stones of the Surrealist myth were evocatively laid
out in a sequence of images culled from the history of art and culture, images that, although
accompanied by captions, speak for themselves: following the photographic front cover of
pebbles in mud, L'Age d'Or, Orphée, Le Peche Originel, Icare, La Pierre Philosophale, Le
Graal, L'Homme Artificiel, La Communication Interplanetaire, Le Messie, La Mise à Mort
du Roi, L'Ame Soeur (L'Androgyne), La Science Triomphante, Le Mythe de Rimbaud, Le
Surhomme, Les Grands Transparents. The First Papers of Surrealism thus presents the
range of themes that Pollock will himself deal with over time, as he comes to them in an
organic sequence of growth. For the moment he seems to be primarily interested in “La
Pierre Philosophale” (fig. 6.8).

Fig. 6.8. “La Pierre Philosophale” and Matta, "A flanc d'abime" in The First Papers of Surrealism,
Exhibition Catalogue, New York: Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, Oct. 14-Nov. 7, 1942.

“La Pierre Philosophale” follows immediately after “Icare,” as the first intimation
after the Fall of a spiritual presence in matter; it is illustrated by another traditional
alchemical image, with which Pollock was already familiar through Graham, the
emblematic bird flanked to either side by the sun and the crescent moon, standing on the
rock of the untransformed prima materia, surmounted by the circle with rays containing
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the sign of Mercury, symbol of the sought for "philosopher's stone." The second
illustration on the page is a 1942 drawing by Matta (see also fig. 6.8) accompanied by
Andre Breton's description, "A flanc d'abime, construit en pierre philosophale, s'oeuvre le
Chateau étoilé." "On the edge of the abyss, constructed in philosophical stone, opens up
the starry Castle." Matta's interest in the lore and process of alchemy in art is thus
announced. It is at this point that Pollock makes contact with Matta, whose circle he briefly
joined. Pollock "was thrilled," as Kadish recalls, "that Matta liked his work." 437

3. Astral Light
Matta, who was barely thirty at the time, while the other Surrealists were in their
forties, had a strong love-hate relationship with them. While "the loved son, the heir
apparent," he also had a desire to make an independent stand, to gather around him young
and talented American artists, and thus to make a group manifestation that was "more
daring and qualitatively more beautiful" that the work of the older Surrealists.438 With a
show of painting he wanted to upstage Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. The walls of
Peggy Guggenheim's new gallery Art of this Century on West 57th Street beckoned -- in
Kadish's words "there wasn't any other place in New York that supplied as much energy
and as much vigor." 439
The layout of this gallery, stunningly designed by Frederick Kiesler and opened on
October 20, 1942, only a week after the "First Papers" exhibition, dramatized the tensions
between abstraction and surrealism that confronted the younger American artists. Entering
first into the Abstract Gallery, a visitor would encounter works ranging from Picasso's
Cubism to the non-objective canvases of Kandinsky and Mondrian, then pass through a
doorway into a parallel Surrealist Gallery, containing works by, among others, Miro,
Masson and Ernst. The Daylight Gallery for the changing contemporary exhibitions lay
beyond, to be reached either from the Surrealist side through a Kinetic Gallery -- where
one might turn a giant spoked wooden spiral to view, through a special mechanism, the
turning display of Marcel Duchamp's Boite en Valise, small reproductions of his oeuvre -
- or through the Abstract side. There before entering, one could peer through a window
into the Daylight Gallery or, just to the left, open with a lever the shutters of a shadow box,
fronted with a black mirror studded with seven small convex mirrors. A photomontage by
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Kiesler in VVV shows the shutter to be constituted from a photographic image of Andre
Breton and its opening as radiating from the center of his forehead, as though opening from
his "third eye," to reveal his Portrait of the Actor A.B. 1941.440 This playful simulation of
the destruction of one plane of consciousness and entry into another is an instance of the
more conceptual dimension of Surrealism that the young Matta wished to challenge.
Along with the Englishman Gordon Onslow-Ford, the Chilean Matta Echaurren
was the last of the Surrealist recruits before their wartime exile. As Andre Breton noted in
his essay "The Most Recent Tendencies in Surrealist Painting" (1939), the younger
Surrealists, Matta, along with Wolgang Paalen, Oscar Dominguez, Esteban Frances, and
Gordon Onslow-Ford, were finally enthusiastically putting into practice what the 1924
Surrealist manifesto had called for, an absolute automatism in the plastic realm. 441 They
strove to liberate the unconscious through automatic techniques, such as fumage,
decalcomania, coulage, etc., techniques of what Paalen has called "divination," whose
function is to sense unexpected images in esthetically amorphous material. 442 Matta, for
instance, created images in his early oils by spilling thin washes of paint on the canvas,
wiping the surface with a rag, and then using a brush to define certain suggested details; in
his drawings by drawing rapidly with lead pencil and then amplifying the suggested images
with colored pencils.443 The drawings especially impressed Pollock and Motherwell, who
thought them "among the most beautiful if not the most beautiful work made in America
at the time."444
Having arrived in America in 1940, Matta quickly became the chief luminary of
the circle of artists that frequently gathered at Francis Lee's loft on 10th Street in Greenwich
Village.445 Motherwell was instrumental in expanding the group in the spring of 1942. 446
On Baziotes' advice he first sought out Pollock, whom Baziotes, who had known Pollock
as a fellow worker on the Project, named as probably the most talented of his friends. 447
Motherwell spent a whole afternoon with Pollock, explaining the theory of automatism in
particular, and showing him how Masson, Klee, and others used it in their work. To his
surprise Pollock listened intently and invited him to come back another afternoon which
he did. But it was not until October 1942 when the exhibition "First Papers of Surrealism"
was staged and Art of This Century opened that, according to Matta, the Americans
realized just what a resource they had in him. 448 The six of them, Matta, Motherwell,
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Baziotes, Pollock, Busa, and Kamrowski began to meet casually on Saturday or Sunday
afternoons in Matta's 9th Street Studio, sometimes at Motherwell's studio on 8th street, to
compare recent work and exchange ideas.449 This continued through the winter.
By early 1942 Matta's art itself was undergoing a change, becoming even more
abstract.450 "First Papers of Surrealism" made clear his by then pronounced interest in
alchemy. Before that, Kurt Seligmann's article "Magic Circles," published in View in
February-March 1942, had spoken to the nature of Matta's interest in alchemy, an article
that provoked the interest of Pollock and Lee Krasner. In it Seligmann writes of “a central
generating power, a morphological principle,” the World Soul. “It is the world soul joined
to the Spirit, a microcosmic Androgyne that the alchemist must seize” to produce not vulgar
gold but philosophical gold.451 According to Jung, Seligmann says, this alchemic process
is mainly of a psychic nature and this, he recognizes, makes it even more analogous to the
artist’s labor.
In a 1944 exhibition catalogue Breton evokes the nature of Matta’s hermeticism,
describing his abstract canvases of 1942-44 (fig. 6.9) as manifestations of what Eliphas
Levi calls "astral light." 452

Fig. 6.9. Roberto Matta, Deep Stones, 1941. Oil on canvas, 17 x 26". Tel Aviv Museum of Art Collection.
Gift of Peggy Guggenheim, Venice. Through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, 1954.

Matta generated this "astral light" by first laying down grounds of rich colors, wine reds,
yellows, etc. with which he had symbolic associations, he then applied black wash; with
the use of rags, he rubbed away the black wash, allowing the colors to emerge.453 In almost
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all of these canvases the astral light coalesces in what Matta called "astral eggs," incipient
"philosopher stones."454
Matta's interest in hermeticism was more psychological than mystical. In astral
light he wanted to discover the flux of the psyche. Using automatic techniques to reveal
psychological morphologies, he hoped to find a "new image of human being." 455
Leonardo's hallucinatory method of generating imagery from a spot on the wall provided
a paradigm: "follow that image. When it comes to seeing things in the spot on the wall, you
will be doing things you don't know -- you'll be discovering and inventing things …. What
appears is something like man -- something of being-- which is made of forms which come
from the whole life history of the human species."456 Fritz Bultman recalls the excitement
generated by Matta's imagistic drawing because "it was thought that Matta had found a
kind of universal dream image that could be related to what they knew about Jungian
psychology."457
To what degree did the Americans comprehend Matta's vision? According to
Motherwell, the group did not discuss alchemy. 458 Matta spoke simply and eloquently of
the enormous possibilities of using psychic automatism to discover psychological
morphologies, reiterating, "we had to find new images of man."459 His overall approach
was in the spirit of Breton’s 1924 manifesto, that is in the spirit of a poeticized science.
Because Matta felt that they had to have some point of departure in their explorations of
the infinite resources of the unconscious, he attempted to set forth a program for his
American friends whereby they were to make automatic drawings based around particular
themes: the four natural elements (fire, water, earth, air), the "blind swimmer" (a theme
derived from a 1934 painting by Ernst), and the hours of the day. 460 Matta was thus
pointing out a path in the dark forest of automatism.
At a more social level the artists and their wives wrote automatic poems together at
informal dinner parties, each person writing a phrase on a piece of paper, folding it, then
passing it on to the next person who would write another phrase, and so on. When the
paper was filled, it would be unfolded and the resultant poem read aloud. A favorite
drawing activity was to make automatic drawings around the theme of male and female
and then attempt to psychoanalyze them. 461 Though Pollock was usually the least verbal
of the group, Lee Krasner recalls that, while treating the activity as an amusement, it was
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Pollock who interpreted many of the male and female images. 462 But the degree to which
Matta's program suggested homework assignments, while at the same time, in Pollock's
own words of complaint, "too much like a game and not serious," 463 bothered him. Later
that winter Matta proposed that each person take home a pair of dice, which he would roll
every hour on the hour and record the numbers that came up. "That was more than Jackson
could take," recalls Busa. "He just got up and walked out."464
That Matta, despite all the "games" he asked his American friends to engage in, did
manage to convey his enthusiasm for the possibilities of paint and abstraction is attested to
in Baziotes and Busa's later statements. Baziotes declared "it was not the surrealist
techniques that influenced me but rather Matta's ideas that abstraction may not necessarily
be non-objective." 465 Busa has expressed most eloquently the infectiousness of Matta's
ideas: "The wonderful thing about Matta's stimulus was his grasp of the morphology of
paint. From him we got the idea that paint could transcend the fact that it was just
something on the canvas. … Paint was not just paint; it could become crushed jewels, air,
even laughter." 466 In Male and Female the proto-canvas, the central white rectangle placed
between the two androgynous personnages and marked by the three diamond shapes,
speaks most eloquently of Pollock's own celebration of the possibilities of paint. In the
“thickness of white” in which appears the pink female torso he wishes to discover
diamonds. Symbolically Pollock projects the core of Matta's vision for art -- an abstract
field of paint animated by incipient 'philosopher stones.' Whatever this might mean
pictorially for Pollock is as yet unrealized.
While John Graham also dreamed of investing spirit in matter, Matta was able to
offer to Pollock the example of his own work: a more successful effort to find spirit-matter
in an abstract field of paint. And this is surely one reason why the very close relationship
of Graham and Pollock began to draw to a close: Pollock was now learning from another
"guru," who, unlike Graham, was not caught up in the dichotomy between the artist and
external reality. Like the other Surrealists, he recognized the imagination as a sufficient
ground for painting. Peter Busa remembers, "Matta's idea was that we have a rich world
within and don't have to look for it outside ourselves."467 Nor was this an isolated interior
world. There was "a feeling that we were breaking down the barriers of art and life." 468
Pollock's "I am nature" reflects the same belief.
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Chapter 7
Stenographic Figure

1. Mondrian’s nod

Fig. 7.1. Stenographic Figure 1942. Oil on linen, 40 x 56". The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mr.
and Mrs. Walter Bareiss Fund, 1980.

The jurors for the 1943 “Spring Salon" at Art of This Century to which Pollock
submitted Stenographic Figure 1942 (fig. 7.1) were Duchamp, Mondrian, and the
Americans Sweeney, Soby, Putzel and Guggenheim. Duchamp was distinctly
unenthusiastic about Stenographic Figure,469 but Mondrian, known for his open-
mindedness, was impressed. Pollock had in his own mind already posed a challenge to
Mondrian with his Interior with Figures (see fig 4.3), addressing Mondrian’s interplay of
vertical and horizontal axes, all the while running his serpents through them. Stenographic
Figure is well described in similar terms. Pollock’s intent "with the balance [of polarities]”
was indeed, as Bultman understood it, “not challenging Picasso so much as Mondrian --
because it's a plastic challenge," using automatism to break Mondrian’s static surface.470
But when confronted with a canvas that could be taken as a criticism of his own approach
to art, Mondrian, to Peggy Guggenheim's great surprise -- her own initial reaction was that
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the work was "pretty awful" -- stood rooted for twenty minutes in front of it: "I have a
feeling that this may be the most exciting painting that I have seen in a long, long time,
here or in Europe."471 Responding to the "tremendous energy" in Stenographic Figure, he
explained to Peggy Guggenheim, "Just because it [Pollock's kind of work] points in the
opposite direction of my paintings … my writings … is no reason to declare it invalid." 472
Mondrian's recognition alerted Peggy Guggenheim to Pollock's qualities, and
helped gain him her support. But what Krasner later referred to as "Mondrian's nod" 473
meant more than that: as Reuben Kadish recalls: "I was there when Jackson heard it, for
Christ's sake, and I remember how excited he was that it was Mondrian who had made the
decisive move, that Mondrian had picked him. He was so excited, he was like a kid." 474
Mondrian himself had rejected subjective vision as veiling the true reality, and Pollock
may have wondered, as I have wondered in my discussion of Male and Female, about the
dangers of building an art on subjectivity. Did not Mondrian’s recognition suggest that his
structural stage could support an automatist instinctuality and spontaneity with sufficient
communicative power to warrant its further pursuit?

2. Automatism
Undoubtedly Mondrian, master of structural duality and its dynamic equilibrium,
recognized the attempt to heal the split at the core of Stenographic Figure, recognized also
the promise of this attempt to move in “the opposite direction.” The example of Matta for
one helped Pollock to find his own way. According to Matta psychic automatism, using
techniques of divination in aesthetically amorphous materials, always produced an image,
whether quite abstract painterly inscapes, dotted with astral eggs, or metamorphic linear
images. "To me the image always represented an act. The action of the imagination is
somehow more valid to me, more developed, than the action of the arm." 475 The Americans
in his circle, however, were more interested in the arm, in the physical manifestation of
mental automatism. Matta remembers that "at one point the artists started discussing not
any more who we are and what happens to us and how we are changed by our paintings,
etc., but started talking with their hands, trying to describe space, like a dancer does." 476
While Matta himself was not as interested in the gestural aspects of automatism,
the experiments in automatic techniques that he and other Surrealists of the younger
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generation engaged in contributed to Pollock's growing freedom with paint. 477 Sometime
in 1941 Pollock, at Baziotes' instigation and in Kamrowski's studio, experimented with
some of the Surrealist's new automatic techniques, pouring and flipping paint directly from
the can onto a flat canvas. 478 While this incident is the first clear precedent for Pollock's
use of a technique that will become central to his mature painting -- though we should not
forget his exploration in the Siqueiros workshop, Matta's own talk of "the 'free agent,' the
element in Surrealism where you don't touch the canvas, where you just let the paint
fall,"479 importantly contributed to Pollock's automatist experiments. In the fall and winter
of 1942 Busa remembers Jackson conducting his own "Surrealist experiments" at every
available opportunity, sitting at a table in a WPA studio "squeezing paint out of a tube and
just seeing where it went," while invoking the "free agent." 480 Matta's notion of the "free
agent" is related to Eliphas Levi's astral light, in terms of which Breton was to praise
Matta's own work of 1942-44: that "mixed agent, an agent that is natural and divine,
corporeal and spiritual, a universal plastic mediator," which dissolves other elements to
give "the true sulphur or true fire." 481 Pollock's free paint handling in Male and Female,
some passages even poured, would seem to be an instance of that "free agent."
Pollock first uses the pouring technique in Male and Female in conjunction with
the symbolic images and structure of the canvas. This conjunction distinguishes Pollock's
early automatist explorations from Matta’s, suggesting rather John Graham’s formulation
of “automatic écriture.”482
The difficulty in producing a work of art lies in the fact that the artist has to
unite at one and the same time three elements: thought, feeling, and
'automatic écriture.' When a person talks about different objects which
interest him his voice and gestures in their rise and fall and in their velocity,
impetuously register his reaction to various aspects of these objects.
Drawing or painting or writing is an immediate and organic accumulation of
these spontaneous gestures set to the operating plane.483
Central is the idea of "reaction." In Pollock's case, however, the reaction is not so much to
"different objects which interest him," as to his thoughts and feelings about his own life
and creative endeavor. In Bird, Birth, and Magic Mirror we have seen these thoughts and
feelings symbolized in his images and their structuring, and in the movements linking the
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images within the structure. Much as Pollock's mastery of the flow of metamorphic line in
Birth occurred in conjunction with his newly clarified symbolic awareness, along the
vertical axis of the serpent rising, and much as in Magic Mirror his painterly animation
occurred in conjunction with thoughts of the union of male and female, so the passages of
automatic paint handling in Male and Female accompany symbols that quite explicitly refer
to such union. The automatic passages are presented as a final gestural overlay on an
already heavily worked canvas, modifying and expressing points of erotic excitement.
Pollock’s approach to automatism is thus a relatively conscious and structured use
of a spontaneous technique. As his thoughts and feelings evolve and become more
differentiated, so will his automatic écriture become more differentiated and expressive.
In a footnote to “automatic écriture” Graham points to its underlying rigor: “by écriture is
understood a personal technique = result of training and improvisation.”484 Pollock’s
approach to an unconscious spontaneity in paint handling is similarly bound by an aesthetic
discipline. The presence of a set of symbols and a pronounced structure in Male and
Female offers a framework for “the possible choices which, when taken, constitute any
expression's form," answering Motherwell’s criticism of Surrealist automatism as overly
unconscious, undirected. In November 1944 in “The Modern Painter’s World,”
Motherwell would formulate his theory of a plastic rather than a psychic automatism. “As
employed by modern masters, like Masson, Miro and Picasso, [it] is actually very little a
question of the unconscious. It is much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new
forms. As such it is one of the twentieth century’s greatest formal inventions.” 485 Pollock’s
painterly automatism is but the latest addition to a growing arsenal of formal devices, which
include symbolic color, position on the surface, directional impulse, painterly sensibility,
metamorphic linear rhythm. It certainly is not just a matter of allowing the unconscious
free rein. Rather it has its place in an evolving pictorial narrative. In Male and Female one
finds the rudiments of Pollock's later synthesis: the modernist surface, the outlines of a
symbolic projection of the rebirth of self onto this surface, the intimation of how automatist
paint handling will become an expressive vehicle of this self-creation.
Matta’s lack of concern for aesthetic issues and modernist pictorial construction
was a bone of contention in his circle, especially between him and Motherwell, and
contributed to the group's dispersal. 486 By late winter Pollock had quit the group, disgusted
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with the dice assignment. Matta himself retreated from the plan of a manifestation as a
way "to show the Surrealists up" and returned to Breton's fold. 487 The Americans were
stranded, financially as well.
Fortunately for Pollock, Peggy Guggenheim was more and more on the lookout for
new American talent. By March 1943 her husband Max Ernst had moved out and she had
broken with Breton over the petty issue of insisting on free advertisement for her gallery
in VVV.488 She was ready to reorient the emphasis of her gallery -- away from the
European Surrealists and towards young American artists. Describing her search for new
protegés in the spring of 1943, Guggenheim reported that "Matta particularly liked
Pollock's art and supported no other artist as strongly." 489 During this period Matta
suggested to Motherwell that he and Pollock consider submitting works to Art of this
Century's "Spring Salon for Young Artists." At the same time, again at Matta's urging,
Peggy Guggenheim proposed to Motherwell that he, Pollock, and Baziotes create collages
which she would consider including in an international collage invitational being planned
for mid-April.490 Alerted by Herbert Matter, a common friend, James Johnson Sweeney,
who had in the 1930's associated with Jolas and the magazine Transition, also spoke to
Guggenheim of Pollock's "interesting work."491 The third and most persistent Pollock
supporter was Howard Putzel, Peggy Guggenheim's gallery manager after Jimmy Ernst
left. Through Kadish he had met Jackson in the summer of 1942 and immediately
recognized his "genius."492 He too proposed Jackson for inclusion in the collage
invitational, and when the time came for the "Spring Salon," held in late May- early June,
helped Jackson select the painting he should submit: Stenographic Figure.493
The basis for the painting’s Synthetic Cubist pictorial architecture continues to be
Pollock’s reconsideration of Picasso’s Girl before a Mirror. Picasso’s halving of the flat
pictorial surface between the classical girl and her primitivizing reflection in the mirror is
recalled in Stenographic Figure by the abrupt juxtaposition of the large flat black and blues
planes, most striking at the top center of the painting. Pollock overrides this structural split
with a broad horizontal wave of yellow planes across the entire canvas, modified by a
slightly whiter, pointed, circular area in the middle. There the point invites us to read the
sloping horizontal that issues from it as defining the plane for the encounter that is the focus
of this picture. The painting's vertical and horizontal planes support a progression of
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spontaneous mark making: thicker and wider gestural marks, such as the red swaths, that
emanate from the left and the right of the canvas and rhythmically answer each other in the
center, are overlaid with an all-over nervous veil of graphic marks. To what do we owe
this heightened display of improvisational automatic écriture?
On the left hand side of the canvas the stenographic marks of the surface layer
suggest a big-breasted female. While her profile faces left, her attention remains, as in Girl
before a Mirror, directed towards the right: by a large eye, strangely protruding from the
back of her head, defined in red strokes and marked by agitated streamers; and by her two
arms, one a red swath of paint, the other a grey swath, which, as in Girl before a Mirror,
reach towards and into the right hand half of the painting. Awakening sexuality, defined
in the Picasso as primitive, is here defined as animal. The hands reach towards what one
might take to be animal teats and doubled buttocks. On the right hand side of the canvas
one discerns, lightly traced in black paint the outline of what similar configurations in
Animals and Figures 1942 (fig. 7.2) invite us to see as a vertical four-legged creature, its
head in the upper right of the canvas, its animal aspect reinforced by the possibility of
reading the outlined white area at the bottom of the canvas as an animal hoof.494 The
agitated eye and reaching hands of the female thus search out, even as they seem to ward
off her animal aspect. While the abrupt division between the black and blue planes in the
upper center of the canvas suggest a break between female and animal, the black element
near the bottom edge and the yellow planes that link the left and right hand sides of the
canvas along the horizontal axis point to the oneness of the stenographic figure of the title:
part beast, part woman, the stenographic figure is a sphinx. The timeliness of the image is
suggested by the fact that, when in the first issue of VVV published in June 1942, the
editors polled twenty-one Surrealists or Surrealist sympathizers "Concerning the present
day relative attractions Of Various Creatures in Mythology and Legend," the most favored
was the sphinx, followed by the chimera, and the minotaur.
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Fig. 7.2. "Animals and Figures" 1942. Oil and ink on paper, 22 3/8 x 29 7/8". The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Straus Fund, 1958.

3. Miro
If Stenographic Figure owes a debt to Matta, more striking is its debt to Miro, a
major Surrealist artist who did not seek refuge in America. In an interview Pollock gave
in 1944, he was unequivocal in his admiration. Responding to a question on the influence
of the European moderns, he stated "the two artists I admire most, Picasso and Miro, are
still abroad."495 Motherwell, who is said to have conducted this interview, himself was
particularly appreciative of both Miro’s pictorial eroticism and his plastic automatism. The
felicity with which Miro could balance his pictorial signs and their presence as pictorial
mark and structure was accompanied by a calm and confidence to which Pollock could
only aspire.
Pollock encountered Miro’s art in the major retrospective held at the Museum of
Modern Art from November 1941 - January 1942 and in Peggy Guggenheim's gallery Art
of this Century.496 It offered Pollock both a seemingly effortless mastery of form and
animal imagery very different from that of Picasso and the other Surrealists. A canvas of
the late 1920s, Dutch Interior (fig. 7.3), owned and exhibited by Peggy Guggenheim in Art
of this Century, provided a paradigm of Miro's joyful vision of the oneness of human
creativity and animal instincts. 497
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L: Fig. 7.3. Juan Miro, Dutch Interior II, summer 1928. Oil on canvas, 28.74 x 36",
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
R: Fig. 7.4. Juan Miro, Person in the Presence of Nature, 1935. Oil and aqueous medium on cardboard,
29.76 x 41.61". Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950.

In this variation on Jan Steen's The Cat's Dancing Lesson, a genre piece in which a dog
participates in the excitement of a cat's being taught to dance to the piping of a woman's
flute, Miro elaborates on the elliptical pattern the Dutch painter used to connect the
narrative components and to carry the conviviality of the scene, translating this pattern into
arabesques that hover around the perimeters of the painting and transect and connect the
music making woman and animal, and the entire lower and upper portions of the canvas,
in a swirling circular rhythm. Similarly in Stenographic Figure Pollock conveys the urge
for a unity between the woman and her animal part with exuberant circular rhythms.
Dutch Interior exhibits many of the pictorial qualities that characterize Miro's work
in exemplary fashion, most importantly the conversion of image into ideographic sign, a
sign, however, that is experienced in its pictorial immediacy. The linear arabesque in
Dutch Interior, for instance, poetically suggests the animal spirits of the music-making
scene, while it is simultaneously experienced as autonomous line and rhythm. In looking
at this work, one is refreshingly aware of the purity of line as line, of color as color,
rhythmic composition as rhythm. The arabesque works in tandem with its poetic meanings
or, more exactly, carries, embodies these meanings. As Rose points out, Miro's art is
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decidedly not an abstract art, it always has a specific referent -- the painter's conception of
a higher reality.498
For Pollock Miro's art opened up new pictorial vistas, which he was able to
assimilate with startling rapidity. Pollock thus approaches Miro's pictorial immediacy and
freedom, including the sensation of the genesis of imagery from the manipulation of
physical matter.499 As one continues to look at Stenographic Figure, one discovers that the
colored lines coalesce into symbolic signs. Some of these symbols are drawn from Miro’s
own repertoire. In several of Miro's "peintures sauvages" executed in the mid-1930s during
a time of both personal and public suffering, as fascism started to gain the upper hand in
Spain, Miro conveys some of his despair at the bestiality of existence with the image of a
heavy footed slouching beast, for instance in Person in the Presence of Nature 1935 (fig.
4) or Nocturne 1938. This heavy-footed four-legged beast makes its way into Pollock's
doodles in Animals and Figures 1942 -- its formal innovation of drawing with colored lines
already linking it with Stenographic Figure -- and finally into the animal part, upright and
lightly traced in black, of the she-beast in the painting itself.
Animals and Figures contains in its upper left hand motif confirmation of Pollock’s
concern with the she-beast: the conflation of woman and animal in one sphinx-like
creature, its female element manifest in the red breasts, its animal component in the four
legs and the tail. Her large singular eye stares up at the flying bird above, which Pollock
had earlier associated with higher consciousness. This motif has a source in Miro as well.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Miro's urge towards the transcendent resurfaced
and he once again celebrated the awareness of realms beyond the mundane, he did so with
the cosmic imagery of sun, moon, and stars, of birds in flight, imagery that Pollock would
have immediately recognized, for he used it himself. For instance, the manner in which
the sun-moon eye of the female in Rosalie, published in the 1940 Cahiers d'Art, awakens
to view the flight of birds, is echoed by Pollock in Animal and Figure with the eye of the
she-beast turning upward to heed the bird. In Stenographic Figure her red eye is absorbed
simply in becoming aware of her own animal nature. Already in Rosalie Miro uses an all-
over automatic line to integrate his composition, the stylistic trademark of his constellation
series. This series was executed in 1940-41 but not exhibited in New York City until after
the war, in 1945, when both the Spanish painter's imagery and style regained their
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significance for Pollock's art. In 1942 Pollock’s incantatory topmost veil of stenographic
marks indicate an early appropriation of Miro’s all-over linear automatism, which he will
embrace more confidently in 1945.

4. Magic Numbers
In Stenographic Figure the theme of awakening animal instincts is addressed also
by the topmost layer of all-over graphic scribbling, with its numbers and letters suggesting
a magical invocation. As we already know, Pollock looked forward to the publication of
Kurt Seligmann’s "Magic Circles” (1942), an article about magic and alchemy, illustrated
with an image of a man in a kabbalistic square filled with numbers (fig. 7.5).

Fig. 7.5. Kabbalistic square, in Kurt Seligmann, "Magic Circles," View, vol. 1, no. 11-12 (Feb.-March
1942).

Seligmann invites us to think of art as magic. "The creative work of the artist is perhaps
also a magic art, whose purpose is to recognize the soul of the world and to create through
this knowledge in the same manner as the magician who creates disturbances by means of
a few scribbled signs. It is dangerous to draw pentacles; it is dangerous to draw any design,
to write words, to create artistic or artificial things, because we cannot know what their
correspondences will be."500
Amid other stenographic marks in the top of the white central area, the numbers 3
and 1 appear to either side of an x-like figure that might also be read as a 4. Earlier (see
fig. 2.13) Pollock had diagrammed the four Jungian psychological functions with their
associated colors, and included the notation, (3 humans 1 animal), suggesting the
proportion of animal to human in the mix that goes to make up the human psyche. 501 Jung
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himself dwells on the presence of the serpent in the psyche, a principle of darkness and
evil, which nevertheless must be recognized, accepted and integrated into the whole
psyche. He expresses the relationship of serpent to psyche in terms of 3 and 1: "A trinity
is … arrayed against the one, the serpent: the three in one against the devil, who is the
fourth."502 In Stenographic Figure, 3, 1, and possibly 4 are significantly located in the
white central area where the rhythmic thrusts from the left and the right hand sides of the
canvas meet. The numerical equation written on the red arm of the stenographic figure as
she reaches towards the animal, 66 = 42, may well be a playful magical invocation of the
highest creativity.503 Busa who saw Stenographic Figure several times during the course
of its creation remembers that Pollock originally included whole words, but later decided
they were too distracting and instead used "arbitrary scribbles" and "numbers that he
considered lucky."504. Once questioned about the numbers 4 and 6 by Lee Krasner, Pollock
"insisted that 46 was his 'magic number'." 505
Since number symbolism continues to crop up in Pollock's work, it bears further
comment. Pollock's New York address was 46 E. 8th Street. The skeptic's response that
the repeated appearance of these numbers 4, 6, 8 in Pollock's art refers only to this address
is limiting, negating the very essence of a sensibility alive to the magical power of
correspondence.506 Pollock’s fascination with the magical potency of numbers makes it
difficult to understand these scribbles as graffiti, as Krauss seems to imply, defacing the
material surface of the canvas. 507 They are instead a groping response to spirit felt to be
latent in seemingly meaningless facts -- not defacement but invocation.508
The feelings that drive such magic scribbling and invocation are bound up with the
very real emotional block that Pollock experienced with women. This block is now
challenged through pictorial means. In Stenographic Figure Pollock posits the emotional
block as the structural split of the canvas. He then works excitedly towards overcoming or
“healing” the split, first through symbols that already have an abstract dimension, such as
the reaching red swaths of paint, and then through all-over graphic marks that hint at and
magically invoke a future integration of higher consciousness and animal instinctuality.
Automatist paint handling will be given a privileged role in this integration, as the
cultivation of its instinctuality points the way to the harmony of conscious and
unconscious, spiritual and instinctual forces.
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Stenographic Figure is Pollock's first effort to recognize and integrate instinct and
desire into a larger whole. While spontaneous passages skittered around the edges of the
central pure rectangle of Male and Female suggesting not so much writing as sexual
release, the also spontaneous marks that in Stenographic Figure cover the entire surface
hint at a hermetic text, as the larger compositional forces surge and break towards each
other in the center in a yin-yang swirl. The play of a free agent is still very much a surface
affair, but, almost desperately, automatic écriture nervously reasserts the underlying theme:
painting as the wedding of spirit and instinct.
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Chapter 8
Alchemy of Pouring I

1. The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle

Fig. 8.1. Moon Woman Cuts the Circle 1943. Oil on canvas, 42 x 40". Musée National d'Art Moderne,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Pollock was “totally aware,” as his friend Bultman put it when speaking of
Pollock’s paintings of the early 1940s, of just “how repetitive these early works are …
there's a theme and variation.” He constantly talked “about the image and how to achieve
an image" and the “release of images.” 509 In Moon Woman Cuts the Circle 1943 (fig. 8.1)
contemplation gives way to action, the act of cutting.510 But where is the moon woman?
Where the circle? We do see a yellow-bladed dagger in the upper center of the canvas.
Immediately one is drawn to the red in the upper right as a figure standing out from its blue
ground: is it a red head, with two eyes, a white feathered headdress? This figure appears
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to be seated on her white haunches, another sphinx, her white legs extended to the left.
From her large round breasts flow diamonds, as she wields the dagger with her extended
red “crescent arm.” But is that red crescent not rather a separate figure, who wields the
dagger against the figure on the right -- slashing its chin, gouging its forehead to cut out
what was its third eye, which we now see connected by a red line to the dagger, ripping at
its belly and breasts to release a flow of diamonds in a savage caesarean birth? Whether
this is a violent cutting of one person by another or an act of self-mutilation remains
unclear, as does the identity of the circle being cut. Is this circle that of the third eye, which
had so agitated the Moon Woman, or that of her body cut in the savage birthing of
diamonds? What does the cutting out of the eye, a blinding, have to do with birth?
Such questions point both to the narrative in which this art has its origins and to the
way its incarnation in paint has left it behind. As Bultman put it, "there's a story -- it's
totally integrated pictorially, however, in Pollock, as in Miro.”511 Pollock himself insisted
“that the image was not literary, but pictorial.” 512 The red of the figuration to the right and
to the left, bound into one circular rhythm that courses through the breasts and a yellow
arcing segment, creates the impression of an original circle that has been broken into,
divided, by the dagger. As a result the blue ground gains its own positive presence,
activating the flat pictorial surface with a new and ambiguous tension between figure and
ground. Instead of splitting the picture plane, as he did in Stenographic Figure, and
working to overcome this split with symbolic figuration and automatic écriture, Pollock
now asserts the unity of the pictorial plane with an unsettling subversion of figuration that
goes far beyond Guernica. While Picasso, as Krauss has commented, "retains the ultimate
unity of the initial figure," Pollock begins to break down figuration itself. 513 How are we
to understand this sacrifice of figuration, presented as an act of violence, even self-
mutilation?

2. The Story of the Dagger

A drawing related to Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, CR 704 (c. 1943) (fig. 8.2) supports
the interpretation of such violence as self-mutilation. Here the female is shown throwing
her head backwards, as she prepares to pierce herself with a dagger. Such preparation
takes place under the sign of a tail-biting serpent, in which we can recognize the winged
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dragon pictured in Jung’s Integration of the Personality, symbolizing "implicitly the

divine and all-creating spirit concealed in matter" (fig. 3).514

Fig. 8.2. Untitled, CR 704, c.1943. Ink and touches of red gouache on brown paper, 12 1/2 x 13".
Collection Amy and B. H. Friedman, NY (gift of the artist).

Fig. 8.3. C. G. Jung, Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1939), Plate VII.
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By then Jung’s interest had shifted from Taoist yoga to western alchemy, which offered
him a key to the final formulation of his psychology precisely because it spoke more
directly to the dualistic traditions of the West, to the way they so often move from unity to
a conflict of opposites only to return to unity on a higher level. 515 The initial and
undifferentiated unity of the dragon, prima materia, the hermaphrodite of incipient being,
must be divided to produce “a pair of opposed forces, usually regarded as the male and
female principles”; from the conflict of these opposing forces will emerge a new unity. 516
“He [Mercurius] is the prima materia … as the dragon he devours himself, and as the
dragon he dies and is resurrected in the form of the lapis.”517 In Pollock’s drawing the
female figure, her nature governed by the tail-eating serpent floating above her, is herself
this dragon that turns against itself. 518 The words that Pollock places alongside his drawing
suggest a dialectic that is to yield a new totality: “Thick/ thin// Chinese/ Am. indian// sun/
snake/ woman/ life// effort/ reality// total.” The words speak of opposites, differentiating
thin from thick, the sun (male) from the all-containing snake (female), in this effort to
achieve a new totality. Alchemy offered Pollock a narrative of the renewal of self. 519 That
story begins with a violent act, a death.
Such stories were widespread among the Surrealists and shared by Graham. The
slicing action, the opening and closing of the eye-like shutter of the shadow-box installed
in Art of This Century, as a way of bringing new artwork into view, was by Kiesler
suggestively presented in the March 1943 VVV as the slicing of the "third eye" of André
Breton himself. But once again it is Masson, who with his explicit images and schemata,
serves as one of Pollock's guides. In La Passion Pour La Nuit, a page of drawings published
in VVV, March 1943 (fig. 8.4), he shows the sun, first trapped, then murdered, followed
by a lunar, female form. 520 The fourth image fuses a headless male and female into an
androgyne, while the final image joins a time-measuring device Rube Goldberg could have
invented to a headless female plunging a dagger into her chest, juxtaposed with a dark,
eclipsed, but now spermatic sun, which wriggles with procreative possibilities. 521 In the
upper right of this scene we see a shining sun, joined by diagonal lines to birds in flight, a
small detail, but one that suggests the Pollock drawing related to Male and Female (see fig.
5.5), freedom figured by the flying bird. Freedom here is presented not simply as an escape
from a trap, but as the final stage of a journey to new life that passes through the female.
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Here already we meet with elements of Pollock’s The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle: the
female as agent in her self sacrifice, her act generating a new birth, in Pollock’s case of
diamonds and, we’ll soon come to see, of a masculine principle figured by the sun. A
distinctly and disturbingly male self-assertion here demands that woman sacrifice herself.

Fig. 8.4. Andre Masson, La Passion Pour La Nuit, in VVV, no. 2-3 (March 1943), p. 27.
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The intensity in Masson’s sacrificial violence can be traced to Georges Bataille. 522
Bataille claimed in "Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh"
(1930) that painting is born with man's refusal to reproduce himself and out of an act of
self-mutilation, an instance of “alteration.” Such refusal presupposes a narcissistic
introversion that refuses to submit to the rule of Venus.523 Alteration here means both
devolution and evolution, describing both putrefaction such as the decomposition of
cadavers and "the passage to a perfectly heterogeneous state corresponding to the tout
autre, that is, the sacred, realized for example by a ghost."524 Body is here left behind in a
way that confounds the logic that maintains terms like high and low, or base and sacred as
opposites. As Krauss puts it, such a coincidence of opposites "allows one to think that truth
that Bataille never tired of demonstrating: that violence has historically been lodged at the
heart of the sacred; that to be genuine, the very thought of the creative must simultaneously
be an experience of death." 525 The sacred is understood here in a way that has to turn
against all life.

In the same spirit Bataille, in another article of the same year, “The Rotten Sun,”
celebrated Picasso’s attack on academic figuration, and dedicated his essay to the “soleil
pourri,” the rotten sun, an oxymoronic image derived from Mithraic ritual and Bataille's
understanding of the function of the third or pineal eye. 526 Krauss explains: “The very
opposite of Descartes’ belief that the pineal eye was the organ connecting the soul to the
body, Bataille’s gnostic understanding of the gland’s function is that it propels man
upward, attracting him toward the empyrean -- representative of all that is lofty -- impelling
him, however, to stare straight into the sun, becoming as a result, crazed and blind.” 527
Upward here also means inward. The third eye is open to a spiritual light that robs whoever
dares to look at it of this world and its comforts, but rewards him with a godlike creativity.
Such looking into the sun played a role in inciting ecstasy. And just such a self-mutilation
or alteration describes for Bataille the essence of Picasso’s creativity. The violent act of
cutting out the third eye in Moon Woman Cuts the Circle is Pollock’s entry into this
sacrificial imagery in terms that echo Bataille and Masson.

If mainstream Surrealism translated the dialectic unity of thesis and antithesis in a

new synthesis proposed by Hegel into alchemical terms, such as the diamond or the
androgyne, Bataille emphasized “l’informe” as a coincidence of light and dark. He was
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fascinated with the collapse of spiritual verticality into bestial horizontality: a low or base
materialism, "la bassesse," as the real source of libidinal energy. But the way in which
both Masson and Pollock were interested in dialectical structure would seem to resist
interpretation of their work in terms of "l'informe." They were indeed fascinated by the
role of sacrifice and death. But they would seem to have held on to a version of the
Hegelian dialectic: their turn to matter aimed at the philosopher's stone. They were not
interested in a blinding light that left the artist crazed, but in diamonds, a symbol that
demands interpretation.

3. Birth Through Destruction

The very real horrors of a world at war had to call into question an art that played
with images of wounding and mutilation as figures of “alteration.” To be sure, Picasso
himself had linked artistic creativity to violence, self-mutilation and death. In 1933, three
years after Bataille’s “Rotten Sun,” his minotaur appeared in the new Surrealist magazine
Minotaure, brandishing a dagger. That dagger is soon turned against him. As in the ritual
of the yearly sacrifice of the bull in the Mithraic rites of renewal, Picasso’s man-bull
undergoes sacrificial mutilation a number of times between 1933 and 1937. For an excess
of brutish instinct, for instance the rape of the beautiful classical woman, he not only
encounters the punishment of the dagger, but repeated blinding, as in Blind Minotaur
Guided by a Little Girl in the Night November 1934. Made uneasy about such violence in
the face of a society at war, Picasso finally put the minotaur to death in The End of the
Monster of December 6, 1937.528 But this is not to say the dagger disappears from his art.
After the trauma of Guernica, Picasso shifted the locus of the dagger, which is now plunged
into the eye of the woman. The dagger becomes the insignium of a wounded goddess, the
wound now not a step to ecstasy, but a badge of suffering (fig. 8.5).529
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Fig. 8.5. Pablo Picasso, Drawing, June 13, 1938. India ink, 17 3/4 x 9 1/2", illustrated in Cahiers d'Art,
vol. 13, no. 3-10, 1938, p. 155.

By having the moon woman cut the circle, Pollock dramatically realigns his
relationship with Picasso's muse. This realignment become vivid when we compare Moon
Woman Cuts the Circle with a Picasso pen drawing illustrated in the 1938 Cahiers d'Art
(fig. 8.6). Three women are seated in a harem setting; the central woman with one eye
blotted out, the other eye with a diamond appended, and yet another diamond lodged in her
belly, gazes at the flowers being presented to her. A drawing by Pollock of a similarly
seated Picassoid woman with a diamond in her belly (CR 610, c. 1939-42) suggests that
this particular drawing by Picasso had caught his attention (fig. 8.7).
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Fig. 8.6. Pablo Picasso, Drawing, Aug. 5, 1938, Mougins, illustrated in Cahiers d'Art, vol. 13, no. 3-10,
1938, p. 169.

Fig. 8.7. Untitled, CR 610, c.1939-42. Black ink and pencil on paper, 13 5/8 x 17 7/8".
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In Moon Woman Cuts the Circle Pollock's female cuts out her third eye and releases from
her belly the flow of diamonds. But though she is kin to the contemplative females in the
pen drawing and in Girl Before a Mirror, she is now, in Pollock's words, a "Chinese-
American Indian." She ceases her yogic contemplation and acts -- with a ferocity that
surpasses anything to be found in either Picasso's or Graham's work.
Pollock here struggles towards a new symbolic formulation of the creative act, at
once a death and a birth, moreover depicted as a violent physical action: the swing of the
“crescent arm,” the gashing of the forehead, the release and flow of diamonds. Peter Busa
remembers Pollock struggling to describe his work on Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle: “If
he had two or three people there, then he could describe his experiences in painting it and
the qualities of the many overtones of a painting not being fixed or static, but in the state
of becoming. Very much like one thing leading to another.” 530 Important here is the
suggestion that painting can capture “a state of becoming,” with shifting meanings. Their
elusive play betrays a preoccupation with the forces of death, the wounding at the heart of
the Guernica. Bultman remembers Pollock's involvement with Guernica as "that release
of a violent image." 531 Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle bears witness to such a release, which
carries Pollock well beyond Picasso's understanding of creativity as metamorphosis in Girl
before a Mirror to an understanding of creativity as birth through destruction. To Bultman
Pollock often spoke of the dream vision, distinguishing between fasting necessary if one is
to become a brave, and the extreme of immolation undertaken to become a shaman. 532 The
fact that the moon woman has donned a headdress of Indian feathers is significant. His
image of the moon woman wielding the dagger possesses something of the savage force of
primitive ritual and sacrifice described in the Smithsonian volumes, or illustrated by
Orozco in the Ancient Human Sacrifice panel of the Dartmouth murals (fig. 8.8).533 The
amorphous hulk of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war, with his necklace of human
hearts, here looms over the ceremony of the ripping out with a knife the heart of a living
warrior.534 To Bultman, who himself was concerned with "the vitality of death" in
American literary traditions and Mexican art, Pollock spoke of Orozco's violent imagery. 535
Pollock's interest in primitive sacrificial and initiatory ritual was fed by his own
experiences of psychological pain. An important precedent for the moon woman's act of
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self-mutilation is the self-destructive imagery of Naked Man with Knife (c. 1938-41) (fig.
9).

L: Fig. 8.8. José Clemente Orozco, Ancient Human Sacrifice, panel 3 of The Epic of American Civilization,
1932-34, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.
R: Fig. 8.9. Naked Man with Knife, c. 1938-41. Oil on canvas, 50 x 36".
Tate Gallery, London, Great Britain.

Against a dark blue ground we see a strong bronzed male body on the right of the canvas,
holding a prominent white dagger whose pointed shape is echoed in a Cubist-Futurist
repetition of daggers, aimed at a female victim's crude hand, an agitated red area of paint,
and echoed again, on a larger scale, in the triangular wedge that drives between the male's
strong legs.536 The emotional charge that the act of mutilation carried for Pollock is still
evident, and now directed to an eye, in the frenetic lines of CR 667v (c. 1943) (fig. 8.10).
There, below the terrified face of the sun, Pollock shows a man's head, with one large
startled eye, the other eye lost under the assault of a heavily marked angular wedge and
hand. Pollock here actually depicts the moment of self-blinding.
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Fig. 8.10. Untitled, CR 667v, c. 1943. Pen and black ink with touch of brown crayon, 18 x 14".

When the wielding of the knife and cutting of the eye finally make their way into
Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, the sacrifice is carried out no longer by a man, stand-in for
the artist, but by that woman in whose terrifying and fascinating dream-image Pollock
encountered the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of the numinous. This Busa in his
description of the painting invokes with the words "spirit of dread." 537 The canvas is indeed
an artistic reenactment of the old destructive impulse, but the sacrifice is now projected
onto a female other, and now with creative consequence.

4. Alchemy as Painting
One might well protest that the story of the dagger and even of its emotional
resonance for Pollock leaves us at a remove from what you see in Moon Woman Cuts the
Circle, from the handling of form and paint, from the specific way in which meaning has
been submerged in matter. Can alchemy help us to understand what here matters? James
Elkins seems to me to be right when he criticizes Jung’s approach to alchemy as too narrow:
“To me what is wrong with Jung is not the basic idea that some alchemists saw their souls
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in their crucibles, but the fact that he made alchemy virtually independent of the
laboratory.”538 It is its working with materials that makes alchemy such an illuminating
metaphor for painting. “Alchemy is the old science of struggling with materials, and not
quite understanding what is happening: exactly as Monet did, and as every painter does
each day in the studio.”539 “Tentative or explosive motions of one liquid through another
are irresistibly metaphors for mental states.” 540 Alchemy, Elkins asserts, “is the best and
most eloquent way to understand how paint can mean.”541 And it is increasingly at this
painterly level that alchemy became important to Pollock, for he, too, was struggling to
uncover and communicate meaning in matter and form.
Much as we have already seen Pollock doing, Elkins, too, talks of how to count in
paint. For the painter the monad is all paint, before it is separated into individual paints. 542
The moment you differentiate the monad into a dyad, the tensions between opposites
needed to explore relationship, whether formal or human, are in place. “The monad and
dyad are wonderful starting places for meditating on the relation of substances, and on
relation in general.” But “anything that is two must become one or three. … With three
principles instead of two, the associations at once become much more dense.” 543 And so
it goes in a meaningful process of dividing and uniting and perfecting.
Pollock had arrived at the moment of wanting to differentiate his pictorial surface,
the flatness of modernist painting, in his own way. He has played with splitting and uniting
in Stenographic Figure. Now in Moon Woman Cuts the Circle he breaks the modernist
surface in a different way -- by breaking the unity of the figure to create a new tension of
figure and ground. This he further complicates by an unexpected layering. Closer
inspection reveals that the red, which one reads as figure, is in fact ground; the blue that
floods around the canvas and into its center, within the broken red circle, is not background,
but is applied by and large over the red in a second layer -- effectively creating a second
and new ground.544 On the top of this ground he outlines in black the stream of diamonds,
as though they have yet to really materialize.
That Pollock at this juncture not only practices pictorial alchemy, but is concerned
with the very lore of alchemy deserves further comment. In CR 652 (c. 1942) (fig. 8.11) a
labyrinthine snake floats above a part anthropomorphic and part-flower figure, whose top
has been split into two equal and like parts. Beside it are the alchemical words: "plays
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[illegible] moon/. The rock the fish/ was winged/ and split of/ two as one could/ grow to
be and/ was the sun [?]." Pollock first wrote the word "son," then rewrote it as "sun." 545
Pollock’s text is an alchemical recipe! As we have seen, any number of artists in the thirties
and early forties, such as Kadish, Graham, Ernst, Masson, Matta, knew the alchemical
recipes. But better than any of them Pollock knew how to cook, using what he knew of
alchemy to come up with new techniques and approaches to painting and its materials.

Fig. 8.11. Untitled, CR 652, c. 1942. Pen and black ink with red ink wash on green cardboard mounted on
blue ground, cardboard 7 x 16 5/8" irregular; Sight, mount 9 x 18 5/8".

5. Collage

Having boldly cut into the figure in Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, Pollock pursued
the idea of generating form by cutting and layering, working in the new medium of collage.
Pollock had learned something of the processes used in creating a collage, when he had
helped Lee Krasner with the WPA War Services photocollage displays from May through
October 1942. These displays were intended to advertise war-training courses.546 But
because he had never made a collage before, when faced with the upcoming collage
exhibition to be held at Art of this Century from the middle of April to the middle of May
1943, he asked Robert Motherwell if they could work together on their collage entries.
Motherwell recalled Pollock’s violence. “He, I remember, burnt his with matches and spit
on it. Generally, he worked with a violence that I had never seen before.” 547
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Fig. 8.12. "Sun Collage," CR 1023, c. 1942. Collage of colored papers with brush, pen and ink, crayon and
colored pencil brushed with water, 15 1/2 x 13 5/8". The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Bequest of Marcia Simon Weisman.

In what I will refer to as the Sun collage, CR 1023 (c. 1943) (fig. 8.12), the theme
of cutting open the figure (note on the left the moon-headed woman, accosted by a bird,
with her one eye floating free, the conjunction of crescent hands and dagger, and a
humanoid figure cut into by penetrating hands) is made literal by cutting a large circular
area from the main red-figured design to reveal, not diamonds, but the shape of a new male
sun, the black and white spermatic ‘sun’ dominating the upper right hand corner of the
composition. Its area is actually an independent white sheet which has been pasted below
the red figured sheet, both of them then pasted onto a larger buff-colored sheet, leaving
large borders on the top and right hand sides. On theses borders Pollock scribbles
marginalia hinting at the descent of consciousness down into matter, that here leads to the
revelation of the sun, now found literally down under the red-figured ground. Expressing
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the theme of descent so literally, Pollock opens up new potential in the Late Cubist spatial
arena. The question of pictorial depth is reopened, not in illusionistic terms, but in the
concrete terms of layering. Cutting the surface opens up an in-out axis within the material
arena, which also can be understood as “below” and “above” the planar surface. Here we
arrive at the horizontalization, also discovered by Picasso in the making of collage. But
Pollock did not shirk its carnal implications, as Bois tells us Picasso did.548 The nervous
mark making, with black ink and red, yellow and blue crayons, that gives the sun its
spermatic vitality appears to be the last detailing of the Sun collage.

Fig. 8.13. "Jack'son'", CR 1024, c. 1943. Collage of purple paper with gouache and pen and ink,
15 7/8 x 21 1/4". Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York.

The exploration of this topmost layer of loose gestural markings continues in CR

1024 (c. 1943) (fig. 8.13), which I will refer to as the Jack'son’ collage.549 Somewhat
chaotic looking, at first it does not appear to contain any figural elements. In fact it does
show a rectangular head, supported by a yellow neck, the lightly drawn profile facing
upwards. Two eyes especially draw our attention. On the head the numbers 4 and 7 are
prominent. At the bottom of the sheet a long spirally line terminates in a hand. Between
the numbers and the neck Pollock’s signature appears, written in a shaky and inconsistent
mirror writing with only the “son” of Jackson Pollock seen in forward script. Recall that
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Pollock in the drawing CR 652 (c. 1942) first writes the word “son,” only to rewrite it as
“sun”. This “sun-son” is the newly differentiated and released masculine consciousness,
the newborn “son” of the moon woman. In Male and Female the male was still defined
very much in terms of the moon woman’s body. Now he has become an independent entity,
a cut and torn piece of purple paper characterized by an overlay of gestural automatism:
the newly independent “son” of the Picassoid muse. Here Pollock breaks away from
Picasso’s contoured and relatively static figuration towards a new level of abstractness and
openness in the figuration and gestural freedom in the execution. Nor are these new
stylistic traits confined to localized passages in a basically Synthetic Cubist work, as in
Male and Female; rather they animate the entirety of the ground of the purple collage
element and generate a new all-over composition.
Is this automatist scribbling what Pollock was proposing as a new “image of man,”
now that he has broken free from the exquisitely controlled figuration of Picasso’s Girl
Before a Mirror? The thought that Pollock is in fact more drawn to bassesse and
putrefaction than his symbols admit demands attention. In resisting Picasso, is he simply
drawn to monstrosity, to the unformed, the chaotic? Is this his legacy, as Krauss and Bois
assert?

L: Fig. 8.14. Untitled, CR 956, c. 1942. Pen and ink and gouache on deep pink paper, 10 5/8 x 3 3/4"
irregular. Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth. Purchase made possible by a grant from the Anne Burnett
and Charles Tandy Foundation.
R: Fig. 8.15. Gnostic stone. God with the legs of a man, the body
of a serpent, and the head of a cock, in Documents 1930, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 7.
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Support for this assertion would seem to be offered by his untitled gouache CR 956, c.
1942 (fig. 8.14), yet another of his new images of man at this time, which bears a striking
resemblance to a Gnostic stone God with the legs of a man, the body of a serpent, and the
head of a cock (fig. 8.15). This Bataille chose to illustrate another of his Documents
articles, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism” (1930), a short essay that places the turn to
base materialism in modern art in the light of Gnosticism’s effort to disconcert and
challenge an earlier idealism. “Gnosticism led to the representations of forms radically
contrary to the ancient academic style, to the representations of forms in which it is possible
to see the image of this base matter that alone, by its incongruity and by an overwhelming
lack of respect, permits the intellect to escape from the constraints of idealism.” 550 Once
more the dream is of a freedom beyond logic. The “God with the legs of a man, the body
of a serpent, and the head of a cock” is very like the creature in Pollock’s gouache: a two-
legged bird-man, sprouting wings instead of arms, his torso marked by a yellow line
mounting, serpent-like, in a spiraling loop towards a single eye. The degree to which the
mounting yellow line in Pollock’s ichthyphallic creature suggests rising libido speaks to
Pollock’s overwhelming lack of respect for convention in art. Should Pollock in his radical
contrariness be understood then as a modern gnostic?
A further look at his gouache suggests not. The most striking difference between
these two snake/bird/men is the stance of Pollock’s creature under banner-like numbers, a
“3”, containing a squiggle of yellow paint relating it to the yellow serpent-like line in the
torso, and an even larger “4”. Once again, as in Stenographic Figure, we recognize
alchemical numerology. Recall Jung words: “A trinity is thus arrayed against the one, the
serpent; the three in one against the devil, who is the fourth.” Did Pollock understand his
snake/bird/man then as some prince of darkness? No: as Jung explains, “The dark part
must be brought completely above the horizon, so that life can go on; and the serpent raised
to the sky illustrates this truth.”551 He elaborates, “A perception of the significance of
fourness, of the totality of the psychic structure, means illumination of the ‘inner
region.’”552 So the serpent, in conjunction with the number 4, gestures, not towards the
unassimilable nature of the base to which Bataille, Krauss, and Bois point, but towards an
ideal of new life.553 A different kind of hope for art suggests itself here, a turn to the
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monstrous as necessary to -- dare we call it that? -- some new idealism. The sexual and
instinctual must be accepted as part of any new totality.
That Pollock’s approach to matter means to be, not gnostic, but alchemical is further
suggested by those numbers 4 and 7 writ large on the face of Jack'son'. In Jung's The
Integration of the Personality seven stages of alchemical transformation lead up to the final
totality or quarternity of the philosopher's stone. 554 Their presence on the Jack'son' collage
speaks of the commitment of the new masculine principle to the hermetic quest, the pursuit
of totality characterized by quarternity, through a journey of transformation. The
masculine principle is reborn as an initiate in the hermetic quest -- an identity thoroughly
in accord with the Surrealists', Matta's, and of course Graham's vision of the artist.

6. Pouring
The alchemist-artist at work in the studio: burning, spitting, cutting, pouring.
Having opened up, in the process of making collages, a differentiated in-out, below-above
axis in his art making, it seems inevitable that Pollock’s desire for the circulation of
energies between male and female poles should take the form of pouring paint from
“above” down onto a flat surface. 555 This can be understood as an alchemical move as
well. Once the uroboric serpent as materia prima has been cut open (think Moon Woman
Cuts the Circle) and the mercurial spirit-substance released (think the "Jack'son'" and "Sun"
collages), the next step is to take this mercurial spirit-substance and project it upon other
substances. “This ‘spirit-substance’ is like quicksilver that lurks unseen within the ore, and
that first must be expelled if one wishes to recover it in pure form. But if one holds this
penetrating mercury, then one can ‘project’ it upon other substances and bring them from
an imperfect to the perfect state.” 556 If such violent sexism does not simply make your
blood boil, consider how such a transformative work might happen in painting. In his
wildest display of painterly automatism to date Pollock creates three partially poured oil
paintings in 1943.557
Pollock acknowledges the erotic component of these poured paintings in the
associated imagery. In a motif visible in the lower right hand corner in Water Birds CR 93
(1943) a taloned hand grasps a female breast. The poured paint is directed to this and other
less discernible imagery in the painting. In Composition with Pouring II, CR 94 (1943)
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(fig. 8.16) the libidinal forces of the male’s presence is explicit: a white phallus outlined in
red is depicted moving towards the lower center of the canvas, the ejaculatory triumph of
this phallus marked with a passage of poured white paint.

Fig. 8.16. Composition with Pouring II, 1943. Oil and enamel paint on canvas, 25 x 22 1/8”. Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966.

In the lower right of Composition with Pouring I, CR 91 (1943) (fig. 8.17) a similar passage
of poured paint is directed more clearly towards a transected eye, within a truncated circle,
recalling the imagery of Moon Woman Cuts the Circle.
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Fig. 8.17. Composition with Pouring I, 1943. Oil on canvas, 35 3/4 x 44 3/4”. Private Collection.

Fig. 8.18. Untitled, CR 685, c. 1943. Pen and black ink on orange paper,12 x 8 15/16" irregular. Location
unknown.

In an untitled drawing CR 685 (c.1943) (fig. 8.18), the head of a jaunty if somewhat timid
bird man stares down at a large eye. In Composition with Pouring I this head can be seen
in reverse, now positioned on the left of the field, the profile facing right with a black
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poured mark for a nose, and the singular eye now in the lower right -- the imagery seeming
to lurk, triumphantly, behind more of the freely poured and splattered lines.
Is this a rape, pushing the female body to the floor and releasing sperm over her?
Is it awkward lovemaking? Later in life when he was asked how did he know when he had
finished one of his mature poured paintings of 1947-50, he replied, "how do you know
when you're finished making love?"558 Of course, Pollock is not literally making love in
these canvases. He is painting. But painting and violent love-making rhymed for Pollock:
one figures the other. In these early poured paintings Pollock begins to literalize and to
enact the circulation of energy he had come to demand of himself. In Moon Woman Cuts
the Circle he had already broken open the self-contained figuration of the moon woman.
Now curving figurative elements, barely recognizable, undulate and even seem to flow on
the two-dimensional surface, as the poured colored lines further activate, mingle with, and
generate a layered materiality of the surface. Descent generates, paradoxically, the
beginning of an ascent, the building up of layers from below to above. In this play of
opposites Pollock catches the scent of endless transformative possibilities: what is spiritual
partakes of the instinctual, and vice versa; the spiritual bird is simultaneously the instinctual
phallus, the female’s third eye is now the eye of her sex.559 Male mingles with female.

As Pollock acts out fantasies of erotic union and procreation in the process of

painting, something else starts to happen: the building up of layers, the rhythmic interaction

of mercurial lines and more fluid colored areas, the generation of a new and increasingly

unpredictable pictorial totality. In the artist-alchemist’s laboratory, a painterly

metamorphosis occurs. The poured paintings of 1943 constitute a first step towards

generating the “diamond body” in art -- not just as symbol, but as an increasingly abstract,

yet concrete, animate, and complex pictorial reality. Pollock has begun to generate the

“recreated flatness” that Greenberg would come to perceive as the strength of all truly

original post-cubist painting.560 To call attention to the significance that such pouring held

for Pollock is not to dislodge his art from modernist discourse, but to enrich our

understanding of what “reverberating meaning” modernist painting can encompass by

opening itself once again to that erotic dimension at the origin of art.
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To claim underlying structure for this newly animated materiality might seem

untenable. Clearly the libidinal spontaneity in these poured paintings is to the fore and

would seem to be given its chief pictorial authority as it links the above and below axis.

But looking more closely at Composition with Pouring I, for instance, one sees a

predominant downward thrust from left to right, the three pronged “hand” associated with

the head of the bird-man grasping towards the center of the canvas. The center and the

left-right, up-down, in-out axes are all acknowledged. Despite the initially chaotic look of

the canvas, the implied axial structure of a centralized three-dimensional diamond

configuration, the realization of which was presented as a tantalizing challenge in Male

and Female, now underlies and sustains the automatist paint handling. Pollock’s later

answer to the accusation of chaos is equally true here: “No chaos, damn it!” 561

Of the move to his mature pouring, Krauss, in writing of Pollock’s “battle of hatred

and envy with his particular mediator, Picasso, the desired object of which would be the

‘figure’ of the unconscious,” states: “At some point it became clear that that figure could

only be approached through bassesse, through lowering, through going beneath the figure

into the terrain of formlessness.”562 But this closer look at Pollock’s early progress reveals

that what he seeks is not bassesse, a simple collapse of the vertical into the horizontal. 563

Yes, Pollock’s relationship with Picasso is intensely rivalrous, but not solely a negation.

Rather than “peeing” on Picasso, as Krauss implies in her discussion of Warhol’s response

to Pollock and Naifeh and Smith postulate in their biography, he might be said rather to

make love to -- or is it rape? -- the Picassoid muse, or to sleep with the mother. 564 The

appropriate bodily metaphors are semen and excited flesh -- the urge procreative. The

extravagance of disorder in the rending apart of form and in the pouring reflects Pollock’s

embrace of chaotic forces, but only in so far as he seeks a new articulation of the dynamic

union of opposites. So, yes, chaos! -- but in the pursuit of a new and more comprehensive

artistic eros, and ultimately a new expression of creativity and human freedom as a

structured spontaneity.
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The value Pollock placed on these early poured paintings is suggested by his gift

of Composition with Pouring I as a wedding present to Herbert and Mercedes Matter. 565

Mercedes had been a close friend of Lee's since the Hofmann School. That the Matters

preserved the experimental untitled pastel with the cut-out diamond suggest that they

understood something of what Pollock was up to. Herbert Matter, a well known Swiss-

born graphic designer, had himself used the axial matrix of a three-dimensional diamond

shape in his 1938 design for an announcement of Plus, a journal of contemporary

architecture (fig. 8.19).

Fig. 8.19. Herbert Matter, Announcement of Plus (New York: Architectural Forum: Time, Inc.) no. 1
(Dec. 1938).

Plus was dedicated to creating, as Naum Gabo wrote, “a dignified frame for a more

perfected social and spiritual life conducted and based upon stable universal principles” --
the goal of the constructive architect/sculptor being “to materialize the images of his inner
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impulses, projecting them from one vital central point in space and making them radiate

toward the outside in an open, free, and unlimited volume, so that the final lines of these

projections form the organic skin of an imaginary organism.” 566 Pollock and Matter shared

an interest in the tensions of structure and dynamic spontaneity, and as well the spiritual

and constructive possibilities of their time. 567 Mercedes Matter liked to tell the story that

when her husband and Jackson were first introduced in the spring of 1942 and left in each

other's company, she and Lee could hear no conversation between the two. Asked what

had happened, Herbert answered, "Jackson said, 'It's really a wonderful time to be living.'

That gave us plenty to think about the rest of the evening." 568 When the Matters left for

the West coast in September 1943, it seems appropriate that Jackson should have given

them as a delayed wedding gift, they had actually been married in 1939, Composition with

Pouring I, an erotic, and certainly experimental, expression of a shared ideal. 569

Burning Landscape CR 95 (1943) (fig. 8.20) hints at this ideal. Whereas in

Composition with Pouring I the automatist expression hints at transgression or surprise

attack, in Burning Landscape the automatist paint handling communicates a sense of

freedom, being able to do what you want, without fear, with spontaneity. This feeling is

supported in large part by the presence -- amid amorphous colored areas and colored lines,

red, yellow, blue, some green, black and white -- of a now clearly visible centralized axial

structure, reminiscent of Mondrian’s verticals and horizontals, but now opened up on an

in-out axis, that is, the axis of pictorial depth. Since Magic Mirror he had located that axis

in the thickness of paint. And now that he had opened up this thickness through physical

layering, he was ready to explore the in-out axis as a spatial dimension in which the plastic

energies of color and line could make themselves felt. The free flow of movement along

this in-out axis, often on diagonals, is new in Pollock’s art (never admissible in that of

Mondrian). Such three-dimensional freedom, first discovered in the throes of erotic

excitement when the in-out axis was still the above-below axis of the poured paintings, is

now turned ninety degrees and incorporated into the three-dimensional structure of Burning
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Landscape. What was natural instinctual expression of a poured line hitting its target is

now, for instance, a red line to the center left moving on a diagonal, sperm-like, penetrating

a circle. But this line is one among numerous other lines, red, blue, and yellow, coursing

spontaneously in all directions, arcing, rising, plummeting. Behind this exuberant display

in the center of the canvas we can detect one symbolic motif in red, the conjunction of sun

disc and crescent moon, which, even as the disc when repeated to the right suggests two

startled eyes of a humanoid head, evokes the harmony of opposites to which the abstract

structure and balancing of dynamic energies aspire.

Fig. 8.20. Burning Landscape, 1943. Oil on gesso on canvas. 36 x 28 7/16". Yale University Art Gallery,
New Haven, Connecticut. Gift of Miss Peggy Guggenheim.

While the title Burning Landscape brings to mind the raging war, it also evokes

Pollock’s Promethean creative ambitions.570 Pollock’s entry in the Metropolitan

Museum’s Artists for Victory exhibition in 1942 was his early The Flame; now the
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Promethean urge to master the transformative powers of fire for the benefit of mankind has

advanced from the still turgid flickering rhythms of the early canvas to a transparent

flickering, suggestive of “Les Grands Transparents”, the final image of the questing

journey posed in the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue. The animated field of Burning

Landscape suggests Promethean daring, now ready to be harnessed to the task of pictorial

alchemy that yet lay ahead. When Peggy Guggenheim first visited Pollock’s studio, it was

Burning Landscape that especially attracted her attention.

6. The Contract

First alerted by Mondrian to Pollock's quality, Peggy Guggenheim, prodded by

Putzel, finally set a date to visit his studio, June 23. 571 Putzel started coming over to the

8th Street apartment every night to brief Jackson on Peggy Guggenheim. As Lee Krasner

remembered, "He told Jackson what to do, and how to behave. Jackson was thoroughly

prepared." But Putzel had not counted on the fact that June 23 was also the date of Peter

Busa's wedding. Jackson was his best man. He was both drunk and late, when he and Lee

got back to the studio. Peggy Guggenheim was enraged. It took Jackson, immediately

sobered, and Lee some fifteen minutes to persuade her to mount the five floors again to

view the paintings. While she liked Burning Landscape, she bought it later that summer,

she still had reservations about giving Pollock a solo exhibition at Art of this Century, as

Putzel urged.572 She told Lee and Jackson that she would ask Marcel Duchamp to come

over. His reaction would be decisive.

Besides Mondrian, Duchamp was the other great figure in twentieth century art

present in New York. The erotic theme of his Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by
her Bachelors, Even (fig. 8. 21), created between 1915-23, in Katherine Dreier's collection

since 1923, and finally on public display at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, was

seminal for the later Surrealists.573 In 1937 Kiesler had hailed it as the masterpiece of

twentieth century painting, celebrating its uniting of "architecture, sculpture, and painting
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in ONE,"574 and paid it homage in his display of Boite en Valise at Art of This Century.

This all-inclusiveness was the opposite of Mondrian's art, an inclusiveness that not only

embraced but was founded on eroticism: the playful Duchamp had once declared that eros

was "the only serious thing which I might consider."575 The Large Glass was, however, an

erotic machine; the energies and forces that connected the Bride above with the Bachelors

below were first of all conceptual and hermetic, footnoted later, in the Green Box of 1934.

Fig. 8.21. Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23.
Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels, 109 x 69 1/4". Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Philadelphia. Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier, 1952.

Ever open to manifestations of eros, Duchamp had no difficulty recognizing that

energies that he had intellectualized were present in Pollock's dynamic handling of paint,
when he made his studio visit in early July. His report back to Peggy Guggenheim was
"pas mal."576 From Duchamp, this was taken as an accolade. Peggy Guggenheim
proceeded to offer Pollock a year contract, $150 a month, with the further stipulation that
if $2700 worth of Pollock's paintings had been sold at the end of the year, the Gallery would
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get a one-third commission -- if less was sold, Pollock would make up the difference in
paintings;577 also a one-man show in November, and the commission of a roughly 9 x 20
foot canvas mural for the entrance hall of her 61st Street town house. By July 15 Pollock
had signed the contract.
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III The Quest

Chapter 9
The Beast

1. She-Wolf

Fig. 9.1. The She-Wolf, 1943. Oil, gouache, and plaster on canvas, 41 7/8 x 67". The Museum of Modern
Art, New York.

“Go ahead, make a mess. You might find yourself by destroying yourself and by
working your way out of it.”578 Thus Pollock once advised his friend Busa. As he set to
work for his November show, the first painting he completed in August was She-Wolf (fig.
9.1), the first of a series of animal paintings done that late summer and fall. Looking at
She-Wolf for the first time, one is struck by the aggressive overpainting, the disjunction
between figure and ground. Pollock apparently began the painting with a messy automatist
splattering of thin paint onto a white primed canvas, revealed in the body of the animal and
in the upper left-hand corner, presumably done when the canvas was horizontal, on a table
or on the floor. Then, righting the canvas, he proceeded to brutally overpaint this thin layer
with the image of a she-wolf, created by thick black and white outlining. Next came the
thick steely grey of the surrounding ground. In delineating the image he used oil paint,
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while incorporating a granular filling, probably sand; for the grey he used a shinier, more
fluid paint that unlike oil dried in a smooth, even plane –- signature properties, as the
conservator Carol Mangusi-Ungaro notes, of industrial paint, such as floor paint.579 Is
Pollock simply making a mess and responding to it? Yes. But his mess and his response
are embedded in a history of emotional and pictorial exploration that lets us understand
more of how an artist might go about “destroying himself” to “find himself.”
The title She-Wolf for this fearful image is tantalizing. The most famous she-wolf
is the legendary she-wolf of Rome, the animal mother of the twins Romulus and Remus
who founded Rome. A modified version of the ancient Capitoline statue of the wolf
suckling the twins, this version childless, resided in the Frick Museum in New York, which
Pollock is known to have frequented. Was Pollock drawn, as Landau postulates, to this
childless version of the animal mother out of the still powerful negative emotions that his
own mother aroused in him?580 Or had he read the first few pages of his Divine Comedy -
- he owned the 1941 edition -- to encounter the She-Wolf, so named by Dante, one of the
three fearful animals that the poet meets as obstacles at the very beginning of his journey
towards heaven, a journey that will first lead through hell: "And down his (the lion's) track,
a She-Wolf drove upon me, a starved horror, ravening and wasted beyond all belief. She
seemed a rack for avarice, gaunt and craving. Oh many the souls she has brought to endless
grief! She brought such heaviness upon my spirit at sight of her savagery and desperation,
I died from every hope of that high summit." 581
A closer look at the painting points to a fearful, but purposeful submission to the
beast. While the she-wolf herself is easily recognized as a four-legged female animal, her
head facing to the left, her teats being a prominent reminder of her gender, the bold motif
lodged within her chest, the two red circles with a hand affixed and joined to a long red
arrow pointing to the back of the animal, is less easily understood. Two eyes and a hand
are the very attributes that help characterize the new masculine principle or 'son' in the
Jack'son' collage. Their positioning in the she-wolf would indicate that, not just the
automatist style of the Jack'son' collage is contained within the image of the wolf, but the
son himself is lodged within the beast, and, if one is willing to see the arrow as a libidinal
symbol with obvious phallic connotations, mating with her by means of this arrow. The
arrow thrusts at the hindquarters of the animal, defined with curving crescent shapes and
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dotted striations, which earlier in Pollock's work have had a uterine significance. A
personnage on the left, intimated by the eyes, attached hand and the front leg of the beast,
invites comparison with the similarly placed figure in Stenographic Figure, invites us
indeed to look at She-Wolf in its entirety as a variation of the same theme. A related
untitled drawing CR 672 (c. l943) (fig. 9.2) confirms the at first surprising theme of sexual
union within a beast.

Fig. 9.2. Untitled, CR 672, c. l943. Pen and ink on paper, 13 1/4 x 10 1/16", irregular.

What seems to have been prohibited in CR 635 (see fig. 5.5), the area "below the belt"
being blocked out by two horizontal lines, is the focus of attention in She-Wolf. No wonder
that when asked to comment on the painting for a publication in l944, Pollock stated: "She-
Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say
something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it."582
Tony Smith, in describing the manner in which Pollock tended to compartmentalize
things, stated that on one hand "Jackson was puritanical. I've never known anyone who
was more so -- I mean stern. On the other hand, I have heard that he was fascinated by all
sorts of things which he considered perverse. He seemed to be pretty familiar with Krafft-
Ebing [Psychopathia Sexualis], and although he didn't advertise it, he thought it important.
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The subject was a factor in his art, in the forms in his paintings, animal and human, male
and female, in the metamorphoses of his shapes, in his conception of the link between
things."583

Fig. 9.3. Untitled, CR 649, ca. 1942. Pen and ink on paper, 11 3/4 x 18 3/4", irregular.

The drawing CR 649 (c. 1942) (fig. 9.3) speaks to Pollock's understanding of this
link. Two motifs speak to the theme of willed descent: the falling, upside down human
figure in the upper right and the way the sun disc in the extreme upper right hand corner of
the drawing is connected to a diamond shape below with a squiggly, plummeting line. 584
In the lower center two schematic humanoid figures are positioned below a male four-
legged beast, one looking up to the beast's human head, the other prostrate under its feet,
repeating a configuration borrowed from Guernica. Here, it should be noted, the beast still
recalls the male beast of Guernica. Pollock shows a path leading away from this prostrate
position: dotted in the manner used by Miro to indicate movement. The path is taken by a
diamond-headed creature in the lower right. Submitting to the instinctual beast thus
becomes a necessary part of the circulation of energies in the creation of new life in the
diamond-body. The Secret of the Golden Flower speaks of this willful casting down of
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spiritual consciousness into matter as "the backward-flowing method." 585 Here it evolves
into a narrative of death and rebirth, signaled by the submersion of the male in She-Wolf.
Once again it is the Surrealists, and especially Masson, who provided Pollock with
the most immediate lead into the imagery of the animal realm. 586

Fig. 9.4. Andre Masson, Meditation on an Oak Leaf l942. Tempera, pastel and sand on canvas, 40 x 33".
Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Masson shows the artist at work within the womb of the beast in his Telluric painting
Meditation on an Oak Leaf l942 (fig. 9.4), which he had exhibited in "The First Papers of
Surrealism," where Pollock had seen and admired it, 587 and Masson points to a sexual
encounter with the she-beast in his Mythology of Being. The Mythology’s penultimate
image (see fig. 6.6) shows the male emerging from the vaginal slit in the earth only to face
the challenge of entering the womb of the hooved animal woman. The accompanying text
has a Nietzschean ring: "You burst from your vein stone -- You become a dancing god."
The message is clear. To gain the ultimate diamond, one must first have the courage to
enter the she-beast. Masson's characterization of male desire as both bird and arrow bears
on Pollock's formulation of the encounter of his newly released masculine consciousness
with the beast in She-Wolf.
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While Masson's mythological schema must have seemed to speak to Pollock of his
own quest, an even more direct guide to the particulars of She-Wolf would appear to be
chapter V in Jung's The Integration of the Personality, "The Idea of Redemption in
Alchemy," to which Pollock had already been attracted for its illustration of the alchemical
tail-biting snake (Plate VII) and for its reiteration in the related text of the slaying of the
dragon as a necessary prelude to the release of the masculine spirit and the ultimate
possession of the philosopher's stone. Plates VIII and IX illustrate the next major step in
the alchemical transformation: in Plate VIII the king devours the son, in Plate IX the lion
devours the sun (fig. 9.5).

Fig. 9.5. C. G. Jung, Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1939), Plate IX.

These symbols speak of the challenge to the son to seek out and allow himself to be
devoured by the realm of physical nature, matter, the unconscious – but only in order to
bring it to consciousness. The text speaks of the hero’s night sea journey: "the necessity
of a descent into the dark world of the unconscious … the night sea journey whose aim and
end is the restoration of life, the resurrection, and the conquest of death. … The regius
filius, the spirit, the Logos or Nous, is then devoured by physical nature -- that is, the body
and its representative organs attain sovereignity over consciousness. The hero myth
presents this condition as the engulfment in the belly of the whale or dragon." 588 Jung goes
on to identify unconscious matter with "the materia prima … the lead of the philosophers,"
further described in a note as a wolf who devours the son.589
Not that Masson’s and Jung’s narratives offer the key to Pollock's art. He had to
paint to make his statement. But he did depend on narratives to get him going. The
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disjunctive and layered effect by which one is struck, looking at the canvas, literalizes the
alchemical theme of devouring: the prima materia, the lead colored paint, that surrounds
the wolf, and the image of the wolf itself brutally overpaint and engulf the automatist paint
handling associated with the male within. Alchemical meaning thus helped Pollock sort
out the pictorial problems he faced after the release of automatist energies in Burning
Landscape. How was he to animate mat areas of pigment with the vitality and spontaneous
movement of his new found automatism, mute matter with his new found self-
consciousness? In She-Wolf the problem is more posed than solved, though the thrust of
the red arrow sends the white area of the hindquarters of the beast into a heaving wave
motion. The clarity of the pictorial statement makes for a powerful painting.
In his April l944 article on "Five American Painters" in Harper's Bazaar, which also
discussed Graves, Gorky, Avery, and Matta, James Johnson Sweeney reproduced the She-
Wolf in color, commenting: "From his She-Wolf it is clear that he can achieve a completely
satisfactory compositional unity without the sacrifice of either [boldness in color
oppositions or force of brushwork.] Pollock's emphasis on the fury of animal nature is his
personal poetry and his strength." The next month, upon the recommendations of Alfred
Barr and Sidney Janis, The Museum of Modern Art bought the She-Wolf for its permanent
collection.

2. Guardians of Secret
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Fig. 9.6. Guardians of the Secret, 1943. Oil on canvas, 48 3/4 x 75". San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, Albert M. Bender Collection.

Guardians of the Secret, signed and dated 8-43, is known to follow She-Wolf
closely (fig. 9.6).590 Here Pollock explores not his fears, but his hopes. Striking is the
painting’s structural symmetry, as is the large rectangular field of heavy white paint
teeming with stick figures at its center, in a way already hinted at in She-Wolf. This
white panel, no doubt, is the "Secret" to which the title refers. The "Guardians" are the
creatures that flank it on all four sides. Pollock's phrase, "the thickness of white,"
written on a related drawing, captures the quality of the paint (fig. 9.7).
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Fig. 9.7. Untitled, CR 697, c. 1943. Brush, pen and ink, and colored pencil brushed with water on paper,
18 3/4 x 24 3/4". Collection Lorna Reis Poe, Los Angeles, California.

No longer the heavy lead-grey of the paint surrounding the She-Wolf on its periphery,
this prima materia is now central, beginning to teem with life, and white, the color
Pollock had associated with a hopeful and higher consciousness in Bird, Magic Mirror
and Male and Female.
More than in Male and Female, the white panel is at the center of a now highly
defined structure, a concatenation of sometimes overlapping rectangles that recall the
framed anticipations of possible paintings that figured in many of his sketches, and made
an appearance near the bottom of Male and Female. The flat surface of Guardians of the
Secret is broken with a complexity new in Pollock’s art. He layers paint: no longer
primarily the two layers in She-Wolf of brutal grey overpainting and of automatist ground,
but a more even-handed, roughly threefold layering, most clearly visible in the upper panel
with its black ground, middle grey-blue overpainting, and topmost layer of white and red
pigments. The central white rectangle with its automatist loose handling of line and paint
acts, as it did in Male and Female, as a painting within a painting. This time it also refers,
as has been widely recognized, to one of the most famous paintings in American literature,
to Herman Melville’s description in Moby Dick, a novel that Pollock knew well, of the
painting that hung in Spouter Inn, where Queequeg and his friend stayed before they set
forth on Captain Ahab's ship.
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A boggy, soggy squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man

distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half attained, unimaginable
sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an
oath with yourself to find out what the marvellous painting meant. … Ever
and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. -- It's
the Black Sea in a midnight gale. -- It's the unnatural combat of the four
primal elements. -- It's a breaking up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But
at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the
picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop;
does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great
leviathan himself?591
In the upper middle of Pollock’s central panel one can make out the lunging black body of
a large whale-like fish. As the picture that hung in Spouter Inn stands for Ahab's quest, so
the panel in Guardians of the Secret stands for Pollock's.592
The rich use of white pigment in the central panel recalls other passages from Moby
Dick in which Melville muses on the mysteries of white, the whale's color.
it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay the
very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the
intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. … in
essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of
color and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these
reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a
wide landscape of snows--a colorless, all-color of atheism from
which we shrink?593
In Male and Female the centrally positioned rectangular area of white held symbols of the
“diamond-body.” Now this area holds the promise of a more conscious engagement with
the beast. This area, however, is a secret protected by guardians.
Are the guardians helpers or obstacles? The dog in the lower panel of the painting
is the most prominent and clearly defined of the guardian figures. Though white, its body
lies surrounded by the same grey matter found in the She-Wolf; it crouches before and
sniffs at the artist's signature, which parallels a phallic diagonal protruding from the black
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panel on the right-hand side of the canvas.594 In Guardians the dog can be seen as
confronting the artist's identity, both as signature and as phallus, blocking his quest, his
access to the secret of the central white panel. When questioned by Lee Krasner, Pollock
stated that the dog was "the father figure." 595 One thinks of Picasso.
An untitled drawing CR 694 (c. l943) (fig. 9.8), which I shall call Animal Attack,
confirms this intuition.

L: Fig. 9.8. "The Animal Attack", CR 694, c. l943. Crayon and pen and ink on white paper, 22 1/8 x 27
1/4" irregular. Collection Mr. and Mrs, Harris B. Steinberg, NY.
R: Fig. 9.9. Pablo Picasso, Minotauromachy, 1935. Etching and engraving, plate: 19 1/2 x 27 4/10".
Museum of Modern art, New York. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund.

In what one might think of as another round in the totem war between Pollock and Picasso,
we witness a dramatic confrontation between a multi-form creature, who bends over to
fend off a fanged animal, galloping above a shadow figure containing hieroglyphs. The
fanged animal attacks a delicately described lotus-like shape in the creature’s genital
region. While Pollock's depiction of the threat of castration is depicted in a number of
drawings, among them CR 650 (c. l942) (see fig. 9.11), both the iconography and rendering
of Animal Attack depend, as Bernice Rose points out, on Picasso's l935 etching
Minotauromachy (fig. 9.9).596 There the animal forces, the minotaur and the horse bearing
a woman, attack and confront the classically defined humans, the fearless little girl and the
fleeing bearded man. In response Pollock poses the crisis as not between the primitive
animal and the classical human (for Pollock the classical world would seem to be a thing
of the past), but between the attacking, doglike Picassoid figure and the shadowy image of
the attacked. In Guardians of the Secret Picasso’s animal, as “father figure,” holds
Pollock’s male at bay.
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Pollock's psychologizing language suggests the Freudian theme of incest: the son's
desire for his mother and the father's prohibition, treated in terms of the male totem animal,
the father figure, and taboo. The editors of View, having published the pros and cons of
modern mythmaking the year before, came out in April l943 for a more Freudian
interpretation of human motivation. 597 In "Magic: The Flesh and Blood of Poetry,"
published in the June l943 View which Pollock owned, Benjamin Peret challenged the
modern artist to dare to become a lone revolutionary, to break the taboo of incest,
"projecting the picture of the assassinated father on the infinity of the heavens," to thus
rediscover the poetic function ab initio.598 In his understanding of the “father figure"
Pollock is close to Peret: the father blocks access to the maternal realm of authentic
creativity.599
The father here is clearly Picasso. William Rubin has pointed to a particular canvas
to which Pollock might have been referring, the Museum of Modern Art's version of Three
Musician l921, a masterpiece of Picasso's late Synthetic Cubism (fig. 9.10).600

Fig. 9.10. Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians, 1921. Oil on canvas, 79 x 87 3/4". The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund.

This contains, as does Pollock's picture, a dog with alert ears shown crouching and in
profile in the bottom register of an overall symmetrical, rectilinear composition, one that
also, it should be pointed out, treats the theme of artistic creation, in this instance music
making. The comparison concerns more than shared layout and imagery. 601 As in the
comparison of Pollock's Male and Female and Picasso's The Painter and his Model, what
matters is the way Pollock differs in his formulation of the creative process, how he
proposes to go beyond a Synthetic Cubist base and animate it with an instinctual
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automatism. The analogy between the flat, opaque, colored planes of Three Musicians and
the flat, opaque planes in Guardians, especially the grey and black ones, is clear. But, as
we have seen, Pollock's canvas is characterized by an acute awareness of ways to break
and change this flatness: by layering and an automatist loose handling of line and paint.
The degree of automatism in the central white panel is obvious when compared with the
smooth milky whiteness of the clown's costume in Three Musicians. The psychological
paradigm Pollock presents would lead to an increased libidinal freedom -- if only the
“father figure” were overcome.
The Freudian narrative put forward by the Surrealists and discussed by Motherwell
and others in his circle allowed Pollock to “square up” with Picasso. And once again, he
turned also to American Indian myth and ritual, in particular to the rituals of initiation into
the Snake Society of the Sia that he had discovered in his Smithsonian volumes. In the
study drawing CR 650 (c. l942) (fig. 9.11) we recognize elements found in Guardians of
the Secret: the ritualistic quadripartite layout of guardian figures flanking a central space
and in the lower register the beast sniffing the phallus of a male figure.

Fig. 9.11. Untitled, CR 650, c. l942. Pen and black ink with touches of colored crayon on paper, 18 x 13
15/16".

In the center of the drawing we see raindrops fall from a variation of the sun-moon motif,
to either side two couples engaged in copulation, suggesting the dual purpose of the Sia
ceremonial that intrigued Pollock, the invocation of rain and fertility, and the initiation into
the Snake Order by a most vivid ordeal by animal. To be sure, the initiatory animal in the
Sia ceremony is a snake, in the Pollock drawing it is an ill-defined beast.602 This shift is in
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accord with his increasing use of the four-legged animal as a symbol for the female realm
in l943, although as late as 1941-42 in CR 620 (fig. 9.12) we see Pollock’s own face
encircled, as in the Sia’s initiation ceremony, by a serpent, whose few feathers hardly
alleviate the terror of this experience.

L: Fig. 9.12. Untitled, CR 620, c. 1941-42. Sepia crayon and pencil on paper, 17 7/8 x 13 7/8". Location
unknown.
R: Fig. 9.13. Altar and sandpainting of the Snake Society at Zia Pueblo, illustrated in Matilda Cox
Stevenson, "The Sia," Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology of Smithsonian Institution, vol. 11
(1889-90), plate XIV.

The sand paintings illustrated in the article on the Sia must have caught his
attention. One of the ritual settings (fig. 9.13) used in the rain and initiatory ceremonials
contains a sand painting of a four-legged animal, a cougar, in a square design. 603 Behind
this lies a second sand painting, and behind this a slat altar. This three-tiered arrangement,
as least as it appears in the illustration of the ceremonial setting, Rushing sees as a source
for the similar three-tiered arrangement in Guardians of the Secret, the painting becoming
an homage to “the shamanic potential of Indian art.”604 But more attracts Pollock to the
Sia ritual: its ordeals, leading to power and fertility, put him in touch with his own fears
and desires. Jung’s psychological temenos becomes reality in Indian “installation art,” as
a symbolic ritual space where positive, creative transformation might take place. 605
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The desired results of such a ceremonial are presented in the three “guardians” located in
the upper register of the painting: from right to left, a striking red rooster-like creature, a
volute-foetal form, and a mask-like configuration formed by two crossing white lines. 606
These motifs testify to the very personal dimension of Guardians of the Secret, as they
build on old associations. A photograph taken of Pollock in his studio with the
unfinished Guardians (fig. 9.14), in which much of the top half of the painting is visible,
provides us with an unusual glimpse into the evolution of his images.

Fig. 9.14. Pollock in his studio with the unfinished Guardians of the Secret. Jackson Pollock Papers,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., Photograph by Reuben Kadish.

In the spot now occupied by the bold red rooster motif the photograph shows clearly
delineated a bird's crested head and eye, echoing one of Pollock's earliest depictions of the
bird in CR 611, a drawing related to Bird. Its final incarnation in Guardians, with rooster-
like flamboyant protrusions, is much like two roosters depicted in CR 697 (c. l943) (see
fig. 9.7), a drawing I've already mentioned as related to Guardians. This time one can trace
Pollock's associations even further back into his personal history. The lower rooster in the
drawing is seen swallowing what one can presume is a hand, because at the other end of
this particular linear configuration one finds a matching hand. As mentioned, Pollock told
a story of how, as a child, the tip of his right-hand index finger was severed by an axe and
swallowed by a buck rooster. That story helped feed his self-identification as a shamanic
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bird-man in Naked Man. The bold splash of red in the shape of a rooster in Guardians of
the Secret gestures towards the reassertion of this totem animal and shamanic identity.
In the photo of the Guardians in progress the black foetal shape to the left of the
red rooster is visible as a disc-crescent motif, which for Pollock has always been a symbol
of the union of opposites. In the finished canvas he transforms this into a foetus, the
consequence of union. The mask-like configuration to its left suggests that the union of
which Pollock is now thinking is that which he had already projected in She-Wolf: a union
of male and female opposites within the realm of the animal. The number of smaller circles
contained in the mask-like configuration, a total of three, two above and one below the
intersection of its two white lines, echoes the number and handling of the eyes of the two
humans embracing within the beast in the study drawing for She-Wolf, CR 672. One last
detail in the photo of Guardians in progress, the white head extending out of the central
white panel on its extreme left, indicates that Pollock’s initial conception more closely
echoed his study drawing, CR 679 (fig. 9.15), with its depiction of the human-headed she-
beast containing the teeming figures and whale-like fish.

Fig. 9.15. Untitled, CR 679, c. 1943. Pen and ink on paper, 10 1/2 x 9 5/8", irregular.

In the final version he obscures this, while accentuating the separate identities of the panels:
the central "canvas" now framed by a female guardian to the left, a male guardian to the
right.607
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In painting and that means also in thinking about the guardians that surround the
secret, Pollock thus builds on his understanding of left-right, up-down, and center of a
canvas, worked out in Bird, then in Male and Female. The horizontal axis connotes the
opposition of female and male, the vertical axis the opposition of instinct and spirit, the
center integration. The central panel refers not simply to the unconscious, but to the
challenge of becoming conscious of what is unconscious. The main advance in Guardians
of the Secret is a clearer distinction along the vertical axis between the animal dimension
of the masculine principle, the father image that prohibits the son's desire, and the son’s
bird spirit associated with birth and integration with the female animal on a higher level of
consciousness. Pollock's basic schema is simple: he begins with the opposites, male and
female, develops the identity of the first (the bird-man), then of the second (the moon
woman), goes on to explore the duality within the female (the she-beast), then the duality
within the male (the threatening male animal), always aiming at a final integration of male
and female opposites.
For the moment pictorial integration remains only a distant possibility. The
structure might be more differentiated, the cast of characters larger, but as yet no narrative
movement, and hence no pictorial movement, occurs. The phrases Pollock writes on the
related drawing CR 697 speak of the pictorial difficulties: "the thickness of white," "the
effort of the dance.”

3. Wounded Animal
From August on Pollock worked on a number of smaller paintings for the
November show.608 Given its particular subject matter, it seems most likely that Wounded
Animal (fig. 9.16) was one of these, and follows Guardians of the Secret. Although the
canvas may not have been titled until after the show,609 its narrative theme is clear. With
its large head, eye, and two pointed ears the animal is very like the one found in the lower
register of Guardians of the Secret, but this animal is wounded, a red arrow piercing its
neck, continuing in a second more schematic arrow veering to the upper left.
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Fig. 9.16. Wounded Animal, 1943. Oil and plaster on canvas, 38 x 30". Location unknown.

The red arrow in She-Wolf and the red bird-configuration in Guardians of the Secret were
symbols of the son. Thus the son can be seen as overcoming the animal father, formerly
the barrier to the central white panel and its potential for creative transformation. Now the
wounded animal is partially buried by the very white pigment that formerly it had guarded.
The static confrontation of father and son in Guardians of the Secret resolves itself in
action.
Wounded Animal invites understanding as the image of the assassinated father
called for by Benjamin Peret. The feathered arrow of the Pollockian bird-son pierces the
Picassoid animal father. Whereas in Head (see fig. 3.6), Pollock's earlier invasion of
Picasso's animal persona, a plumed serpent mounted upwards through the Minotaur head,
in Wounded Animal the feathered arrow generates a downward rhythm that continues in a
grey line marked by white striations and two black eyes at its bottom tip. If one reads this
last motif as a serpent, the entirety of the downward rhythm becomes that of Pollock's
plumed serpent striking down the Picassoid animal, another example of Pollock's strategy
of reversal. Around l941 he had worked on the theme of the serpent rising up a vertical
axis; now he uses the theme in reverse, to explore movement down this axis. 610 Pollock's
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acknowledged magic numbers, 6 and 4, are painted large at the bottom of the
composition.611
While the pictorial excitement of Wounded Animal draws on the energy of
Guardians of the Secret, now it suggests a new freedom. The diagonal thrust of the red
arrow generates a rhythmic movement that seems to loop in and out of the white pigment,
around and down the black pole on the left of the composition. Continuing upward, this
pole suggests another arrow, answered by a similar arrow on the right. Hints of arrows
proliferate, almost dance in the light gray ground. Within a loosened up three-dimensional
pictorial space the wounding generates a new and almost playful rhythmic ease. The
rigidities and layering effects in Guardians of the Secret begin to dissolve. The son gains
access to something that was kept contained in the Guardians’ central panel.
Along with another small canvas entitled Conflict, Wounded Animal was singled
out for critical notice by Clement Greenberg in his review of Pollock's show that appeared
in The Nation.
In the large, audacious Guardians of the Secret he struggles between two
slabs of inscribed mud (Pollock almost always inscribes his purer colors);
and space tautens but does not burst into a picture; nor is the mud quite
transmuted. … The smaller works are much more conclusive: the smallest
one of all, Conflict, and Wounded Animal, with its chalky incrustation, are
among the strongest abstract paintings I have yet seen by an American.
Here Pollock's force has just the right amount of space to expand in: whereas
in larger format he spends himself in too many directions at once. 612
The decisiveness of Wounded Animal derives in part from its content; Pollock here is able
to unite elements that were dramatically separated in Guardians of the Secret. In so doing,
he manages, in Greenberg's much later words, to begin to solve the problem "of loosening
up the relatively delimited illusion of shallow depth that the three master Cubists -- Picasso,
Braque, Leger -- had adhered to since the closing out of Synthetic Cubism."613 Pollock’s
dependence on narratives leads not, as Greenberg feared it might, to kitsch, but to stronger
paintings.
In his catalogue essay for the exhibition James Johnson Sweeney praises Pollock's
talent as "volcanic" and commends his ability to "paint from an inner impulsion without an
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ear to what the critics or spectator may feel." While tempering his praise -- "Pollock needs
self-discipline" -- his final assessment should have pleased Pollock: "Among young
painters Jackson Pollock offers unusual promise in his exuberance, independence and
native sensibility. If he continues to exploit these qualities with the courage and conscience
he has shown so far, he will fulfill that promise." 614 Pollock responded: "Dear Sweeney -
- I have read your forward to the catalogue, and I am excited. I am happy -- The self
discipline you speak of -- will come, I think, as a natural growth of a deeper more
integrated, experience. Many thanks -- We will fulfill that promise -- Sincerely,
Pollock."615 Wounded Animal can be seen as an important step toward such fulfillment.

Fig. 9.17. Male and Female in Search of a Symbol, 1943. Oil on canvas, 43 x 67". Marlborough Gallery,
Rome.

While Pollock had written his polite note to Sweeney, the charge of a lack of self-
discipline had in fact made him furious. In time to have it added to the show, he painted
Male and Female in Search of a Symbol (fig. 9.17), bringing the wet painting to Sweeney
in the gallery and saying, "I want you to see a really disciplined picture." 616 The painting
is interesting because in terms of the story that Pollock has been telling himself, this is
indeed a "disciplined" work. In Wounded Animal he may have wounded "the father," but
the problem of the relationship with the female remained. This he poses in Male and
Female in Search of a Symbol with a clarity new in his treatment of the theme. What was
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only implicit in Guardians of the Secret is made explicit. Pollock shows the male and the
female aligned along the horizontal axis and the sexual dimension of their relationship.
The female on the left is characterized by a triangular, yellow, crescent-moon tip or horn,
one large eye, a hand appended to her head, and a yellow pubic triangle below. As in Male
and Female, male and female attributes are placed on both sides of the canvas; the female
has a phallic hand, the male is marked by a yellow triangle and has a face in the shape of a
crescent moon. All these, however, are covered with the whiteness of potential creativity.
The male's chief attribute is blatantly his red phallus, here not covered in blackness and
confronted by the "father figure" as in Guardians of the Secret, but assertively visible. A
long horizontal blue bar in the lower register of the painting links the male to the female's
yellow pubic triangle. This recognition of sexuality represents a reversal, if you will, of
CR 639, the study drawing for Male and Female in which the genitals are hidden from view
by a horizontal bar.
The red phallus and the white hand stretching from the female side of the canvas
attempt to bridge and fill the area between the male and the female, as do other motifs,
such as the eye hovering in the upper middle part of the canvas, and the numbers, 8-43.
These scrawled motifs recall those in Stenographic Figure l942. It has been suggested that
8-43 is a date for the painting, thus adding Search for a Symbol to She-Wolf and Guardians
of the Secret which are dated 8-43. That may be so. However, Pollock has also signed and
dated the painting on the lower right hand corner in white simply “43”; moreover, there are
no precedents in Pollock's work for dating a picture within the calligraphic marks on the
canvas. As in Stenographic Figure, the numbers refer to stages in the hermetic quest. Like
4, 8 is a number of psychic unity, presented at a higher level of differentiation. As there is
difficulty in making the transition from 3 to 4, because the fourth component of psychic
wholeness is considered taboo, evil, so there is difficulty in making the transition from 7
to 8. The eighth element is the most difficult unconscious content that struggles towards
the light.617 This number will continue to appear in Pollock's work, most significantly in
l946. Its appearance in Male and Female in Search of a Symbol speaks to Pollock's
projection, even if only through the abstraction of number symbolism, of the completeness
of the integration of opposites he desires. He remains in search of a more potent expression.
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4. Pasiphae

Fig. 9.18. Pasiphae, 1943. Oil on canvas, 56 1/8 x 96". The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase,
Rogers, Fletcher, and Harris Brisbane Dick Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1982.

While in Search for a Symbol Pollock clarified the male-female theme that
underlies the animal series, he neglected the final challenge of the story he told himself:
the male's encounter with the she-beast at a more conscious level. He takes up this
challenge in Pasiphae (fig. 9.18), a very large canvas compared to She-Wolf and The
Guardians of the Secret. It was finished too late for inclusion in the November show, and
was first exhibited in his second showing at Art of this Century in April l944. In this
extraordinary painting Pollock blasts through the inner rectilinear structure that served in
Guardians of the Secret to formulate his emotional and pictorial dilemma, and now
occupies the center with an unleashed and impetuous energy, leaving behind the flat planes
of Picasso’s Three Musicians, and far surpassing the automatism of Masson’s Meditation
on an Oak Leaf. Still, some of the structure of Guardians survives. The central panel here
becomes an ill-defined, ghostly oval. And the guardians, too, survive in ghostly form, at
least two on the right, two on the left.
Viewers agree that in the large ovoid central medallion of Pasiphae an angular black
stick figure is depicted above an animalistic creature, the two engaged in a sexual
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embrace.618 But before we leap to the Cretan myth, we should note that the title of this
painting was originally not Pasiphae, but either Moby Dick or The White Whale, after
Melville's novel. In a studio visit, Peggy Guggenheim, when told the painting’s title,
disliked the connection with Melville, for whose work there was a current “fad”; Sweeney,
who was with her, pronounced the title of Moby Dick “a cliché” and, responding to the
painting, proposed Pasiphae instead.619 At first Pollock was skeptical; Krasner
remembered him saying something to the effect of “Who the hell is Pasiphae?” Sweeney,
who had that morning come upon a reference to the Minoan Queen in some work he was
doing on Pound and Eliot, related the story of Pasiphae, the mother of the Minotaur. What
he saw in the painting reminded him of the story of the Minotaur’s origins. Landau
synopsizes the two sheets of notes, which Sweeney must have jotted down for Pollock: “In
Greek mythology, Pasiphae was the daughter of Helios the Sun and a nymph. She married
King Minos of Crete, but was bewitched by the gods into falling in love with a bull who
lived at the base of a rumbling mountain on the island. Wearing a wooden cow costume,
which the famous inventor Daedelus designed for her, Pasiphae descended to the bowels
of the volcano where she mated with the bull, a union which produced her bestial son.” 620
Because the story concerned the mother of the Minotaur and dealt with a combination of
eros and bestiality, Pollock found it interesting and agreed to the change of title.
An important difference between the Pasiphae story and Pollock’s canvas is the sex
of the beast. The flailing beast in the center of Pasiphae is evidently not a bull. Rather its
three greyish-white teats mark it as another she-beast. By accepting the title Pasiphae he
takes on the Minotaur’s mother -- yet another manifestation of the monstrous female.
Returning to the intended title of The White Whale or Moby Dick, we realize that Pollock’s
she-beast is “the white whale”: “that one portentous something in the picture's midst. That
once found out, and all the rest were plain.” 621 In so far as the central white panel in
Guardians of the Secret can be seen as Pollock's own version of the painting at Spouter
Inn, even to the images of whale-like fish amidst the maelstrom of white pigment, the
central ellipse of Pasiphae can be seen as a figure of that painting containing now not a
whale, but a female monster on whose back rides a small, black stick-figure. The beast's
head is composed of a great beak-mouth, a large eye, and a purple coxcomb-like crest. Her
hind end is shown kicking up two large legs; her belly is marked by her three whitish-grey
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teats. But as William Rubin points out, the interpreter of Pollock’s paintings must respect
the sometimes elliptical relation between image and title. 622 Pollock’s “Leviathan,” this
monster of the deep, is not precisely anything, whether a whale, or Pasiphae, or the body
of Lee Krasner or that of his own mother. It is this monstrous multi-faceted female “other”
that must be confronted.
As Ahab clung to the back of the whale in Moby Dick, a black stick-figure rides
the monster in Pasiphae. This figure -- no more than a heavy, black zigzag line --
culminates on the left in a sun disc-head, projecting spokes; its torso is transected by a six-
pronged line. The three-pronged motifs on either side of the stick-figure are an Indian
symbol for feathers or wings that Pollock has used before. 623 The two major attributes of
the male figure in Pollock's art of l943, the sun and the bird, are thus combined. Now
joined to the sun-disc head, they speak to the promise of the male's bird-like attribute,
implicit in the arrow and most completely anticipated in the Animal Attack.
Another striking and crucial attribute of this male is his hand. The hand was an
attribute of the son in the Jack'son' collage. Now in Pasiphae the winged-sun figure plunges
his hand downwards into the belly of the beast in a gesture of possession and control.

L: Fig. 9.19. Hands at Castillo. illustration in G. Baldwin Brown, The Art of the Cave Dweller (New York:
Coleman, 1931), p. 75.
R: Fig. 9.20. Untitled, CR 666, 1943. Ink on orange paper, 11 1/2 x 12 5/8". Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C..

And again, much as Pollock seemed to invoke the magic of cave art images of arrows
piercing animals in Wounded Animal, so he echoes the configuration and magic of yet
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other cave art illustrated in his book The Art of the Cave Dweller, in particular the stenciled
hands superimposed over the bodies of the painted animals at Castillo, in an act described
as one of possession (fig. 9.19).624 The hand's importance as an iconographic element is
clear in a related drawing CR 666 (l943) (fig. 9.20). There it is centrally placed, but above
a variation of the bird motif, and below the beast. This drawing brings us close to the pulse
of Pollock’s active fantasy. The three major elements of the drama in Pasiphae are present,
but in reverse order, a curious fact reiterated in the motif on the right -- the triangular-
pronged bird motif is below the sun-headed figure, who in turn is trampled by the beast.
The drawing self-consciously explores the elements of the drama and of the configuration
of fear and defeat. But in a typical act of reversal Pollock turns this completely around in
Pasiphae. The animal has been brutally mastered, but by a skeletal stick-figure.

5. Mythmaking
The question of animal mastery was very much a point of discussion when Pollock
was at work on Pasiphae. In the December l943 View Nicolas Calas celebrates in "Apes,
Warriors, and Prophets" the horse as the great totemic animal of the past on whose back so
many conquerors rode to victory, but castigates the artist who, like Giorgio de Chirico,
without courage remains stuck in this totemic past. Those still enthralled to the horse are
"victims of horses, they understand only the hind part, the seat of animal drives. These
masters remain below the horse."625 Instead the artist should master the animal. In this
connection Calas, too, trumpets the challenge of breaking the taboos. "Revolt against the
father is a mark of individualism, of a struggle for freedom and of an irreducible opposition
to an existing order. The hero is a lawbreaker. The first hero was the killer of the father:
Between the totem animal and the god, the hero made his appearance, says Freud in
Moses."626
Given his own past Pollock would have been struck by the way Calas warned the
aspiring hero away from Chinese wisdom and its quest for perfection, an inner order, and
opposes to it the idea of transformation through evolution, quoting Hegel: "The history of
the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom." 627 Pollock,
too, struggled to gain such mastery and freedom. Pasiphae represents progress in that
struggle. In light of the imagery in the immediately preceding paintings, its central theme
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becomes clear: the winged sun-hero, even if but a stick-figure, penetrates the central white
panel of Guardians of the Secret, now in Pasiphae a blue ellipse, the watery world of the
womb, where he rides “the white whale." Pollock celebrates this accomplishment on the
extreme left center of the canvas, where in a white rectangular panel we now detect a yet
smaller stick-figure, with its circular eyes and hand appended, recalling the terrified
presence of the 'son' in She-Wolf, but here safely lodged in the desired temenos. Placing
his signature in yet another rectangular white area in the lower left corner of the canvas,
Pollock reiterates the theme of possession. In paint at least Pollock had overcome the threat
of the father and made good on his desire: not only a union with, but control of the she-
beast. The effort involved must have seemed enormous to one convinced that art and life
are one and the same. Had Pollock not done what Calas had demanded, when he replaced
the totemic world of the Mediterranean basin, inhabited by Minotaurs and the bulls and
horses, the world of Pasiphae, with an American totemic world, where bird-men dominate
whale-like monsters, releasing new energies? 628
Pollock's mythic narrative frees an extraordinary pictorial energy and freedom. In
Pasiphae diagonal forces float, plunge, kick, stretch their way across and in and out of the
canvas surface. The repetition and decreasing size of the curving shapes from the bottom
towards the center of the canvas, from large disc-crescent motifs, via spiraling motifs, to
the whitish-grey teats of the she-beast, are countered from above by a progression of
angular motifs, from the large red and white zig-zag lines that float out towards the
spectator at the top of the composition to the zig-zag of the winged sun-figure, as he
plunges his long black hand diagonally down and into the belly of the beast, reaching for
the teats. The union is an intersection of vectored forces, richly embellished, for instance
by the repetitions in red, the bold red zigzags at the top, the red line undulating around the
winged hero like a banner, the shorter more broken red marks like bloody scratches under
the black prongs of his hand. The teats support a fine tracery of pouring.
The meeting of hero and beast generates diagonal thrusts to either side as well.
The beast's strong back legs kick upward and towards the right, a movement reinforcing
and dramatizing the phallic thrust of the red hand upwards towards the empty "eye," the
center of ritual focus on the right hand side of the canvas. The corresponding point of focus
on the left-hand side of the canvas is a large disc-crescent motif, emblem of accomplished
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union, the disc-eye spewing grey paint. The purple coxcomb of the beast can be read also
as the second hand of the winged hero, which stretches to the left and upwards, via the
white striated channel, towards this emblem of union, a line of movement that next and
finally leads to the yellow head of the female in the uppermost corner of the canvas. The
movement that courses through the entirety of Pasiphae demonstrates a new freedom in
Pollock’s approach to figuration and the relation of figure to ground. No longer are they
brutally disassociated as in She-Wolf. Figures are no longer compartmentalized as in
Guardians of the Secret. Building on, but far surpassing the incipient freedoms of
Wounded Animal, Pollock depicts the zigzag line of the winged sun-hero penetrating into
the organic mass of the beast he rides. This penetration of image by image is accompanied
by the penetration of blue and blue-grey ground into all the figures on the canvas, creating
an all-over and very shallow patterning of figures and of figure and ground. Of the l943
animal paintings it is the most thinly painted and the least reworked.
Passages of impetuously, spontaneously handled line and paint are no longer
localized, as in the interior area of She-Wolf or the central panel in Guardians of the Secret.
Nor are they a response to a lower layer of imagery, as in the earlier Stenographic Figure
or even in Composition with Pouring I or II. Spontaneity now pervades the entire painting,
generating the very images.
Pollock never makes a finalized study drawing for a canvas. His formulation of
imagery in a painting is always fundamentally improvisatory. Such improvisation,
however, presupposes explorations of a theme that one can trace in the imagery of related
drawings, which circle around the quest for self, for himself as creator. Pollock has
developed not only his understanding of the Jack'son' figure, but also of the profoundly
troubling bestial dimension of his female muse, shadowing the hoped for union of male
and female opposites. What he has learned is how to project all of this on to the canvas,
its up and down, left and right, center, and layered depths.
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Chapter 10
Success and Night Journey

1. Mural

Fig. 10.1. Mural, 1943. Oil on canvas, 7' 11 3/4" x 19' 9 1/2". University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa
City, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim.

In pushing for the commission of the roughly 9 x 20 foot canvas mural for the
entrance hall of Peggy Guggenheim’s town house, Putzel wanted to see "whether a larger
scale would release the force contained in Pollock's smaller paintings."629 The format and
semi-public setting did indeed call for a different approach. Jackson, in a letter to Charles
(July 29, 1943), described the mural canvas stretched. "I've had to tear out the partition
between the front and middle room [of the apartment] to get the damned thing up. … It
looks pretty big, but exciting as all hell." 630 Memories of Benton's mural achievements
surged up. The Benton admirer Harry Jackson, who around 1947 talked with Pollock a
great deal about the canvas for the hallway, reports that Jackson "regretted that he was
unable to make a great figurative mural but he felt that the disciplines necessary for
realizing such work had been lost to us. He admired Tom z and he wanted to be able to do
what Tom dreamed of doing, that is, to make Great and Heroic paintings for America. He
was painfully aware of not being able to do it the way he wished and he was determined to
do it the way he could."631 His way was to answer Picasso's Guernica. Mural (fig. 10.1)
was just shy of the roughly 11 feet 6 inches x 25 feet 18 inches of Guernica.632 Certainly,
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whatever Pollock produced here would, at least in his own mind, be a first answer to the
challenge it posed.
For hours, Lee remembers, he would sit in front of the huge and as yet untouched
canvas.633 As Kadish observed, “it was a gestation period. Whatever it was that was taking
place was taking place inside. Other artists drew sketches, Jackson’s preparations were all
internal. I felt, when it was ready to come out, it would come out.” 634 The legend goes
that Pollock painted Mural in one fifteen-hour session the night before it was installed in
Guggenheim’s townhouse. The all-night session probably did occur, as Krasner and John
Little remember it, although exactly when cannot be ascertained. But subsequently Pollock
probably continued to work on the canvas over several days. During that time it was
documented and finished, before being transported and installed in Guggenheim's hallway
in time for the November 9 party following the opening of his one-man show.635
In Mural we see figures like those found on the edges of Guardians of the Secret
and Pasiphae which now, as it were, travel across the whole arena of the painting. One
thinks immediately of the photographic motion studies created by Edward Muybridge
(1830-1904). Herbert Matter, an artist and good friend of Pollock, also created motion
studies, some of which were shown in the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Certainly these
pieces had an impact on Pollock.636 Of greater importance to the rhythmic construction of
the painting is the organization of the elongated frescoes by Benton and his geometric
abstract sketches (Fig. 10.2).637

Fig. 10.2. Diagram published as fig. 23-24 in Thomas Hart Benton, "The Mechanics of Form
Organization," The Arts (New York), November 1926.

The personages that we have seen before in his art clustered on the left and the right
now cover the long surface. But are they “personages”? Defined by long curving lines,
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they are perhaps more properly referred to as psychological condensations, disposed over
the length of the canvas in a rhythmic sequence that moves from right to left in a repetition
of vertical accents, increasing in speed and then breaking like a wave into small eddies as
the left-hand side is approached. 638 This rhythmic movement can be seen as that of the
presumably male force on the extreme right making its way to the female left-hand side,
with its dancing rhythms and curving configurations that hint at Pollock's previous
renderings of the womb. The acceleration and subsiding of the linear rhythms in Mural
presents itself thus as the abstract figure of an encounter and union between male and
female.
Harry Jackson relates, not altogether convincingly, that Pollock "had tried to paint
a horse stampede on it [the canvas] and when it got beyond his control he got mad and
started to sling the paint onto the canvas to create the driving, swirling action and thrust
the composition and heroic sized demanded." 639 But that the account is not altogether off
the mark is suggested by the fact that to Busa and to Kadish, on separate occasions, Pollock
described what happened in similar language: “I had a vision.” “It was a stampede.”
Eventually the stampede was joined by “every animal in the American West, cows and
horse and antelopes and buffaloes. Everything is charging across that goddamn surface.” 640
The mustangs were stampeding once again, as they had in his youth, and as he had
commemorated them in the bowl telling “the story of my life.” The longing of the male
hunting the mustangs depicted in the bowl, which was to issue in the almost sadistic
encounter with the flailing beast in Pasiphae, here releases itself into the more abstract and
rhythmic dialogue of erotically charged forces.
Robert Motherwell commented, "Probably the catalytic moment in [Pollock's] art
was the day he painted the Mural … dancing around the room he finally found a way of
painting that fitted him and from then on he developed that technique and that scale." 641
Narrative here gives way to enactment. For the first time Pollock releases his thoughts,
feelings and desires directly into abstract rhythms, line and paint. The degree of abstraction
would seem to be dictated by the content that Pollock wants to convey. As Kierkegaard
knew, the very immediacy of desire makes it a most abstract idea, demanding in its
realization the most abstract medium, music. In Mural Pollock makes such music. Linear
rhythms dance through and catch up the thickness of the colored paints throughout, making
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that synthesis of drawing and painting for which Pollock would later be recognized. 642
While the major flow of movement would seem to be from right to left, one senses that
Pollock worked his way back and forth across the canvas, diving in and out of the fabric
of line and paint that he builds up with a surprising ease, as he pursues his underlying
theme. The structural axes that he had explored with such rigor in the animal series, that
were to culminate in the diagonally vectored energies of Pasiphae, here support the play of
desire and energy unleashed over a much larger surface. He weaves his way, not just back
and forth across it, but up and down, and in and out, calling on the entirety of what he
knows and has practiced, as with large gestures he brings the paint to life. This is Pollock’s
first answer to Guernica: a reassertion of Eros, which has, as Andre Breton declared “the
task of reestablishing that equilibrium briefly broken for the benefit of death.” 643 The
palette is surprisingly light and gay, extending to yellow, pinks, and blue, the surface is not
in the least impacted, the raw canvas is visible throughout, occasional splashings and
drippings of especially red and yellow paints enliven the whole. In its abstract, all-over
rhythmic automatism Mural anticipates Pollock's later famous poured paintings.

2. Aesthetics
The achievement in Mural won a special accolade from Clement Greenberg.
Greenberg recalls, "Howard Putzel told me they had this great painter at Art of this Century,
and showed me some things in the back room. They were beyond me, but then I saw others
a few months later and they weren't beyond me, but they weren't that good either. But I
thought his first show there was good and reviewed it in The Nation. And when I saw
Mural -- it was great. People were saying it goes on and on repeating itself, but I told
Jackson, 'That is great art.' … I went for his all-over approach from Mural on."644
Undoubtedly such affirmation encouraged Pollock to advance his art in terms of the formal
issues of abstraction, all-over composition, and automatist execution. Throughout l944
and l945, up until his second one-man show in March l945, he continues to push his art
vigorously in this direction. The greatest strides in the evolution towards the style that will
eventually characterize the poured paintings of 1947-50 are made in this period of little
more than a year.
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How was this formal advance achieved? Did Pollock, as Landau claims, begin “to
move more definitely away from dependence on therapeutic sources” to “a new type of
work to be initiated the following year [1944], in which more abstract energies would be
substituted for the resolution of Jungian problems.” 645 This suggests a distinct break in
Pollock’s work? But did Pollock move away from the imagery that had captivated his
imagination and emotions in order to pursue “a rapidly increasingly non-objectivity and
self-reliance,” a more aesthetic approach to his work, an approach more in keeping with
that advocated by the critic who hailed his art as “great”?
What led Greenberg to immediately respond to Mural as “great art” and what did
he mean by the “all-over approach”? “All-over” refers to a particular form of pictorial
spatial composition, new in modern abstract art. In “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” (1940)
Greenberg had admired the degree to which Analytic Cubism, in its attempt to purify
painting, had destroyed the realistic pictorial space of the Renaissance and with it an art of
representation. Spatial illusion in painting would henceforth no longer be realistic illusion,
which so easily allied itself with “literature” and degenerated into kitsch, but an abstract
and optical illusion, created as realistic space cracked and splintered into flat planes which
then came forward emphasizing the picture plane. 646 Greenberg was aware that many
young American artists, including Pollock, had appropriated the extreme flatness of
Picasso’s late synthetic cubism, recognized that their problem as artists would be to recover
a degree of the optical illusion that made Analytic Cubism so exciting. In Mural Greenberg
suddenly confronted an art that seemed to embody the kind of “recreated flatness” and
abstractness that he was looking for, now carried forward to an innovative “all-over” spatial
composition. Some spectators reacting to Mural simply saw it as going “on and on,
repeating itself,” anticipating the charge of a decorative and “apocalyptic wall paper” that
would be brought against Pollock’s poured paintings.647 Defending Number 1A, 1948
against that very charge, Greenberg wrote, “Beneath the apparent monotony of its surface
composition it reveals a sumptuous variety of design and incident.” 648
But to celebrate Mural as great art for its “all-over” spatial composition alone is not
to do justice to the painting’s distinctive flavor of “absent meaning.” This is not to deny
that something in Pollock’s project did invite such an aesthetic response. Pollock did not
want paint to be simply a means to the expression of some statement, whether subjective
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or universal. He wanted paint to incarnate meaning. Nor does Greenberg neglect the
importance of content. But he insists such content be transposed into aesthetic form
without residue. In “A Newer Laocoon” Greenberg asserted that “the picture … exhausts
itself in the visual sensation it produces. There is nothing to identify, connect or think
about, but everything to feel.”649 Ignoring what in Mural does remain “to identify, connect
or think about,” he discovers a painting with much “to feel.” Manny Farber, writing on
Mural in 1945, is eloquent on this point: “An extraordinary quality of Pollock’s composing
is the way he can continue a feeling with little deviation or loss of purity from one edge to
the other of the most detailed design.” Reiterating Greenberg’s hopes for abstraction, he
continues, “Pollock’s composing is consistently directed towards two-dimensional abstract
design, and I think this kind of abstract design is as unworked and rich in new art forms,
devices, and problems as naturalistic design is overworked to the point where nothing in it
seems rich.”650
Had Pollock achieved his goal? In terms of his personal quest, had he found his
diamond, “done it”? Was the new task to explore further the abstract realm he had just
entered, in other words, to adopt a resolutely aesthetic approach to his work? That he does
do so is suggested by the relation between Mural and Gothic (fig. 10.3), a work dated 4-
44.

Fig. 10.3. Gothic, 1944. Oil on canvas, 84 5/8 x 56". The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Bequest of Lee Krasner.

Pollock's own notation points to a detail of Mural as a basis for Gothic: "Blue detail (mural)
Black Dancer with three parts -- 84 1/2 x 56."651 These are the dimensions of Gothic. The
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particular detail of Mural on which Gothic builds is the passage where the male “figure”
or “force” on the right is beginning to build up momentum as it traverses the canvas from
right to left in an encounter and union with its female opposite. Maintaining the degree of
abstraction he had attained, Pollock takes this segment of the rhythmic union of opposites
on the horizontal axis and transforms it into a synthesis that is structured not just with
horizontal repetitions but primarily with mounting vertical rhythms. So while a repetition
of structure, it is also an aesthetic variation and advance. As a painterly field its colors are
more finely pulverized in space and its linear impulses more thoroughly integrated into the
painterly fabric. Compared with Mural, this is an even more integrated all-over
composition.
Greenberg liked it, gave it its title of Gothic, and included it in his later critical
writing in his pantheon of all-over canvases.652 But did Pollock find such an aesthetic
response to his own earlier work adequate? Conceivably he could go on painting such
variations on Mural; indeed, his notation implies that Gothic was to be a part of a larger
work entitled Black Dancer. That it never materialized could be taken as an indication that
Pollock found such formal reworking of what he had achieved a dead end. The narrative
that energized him is not Greenberg’s narrative of art pursuing its own essence. The
thought of artistic purity offered no fuel to the fires of his imagination.

3. The Image
After Mural and Pasiphae, Pollock found himself at sea, not knowing what to do
next in his art. He was at sea also emotionally. “During the late winter and early spring of
1944, he reached an apogee of drinking and self-abuse unseen since the months preceding
Bloomingdales.”653 To relax and to get some work done, he and Krasner spent a couple of
months that summer on Cape Cod in Provincetown, then the most famous American art
colony. Realists and social realists whose reputations were made in the l920s and l930s
were there along with some of the avant-garde, Hans Hofmann and his students, John Little
and Fritz Bultman. While the summer did not produce much work, it did spawn what Fritz
Bultman recalled as an intense and ongoing dialogue between Hofmann and Pollock. This
was undoubtedly fueled by Pollock's aggressive-defensive manner towards Hofmann,
occasioned by Hofmann's authority and preeminence and importance to Lee as a teacher.
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Whether it was this summer’s dialogue or the 1942 introduction to Hofmann that
occasioned Pollock’s now legendary statement, “I am nature,” this discussion points to a
difficulty Pollock faced as an artist. Hofmann warned Pollock: “You will repeat yourself
– you work by heart, not from nature.”654 Pollock responded with “I am nature,” insisting
that the image that mattered to him originated in his inner nature. Still, Hofmann's warning
points to the problem of such an inward turn: can the artist will such images to arise? What
if these inner images won’t surface, won’t appear?
“I am nature” asserts a oneness with nature and its forces that would seem to insure
the spontaneous production of ever new forms and images. But art can hardly be
understood as such production. It is an intentional activity. As such it is inevitably
governed by what the artist is up to. An artist may well get so caught up with his or her
ideas and feelings to the point that he or she can execute certain actions seemingly
spontaneously -- like nature, without thinking. Pollock’s paint handling often suggests
such spontaneity. But this presupposes the choice of a certain game or activity. Why
choose to play just this game? Anyone who clings to the notion that, like nature, he doesn’t
have to worry about what he is up to, about the chosen path, will, inevitably, crash, for the
artist’s claim to be nature is refuted by his need to decide to do this rather than that. No
matter how much Pollock might long to be nature, to be always a part of that magnificent
“stampede,” he could not long sustain such euphoria.
For Pollock the question of what to do had been answered by the urgency of his
very personal fears and desires and the demands of the troubling dream images to which
nature in him gave birth. The turn to abstraction threatened to put out that fire. Pollock
did not give up on the role of the inner image that had served him so well up to this time.
If only the image would come. Given its absence, there was another option: recycle the
old images, hopefully with new formal permutations. This Pollock did as a way of going
on -- “with some of my early images coming thru.” 655 Pollock wrote this in 1951, another
moment in his career when he had crashed and was at sea, but it could have been said
already in 1944. The analogy between the 1944 and the 1951 crises extends even to a
predominance of black (in 1944 sometimes purple) and white in his art.
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Rifling through his earlier art Pollock reviews the initiatory journey in
diagrammatic form in Blue, White, and Orange Composition CR 109 (c. 1944) (fig. 10. 4),
as if it were one of his many schematic drawings blown up large.

Fig. 10.4. Blue, White, and Orange Composition, c. 1944. Oil and pastel on canvas, 24 x 36". Private
collection.

He relies on the by now familiar schema of horizontal and vertical axes, the diamond
located at the bottom of the vertical axis. Other details in the canvas relate to Pasiphae.
On the horizontal axis the maw of a bestial creature releases a small disc depicted as
moving to the left, echoing the movement of the winged sun-hero and the purple hand in
Pasiphae. The large lumpish fish shape positioned like a banner on the top of the vertical
axis suggests the whale of Pasiphae. The diamond, the sought-for treasure, is in the depths,
where, in accord with the hermetic paradigm, further trials await, here intimated by the
bisected disc.
But if Pollock now seems to recycle old material, the works of 1944 communicate
a very different and darker mood.
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Fig. 10.5. Figure , CR 107, c. 1944. Oil on canvas, 16 x 16". Private collection.

In Figure CR 107 (c. 1944) (fig. 10.5) the theme of splitting and dismemberment is
startling, because the dismemberment is now of a human and a four-legged animal, the
very vehicles of Pollock’s ambiguous mastery in Pasiphae. The relationship between hero
and four-legged beast is replaced by a confusion of man and animal parts, that casts doubt
on Pollock’s own understanding of the relationship of male and female in Pasiphae as the
male’s victory. The overall figure can be read as both human and animal; the bottom of
the entire figure can be read as horse-like, its teats recalling those of the beast in She-Wolf
and Pasiphae. But a man's head and hand rise on the left and a human-like limb rises on
the extreme right. Due to the powerful play of negative and positive, black and white areas,
one can also see a small stick-like animal present in the torso of the larger figure. This
confused and splayed figure is caught in, or simultaneously holds and is held by, a spider-
like web of thin white lines.
Pollock now emphasizes dismemberment. Was the mastery of Pasiphae then a
triumph? In another canvas dealing with dismemberment Composition with Sgraffito II
(fig. 10.6) the horse alone is shown, its back on the ground and only its head and limbs
thrust upward; in the tentative sgraffito markings in the upper right a disc and a bird-like
creature float free of the horse's destruction below. The reference to the collapsed but
protesting horse of Guernica is unmistakable. Had Pollock really left behind what Calas
has called the great totemic animal of the past? Had he really freed himself from the father
Picasso?
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Fig. 10.6. Composition with Sgraffito II, CR 110, c. l944. Oil on canvas, 18 1/4 x 13 7/8".

Pollock’s concern with destruction may also be a concern with the ongoing war.
The Surrealists continued to invoke the hermetic paradigm, for instance in the February
1944 issue of VVV, as it pertained to the war, while simultaneously downplaying the
imagery of violence and calling for a renewal of chance and automatism in the creation of
new forms.656 Earlier they had celebrated death as a path to the creation of new forms and
renewal. Was this what Pollock was now proposing with his savage images?

Fig. 10.7. Composition with Sgraffito I, c. l944. Oil on canvas, 23 x 15". Sir Evelyn and Lady de
Rothschild, New York.

Composition with Sgraffito I (c. l944) (fig. 10.7) makes of sacrifice an aesthetic
event. He had already addressed the wound at the heart of Guernica in Moon Woman Cuts
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the Circle, and transformed it into a powerful formal statement. The dagger’s cut initiated
an assault on figuration that helped to release automatist impulses. Now in this
dismemberment canvas of 1944 he re-iterates the rending imagery of Moon Woman Cuts
the Circle to advance the disruption of late Synthetic Cubist figuration as he found it in
Guernica. Multiple rendings now generate, through purple and white areas, the same kind
of figure-ground ambiguity achieved through the use of black and white in Guernica. But
as in Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, Pollock pushes beyond Picasso. Striving to break
down the autonomy of the figure, Pollock activates the dark ground of his dismemberment
canvases, by suggesting the presence of partially defined and threatening shapes and
beings, for instance the large central black triangular shape, as he pushes to generate an all-
over surface tension.657

4. Night Series
In attempting to push beyond Picasso's own disruption of Synthetic Cubist
figuration Pollock not only employs the formal strategies he had begun to use in Moon
Woman Cuts the Circle, that is the opening up of the pictorial surface with a new ambiguity
of figure and ground, he also reuses the formal strategy of a literal three-dimensional
layering. In his first poured paintings, he had layered by pouring paint on top of colored
areas; then in She-Wolf he partially buried this spontaneous automatism beneath a
disjunctive layer of thicker grey paint. In 1944 he undertakes to activate matter in a number
of major oil paintings, the Night Series. In these explorations of the night, as in Gothic, he
cannibalizes structural strategies from the cycle of work that culminated in Pasiphae. But
darkness has now invaded his pictures. For instance, in Night Ceremony (c. 1944) (fig.
10.8) the tri-part vertical composition echoes the three-figure configuration on the right
hand side of Pasiphae. But its pronounced layering of first vivid colors, then thick black
paint blotting some of the colors out, with some of them being reapplied in surface
markings, though dramatic, remains jagged, even turgid. The layering is less disjunctive
in Night Mist (c. 1944) (fig. 10.9).
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Fig. 10.8. Night Ceremony, c. 1944. Oil and enamel on canvas, 72 x 43 1/8". Private Collection.
Fig. 10.9. Night Mist, c. 1944. Oil on canvas, 36 x 74". Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida.

There Pollock reuses the horizontal structure of Guardians of the Secret. The rectangular
temenos remains, as in Guardians, the center of attention, though it is now pushed to the
bottom of the central vertical axis of the painting. Swarming figures, particularly visible
on the right hand side of the canvas, look downwards to this spot, a position echoing that
of the diamond in [Blue, White, and Orange Composition]. In Night Mist the initiatory
journey is distinctly painterly. Pollock starts with a dark, mostly grey, ground, to which he
adds small color areas, yellow, orange, blue, green. Many of these are left visible under
the next predominant layer of black paint. These three layers are then thoroughly activated
by the topmost layer of an all-over drawing in white paint. A few clear symbols, floating
just to the upper left of the temenos, the diamond drawn in yellow and white, the figure-
eight infinity loop drawn in white, indicate the journey's ultimate goals of integration. The
relative resolution of the all-over painterly field in Night Mist, when compared with Night
Ceremony, depends upon the fundamentally graphic ease with which Pollock activates his
surface with all-over marks. This in turn depends upon the underlying structural echo of
Guardians of the Secret. But the secret of an all-over painterly automatism remains just
that -– a secret.
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5. “That male-female thing”

Fig. 10.10. Night Sounds, c. 1944. Oil and pastel on canvas, 43 x46". Private Collection.

Precisely because emotional turmoil in addition to an interest in aesthetic

experimentation motivates its images and forms, Night Sounds (c. 1944) (fig. 10.10) is an
especially strong member of the night series -- alternatively it might be viewed as the
culminating canvas in the dismemberment series. As in Male and Female in Search of a
Symbol, Pollock focuses here on the most elemental terms of his narrative. A crescent-
shaped head on the left, a descendant of the moon woman, threatens the personnage with a
disc-torso on the right, descendant of the 'sun-son,' as a much smaller figure positioned in
the upper left, its torso an infinity loop, witnesses the scene. The base of the white canvas
itself becomes the female’s threatening jaw and neck. The next layer of black becomes not
only the ground for the entire painting, but also the ambiguous figure of the animal-like
creature in her head that reaches out to castrate the testicles, drawn in white, of the male-
figure. The colored lines, that delineate the male are drawn with chalky pastels on top of
the black: within his disc torso a flaming red heart, his agitation and even terror indicated
by the nervous lines and the phosphorescent colors. The male with his topmost colors has
not yet entered the blackness of the ground, nor the white maw of the raw female canvas:
a distinctively Pollockian narrative told in pictorial terms.
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This is anything but a happy picture. The anguish it communicates mirrors the
emotional tenor of his life in the spring of 1944. Not only was he drinking heavily, but his
relationship with Lee Krasner had become very difficult. Sometime in early 1944 she had
brought her easel back from Reuben Kadish's studio, where she had stored it when Jackson
tore out the wall of her studio to make room for the giant Mural, and began to paint again,
for the first time after two years. Jackson felt threatened by his painting lover. At that
stage "they were so competitive that they couldn't even work in the same house together,"
recalls Kadish, who shortly thereafter welcomed Lee back to the vacant room next to his
studio. "He couldn't stand having her around while he was working. She couldn't stand
being around him. It was suddenly like a male-eat-female thing, that kind of antagonism.
She was being digested into oblivion by his presence." 658 "That male-female thing was a
subject of conversation. The male destroys female, artistically, and spiritually, as well as
consumes. And no male was ever going to be consumed by a female! That did occupy a
great deal of his conscious[ness]. It expressed itself in his painting." 659 Night Sounds
reflects this tumultuous and fearful antagonism between male and female, the fear of being
consumed feeding a beastly desire to consume.
Naifeh and Smith have called attention to the fact that Pollock was during this same
period drawn into the circle of homosexuality that surrounded Peggy Guggenheim and the
gay subculture of the New York art community, frequently visiting George's Tavern on
Seventh Avenue, and then, during the summer of 1944 in Provincetown, into the gay demi-
monde that clustered around Tennessee Williams at Captain Jack's Wharf. Whether
Pollock's sexual anxieties during this period ever permitted a homosexual act is not known
-- perhaps, Naifeh and Smith speculate, during a drinking binge on the brink of oblivion. 660
In mid-August Lee in desperation turned to Jackson's family; Sande and Stella came over
to Provincetown from Deep River and Jackson's nightly forays stopped for the remainder
of the summer.661
But Pollock's heavy drinking continued into the Fall, into October and November.
His condition began to improve only when he started, sometime in the fall, to visit the
homeopathic physician Dr. Elizabeth Hubbard on a regular basis. Both Pollock and Lee
Krasner had met Dr. Hubbard in the fall of 1943 through their friends the Matters, and Lee
began at this time to consult Dr. Hubbard. Finally, a year later, she persuaded Pollock to
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also become a patient. 662 Dr. Hubbard became Pollock's personal physician and close
friend up until his death. She helped the troubled painter chart a course to less perilous
waters, allowed him to gain some distance from the fearful sea-monsters he had been
battling.
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Chapter 11
Totem Lessons or Rites of Renewal

1. Words of Praise

Fig. 11.1. Totem Lesson I, 1944. Oil on canvas, 70 x 44". Collection Harry W. and Mary Margaret
Anderson.

In October of 1944 Pollock created the first of the two canvases that in his second
one-man show at Art of this Century in March 1945 floored Greenberg, Totem Lesson I
(fig. 11.1) and Totem Lesson II: for these “I cannot find strong enough words of praise.”663
Pollock had long been making efforts to loosen and open up the two-dimensional pictorial
surface, whether with the play of negative and positive shapes or with layering of lines and
paint, which he then attempted to integrate into an all-over pictorial fabric. But compared
with the somewhat dry and dense all-over painterly fabric of Gothic, in Totem Lesson I
Pollock presents us with an almost voluptuous materiality of pictorial surface, which
simultaneously gives a sensation of openness. Such openness is not the result of spatial
illusion; rather it arises directly from the handling of his pictorial means. The
underpainting appears to be pink under a black ground that largely gives way to opalescent
bluish grays and some surface streaking of white. These white streaks, especially diagonals
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in the upper portion of the canvas, create the sensation of transparency, enhanced in turn
by two things new to Pollock’s art: the luminosity and liquidity of paint.
Pollock had long been struggling with the matter of paint in his art. But he had
never really dealt with paint in terms of light. He had opposed black or dark grey to white,
for instance in Bird, Male and Female, She-Wolf, Night Sounds, Night Mist, but carrying
a symbolic charge, these were not conceived of as poles of the tonal values that artists in a
naturalistic tradition used to render the illusion of light. When he sought to enliven dark
black matter in the Night series he did so by using colors, attempting to integrate disjunctive
layers of black, white, and colored paint. Now blackness turns a luminous gray; resistant
matter becomes fluid in the process of transformation. Note this liquidity, especially in the
gray arm and lunar headdress of the personnage on the right. Dark matter here transforms
itself into light. Thus Pollock recovers for himself an old pictorial tool, tonal gradations.
Since this tool is not in the service of realistic illusion, should a viewer simply call this new
illusionism “optical”? Such optical illusion was highly prized by Greenberg. But Pollock
did not arrive at it by continued formal experimentation alone. Inseparably bound up with
his new sense of space and a qualitatively different and new sense of pictorial matter is
imagery that eloquently embodies the transformations of understanding and feeling that
allowed for this new stylistic expression.

2. Return of the Bird Man

Not only in Totem Lesson I do we sense a shift in Pollock understanding of his
artistic pursuit. Having argued so tenaciously for the power of the image drawn from
oneself, he proceeded, probably in the fall, to paint a number of such images, as if to
reassure himself of the image’s importance. Again he turns to the four-legged animal
imagery that had been occupying him, this time not to explore violent themes of initiatory
trial or sacrifice, but themes of fertility and birth. In Equine Series III a renewed masculine
principle is reborn as a disc tinged with orange, a sun disc –- emerging from a horse. Such
literal-minded projection of rebirth following the destruction in Guernica produced some
of the most awkward paintings of Pollock’s career; and leaving the issue of good painting
aside, even the animal story of the equine series left Pollock dissatisfied. That he felt the
need for paintings dealing with the theme of union and rebirth on a more fully human and
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spiritual plane is indicated in a painting extraordinary for its programmatic clarity, Beach
Figures CR 114 (c. l944) (fig. 11.2).

Fig. 11.2. Beach Figures, CR 114, c. l944. Oil on canvas, 27 x 20".

Pollock had expressed a similar concern in a drawing related to Male and Female,
CR 635 (c. l942) [see fig. 5.5]. The embarrassing sexual hang-ups that T.J. Clark found in
this drawing and in such paintings of the early 1940s as Male and Female, Guardians of
the Secret, and Pasiphae are not just “black comedy,” but part of Pollock’s search for
meaning in his art and life. 664 A contemporary viewer may distrust and want to elide the
all too personal, at times almost pornographic, subject matter that attracted Pollock, but its
pictorial exploration served him to sort out and deal with his thoughts and feelings about
human being and potential in a way that led to great art. Beach Figures thus bears attention.
Dominating the center and left of the canvas are two full-length vaguely humanoid male
and female figures in sexual union. The female stands on the left, her head a white triangle
surmounted by two eyes. An emphatic dark horizontal line separates her torso from her
pelvic area, a separation comprehensible when one looks at the corresponding area on the
right hand side of the canvas: this area is dominated by a curious beast. Its triangular head
and two triangular legs make a tripod base for its belly area, which extends into two legs
reaching upwards as if hands. The beast with its teats can be seen as the same animal that
was the vehicle of sexual union and birth in Pasiphae and the equine series, but now it
reaches upwards towards a bird that has attached to it a five-dotted hand. The sexual
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activity located in the lower half of the female body, below the horizontal line, appears
associated with the four-legged animal as a vehicle of sexual union. But union on this level
of animal sexuality seems unacceptable. Not only does the beast itself raise its arm-legs
as though striving upwards, the bird-hand spirit is linked by an emphatic line to the male's
face, turned upward as though listening to the bird, who seems to be calling for a union of
opposites on a higher level. As before, we must go beyond T.J. Clark’s assessment of the
1942 drawing, “Copulation in it is portrayed as an upright and basically ludicrous sacrifice,
of dignity and identity” -- and look to the ideas Pollock was then exploring. 665
A way to what then occupied Pollock is provided by his lengthy discussion with
Fritz Bultman of Pico della Mirandola's oration “On the dignity of man," shortly after it
was published in two parts in the October and December l944 issues of View.666 Pollock
said that the ideas contained in it impressed him very much. These Bultman synopsized as
"sinking into the beast to be born again into the divine likeness." 667 Pollock must have
found in the oration an unusually clear statement of his own search. Pico's text thus bears
a closer look. Accompanying that text, when its English translation was published in View,
is The Emblematic Man (fig. 11.3), the man with the figure-eight, infinity loop visage,
signaling man's infinite possibilities, the culminating image in Masson’s Anatomy of my
Universe.

Fig. 11.3. Andre Masson, The Emblematic Man, 1943. Illustration in “Pico della Mirandola’s
very elegant speech on the dignity of Man,” (1487) Part I, View, series 4, no. 3, Fall (Oct.) 1944, p. 88.
 230

Masson placed the image next to the words Pico’s God addresses to man at the Creation,
words central to both Masson’s and Pollock's beliefs:
We have assigned you, O Adam, neither a determined place, nor an
appropriate figure, nor a particular heritage, in order that you may have and
possess, according to your desires and decisions, always the place, the
figure and the goods chosen by yourself. All other creatures have a definite
nature constrained by the laws that we have prescribed. You alone, free of
all obstacles, will fix your own nature, according to your own judgment to
which I have committed you. I have placed you in the center of the universe
so that you may look around with greater ease at everything in the world. I
have made you neither celestial nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal;
according to your will and for your own honor, modeler and sculptor of
yourself, stamp yourself with the form that you prefer.668
The passage just quoted continues in Charles Glenn Wallis's translation, the one used in
View. "Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst
again grow upward from thy mind's reason into the higher natures which are divine." Pico
ties human freedom to Adam’s ability to choose his place on a ladder that extends from the
beastly and mortal to the celestial and immortal. It is "not a separateness from the body
but a spiritual understanding which makes an angel." Man has the capacity to transform
himself. Pico points to Protean man, fused or confused by the text with Promethean man,
with whom we know Pollock has identified since the late l930's. "It was not unfittingly
that Asclepius the athenian [sic] said that man was symbolized by Prometheus in the secret
rites, by reason of our nature sloughing its skin and transforming itself." 669 In Beach
Figures Pollock presents more clearly than he ever had before the dichotomies that are
aspects of man himself: the four-legged animal associated with lower, sexual, instincts, the
bird with higher consciousness.
Pollock’s presentation of these dichotomies and their transformation parallels
Pico's. Almost expected is Pico's repeated use of the archetypal image of the bird: "to feed
the cock, that is, to nourish the divine part of our soul upon the knowledge of divine things";
or "The Chaldean interpreters write it as a saying of Zoroaster's that the soul has wings:
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when the feathers fall off, she is born headlong into the body, and when the feathers sprout
again, she flies up again to the heights."670 More unusual is his image of the feet and hands
of the soul struggling along the ladder joining the earth to the heavens.
As the mysteries put it, it is sacrilegious for the impure to touch that which
is pure. … Naturally, the feet of the soul are that most despicable portion
which alone rests upon matter as upon the earth, I mean the nutritive power
and the food -- taking kindling-wood of lust and mistress of voluptuous
softness. As for the hands of the soul, we might as well have spoken of
anger, which struggles as an opponent against appetite and, like a foot
soldier in the dust and sunshine, carries off the things which are being
squandered by the appetite, dozing away in the shade. But, so as not to be
hurled back from the ladder as profane and unclean, let us wash these hands
and these feet in moral philosophy as in living waters, -- that is, the whole
sensual part wherein the allurement from which, they say, the soul gets a
twisted neck, while being held back. 671
Pollock's art bears witness to such a twisted neck. Such twisting helped feed his artistic
imagination, as, manifest in the violent sexuality of the great animal images of l943 and in
his handling of paint. Pollock did not shirk from the exploration of material filth.
Emboldened by the directives of the hermetic quest, he met the challenge of the descent
into the beast -- in order to discover the creative force of a realm some might simply reject
as evil. Pico's directive to be sure is not primarily down, but up. And for Pollock, too, the
challenge is not only to sink into the beast, but to do so in order to become divine: “a
painting had to have all of this in it in order to be a painting." 672 Art he asserts has its
foundation in freedom.
While Pico privileges the way up, he dwells on the necessary capacity to ascend or
descend the ladder. As he works through Totem Lesson I and Totem Lesson II, Pollock
insists on the same capacity.
But, if we want to be the companions of the angels moving up and down
Jacob's ladder, this [washing the feet and hands of our soul in moral
philosophy] will not be enough, unless we have first been well trained and
well taught to move forward duly from rung to rung, never to turn aside
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from the main direction of the ladder, and to make sallies up and down. …
we shall at one time be descending and, as it were, tearing apart one broom
into many by titanic force; and we shall at another time be ascending and,
as it were, gathering into one the many strands of the broom by an
apollonian force.673
Believing that the Greek philosophers had been initiates of the Orphic mysteries, Pico sees
moral philosophy and dialectic as purgative arts or degrees of initiation, customary in the
secret rites of the Greeks.674 Pollock had already been drawn to rituals of initiation through
his knowledge of American Indian religion. And ever since Pollock's self-identification
with a shaman in l941, the bird image as an emblem of spirit has been present in his work.
Pico now seemed to confirm his most basic intuitions. Totem Lesson I invites
interpretation as a painterly response to the same issues addressed by Pico's oration, but in
a distinctly Indian key.

3. "Offering of Smoke"
Just above the center of this canvas on the right we see a head with what vaguely
looks like a pipe in its mouth, wearing what, in the context of the related exploratory
drawings, will be seen as a crescent of light grey feathers. In Beach Figures Pollock
associated the man with the bird. Now he bedecks the male with feathers. Pollock presents
the feathered head bowed, in an attitude of contemplation, oriented to the suggestive jumble
of sexual, foetal imagery on the left-hand side of the canvas. The fleshy pink links the
male head to the pubic triangle below, penetrated by a fertile four. The attitude of
contemplation echoes that in Moon Woman l942, when the moon woman first
contemplated the Golden Flower. Now it is the male's turn. Pollock's feathered male is
granted the vision of a new essence, where the foetal form opposite the head brings to mind
John Graham's invocation of the foetus as "ancestor of all forms and beasts at one and the
same time."
The veiled bedecking of the male in his feathered hood continues Pollock’s old
identification with the shaman, the bird-man, who had made a shadowy appearance in The
Animal Attack and gained a stronger identity as the winged-sun figure in Pasiphae. But
only in Totem Lesson I is the male's identity as a bird-man so openly acknowledged.
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Some of the particulars in Totem Lesson I vibrate with the wealth of American
Indian ritual, as Pollock knew it from his Smithsonian volumes. Especially pertinent are
the visions granted to the practitioners of the Pawnee ceremony of the Hako, a fertility
ceremony calling for the birth of a child to the Son. The report on that long and beautiful
ceremony, richly illustrated with plates and diagram, fills one of Pollock’s Smithsonian
volumes. Since the over-all ceremony is presented as a rapprochement between Father and
Son, it would have appealed to Pollock, who was himself seeking a resolution to a tension-
filled relationship between "father" and "son," in which the ultimate goal is fertility for the
son. Pollock probably looked to the Hako already in l943, for Guardians of the Secret
seems related to the first ritual for the setting aside of the holy place, the place of fertility. 675
Totem Lesson I suggests that Pollock responded to the ninth through the fourteenth rituals,
that is the completion of the public ceremony. The ninth ritual occurs during the first night
of the five-day ceremony, "Invoking the Visions." The visions, it is explained, can come
to men in dreams or, when they are awake, as revelations. 676 The psychic power of the
ceremony as a rite of renewal in the individual life and career of a man is openly
acknowledged.677 Following the first night of visions is the tenth ritual, "The Birth of
Dawn." "Tira'wa atius [the father of all] ... moves upon Darkness, the Night, and causes
her to bring forth the Dawn."678 Paralleling the Indian ritual, Pollock celebrates the
transformation of female darkness animated by masculine spirit to produce a new light --
here perhaps we have a key to the extraordinary luminosity in the painting. In "The Birth
of Dawn" the Morning Star, the precursor to the Sun, appears: "The Morning Star is like a
man; he is painted red all over; that is the color of life. … On his head is a soft downy
eagle's feather, painted red. This feather represents the soft, light cloud that is high in the
heavens, and the red is the touch of a ray of the coming sun. The soft, downy feather is the
symbol of breath and life." 679 On the second day in the eleventh ritual, "Chant to the Sun,"
the ray of the sun, spoken of as if it were a bird, brings vitality and strength directly to the
Son. In a drawing related to Totem Lesson I, CR 716v (fig. 11.4), about which I will have
more to say shortly, Pollock makes clear both the sun and the bird imagery associated with
the male. In the painting the sun's presence is suggested by the pinkish red hues. The
"color of life" is applied to both the head of the male and to the pubic triangle. On the third
day in the thirteenth ritual the female element is invoked and the promise of the Earth,
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fructified by the ray of the sun, to be fertile and to bring forth children is renewed. To
confirm communication with the great unseen power that governs the mystery of fertility,
an "Offering of Smoke" with a pipe is given. "The offering of smoke is the closest and
most sacred form of direct communication with the great unseen power." 680 Contemplating
the foetus, the female's promise of new life, Pollock's male figure, his face glowing pink
and crowned with downy feathers, holds a "pipe" in his mouth. Pollock depicts the male
thus, holding a pipe, in only one other canvas, The Key l946, in another moment of high
Indian ceremony.

4. Challenging Freud
Pollock's art is highly syncretic, drawing on a wide range of sources that he felt had
a bearing on what preoccupied him and helped feed his imagination. While the primitive
cast of his painting thus draws on a Pawnee fertility ceremony, it also owes a debt to
Wolgang Paalen’s "Totem Art," published in the December l943 issue of Dyn, an
encomium on primitive art, the result of a trip he took in 1939, fleeing Europe as World
War II threatened, to the Northwest Coast of America to study what remained of Indian
culture.681 Pollock was very much aware of Paalen’s writings in Dyn, the little magazine
he had started in 1942, as Moon Woman Cuts the Circle was illustrated there in November
1944. Paalen, a former Surrealist, had strong links with Matta’s circle. Matta and
Motherwell had indeed spent the summer with Paalen in Mexico in 1941 discussing the
issues of a new art. The December 1943 issue was devoted to a broad range of Amerindian
art that Paalen, as artist and amateur ethnographer, expected would have an impact on the
hoped-for new art: "This is the moment to integrate the enormous treasure of Amerindian
forms into the consciousness of modern art. … This integration would be the negation of
all exoticism … the abolition of interior frontiers … a universal art will help in the shaping
of the new, the indispensable world consciousness."682
It is in his discussion of the precise nature of man's relationship to the totem animal
that Paalen makes a distinction important to Pollock. Challenging Freud's understanding
of the totem as a substitute for the father-ancestor and of primitive taboos associated with
the totem as being instituted as prohibitions to incest, Paalen asserts that primitive societies
are matriarchal, descent passing through the mother, that taboos are far more closely related
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to the general tendency of the archaic mind that divides the universe into auspicious and
inauspicious zones than to fears of incest, and that, following Robertson Smith, "the sacred
mystery of the death of the animal is justified by the fact that only thus can be established
the link uniting partisans to one another and to their gods." The "totemic repast" is not a
reenactment of the "killing of the father," but a communion with the gods. An
understanding of totemism as grounded in the world of the father and the prohibition of
incest, in effect a prohibition of instinctual expression, gives way to an understanding in
terms of the world of the mother. Totemism comes to be understood as positive
communion with the divine, superior forces, extra-human powers, the timeless and the
universal.683
As shown by Guardians of the Secret and Wounded Animal, Pollock had accepted
the Surrealists' Freudian understanding of the totem animal as the father and the scenario
of the killing of the father to achieve an incestuous union with the female. The lesson in
Totem Lesson I would seem to be a changed understanding of animal totemism, a shift
away from its association with prohibition and incest to a positive acceptance of the role
of the animal. Paalen explains, "Demons and gods everywhere are the children of fear and
of desire, and as fear observes badly, it creates monsters and when ever it predominates it
personifies extra-human forces with traits that are demoniac rather than divine. … Totem
Art, which is essentially virile, rarely creates monsters, those abortions of the imagination.
In the totemic world, in which the animal is considered equal to man, the zoomorphic
figuration, the mixture of human and animal traits, is in no way repulsive. In fact, this
mixture did not seem monstrous until after the advent of Christianity." 684 Such clear
assertion of the positive aspect of the animal rings out in the intellectual landscape of the
mid-l940s and would seem to have helped Pollock in readjusting his attitude to the totemic
animal. And for the first time Pollock now declares the radiant bird identity of the male
for all to plainly see. The sometimes huge, threatening, sexual four-legged animal in
Pollock's work now becomes sleek, and is aligned with the male: notice in the lowest
register of the canvas a four-legged stick-like animal, its long neck reinforced with a streak
of yellow, darting towards the right, aligned with the head and the arm of the bird-man.
Paalen asserts the animal identity of the god: "the boar 'before becoming the killer of
Adonis was Adonis himself.'"685 This equation of the god and the animal was
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acknowledged, he says, in matriarchal times. One can hypothesize that in Totem Lesson I
the four-legged animal is the god-like phallus, no longer burdened by the father’s crushing
presence. The animal springs to the right, away from the triangular head with eye on the
left -- which invites comparison with the triangular attribute of the lower female animal in
Beach Figures or the triangular head of the prohibitive “father figure” in Guardians of the
Secret. The fact that Pollock in Totem Lesson I inscribes the date 10-44 and his signature
on top of this triangular head marks his confident reversal of the father figure’s prohibition
in Guardians of the Secret.
And once again visual thinking expresses itself in the way paint gets handled. That
Pollock now feels that he has access to “the thickness of paint” in a way that was prohibited
earlier is celebrated in the striking motif in the second register of the painting, above the
bottom register with its animals. There arising out of a pink three-sided figure, a triangle,
is a large number “4”, and in it is cupped a marvelous passage of gooey yellow-green paint.
The tension between 3 and 4 that before was noted in stenographic markings, whether in
the Jungian sketch for the Crucifixion gouache of c. 1940, Stenographic Figure, the
gouache CR 956, or Male and Female in Search of a Symbol, now not only becomes a
major motif, but speaks to the resolution of the tension. The realm of the material and
instinctual, associated with the serpent, the devil, the fourth element that the patriarchal
Christian trinity rejects, is now no longer forbidden. So from the triangle rises the 4, a
projection of the quarternity, a new unity that is all-inclusive. The 4 celebrates what was
formerly taboo: the “thickness of white” becomes a new and sexy juiciness of paint.

5. Totem Mother
The relationship between Totem Lesson I and Guardians of the Secret invites the
question: what is the site of this lesson? The female temenos itself? That Pollock's
depiction of the male's acceptance of the full range of his animal being does take place
within a new sense of opened space within the material surface of the painting we have
already seen. That this space is understood as fundamentally female is suggested by the
introduction of a new personnage in Pollock’s art, whom I shall refer to as the totem
mother, her two-eyes visible at the top of the canvas and presiding over the encounter of
bird-man and foetus. The eye on the left is penetrated by the feathered emblem of the bird
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spirit; her right eye is composed with two complementary halves. Thus we are told both
that she is receptive to the bird spirit, and that her nature contains within it complementary
opposites. The old “devil woman”, the woman of two contrasting natures, either high-
minded or bestial, transforms into an all-containing, androgynous, but fundamentally
female entity: the totem mother.
Pollock's concern with an androgynous entity is evident in a drawing sheet related
to Totem Lesson I, CR 716v (fig. 11.4) and r.

Fig. 11.4. Untitled, CR 716v, c. 1944. Pencil on paper, 11 x 8 3/8".

On the front he depicts a phallus with breasts, on the back a central commanding ithyphallic
female, flanked by the female triangle with eye on the left and two dual-faced images of
the male on the right, as moon/sun below, and wearing a feathered headdress above. All
but the image of the male as moon/sun make their way into the final painting, and even
this, we have seen, might be construed as the new luminosity within the painting. The
androgynous totem mother maintains her central position. 686
In his pursuit of meaning, Pollock seems to have embraced what in the late
twentieth century became known as New Age thinking. For some this is kitsch, a false
return to a past that lies behind us. Whether kitsch or not, what he discovered in articles
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such as Paalen’s tapped deep emotional reservoirs that could get him going as a painter.
Just how deep these emotional reservoirs are is suggested by a drawing that he had given
to his analyst in l939-40, CR 555 (see fig. 2.11). There the masculine principle is boldly
modeled in the foreground, phallic in character, reaching upward and outward towards the
schematically sketched female principle in the background. Some four years later in Totem
Lesson I we recognize the underlying pattern of CR 555. This time the male, instead of
reaching out to a schematic female, exists securely within the container figure of the
matriarch. It is indeed possible to see the male's headdress as also the totem mother's
cradling arm. The "frustrated longing for the all-giving mother" seems to have been
overcome. The stretching out for relationship is transformed into the sensation of her
containing embrace. How different this is from his earliest depiction of Woman (see fig.
1.7) and the dark cavernous emptiness of her womb. Despite this woman's large breasts,
her lack of nurturing is suggested by the near-skeletal being of those who hover around
her. In the paintings of l943 Pollock's struggles for a mimesis of the male’s entry into the
female being. Now, in the fall of l944, the female is no longer the alien other to be
conquered and seized. His art speaks of a dwelling within that other. At least in his art, he
seems to have begun to satisfy some of his oldest felt needs. Emotionally he is returning
to his beginnings, going back further than the felt need to "ride Picasso's horse." He is
going back to his need for harmonious containment within the world of the Mother, where
thoughts of the mother fuse with thoughts of Mother Nature.
This change in mood may have owed much to Pollock’s new relation with Dr.
Hubbard. "She was," says her daughter, "like a good witch, a white witch." 687 Interestingly
Dr. Elizabeth Hubbard was physically similar to Stella Pollock. "With her 'enormous
bosoms,' somber clothing, steel-gray hair, tight corset, square jaw, erect posture, and deep,
masculine voice … Elizabeth Hubbard was Stella Pollock." 688 But while Stella had
unwittingly played the role of the "Terrible Mother," Dr. Hubbard helped Pollock discover
the Good Mother. No doubt her new presence in Pollock's life bears on the appearance of
the totem mother in Totem Lesson I.
Dr. Hubbard, too, was "steeped in theosophy," as Lee Krasner later recalled. 689 The
theosophical premise of spirit within matter was the foundation of the homeopathic
medicine she practiced. 690 For Pollock's drinking problems she prescribed herbal
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remedies.691 In response to his psychological problems she too can be expected to have
put forward the theosophical tenet that Pollock first heard from Krishnamurti: "as the potter
molds the clay to the delight of his imagination, so can man mold his life through the desire
of his heart." In Totem Lesson I we witness Pollock’s reappropriation of art, after the
confusion and stalemates of the spring of 1944, as a healing vehicle of spiritual growth.

6. Totem Lesson II
Totem Lesson I was one of just three canvases included in Pollock’s second one-
man show at Art of this Century in March 1945. The others are Two (fig. 11.5) and Totem
Lesson II.

Fig. 11.5. Two, c. 1943-45. Oil on canvas, 76 x 43 1/4". Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

Greenberg praised Two, not in his review of the Guggenheim exhibition, but in his review
of the 1946 Whitney Annual. There he singled it out as “the best painting” in the show.
“As for the paintings at the Whitney, their shortcomings lie not so much in their execution
as in their conception. … very few know, feel, or suspect what makes painting great
anywhere and at any time -- that it is necessary to register what the artist makes of himself
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and his experience in the world.” 692 But while Greenberg recognizes the importance of
“what the artist makes of himself and his experience in the world,” just what that is in
Pollock’s case he would rather not know, so long as he could sense the excitement of the
aesthetic transposition. Here Pollock pits himself against the stable planar slabs of late
Synthetic Cubism and cracks them open. Within the vertical format of roughly five panels
the all-over grey mediates between the forward release of white and the recessive blacks
that are further caught up in the play of diagonal tensions that circulate through the canvas.
The whole is enlivened with an all-over balancing of smaller passages of strategically
placed oranges and yellow.
With these forms Pollock advances his most fundamental theme, the union of
opposites. In Two the male and female opposites are clearly differentiated. The male on
the left bears the phallus; the female on the right is characterized by her breasts, and seed-
filled pubic area. Her lower body is dominated by a long, roughly triangular, white shape
which is joined to the male phallus. As in Beach Figures, the sexual union is explicit; but
now no prohibition applies. The four-legged animal is nowhere in sight; if anything the
sexual aspect of the female which had formerly been displaced onto the beast is now openly
acknowledged. That the bird spirit presides over this union is suggested by the white head-
like shape that flies propelled by little feather appendages along the diagonal from the
male's head to touch the head of the female, and by the female's own crown of golden
feathers. For the first time in Pollock’s work their union explicitly produces a birth. The
female releases from her seed filled pubic area a red foetal shape. Birth is visualized not
just as metamorphosis, as it had been in Birth, or partial rebirth of the male, as in Jack’son’
or the winged sun-figure in Pasiphae or even the shaman with his totem animal
contemplating the spiritual embryo in Totem Lesson I. Rather it is visualized as the embryo
itself, produced in the union of male and female opposites. This generates the excitement
of the canvas that commanded Greenberg’s attention.
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Fig. 11.6. Totem Lesson II, 1945. Oil on canvas, 72 x 60". National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

In Totem Lesson II (fig. 11.6) the viewer is confronted by an overwhelming sense

of sheer paint, materia, which is at the same time strangely buoyant and alive. The field of
the large canvas, 72 x 60 inches, is covered with an initial layer of black paint (with some
brown underpainting visible beneath this) which, but for the definition of a large black
personnage along the central vertical axis, is covered with a layer of grey paint, over which
move mostly white markings. The linear impulse that moves around and through this field
of paint is initiated by the downward force on the left of the canvas of the long sharp black
triangular wedge, orange tipped. This encounters the black arcing back of an amorphous
creature in the lower left; the rhythm of this arc rotates under the feet of the central figure
and rises in an inverse arc up the right of the canvas in an increasingly abstract passage.
The upward movement is continued as the grey paint seems to become more fluid and
moves over the black, some of which we can still see beneath, up the canvas. This sensation
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is enhanced by the liquid white lines, playing through and over the grey, rising to the upper
right hand corner of the canvas. The dynamism of descent and ascent encompasses the
tonal layering of black, gray, and white paint, and activates the entirety of the three-
dimensional axial structure of the canvas, left-right, down-up, and in-out. Greenberg’s one
complaint: “Pollock’s single fault is not that he crowds his canvases too evenly but that he
sometimes juxtaposes colors and values so abruptly that gaping holes are created.”693 Was
he thinking of the looming black void of the central black personnage in Totem Lesson II?
Who is this? As in Totem Lesson I, and in CR 716v, we recognize once more the
all-containing totem mother. But now she is the black of the ground of the painting. Within
the swelling contours of her body she contains motifs inscribed in mostly gray and white,
including a foetus, the spiritual embryo first found in Totem Lesson I, and below, drawn
in white hints of stenographic signs, the most prominent of which suggests a European 7.
What then is the lesson of Totem Lesson II? Striking is Pollock’s insertion into the
grey field of the large continuous rhythm of first descent and then ascent, moving also from
still recognizable imagery to greater abstraction. The imagery speaks of the cycle of death
and rebirth: on the left of the canvas we can detect a female figure; below the hint of
feathers on her head we recognize more clearly her breasts and the black triangular wedge
shape, descending from one of her breasts. It descends upon a curious, bent over animal
form with the suggestion of a human hand as its head. We recognize another version of
the animal phallus in Totem Lesson I and an image of the threat of castration. The
configuration points back deep into Pollock's past, echoing in a remarkable way CR 531
(c. 1939-40) (see fig. 2.9) where a menacing triangular shape thrusts an arrow down at a
helpless animal-human form -- the image which Dr. Henderson took as one of extreme
introversion. But now the cutting force of the triangular wedge has positive power, echoing
the triangular dagger in Moon Woman Cuts the Circle. For its downward force initiates
the linear rhythmic impulse that courses its way across and up the canvas, setting in motion
a more abstract and painterly animation of the pictorial field. The works that follow will
show just how Pollock will put the two totem lessons, the promise of new life, and the
willed submission to death in pursuit of that new life, to work in the continuation of his art.
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Chapter 12
Line, Paint, and Abstraction

1. Kandinsky
The article that included Greenberg’s appreciative discussion of Pollock’s second
one-man show (March 19- April 14, 1945) also covered Mondrian's and Kandinsky’s
memorial retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art (March 21 - May 13) and at the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (March 15 - May 30). Greenberg praises Mondrian
as "one of the greatest painters of our time,” citing his “rationalized décor,” while
downplaying “his platonizing theories” as almost naïve. Kandinsky is said to be
"Mondrian's only true compeer." As one might expect, for Greenberg Kandinsky’s
“spiritual” has “no religious connotations.” As to his forms, “his chief mistake was to draw
too close an analogy between painting and music,” hardly a surprising judgment given
Greenberg’s appropriation of Lessing’s distinction between arts of space and arts of time.
Music as an art of time could only seem to weaken avant-garde painting, which, to be true
to its medium, needed to address pictorial flatness. Later Greenberg was to charge
Kandinsky with having failed to grasp Cubist pictorial logic. 694 In the review Greenberg
went on to praise Pollock, "the strongest painter of his generation" for the all-over intensity
of his canvases, if anything too “suffocatingly packed.” 695 The death in 1944 of both
Mondrian and Kandinsky, the two great non-objective painters of the first half of the
twentieth century, posed the question of the future of abstract and non-objective art. To
whom would their mantle fall?
The juxtaposition of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Pollock in Greenberg’s review was
suggestive. In his Interior with Figures, c. 1938-41 (see fig. 4.5), Pollock himself had
posed a challenge to Mondrian by having snakes run through the Dutchman’s grid. And
when asked by Dorothy Seiberling in an interview, preparatory to her Life article, to name
his favorite artists, Pollock offered only de Kooning and Kandinsky among twentieth
century painters -- not Picasso.696 As this singling out of Kandinsky suggests, even in 1945
he was interested in exploring the temporal dimension of painting in a way Greenberg
would have thought a deflection from the task facing an authentic modernist art. In a radio
interview in late 1950 he was emphatic in his insistence that, “The modern artist is working
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with space and time.”697 But he also could not have followed Greenberg in his dismissal
of the spiritual and religious connotations of Kandinsky’s art and would have welcomed
his insistence on the primacy of content. Kandinsky had explained this primacy succinctly
in his 1914 essay, "Painting as a Pure Art." "CONTENT AND FORM: The work of art
consists of two elements: the inner and the outer. The inner element, taken individually, is
the emotion of the artist's soul. ... The inner element of a work of art is its content. ... The
decisive element is that of the content. The form is the material expression of the abstract
content. The choice of the form is therefore decided by the inner spiritual necessity which
is the only real unchanging law of art." 698 The highest artistic challenge, Kandinsky argued,
was to release form from the object in nature and to find the purely artistic non-objective
form capable of giving a painting the power of independent life, and of spiritual
expression.699 Non-objective abstraction would communicate directly, like music.

2. Engravings
That interest in the temporality of modernist painting comes to the fore in Pollock’s
work of c. 1944-45, especially in his explorations of the to him new medium of engraving,
a medium that made him more aware of the activity of producing a line and of the way we
experience in such a line the trace of such activity. In the fall of 1944 and the spring of
1945 he engraved eleven intaglio prints at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 in New
York City. Not that these were an unqualified success. Pollock "wasn't happy with the
prints," Reuben Kadish, who helped him pull a few trial proofs, recalls. 700 Pollock had
difficulty with the new technique. The engraved lines are often labored and when Hayter
suggested that Pollock consider printing editions he was not interested. But an examination
of one print in particular, CR 1077 (c. 1944-45) (fig. 12.1), probably produced near the end
of this period of experimentation, 701 suggests a leap in Pollock's artistic evolution that
points forward to the all-over rhythmic web of the mature poured paintings. Its special
place among the engravings, and indeed in Pollock's entire oeuvre, is signaled by his
inscription of the letters "A" (upside down), "R" (in reverse), "T" next to each other in the
print's lower left. This inscription, reversed in the printing process, is unique in Pollock's
work and suggests that he felt that he had hit on something he wished to celebrate as an
embodiment of his understanding of "art," his strange manner of writing the letters
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signaling a new found freedom, but also suggesting uncertainty about where such freedom
might lead the artist. I shall refer to this print by the title ART.

Fig. 12.1. ‘ART’, CR 1077, c. 1944-45. Engraving and drypoint, printed in black, second state printed by
Pollock and S. W. Hayter at Atelier 17, 14 15/16 x 17 5/8". The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift
of Lee Krasner Pollock, 1969.

In ART Pollock exhibits a new ease and extended rhythm in his linear automatism.
Line moves back and forth along the horizontal axis, up and down along the vertical axis,
sweeps back and forth along the diagonal axes, moves in swooping curves in and out of
the surface in an ambiguous three-dimensional space, the spatial rhythm being amplified
with tonal variations of black and white. These linear rhythms, only semi-abstract, are
integrated with the still very visible imagery and express what the images more explicitly
signify. By now Pollock’s underlying conception of a union of opposites is something of
an “étant donné.” The male figure dominates the entire left hand side of the print, his head
pierced by a downward pointing feathered arrow, his phallus an animated creature with
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two eyes. Luminous he presides over and seems to orchestrate the passage of the automatic
linear rhythms, in the flickering shadows of which lurk Pollock's various symbols for the
female. The theme is a union of male and female, but now it is achieved with a new ease.

3. Rhythmic Currents
Such interest in rhythm raises questions. Pollock here is moving in a direction quite
at odds with that wrestling with the pictorial surface that Greenberg deemed important. 702
But Greenberg’s own emerging aesthetics went not unchallenged in the 1940s, and one
voice that appears to have mattered especially to Pollock is that of Wolfgang Paalen, who,
in the pages of Dyn put forward a position that might in retrospect be called an “Anti-
Laocoon.” Paalen speaks up for the emotional power of rhythm and the importance of time
in painting, especially as it relates to an emergent abstraction. 703 It is Bultman once again
who recalls how "deeply involved" Pollock was "with Paalen's idea of passing through
'emotion to abstraction,' 'ancestral stratifications,' and 'evolutionary stages of the
species'." 704 I have already touched on the significance of Paalen’s article "Totem Art" for
Pollock. Paalen followed up that article with another, "On the Meaning of Cubism,"
written in June 1944 and published in the next issue of Dyn in November 1944. Pollock
and Paalen’s paths were to continue to cross. Paalen’s one-man show at Art of this Century
came right on the heels of Pollock’s March 1945 show. More importantly, Paalen had
chosen not only to illustrate Moon Woman Cuts the Circle in the November 1944 issue of
Dyn, but Male and Female in his Form and Sense, a collection of his essays published in
l945 by Wittenborn. Among his papers was a Pollock brush drawing. Pollock in turn had
all five numbers of Dyn in his library.705
In some ways Paalen's thoughts on art pick up where John Graham's left off, despite
his rejection of metaphysics and psychologizing mysticism in favor of the scientific
understanding of the universal. 706 He too was committed to a collective unconscious and
celebrated primitive art and the expressive power of modernist art, especially that of
Picasso. But while Graham around 1943 began to put his faith in the evolution of symbols
rather than form, it was in Picasso’s Cubism and Mondrian that Paalen found guides to the
creation of the new abstract and universal "pre-figurative" images from which he expected
an answer to the current state of social, moral and aesthetic confusion. A prefigurative
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image, Paalen stated in April 1942, “does not have to be referred for its meaning to an
object already existing." Its true value “does not depend upon its capacity to represent, but
upon its capacity to prefigure, i.e., upon its capacity to express potentially a new order of
things."707 Thus abstraction is not rooted in perception. No longer is art bound by that
pictorial logic derived from the Cubist-Cézannian analysis of appearances so important to
Greenberg.708 But this further break does not mean an increase in the autonomy of art.
Rather in respect to society, the “prefigurative image” has a moral function; abstraction’s
role is to point to a new order.
The emergence of a prefigurative image was for Paalen associated with the
liberation of a “torrent of imaginative association through the shock of surprise."709 At
first his concern was to go beyond Surrealist egotism to a collective dimension (where “I
is an other”);710 then, invoking totem art, his concern was to extend the collective to the
universal. Pollock would have been drawn to Paalen’s description of how to effect such
an extension:
The innumerable magic practices, in seeking to integrate superior forces
into human life, seek to assimilate the power of other entities to the
individual -- if not to assimilate the individual to extra-human powers. Thus
are combined, an active part: assimilation through a sort of somatic
mimetism (dance movements similar to the movements of animals, all kinds
of mimicry of emotions), with a passive part: mimetism of camouflage
(masks, disquises). These two kinds of mimetism, active and passive, are
the two poles which release the great current of rhythm which, going as far
as trance, in traversing the individual, effaces his personal memory in order
to conjoin it emotionally with the great reservoir of generic memory. Thus
magic might be defined as a sort of affective mimetism through which man
identifies himself with the universe. Through dances, sacrifices, cannibal
repasts, orgies, and divinatory and incantatory rites the great communion is
accomplished -- in a frenetic choreographic action is conjured the power of
the ancestor, of the beast-demon.711
The passage invites us to understand the sacrifices, dances, and rites depicted in
Composition with Scraffito I and II, Figure c. 1944, Night Mist, Night Ceremony, not just
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as aesthetic exercises but as examples of affective mimetism that in Totem Lesson I

conjures “the power of the ancestor” -- and in "Art" releases “the great current of rhythm”
that effaces the personal to join us to “the great reservoir of generic memory.”
This rhythmic current moves through totem art and should move, Paalen thinks,
through modern art, transforming it into a universal art. The goal for him is an abstract art,
which with non-anthropomorphic elements can, nevertheless, carry a human message, and
express cosmic sensations in terms of human emotions.712 The artist organizes these
emotions and affective values -- rhythmically. 713 In “On the Meaning of Cubism” in the
November 1944 Dyn he shows this by analyzing the rhythmic power of Picasso's and
Braque's Analytic Cubism and of Mondrian's non-anthropomorphic compositions.
In his overview of the treatment of space-time in Western painting, Paalen shows
that Western perspective painting had sacrificed time to a greater illusion of space. "And
by the abandon of the time element rhythmic quality was lost; by the static fixation inherent
in the unique point of view of central perspective, the picture no longer showed anything
but frozen movements instead of expressing rhythmically the sensation movement." 714
With the exception of El Greco, whose "dazzling helicoidal rhythms ... are the greatest
space-adventure of painting between the invention of perspective and cubism," it is not
until Analytic Cubism (fig. 12.2) that the mechanical rule of perspective is broken.

Fig. 12.2. Pablo Picasso, "Ma Jolie", Paris, winter 1911-12. Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 25 3/4". The Museum
of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.
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"For in decentralizing plastic action, it obliges the look of the spectator to follow infinitely
interlaced turns and thus reintroduces the time element." 715 He points out that Chinese
painting, never constrained by linear perspective, had always retained its sense of rhythmic
sequence, but with only a relatively two-dimensional sense. Cubist painting on the other
hand had a rich "contrapuntal" space in which depth and rhythm are in balance. This
contrapuntal space struck Paalen with "an almost ritual power of incantation, by a
syncopated rhythm which irresistibly evoked jazz." 716
Pollock loved El Greco. And he certainly loved jazz, playing jazz records, Krasner
remembered, “day and night for three days running, until you thought you would climb the
roof!”717 Of Picasso’s Three Musicians Kurt Seligmann wrote in 1942, "The enchanted
world in which Picasso's three musicians live is only a few feet deep. The sound of their
instruments is a praise of claustration, of happiness within the four studio walls. In our
epoch of air attacks these four walls may crumble."718 Sharing this general sense that the
flat Synthetic Cubist space of Picasso’s Three Musicians was indeed stifling and
crumbling, Paalen proceeded to articulate an appreciation of Analytic Cubist space that
encompassed concerns for the necessity to open up the Cubist surface, as well as for the
affective value of space and the dynamism of space-time. His observation of the
contrapuntal space of Analytic Cubism in which depth and rhythm are in balance
effectively describes, perhaps not just fortuitously, Pollock's new mastery of the three, and,
if you include time, four dimensional axes of his space in ART, weaving rhythms across
the surface, left-right, up-down, and finally in-out. Paalen’s appreciation of Analytic
Cubist space helps us to understand that the analogy between Pollock's ART and Analytic
Cubist composition that can indeed be drawn extends well beyond the Greenbergian
observation of a similar "articulation of evenly distributed surface accents." 719
Nor does this notion of all-over evenness account for the tautness that sustains
Pollock’s experiments in automatism. Paalen’s description of Cubist space-time in terms
of space-light, and what he had to say about crystalline structure must have fascinated
Pollock. Paalen explains that because light and shade in Cubist painting are no longer
constrained to outline a given form and volume, "the great novelty of Cubist painting
consists in the fact that light becomes a constitutive element of the pictorial texture, that it
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enters as a dynamic factor in the structure of the picture ... light, for the first time free to
seek adventure in the crystalline web of the spatial axes, vanishes and comes back, goes
and comes like a drop of water eternalized in a block of quartz." 720 Paalen points out a
"structural unity like crystal" in Cubist composition, "making one think of that constancy
of the interfacial angles that is the fundamental law of crystallography." The presence of
a small but emphatic diamond in the lower left of ART reminds us that Pollock continues
to think in terms of the formation of "the diamond body," and its three-dimensional axial
structure. In ART the emotive experience amplified by Pollock's mastery of a new
dynamism of light and dark lives around a now only implicit but still present diamond
structure, light now free in Paalen’s words “to seek adventure in the crystalline web.”
Paalen had likened the painter to a diamond cutter who “with the aid of geometric
models, discovers the grain of the crystal. At the risk of ruining the stone, he has to
determine perfectly the line of cleavage, and with a single tap of the mallet decides its fate."
He points to "the unique glory of Picasso. ... he knew what tap was needed to free
painting."721 On the other hand Picasso failed to free painting from "subject," "in the sense
of images identifiable with entities pre-existent to the picture; entities which do not
necessarily belong to the external world, mythological and dream personages are equally
subjects."722 Picasso failed, according to Paalen, because of fear. And Paalen describes
Picasso's fear in terms of a monster. "Unable to make up his mind to let Venus go or to
renounce his liberty as a creator, Picasso came to create hybrid beings. Certainly it is one
thing to melt two heads in one -- and another to make a two-headed calf (a bad joke better
left to God), but fear, mother of monsters, is too powerful in these days not to take
sometimes in its trap the spirit that cannot renounce the illusion of being perfectly free. He
who believes himself absolute master of the paradox at another turn becomes its victim." 723
Unable “to let Venus go,” unable “to renounce his liberty as a creator,” he becomes the
minotaur. The struggle with the minotaur is the struggle of the artistic will to power that
cannot accept the lack of power so manifest in its bondage to Venus.
Bernice Rose points to Picasso's engraving Minotauromachy (see fig. 9.9) as a
starting point for ART.724 Certainly Pollock, just beginning to work in this medium, would
have looked closely at the master's print. It, too, powerfully states a crisis of consciousness
and fear in terms of man and beast, and light and dark. Picasso ultimately resolved the
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crisis by putting the minotaur to death in his art. But to put the minotaur to death is to give
in to that fear of not being master in the house of the self. And if such lack of mastery is
the human condition, to kill the minotaur is to mutilate the self. Pollock had been aware
of Picasso's crisis and the challenge of meeting it in his own terms since the animal imagery
of 1943. In ART Pollock sought to vanquish the fear that held Picasso at bay, commune
with the beast, and in Paalen's terms move toward a realm of freedom beyond an
identifiable subject, a freedom beyond the self-centered ego that refuses to let go.
For taking this step Paalen praises Kandinsky and Mondrian. Their courage
allowed them to abandon "the causal development of plastic relations," in which form, light
and shade are causally linked to the appearance of given things, and to arrive at non-
figurative art. According to Paalen this paralleled the abandonment of the causal concept
by modern microphysics.725 The same revolution in both science and art pushes the
abandonment of anthropomorphic concepts and in art this opens up the expression of
cosmic sensations. He singles out Mondrian for special praise. "... the necessity of the
liberation of rhythm has probably never been better understood than by Mondrian." 726 But
he goes on to criticize Mondrian for believing that he had discovered the means of absolute
plastic value which permitted the expression of the platonic essence of things. This led
him "to exclude as plastically improper almost all that makes the interest of art.” This
critique of Mondrian's art as overly reductive points to another way in which Paalen may
have been helpful to Pollock as he was poised on the threshold of non-figurative art, by
encouraging the sort of open-ended, complex, rich articulation of structure so evident in
Hayter's mastery of the dynamism of line and concrete construction of space.

4. The Dynamic of Line

Paalen’s admiration for Hayter’s work (fig. 3) is evident in his illustrations of
Hayter’s pen drawings in Dyn.727 Pollock himself had known about Hayter, who had
moved his workshop from Paris to New York in 1940, since the late 1930's, first through
his work, somewhat later through their mutual friend John Graham. 728 The exhibition at
the Museum of Modern Art, "Hayter and Studio 17: New Directions in Gravure" (June 28
- October 3, 1944), further stimulated Pollock's interest. Hayter's workshop, relocated in
the fall of 1944 at 43 East 8th St. almost directly across the street from Pollock's apartment,
 252

was patronized by artists of different nationalities -- Masson, Matta, and Noguchi were
frequent visitors -- functioning as a European cafe, a place to meet and talk, just the sort of
clubby place Pollock tended to avoid. But his friend Kadish, who had by late 1944 become
one of Hayter's assistants, persuaded Pollock to come; "I inveigled Jackson into trying it
because I thought his work had a kinship to Hayter's prints," he recalls. 729 The techniques
of printmaking promulgated by Hayter were indeed just the tools that Pollock needed at
the time. Pollock’s phrase “Technique is the result of need” rings true. 730 He needed tools
to get at what Paalen had called “the great currents of rhythm.”
Hayter intended Atelier 17 to be a place where mature artists could make prints and
experiment with various printmaking techniques. He gave basic technical instruction,
answered questions, and made suggestions, most often in respect to a particular print being
worked on. Hayter's ideas on art had a strong influence on the artists who worked with
him and he himself recalled that "Jackson Pollock always claimed that he had two masters,
Benton and me." 731 Whether in the workshop, or while drinking beer together at
neighborhood bars, or through the five articles that Hayter wrote in 1944-46, Pollock had
ample opportunity to learn Hayter's ideas as well as techniques. 732
Hayter had exhibited with the Surrealists in Paris in 1933. The titles of his works
in the early 1940's indicate a continued interest in mythic content: Myth of Creation,
Laocoon, Cronos, Sphinx. He, too, believed in a collective unconscious and attributed a
higher order of reality to the images or patterns that arose from it. 733 Like Paalen, he
concentrated on the challenge of exploring what he called the "space of the imagination,"
with its subjective and universal dimensions.

Fig. 12.3. Stanley W. Hayter, Untitled, 1944. Illustration in View 4 (1944).

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"In the unconscious mind one might expect to find trace of the experience of space derived
from other species from which the human has evolved, the freedom of movement in three
dimensions in water reconquered in some respect by the conquest of the air …. It can travel
forward or backward in time as it can travel inward or outward or both, or into an unlimited
series of dimensions." He concludes, "Thus the space of the imagination contains an
essential mutation and ambiguity; that order of ambiguity that permits the poet to imply an
infinite series of linked consequences in a single phrase." 734 How does an artist create such
a fluid multi-dimensional and suggestive time-space? First Hayter asserts the importance
of movement: "Without motion, in the sense of physical displacement in the medium, the
experience of space is incomplete. In this respect, the recognition of space can be
assimilated to movement itself -- to the primary function of life."735 Rather than emphasize
space-light and rhythm, Picasso, and Mondrian as Paalen does, Hayter focuses on the new
space articulated by Kandinsky, Miro, and Klee, especially on the formal tool of line and
on automatism.
On the occasion of Kandinsky's death on December 13, 1944 and the Memorial
Exhibition held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in the early spring of 1945,
Hayter wrote an article, "The Language of Kandinsky." Rather than criticize Kandinsky,
as Greenberg later did, for a failure “to grasp the pictorial logic that guided the Cubist-
Cezannian analysis of appearances,” Hayter’s structural analysis of Kandinsky's space
detailed a "different order of space" (fig. 12.4).736

Fig. 12.4. Wassily Kandinsky, Light Picture (Helles Bild), December 1913. Oil and natural resin on
canvas, 30.6 x 39.4". Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding
Collection. By gift 37.244.
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There "the basal plane is eliminated and the space figured appears not only to be continuous
in all directions, but its coordinates are no longer referred to a solid plane. Like inter-stellar
space it is to be referred only to remote points in terms of motion." 737 In such scattered
works as the multi-media drawing CR 723 (1944), the overpainted engraving CR 990 (c.
1945),738 and in numerous drawings of 1946, Pollock was already headed towards the kind
of open, transparent, ambiguous space that fascinated Hayter, who points out that this is
also the space found in Miro's 1941 Constellations series, gouaches that were being shown
in New York in early 1945. 739 Predisposed to seeing the indeterminate "space of the
imagination," Hayter writes convincingly of Miro's and Kandinsky's "demonstration of
space as a transparent medium by points or small elements suspended in depth with a wide
movement through the space."740 Line moves in three-dimensions; color further serves to
situate elements in space; movement itself is figured with a series of points, or with traces
like trajectories, or with an unbalance of tension between forms; suspended from a fixed
point like a Calder mobile, the elements of the composition move as a balance or
pendulum.741 In CR 723 and CR 990 Pollock begins to experiment with how free-floating
color could contribute to the construction of an open space, but his primary interest in the
engravings is Hayter's preferred tool, line. 742
Both in "Line and Space of the Imagination" (December 1944) and "The
Convention of Line" (March 1945) Hayter is eloquent on the versatility of line. Line, he
insists, "is not primarily associated with the exact reproduction of immediate visual
experience because the trace resembles astonishingly few phenomena in external nature."
Thus it "becomes at once a convention in its use in representation" and a very evocative
one at that.743 The "space of the imagination" is not limited in direction or duration; line
acquires the capacity to suggest ambiguity. For instance, when two lines are drawn to
converge, we might read, following the familiar experience of perspective, the point of
convergence as more distant than the open ends of the lines. On the other hand, we can as
easily read the point as projecting in front of the plane of the drawing. Such ambiguity,
here of direction, "gives us an enormous positive advantage in the description of the space
of the imagination." 744
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Hayter also calls attention to the temporal significance of line: "when we employ
such expressions as a line of action, a line of development, a musical line, we are no longer
referring to a displacement in space alone -- the narrative sense of a displacement in time
is involved." 745 Line "can be taken as the description of past achievement, as the railway
line where trains have passed, as the unravelled clue of Ariadne which permitted the
repetition of the act already performed," it can be "considered to travel ahead of the
movement of the individual experiencing them." 746 The elementary gesture of tracing a
line permits thus an "imaginative domination of space and time," echoing the magical
power that the line gave primitive man over space and experience. 747
Hayter understood printmaking as a privileged arena for pursuing the expressive
possibilities of line. "Particularly in engraving, which is essentially the art of line, of the
line in three-dimensional space, it became necessary to exploit the enormous possibilities
of indicating the properties of matter, force, motion, and space." 748 He had newcomers to
the workshop do an automatic drawing, which, done on a zinc plate prepared with a soft
ground, was to utilize all the available space, but not suggest outlines, objects, texture, or
light and shade.749 Once the drawing was made, Hayter encouraged the newcomer to
examine the plate in a mirror, since a print made from it would be a mirror image. He then
would elucidate the principles involved: "orientation signifies direction only with regard
to the position of the spectator (where he is); direction as north-going or south-going
(where he goes); cheirality, right- or left-handedness; velocity, how far in how long; and
rhythm, the continued sense of how often."750 Pollock's understanding of the axial structure
of the canvas was responsive to all of these.
Exploration of the diagonal, already evident in Two, allows Pollock to further
engage horizontal and vertical forces in a dynamic interplay. Hayter explained that an
observer's eye had a tendency to follow a diagonal from north-west to south-east in a
descending, from south-west to north-east in an ascending direction. He also had done
experiments with a gestalt psychologist at the New School in 1940-41 and discovered that
"the psychological importance of the sensation of rising or falling is far greater to the
human intelligence than the direction from left to right.”751 Strong diagonal movement, in
particular north-west to south-east, is a new aspect of the axial organization of ART and is
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used by Pollock to dramatize the theme of descent, a dynamic of line that Hayter
undoubtedly brought to his attention.
Hayter understood how to express, not only displacement or motion across a
surface, but in and out, particularly rhythmic motion.752 In Totem Lesson I Pollock had
discovered a new sense of depth by exploiting the full range of tonal values. The challenge
he faced was how to move in that three-dimensional space of the imagination. Hayter
helped him meet that challenge. He pointed out that certain types of curves cannot be seen
as lying on the surface on which they are drawn or printed, but are immediately understood
as being convex or concave and, if intersected in particular ways by other linear elements,
can be made to be seen in reverse or ambiguously, both as convex or concave. These
swooping three-dimensional curves are found throughout ART. In-out rhythms also result
from "the alternation in black and white of elements seen successively as objects or as
background."753 Pollock had already used oscillating ambiguities of black and white to
open up the flat surface and to break down the distinctions of figure and ground, e. g. in
Night Sounds (c. 1944). Now in ART he achieves an in-out rhythm with the play of black
and white values and the accompanying ambiguity of figure and ground, in conjunction
with swooping curves.
This achievement presupposes a learning process. Pollock's first engravings had
offered little more than linear stick figures (see for example CR 1075); in such engravings
as CR 1070 and CR 1074 he worked his way from schematic figuration to a more
sculptured, light-dark patterning, achieving a greater sense of depth; but the dynamism so
striking in ART still eluded him.754 In the end it was the medium of engraving itself that
provided Pollock with the key to meeting that challenge. Hayter had observed the unusual
role of line in the construction of three-dimensional space in line engravings. Depending
on the pressure put on the burin, the depth of the cut in the metal plate varies, and
consequently so does the height of the relief of the printed line. This constitutes in Hayter's
words a "concrete construction of space." 755 As Sweeney remarked, "line engraving exists
in a middle realm between relief-sculpture and drawing."756 But the high and low-relief
printed lines have a capacity for spatial ambiguity that Hayter valued for its potential in
describing "the space of the imagination." The printed line in higher relief can be read as
nearer to the plane of the image than the line in lower relief; on the other hand it can just
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as easily be read as more remote (see fig. 12. 3). Pollock attempts to take advantage of this
phenomenon in the two states of CR 1080 (P18) (fig. 12.5) and CR 1081.

Fig.12.5. Untitled, CR 1080 (P18), c. 1944-45. Engraving and drypoint, printed in black. First state,
printed by Pollock and S. W. Hayter at Atelier, 11 3/4 x 8 3/4". Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harold
Rosenberg. Gift of the artist.

He engraves the plates with lines of distinctly different depths, creating an effect of layered
depth, magically integrated by the ambiguity of what is near and what is far. While far
from resolved here or in ART, where it also occurs, there is an intimation that the
manipulation of the thickness and thinness of lines and their concrete variations in relief
might contribute, as it later does in Pollock's poured paintings, to the "concrete construction
of space" and integration of the "in" and "out" of a surface.
In ART line not only moves back and forth along the horizontal axis, up and down
along the vertical axis, sweeps back and forth along the diagonal axes, especially the
northwest-southeast axis, but also curves in and out of the surface in an ambiguous three-
dimensional space, the spatial rhythm being amplified with tonal variations of black and
white. Hayter's understanding of rhythm helps us understand Pollock's spatial elaboration:
"Rhythm can be defined as the repetition of similar elements at regular or recognizably
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related intervals."757 For rhythm to be seen in graphic terms as an in-out pulsation, "there
must exist in the elements themselves a certain state of labile equilibrium. Examples of
this sort of equilibrium are familiar to us in the fluctuation of potential in alternating
current, in the swing of a pendulum between two extremes of apparent rest, in the vibration
of a stretched cord." 758 The movement between opposites establishes an interval that can
then be rhythmically repeated and varied.
What we know already is that Pollock conceived of his essays in automatism as a
dialogue between male and female opposites, which provide the two extremes between
which the rhythmic current will pulse and play. What initially appears to be an automatic
doodle in CR 1079 (P17) (fig. 12.6), on further inspection reveals a new level of awareness
in Pollock's understanding of the power of line to join opposites.

Fig. 12.6. Untitled, CR 1079 (P17), c.1944-45 (printed posthumously 1967). Engraving and drypoint,
printed in brown ink, 8 15/16 x 11 3/4". Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Lee Krasner Pollock.

The most deeply cut and heavily inked line in the print is positioned in its center, traversing
the horizontal axis from left to right in two rising waves. The foetal-dots that he often used
for the female invite us to see the central trough as a "maw-womb."759 The line curves and
the foetal-dots that he often used for the female continues down on a diagonal axis to the
bottom of the central vertical axis, where it loops around, forming a two-eyed head, the
exact head of the two-eyed animal phallus in ART, and moves up the central vertical axis,
converting dramatically as it exits the maw to a less deeply cut and lightly inked line, which
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becomes an upward opening crescent, from which exits an upward pointing arrow. The
imagery hints at the theme of sexual possession, but more importantly, the continuous
movement of the line conveys the dynamics of such union -- as a descent followed by an
ascent, or death followed by a rebirth, given formal expression as a thick dark line
becoming a thin light line.
That Pollock did have such associations with the transformation of a thick dark into
a thin light line is clear in two other prints in which we get a sense of the personal narrative
with which he is struggling. In CR 1085 (fig. 12.7) a male is depicted standing, his bird-
head slung backward, a coiling snake striking with its knife-like tail at his jugular.

Fig. 12.7. CR 1085 (P21), c. 1944-45. Engraving and drypoint, printed in black, 11 15/16 x 8 7/8". Collection
of the Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Lee Krasner Pollock.
Fig.12.8. CR 1083 (P20), c. 1944-45, Engraving and drypoint, printed in black, 11 13/16 x 8 13/16".
Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Lee Krasner Pollock.

His protruding phallus, emphatically engraved with heavy lines, is "x"ed or cut with two
lines, one of which is particularly deeply gouged into the plate. The large diamond shape
in the lower left is simply bisected into black and white halves. In CR 1083 (fig. 12.8), the
companion print, the diamond shape is transformed into a rounder, more richly modeled
form. Such richer modeling is amplified in the central passage of the print, the protruding
phallus this time rendered more as a finger with nail, whose tip is transected with an
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emphatic line. The overcoming of this castration threat is here effected by the continuing
ascent of the deep line that does the cutting or castrating and its transformation into a lightly
engraved line that contours the edge of a triumphantly waving four-fingered hand in the
upper right. This transition from death-threat to rebirth is also a transition from a deep dark
line to a thin lighter line. In the engraved line he discovered a tool that could convey
dynamism in the relationship between opposites. Pollock now manages to compress the
death-rebirth pattern that has been so persistent in his work into one continuous
transformative movement in a three-dimensional space.
The dynamic relationship between opposites that Pollock had explored in
sequential narrative in different canvases and most recently in the prints of this series, in
CR 1079 is conveyed with a single line, the equivalent of motion in graphic expression that
Hayter had analyzed. That complex dynamic linear trace, moving left to right, down to up
and in and out (thick to thin), anticipates the fluid poured gestures that are so important in
his mature work. As T.J. Clark observes, “expressiveness in Pollock often hinges on the
kind or degree of three-dimensionality that is given the throws of paint.” 760 In ART Pollock
starts by exploiting laboriously the “all-over” movement of the engraved line to enact the
union of opposites he desires and dreams of. He is beginning to create a new whole: an
all-over, though still semi-abstract, configuration of flowing lines and flickering lights and
darks, that is at the same time a condensation of that union of opposites he so passionately
pursued. It is no wonder then that he inscribed the letters "A", "R", "T", in the lower left
of the print.
But Pollock did not find the process of printmaking sufficiently responsive. As a
painter the challenge was to realize the promise of linear automatism that he had explored
in that difficult medium within the material thickness of paint. 761 And it is to this challenge
that he turns in two paintings that he included in the March exhibition: The Portrait of HM,
and There were 7 in 8.

5. Paint and Abstraction

In Portrait of H. M. 1945 (fig. 12.9) the viewer is confronted with a field of churning
paint, at first glance a "totally arbitrary and claustrophobic pattern." 762 Its black and white
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lines, tilted grey planes, small dabs of blue, green, yellow, lavender scattered throughout
create an all-over and chaotic impression.

Fig. 12.9. Portrait of H. M., 1945. Oil on canvas, 36 x 43". University of Iowa Museum of Art,
Iowa City. Gift of Peggy Guggenheim.

Over time, however, the viewer becomes aware of swirling, rectilinear rhythms that rotate
around the striking eye-like white center of the canvas. Notice, for instance, in the lower
portion of the canvas the long white diagonal line that meets another white line at little
more than a right angle, establishing a rotational pattern that continues on the left in the
arcing whitish-grey planes and on the top in the arcing black lines. Once we focus on these
planes, they expand into an oval that echoes the oval in Pasiphae.
The strong presence of the diagonals presupposes Pollock’s exploration of a process
of descent and ascent in the looping movement of CR 1079, elaborated in Totem Lesson
II. Diagonal movement now works itself out in the third dimension. First of all there is a
layering and intermingling of paint that proceeds from the bottom white ground in the
center to a layer of browns, light greys and blues; it in turn supports a welter of greens,
yellows, and lavenders, caught up in the welter of black and white lines applied on the
surface of the painting. Black is somewhat more dominant at its top edge. The layered
oppositions of black and white found in Totem Lesson II are thus traversed in reverse, not
black (back) to white (front), but white (back) to black (front). Moreover, black and white
are now in constant dialogue, intermingling throughout: sometimes black and white lines
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parallel each other, or white lines shoot through black circles; but it is primarily in the
tilting triangular and angular whitish-grey planes that the opposites merge, as white and
black effect a union of opposites along the diagonals of the composition. An erotic charge
still animates this swirling composition, as is clear in one of the black and white engravings
that served as its prototype, CR 1080. But there one can still read the imagery, the headlong
dive of the male into the female body. 763 Now such imagery is replaced with a field of
churning paint in which opposites merge. No figuration is visible.
Is Portrait of H.M. a non-objective canvas? If so, it is one of Pollock’s first. But
what about the title? Does H.M. refer to Helen Marot, the older woman friend who
befriended Pollock in the late 1930s? 764 Clearly this is not a portrait in the usual sense.
Ann Gibson observes that the ostensible use of a prototypically referential mode such as
portraiture in an abstract work such as this is a way of calling attention to the very fact that
this art does not represent as we expect portraits to do. "The implication is that the art is
ineffable: a thing-in itself, like a person, rather than something that refers to a person." 765
But does this mean that Portrait of H.M. does not refer at all? In this painting Pollock does
not so much abstract from a pre-existent image or object, as present, in Paalen’s words,
“through the specific means of art, a direct visualization of forces which move our bodies
and minds.”766 As such a visualization of forces the Portrait of H.M. embodies some of
the energies Pollock associated with the female force that had occupied him over the years
-- H.M. may thus refer to “Her Majesty”767 -- and that Helen Marot embodied in a way that
he found calming and reassuring.
Paalen had praised Mondrian for his courage in entering the realm of non-
objectivity, and called for the comparison of pictorial structures as an evaluative tool when
judging non-objective painting. Pollock himself may have had in mind just such
comparison as he worked out his own kind of non-objectivity.768 Mondrian, too, sought
dynamism, but restricted it to the dynamic equilibrium of vertical and horizontals lines and
primary colors, the absolute plastic values on which he insisted because he took them for
an expression of the Platonic essence of things. To Mondrian the diagonal was anathema.
Although he permitted 45 degree diagonals to define the pictorial field of some sixteen
diamond-shaped paintings during the course of his career, he never admitted it within the
pictorial field, for such a diagonal would have undermined the equilibrium necessary to the
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expression of pure reality, breaking “the relationship with architecture and its vertical and
horizontal dominants.”769 That Mondrian’s explorations of the relation of horizontal and
vertical were important to Pollock he later admitted to Tony Smith. 770
What role does the diagonal play in Portrait of H.M. where Pollock for the first time
clearly admits it into the dynamic three-dimensional diamond structure of his picture?
Linking the poles of the axes, left-right, up-down, and additionally in-out, it functions
inside the pictorial field to build a dynamic circulatory structure, capable of linking and
transforming opposites, acknowledging them even as it transforms them into new wholes.
Pollock thus embraces time and transformation. While for Mondrian "time and subjective
vision veil the true reality," 771 for Pollock it is through time and subjectivity, by confronting
his fears of the female, of the material realm, that he pursues an understanding of universal
dynamism as a process of material metamorphosis. His preoccupation with sexual union
remains evident, especially in the way the wedge-like plane in the lower left relates to the
oval and the white triangle in the center.

6. “I choose to veil”
If in Portrait of H.M. Pollock has gained a certain freedom in discovering the play
of opposites within paint, he still has not worked out for himself a way to advance beyond
the repetitive rotation of this abstract structure to an abstract automatism. This he begins
to do in There were 7 in 8 1945 (fig. 12.10). About this painting, and not the poured
paintings as has sometimes been thought, Pollock made his well-known statement: “I
choose to veil the imagery.” As in ART, some imagery is still detectable beneath the web.
Pollock’s statement underscores both the decision to go abstract, but also the relation
between imagery below and the veil of automatist line. This relation bears attention. Many
interpreters of Pollock’s art see a divide here. Pepe Karmel, for example, sees Pollock
practicing two separate and unrelated styles: a flat figural style, exemplified by Totem
Lesson I and Totem Lesson II, and an interlace style, exemplified by his 1944-45
engravings, some 1946 drawings, and the mature poured paintings. Pollock has to set
“interlacing aside in order to create flat figures”, and has “to sacrifice this [flat] style -- a
successful one -- when he returned to the interlace in 1947.” 772 There were 7 in 8 thus
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provides an occasion for understanding more about the connection between the evolution
of Pollock’s imagery and his advance to an automatist abstraction.

Fig. 12.10. There Were Seven in Eight, 1945. Oil on canvas, 43 x 102". The Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Mr. and Mrs. Walter Bareiss Fund and purchase.

According to Krasner, Pollock actually started There were 7 in 8 in the fall of 1943,
beginning the composition with "more or less recognizable imagery -- heads, parts of the
body, fantastic creatures.” He then abandoned this imagistic composition, returning to it
many months later, finishing it in time for inclusion in his second one-man show in March
1945. Krasner inquired why Pollock had not stopped when the images were "exposed"; it
was at this juncture that he replied "I choose to veil the imagery." 773
The painting's large horizontal format and genesis in the fall of 1943 link it to
Search for a Symbol, Pasiphae and Mural. Especially noticeable in There were 7 in 8 is an
asymmetry reminiscent of Mural, more perpendicular forms on the right giving way to
more curved and loosely organized ones on the left. The right half of the canvas itself
breaks into a “triptych”: each panel framed by tree-like perpendiculars, the central panel
presided over by a large white angular diamond shape. In the upper part of the right-hand
panel a linear head-like configuration is striking; another such “head” in the central panel
is suggested below the diamond shape, the bottom wedge of which thrusts down towards
this head. The third panel nearest the center of the canvas is the most compressed.
This panel structure is less pronounced on the left half of the canvas, as larger
rhythms take over. There, much as the diamond does on the right, a yellow crescent moon
presides. But it is caught up in larger diagonal movements. One mounts from the bottom
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of the central vertical axis of the canvas, where an eye is visible, moving in coiling rhythms
upwards towards the left through the curves of the yellow moon to what is a white “head”
in the upper left of the canvas. This head can be seen as that of the female personage,
standing as it does on the female side of the canvas, in association with the moon. A
crisscrossing diagonal movement fans back across the canvas, from the footing of that
personage, via the moon, towards a second white diamond shape, its labyrinthine diagonals
opening out and upwards, under presiding ceremonial eyes. Also converging on this
diamond shape is an arcing rhythm, that moves across the top of the canvas, from the more
static right, breaking through its central tree-like perpendicular with curving and angular
marks, propelled in part by the arc of the white motif, just to right of the upper central axis,
with its three pronged appendages reaching both down and up. A relation between the
more rigid right and the more fluid left is thus established that echoes his old theme of
sexual opposites and union.
Traces of images such as heads, eyes, moon, diamonds, suggest that the veiled
imagery of There were 7 in 8 echoes that of ART, the hero's pursuit of a union for the sake
of the formation of the diamond-body, a pursuit involving risk-taking, letting go, and
recovery, death and rebirth. A drawing CR 750 (c. 1945) (fig. 12.11), dating from the same
time casts light on the painting.

Fig. 12.11. Untitled, CR 750, c. 1945. Black ink on paper, 20 x 14". Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of
Lee Krasner Pollock, 1982.
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In this drawing too the diamond figures importantly. In its lower register the diamond is
positioned at the bottom of a vertical alignment topped by the moon. From a position atop
this vertical axis a human figure falls, purposefully drawn, very much on the diagonal, head
separated from the torso, and marked by one wide open eye, as though to say, to pursue the
diamond, one must be willing to take a fall, to lose one's head. Veiled that would also seem
to be the message of There were 7 in 8.
How is the automatist veil related to such imagery? In There were 7 in 8 the white
sized ground of the canvas is visible throughout. On it Pollock drew his heads, eyes, moons
etc. with thick lines in black oil paint. These he chose to veil with a layer of scattered
colored patches that look as if they had been roughly crayoned, followed by a topmost
layer: a thinner scribbled black linear web. One particularly noticeable trajectory in this
web leads from the lower “head” on the right of the canvas upwards on a diagonal towards
the head of the female personage. In a more abstract, freer, and simplified way its rhythm
echoes what is already articulated by the symbolic positioning of the figures with their
thick lines. In dialogue with the thicker bottom lines of figuration, the rhythms of the top
scribbles effect not only the "in" and "out" of a surface, but also figuration and abstraction.
Although the abstract “music” of Pollock’s scribbled lines is decidedly scratchy, it
accompanies the figuration below it much as a musical setting accompanies the words of a
poem, even if it may veil them, making them difficult to hear.
Looking at There were 7 in 8 in light of the narrative that appears both in the
drawing CR 750 and harks back to Art is strengthened by Pollock’s suggestive title. In an
alchemist’s quest, 7 steps are needed to reach the goal of “8”. Masson's hero in Mythology
of Being traverses 7 stages to grasp the diamond. The goal of the quest here becomes a
pictorial problem: the ambition to transpose all that he has discovered through his images
and their placement within the canvas into a free and abstract linear play. And this is to be
done not just as a release into an abstract realm, but also as a casting back of the top veiling
lines into a relationship with the bottom figuration. This casting back makes a figure eight,
if you will, encompassing imagery and abstraction in a dialogue promising that the
thoughts and feelings associated with the imagery will be translated into an abstract
automatism.
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7. Non-Objectivity
In his review of the exhibitions of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Pollock Greenberg
noted "The hope shining from Piet Mondrian's white canvases with their criss-crossed
bands of black .... Mondrian's pictures are an attempt to create conditions of existence and
stabilize life itself." 774 If Mondrian’s urge is to stabilize life, Pollock, in this respect closer
to Kandinsky, wants art to embrace process and time. But beyond both Mondrian and
Kandinsky is his desire to encompass the whole of what it is to be human – including the
full power of eros and an awareness of death. These Pollock will confront through his
engagement with matter.
For Kandinsky and Mondrian, the stuff of paint was never that important.
Kandinsky ultimately discounted his material means. "... the form (material substance) in
general is not the most important, but rather the content (spirit)." 775 And though Mondrian
insisted on the concretization, through color and line, of the universal unity-duality, pure
plastics were but a means to the expression of pure reality. For Pollock, however, paint
was not something that you just used to express what you had to say. Rather it was an actor
in the dialectic that was his art; it was the matter that was to be transformed in the dialectic
of matter and spirit. It was the very vehicle of Pollock's quest for redemption as an artist-
man. The creation of the diamond-body in art was understood by him as also a self-
creation, an equilibration of instincts and an ideal freedom in the world of matter. The
challenge was to achieve this in the realm of matter. He had begun to do this in Portrait of
H.M. but without the desired spontaneity and automatist freedom. This Pollock "outlined"
in There were 7 in 8.
The plastic experimentation in There were 7 in 8, while bold, is admittedly crude.
The effect of Pollock’s attempt to handle an abstract painted line with an all-over
automatist freedom is of a black linear scribble, topping the layer of rough color patches,
topping the images. The promise of the fluid very light yellow-green matière cupped in
the number 4 in Totem Lesson I is still distant. The color patches are not integrated into
the linear impulse. The challenge of generating a fluid movement in space-matter, posed
in Totem Lesson II and There were 7 in 8, remains largely unmet. For Pollock this
challenge is, as always, not purely formal. His art had always built on his explorations of
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his thoughts and feeling in symbolic imagery. Only once these thoughts and feelings are
better understood, will Pollock attempt to transpose them into what he takes to be the more
universal language of an abstract rhythmic expression in painting. But first he must pursue
his images, the words if you will, of his future musical expression in painting.
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Chapter 13
Development of the Foetus

1. Marriage
Pollock’s third one-man show had been scheduled for April 1946 at Art of This
Century. It was preceded by what was for Pollock an unusually positive period, marked
by three important changes in his life. He and Lee Krasner spend a happy summer in East
Hampton in 1945, they proceed to buy a house there early that fall, and they get married in
October before making the move in November. He immediately felt at home in the new
environment. In the interview published in the February 1944 issue of Arts and
Architecture he had commented: "I have a definite feeling for the West: the vast
horizontality of the land, for instance; here only the Atlantic ocean gives you that." 776 In
the summer of 1944 Pollock and Lee had hiked the dunes, swam in the ocean, collected
shells along the shore,777 but there were also problems, especially his drinking. The end of
the following summer drew Pollock and Krasner once again to the ocean. This time they
spent around six weeks with their friends Reuben and Barbara Kadish and their two
children. The Kadishes had sublet a fishing shack from William Hayter at Louse Point on
Gardiners Bay in East Hampton. 778 For Pollock it was an idyllic time. World War II had
ended in August 1945, almost unnoticed, certainly unheralded in his art. They clammed,
fished, biked around to Harold and May Rosenberg's place on Neck Path, where Jackson
doted on their three-year old daughter Patia, and had weekend barbeques with the
Hayters.779 Barbara Kadish remembered “a lovely summer -- not the two weeks it has been
called, or the mere weekend Lee remembered -- and Jack and Lee were very friendly. I
never understood why people say awful stuff about Jack; I just remember this lovely person
and what a nice time we all had." 780 Only Pollock's getting drunk on too much beer in the
company of Reuben Kadish and "the boys" marred the visit, especially in the eyes of Lee,
who wanted to remove Jackson from all temptations to drink. 781
In late August Krasner and Pollock happened to accompany the Kadishes on a
house-hunting expedition. Shortly after being back in New York Lee, thinking that there
would be less chance of drinking and more chance of Jackson painting, proposed that they
sublet their 8th Street apartment and rent a house in The Springs for the winter. "Leave
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New York? Are you crazy?" was Pollock's initial response. But within a week, he changed
his mind. He wanted not only to move to Long Island, but even to buy a house. Lee moved
quickly, and within a short time they had found on Fireplace Road in Springs a handsome,
solid-looking farmhouse. Its disadvantages were that it had no bathroom and no heat. But
it was set on five open acres, with old trees in the front yard, a barn (which the following
summer Pollock would convert into his studio) in the back, and a breathtaking sweep of
grass down to Accabonac Creek and the harbor beyond. After some persuasion by Lee,
Peggy Guggenheim lent them $2000 for the down payment, and worked out a new, two-
year contract with Pollock. She raised his stipend from $150 to $300, less a deduction
toward repayment of the loan. In exchange Pollock was to give her his total output, except
for one painting a year to be retained by Lee. In early November they made the move. By
Thanksgiving they were sufficiently settled in their new home to invite Pollock's family
for dinner. Years later, in explaining his sudden decision to move, Pollock confided to
Jeffrey Potter, a friend and neighbor in Springs, that after three days "on the sofa [in the
8th Street apartment] he realized two things: he would always be homeless inside; outside
he had found home."782 Potter wonders, “Did he mean Lee or East Hampton? It wasn't the
kind of thing you asked Jackson.”
Lee and Jackson married on October 25, 1945, before making the move. For three
years Lee had been against it, then she suddenly issued "an ultimatum -- either we get
married or we split." 783 Later she attributed her startling reversal to the death of her father
in November 1944. "At that point it just snapped and suddenly I wanted to be married." 784
There was also Jackson's concern for their new neighbors' sense of propriety that led them
to discuss marriage.785 Lee recalled: "I said [to Jackson] 'You will have to make the
decision.' He said to me, 'I have made the decision. We get married.'" 786 Lee proposed a
civil ceremony, but Jackson insisted on a church ceremony. "City Hall?” he objected.
“That's a place to get a dog license. This has got to be a church wedding or else no wedding
at all."787 Lee and May Rosenberg finally found a Dutch Reform church whose minister
was willing to marry a "non-practicing Jew and an unbaptized Presbyterian." 788 The
Church required two witnesses. Again Pollock had definite views, this time echoing the
predominant role of the female, most recently that of the positive totem mother, in his art.
May Rosenberg recalls, "Lee wanted Peggy Guggenheim, Harold Rosenberg and me as
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witnesses. Jackson wanted only me. Lee was taken aback at not having Harold, but
Jackson said it would just be the three of us at the wedding. Lee still wanted Peggy, just
had to have her; then Jackson weakened because Peggy was advancing them money. But
then Peggy backed out, so the three of us went and the church cleaning woman was the
second witness. The minister gave the most beautiful speech about 'We are all different
yet one.' Then I took the three of us to lunch -- Jackson didn't want to call Harold -- and it
was all very moving." 789 In another recollection, May Rosenberg reiterates, "It was a
beautiful ceremony. The minister made a beautiful speech. He spoke about religion, and
their religions, and God. It was beautiful. I was transformed." 790
The promise of the marriage and the move to the country would seem to be reflected
in the euphoric mood of an untitled drawing that I shall refer to as The Shaman, CR 741
(c. 1945) (fig. 13.1).791

Fig. 13.1. "The Shaman", CR 741, c. 1945. Ink and colored pencils on paper, 20 1/2 x 25 7/8". The
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Lee Krasner Pollock, 1982.

Two figures are depicted walking on a diagonal as though on a path through a fantastic
landscape. On the left is the bird-shaman with beaked head, shown holding or is it pierced
by what is both wing and feathered arrow, possessing the masculine, even phallic,
significance it held in She-Wolf. A slightly smaller human figure guides the shaman-hero.
One can assume the figure to be female, given Pollock's traditional juxtaposition of male
and female. Here she fulfills the role of guide, directing the shaman-hero towards the right,
which is dominated by a strange configuration somewhat like a totem pole, a vertical
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alignment of two major motifs, the sun wheel on the bottom, a head and crescent-womb
shape with its dotted striations on the top. The shaman-hero’s journey is towards union.
The crescent moon hugging a star presides over the whole scene. That the desired union
might be procreative is suggested in the slight swelling and opening of the crescent shape
at the top of the totem pole. Suggestively phallic protuberances constitute a head for the
stick-figure floating above the bird-man. A cornucopia-like triangle links the couple with
the right, as they set forth expectantly on their journey. Isamu Noguchi, who first became
acquainted with Pollock at Atelier 17 in 1944-45, commented, "I think Jackson saw in
himself a mystical link -- a sort of medium. And Jackson was guided by a definite
apparition, meaning Lee. She was the agent, be it angel or witch." 792 Since Lee and
Jackson's arrival in the country, Pollock had remained more or less sober. "If there were
occasional lapses at Jungle Pete's, at least the long decline of the last two years had been
reversed."793 In late 1945 Pollock began painting in one of the upstairs bedrooms in
preparation for his show: Moon Vessel, Troubled Queen, Waterfigure, Development of the
Foetus, The Little King, Circumcision, The White Angel.

2. The Child Proceeds

Fig. 13.2. The Child Proceeds, 1946. Oil on canvas, 43 x 22". Location unknown.
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The fact that The Child Proceeds (fig. 13.2), sometimes known as Development of
the Foetus,794 dated on the back 1-46, has never been included in a major Pollock
retrospective hints at the embarrassment, if that’s not too strong a word, that the figurative
canvases done the year before Pollock turned to his abstract poured paintings elicit. The
images appear crude and often congested. Clark has written of this figuration: “The attempt
to remake them ‘out of the unconscious’ had led, as it often did, to amateur theatricals,
portentous, overstuffed, and overwrought. ... Abstract painting was a way out of the
mess.”795 I want to claim the contrary. Awkward and embarrassing as they may be, Pollock
needed these images to prepare for his turn to abstraction. Congested as they often are,
such congestion manifests the power of his active fantasy and the liberating effect of the
evolving narrative.
In There were 7 in 8 the formal challenge was clear. Pollock may have generated
an all-over and in-out linear impulse, but this line had yet to animate the colored paint.
Viewing Kandinsky's fluid use of color in the pre- World War I canvases and the integral
role of primary colors in extending the multiplicities within the dynamic equilibriums of
Mondrian's canvases in the two great memorial retrospectives would only have served to
focus Pollock's attention on the challenges presented by color. As if to acknowledge this
challenge, after the success of animating matter by means of tonal variations in Portrait of
H.M., Pollock dramatically reintroduces bold areas of flat color into his painting, for
instance a stunning but very flat expanse of yellow in The Child Proceeds. Only in one
isolated area, that of the “foetus,” does he enliven this flatness with a striking passage of
animated paint: an automatist handling of mostly blue and white, simultaneously painterly
and linear, and spatially alive, as areas of color move from wide to narrow, and from thick
to thin. Such vitality even includes the opposition of the thickness of paint and its
frequently visible support, the sized canvas.
Pollock provides this abstract automatist “foetus” with an unusually legible context:
the union of two full-length androgynous personnages. The more malish figure on the left,
tall, slender with a distinctly human head, is rendered in a rich earthen brown color with a
white numen or glow around his head and neck. His upper torso, marked by two circles
suggesting breasts, signals the androgynous wholeness to which Jungians and Surrealists
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aspired. The middle of his body is backed by a blue band within which is lodged the white
neck of the womb-vessel by which he is joined to the more female figure on the right. She
is another three-eyed moon woman. Her head now is white, her torso orange, tinged with
a masculine fire, and transfixed by a red feathered arrow. Her body swells with the new
life of the foetus in her womb.
In Male and Female, too, Pollock had addressed the union of full-length male and
female personnages and the product of their union. But now the symbol for what is desired
is no longer diamonds, but an embryo that is materialized in the differentiated animated
paint lodged in the womb of the moon woman. Here we have the foetus of the animated
material of his future art.
No doubt inspired by his new commitment to Lee Krasner, Pollock embarked on
another series of enactments of his erotic fantasies. As already in 1943, such enactment
entails pouring. In Troubled Queen (c. 1945) and most dramatically in Moon Vessel (c.
1945) (fig. 13.3) he renews his experiments in pouring paint.

Fig. 13.3. Moon Vessel, c. 1945. Oil and enamel on composition board, 33 3/8 x 17 1/2". The Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston.

In the latter he pours the paint, mostly black, some yellow and white, onto imagery that is
mostly white and red, within a purple-black ground. The imagery in Moon Vessel is not
pronounced; the vase shape on the right can be seen as the moon vessel of the title, an
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invocation of the alchemical figure for woman. More important than the “vessel” is the
automatist web of line. Beneath this web one can make out two eyes; one in a square area
above the vase, the other in the roughly circular white area in the upper center of the canvas.
This circular area may be the head of the moon woman herself, for beneath it is a hint of
an anthropomorphic body. Ever since Moon Woman Cuts the Circle the positive moon
woman had been largely absent from Pollock's work. Female animal imagery
predominated. In Totem Lesson I and Totem Lesson II we met with the totem mother.
Only now does the moon woman return.
In Troubled Queen (fig. 13.4), too, it is difficult to make out the imagery amid the
scumble of paint and the tendency to break down imagery into increasingly abstract parts.

Fig. 13.4. Troubled Queen, c. 1945. Oil and alkyd (synthetic paint) on canvas, 74 x 43 1/2". The Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston. Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund and Gift of Mrs. Albert J. Beveridge and
Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection, by exchange.

The most striking image is in the upper center of the canvas, the light grey and white
triangle containing one rose-purple eye. This dominates the again vague suggestion of an
anthropomorphic body below. The title tells us she is a queen, and a troubled queen at that.
Her torso area is opened up with jagged diagonal vectors that echo the three-dimensional
diagonal wedges of Portrait of H.M.. But now the diagonals accommodate more color,
brown-purples, a more extreme ranging between spatial in and outs and thick-thin
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applications of paint, and betray a more violent compositional energy. The diagonals no
longer rotate around the center, but are caught up in an overriding x pattern traversing the
canvas from corner to corner. The implied diagonal moving from the upper left, the head
of the troubled queen, to the lower right, dominates: a downward force that suggests
purposeful descent, confirmed by the imagery of a wedge shape thrusting down into an eye
inserts one of the most striking passages of pouring in the painting, a red splatter, followed
by a yellow poured line that goes pointedly to the center of the eye. The eye, suggesting
both a desired state of consciousness and the vulva of the female sex, has been the target
of pouring before, in Moon Vessel, and earlier in Composition with Pouring I. Pouring
paint down onto a canvas as a figural enactment of erotic union is not unexpected, but the
way it is here integrated into a by and large brushed three-dimensional diagonal
composition is striking. Pollock submit his impulses to a structural discipline and uses
them to enliven a now richly articulated layering. Pouring is just one more tool in an
arsenal of devices to open up and activate the thickness of paint.
In his attempt to enliven the painted surface in a meaningful way Pollock is more
successful in Water Figure (fig. 13.5), a canvas dated on the stretcher 11-45.796

Fig. 13.5. Water Figure, 1945. Oil on canvas, 71 3/4 x 29". The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Again we recognize a female figure with triangular head, this time with two eyes, and a
suggestion of a third eye hovering in the upper right of the painting. Awash against a
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watery blue background we can pick out her thicker whitish-pink limbs. Flesh colored
shoulders, arms, hands are distinguishable, as well as thighs, and legs resting on yellow
colored feet. All are shadowed with rich earthen browns. The sense of excited movement
in the painting seems to be generated, once again, by figurations of sexual union. A large
red feathered arrow thrusts downward on a diagonal to her pinkish white womb. Another
blue-black arrow thrusts, on another and roughly parallel diagonal, upward to this same
general area. The red arrow recalls She-Wolf, and the blue watery realm Pasiphae.
As in Troubled Queen, we cannot miss the overall diagonal slant of the
composition, around which much of the three-dimensional drama of layered paint handling
is orchestrated. This time the orchestration, especially of the bold colors, is more assured.
Even as, and perhaps because, they are held in place by the main diagonal, colors function
dramatically to articulate an in-out dimension in the space-matter. A very thin, but bold
orange line in the upper left is caught up in the black and the blue of the ground; the red
arrow reads, by virtue of its hue and thick wide application, above the opaque white
expanse of the womb; the blue-black arrow at the bottom confronts this white at its own
level. Back up the composition, and again paralleling the main diagonal, this blue appears
to have somehow entered the white and finds for itself a fluid passage through the
constricted white torso. The liquefaction celebrated in the title of one of the 1943 poured
paintings, Waterbirds, now is re-celebrated in Waterfigure, where union, as a circulation
of energy through colored paint, is beginning to be accomplished. Rather than simply
pouring down on the flat colored surface, Pollock now succeeds in pushing an automatist
impulse through thick paint, producing passages that are at once painterly and linear, and
that generate varying spatial sensations. Following the love-making metaphor so important
to Pollock, it is as though he here is beginning to get inside the flesh of paint, and of moving
there freely, instinctually and fearlessly.

3. The Little King

No doubt Pollock’s progress towards automatist abstraction continues to be fed also
by alchemical lore, reinforced by the appearance of another of Kurt Seligmann's articles
on alchemy and magic in the December 1945 View.797 In "Heritage of the Accursed"
Seligmann emphasizes the important instigating role of woman in Gnostic philosophy and
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in alchemy, as the "God-Mother Sophia (wisdom!)," who sent the serpent into paradise and
instigated man's quest for knowledge.798 But more than alchemy helped focus Pollock on
the development of a foetus. Just at this time he was obsessed with thoughts of the child.
May Tabak recalls that in the summer of 1945 "all the time Jackson was watching the
children --our Patia, about three, and the little Kadish boys. He was crazy about
children."799 Naifeh and Smith postulate that marriage and the move to the country were
tied up with a desire to emulate his brothers, Charles and Sande, who both moved to the
country to start their families. Dr. Hubbard and Reuben Kadish recall that Pollock was
eager to have children.800 Only after they were married, probably in the spring, certainly
by the summer of 1946, did Lee tell Jackson that she would not have children with him,
"because he couldn't be counted on for the long haul." 801 Not having children remained a
bone of contention between them even as late as 1955, and a point of sadness for Pollock. 802
He often talked with friends about wanting to have children. A small ink drawing, CR 754
(c. 1945) (fig. 13.6), shows him dangling a cigarette absorbed in looking at a human foetus.
This theme and the fact that it is executed on dark blue paper links it to The Child Proceeds.
There, too, Pollock was certainly thinking also of a human child. 803

Fig. 13.6. Untitled, CR 754, c. 1945. Ink on dark blue paper, 11 1/2 x 8 3/4". Private Collection.

Because the sexual metaphor is central to his art, it is of interest to hear Lee's
nephew, Ronald Stein, recollect discussions with Jackson of fatherhood. "He didn't see
offspring as a natural occurrence so much as an expression of will and consequent risk
taking. 'How can you get such self-confidence to re-create the self? Sure, I know there's
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a mother, but the idea is the father's. So the kids are too. Mothers are just the agents, the
giants that better turn us loose -- or watch out!"804 This conception echoes his artistic
formulation, ascribing the idea, or let us say the spiritual function, and the risk taking, to
the male, and a threatening material agency to the female. Tony Smith, a father of four,
recalls, "He was always asking what it was like. Did they seem a part of you, an extension
of you? ... It was almost as if he thought you could have some control over what they would
be like -- even as babies. It must have been the way he thought about art." 805 Given such
an understanding of becoming a father, it is not difficult to understand Lee’s refusal.
Pollock’s emphasis on male willfulness and control reflect his approach to art. Here he did
have some control. Here he was able to give birth to a third, to something totally new.
Certainly in 1945 his new openness to Lee and his hopes for a child, a re-creation
of the self as he put it, helped precipitate a new element in his art. In The Child Proceeds
the foetus is still in the womb. In The Little King (c. 1946) (fig. 13.7) the child is born.
Much as the moon woman contained within her body the diamond, which was released
from her body in Moon Woman Cuts the Circle and led to the appearance of Jack'son', so
now the moon woman as Queen mother once again effects a birth. Pollock calls the new
entity "the little king," male, it should be noted.

Fig. 13.7. The Little King, c. 1946. Oil on canvas, 50 x 40". Private Collection.
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We only know The Little King from a black and white photograph published in the
Catalogue Raisonne as CR 144, for Pollock reused this canvas in one of his first
experiments in pouring in 1947, Galaxy (see fig. 16.7) published in the Catalogue Raisonne
as CR 169. This reuse enables us to follow Pollock's progression through a process of
layering from imagery to poured abstraction. But for the moment I am interested in Galaxy
only because we can peer beneath the layer of white pouring to see some of the details and
colors of The Little King.
The upper middle of the painting is dominated by a white colored triangle with one
blue eye, the face of the Moon Woman, echoing that in The Troubled Queen. Below her
face we see the swelling outlines of her rib cage. The right hand side of the canvas is
dominated by the little king. There, still partly encased by a dot-striated yellow and blue
crescent, we see a black figure-eight infinity symbol, filled with orange-red paint, which
might also be viewed as the eighth finger on a seven-fingered hand. Two eyes can also be
detected within this hand. Out of all the male identities Pollock has created, the little king
bears the closest resemblance to the son of the Jack'son' collage of 1943 (see fig. 8.13). In
this collage Pollock announced the birth of the masculine principle as an initiate in the
hermetic quest for the alchemist's philosopher's stone, the goal of quarternity or totality
signaled by the number 4, the seven stages of transformation necessary to achieving this
goal by the number 7. In The Little King the initiate appears to be nearing the end of the
quest.806 The number 7, placed prophetically on the surface of the Jack'son' collage, is now
embodied in the seven fingers of the little king's hand. But his distinctive eighth finger,
the figure-eight infinity motif, symbolizes the goal of the most difficult totality, beyond
that symbolized by the number 4, yet to be attained: the power of eight, "the true, creative
formative power," "an unending capacity for transformation." 807 Here we have an
intimation of why Pollock would later choose The Little King as the canvas through which
he would initiate his mature abstract poured style, pouring paint down on to its imagery
transforming the canvas into Galaxy.
One last detail of The Little King points to what must still be addressed before such
a move might be made or even thought of: the little winged dragon in the upper right hand
corner of the canvas, just above the little king’s face. Nearing the end of his quest Pollock
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presents the dragon motif once again. 808 The male, for the first time since 1941, reclaims
this totem animal, a synthesis of instinctual and spiritual forces, for himself. What in 1941
had been the Pre-Columbian plumed serpent now is more clearly the winged dragon of
alchemy. This version may well draw on Seligmann’s illustration of Valentine's geometric,
numerical diagram of the enlightened man (fig. 13.8).809

Fig. 13.8. Valentine's Diagram, in Seligmann, "Heritage of the Accursed," View, Dec. 1945, p. 7.

Pollock appears to concoct the little creature in the upper right hand corner of The Little
King by conflating or uniting Valentine's four-legged dragon and winged bird, to make his
own version of the alchemist's dragon, this time with its intimations of the philosopher's
stone. But the cramped details show that Pollock remained far from that “unending
capacity for transformation" he hoped to realize in his art. The presence of the winged
dragon continued to remain a mere promise.

4. The White Angel

That Pollock is very much aware of the distance that he has yet to travel is evident
in The White Angel (c. 1946) (fig. 13. 9). In this painting, for which a terminus ad quem
date exists of April 1946, when it was shown in his third one-man show, Pollock retreats
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to a mat, though eloquent, surface. Once again the imagery speaks of the way to the final
creation of the philosopher's stone.

Fig. 13.9. The White Angel, c. 1946. Oil, enamel, and sand on canvas, 43 1/2 x 29 5/8". Private Collection.

On the left side, stands an androgynous figure. Four dotted eyes, equal in size, are echoed
in the four little cross marks placed on its shoulder. The figure's four-fold awareness
includes acknowledgement of its own dualities. The earth-brown of its upper torso is
surrounded by the blue of a spiritual consciousness. Androgyny is further signaled by an
orange phallus protruding from underneath the triangular white pelvis.810 The angel's dual
nature as a creator-destroyer, is hinted at by the presence, lurking behind her soulful four
eyes, of a hint of a curved green sickle shape, symbol of her sacrificial demands. This
shape is more clearly echoed in the white shape behind the plant motif on the right.
A much less well-defined figure on the right side of the canvas includes two faces,
fixed to a green diamond-square shape, one above, one below. The face below is that of a
brown-black Indian head with large protruding nose and feathers, its eye an interlocking
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triangle and circle. The face above is white with a large circular eye dominating the face.
The green diamond connects the two faces. At this point this symbol of the fourfold self
is only a projection of a hoped for unity. The dark Indian head with its phallic nose Pollock
associates with the instinctual. The spiritual aspect of the male is symbolized by the white
upper head. The union of these sexually so ambiguous figures is overtly signaled by the
protrusion of the white triangular wedge and the orange phallus into the large curving
brownish green area lying in between the two male heads, as though to fertilize it. In this
fertilized green-brown area nestles the clear green diamond-shape, promise of the four-fold
self, a conscious union of opposites. The chart found within the diamond-square, outlining
the way to self as 4, and even to self as 8, belongs with other charts of progression towards
the diamond-body Pollock had made, for instance in drawings, CR 580 (c. 1941), CR 584r
(c. 1939-42), CR 635 (c. 1942), CR 649 (c. 1942), CR 972 (1943), CR 699 (c. 1943), CR
1079 (c. 1944-45). But only once before in Blue, White, and Orange Composition (c. 1944)
(see Fig. 10. 4) did one of these charts make its way so baldly into an oil painting. The
most essential motifs of the chart in The White Angel include an isolated dotted circular
motif, male, and an angular motif, female, which occupy the area below the delineated
horizontal axis of the diamond-square; it is intersected by two vertical lines, the first joining
the female angular motif to a circular dot positioned above the horizontal axis, the second
joining a feathered motif to an even higher dot; this dot surrounded by seven smaller dots
can be seen as the eighth dot. A white spiral line circles around the intersection of the
axes, rises, and with its 4 fingered white hand grasps the lowest dot of the male motif which
is the terminus of the black curved line. Projecting the fulfillment of the potentiality buried
in the diamond seed, the vertical that issues from the diamond-shape and extends up the
canvas, becomes a burgeoning plant, with roots to each side, bearing figure eight leaves,
and one bud. Behind this plant we spy the white sacrificial scythe: the aspiration for self-
realization, as Pollock understands it, always stands exposed to the female's demand for
sacrifice. But the adjoining sun-like aureole with its ambiguous markings promises new
life.
In painting The White Angel Pollock could have been inspired by any number of
stories of hierogamy, not just the alchemical coition of male and female, sun and moon or
the Gnostic story of the union of Sophia and the Redeemer told by Seligmann in “Heritage
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of the Accursed.” Some of the details in The White Angel suggest the hierogamy described
in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.811 Pollock owned Joseph Campbell’s A Skeleton Guide
to Finnegan's Wake. Here he could read that the World Tree or World Axis, so
magnificently described in Finnegan's Wake, represents the figure of HCE (Here Comes
Everybody, etc.) and ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle, etc.), the primal male and female in their
eternal union.812 At one point Joyce, stressing the whiteness of the Cosmic Tree’s setting,
describes it as the great "tree-man-angel."813
But whatever his sources, Pollock's symbolically over-determined pictorial
formulation of a union of opposites at once instinctual and spiritual is very much his own.
The White Angel exhibits a new and bold command of large and layered color areas.
Greenberg's criticism made of the April 1945 show, "Pollock's single fault is . . . that he
sometimes juxtaposes colors and values so abruptly that gaping holes are created," 814 no
longer applies. Taut colors now hold the entire two-dimensional surface in tension. But
most interesting pictorially is Pollock's layering of color. Here we have no longer just a
linear impulse aiming to penetrate a female three-dimensional colored matter, but an
attempt to animate it. How does Pollock create this effect? The brilliant yellow-orange
associated with the "male" personage on the right is more pervasive than initially expected,
as it extends as an underpainting of the sand-textured olive paint in the large rounded area
joining the male heads. Recall that the brownish green of the "female's" torso suggests her
aspect as earth mother. Thus the placement of the orange under the sandy green-brown
suggests the presence of the male, sun-like, in the female earth. This layering gives the
sensation of the sun being in the earth, warming and fertilizing it, a fulfillment of the
promise of CR 1023, the 1943 collage, which announced the release of an independent
spermatic sun-son disc from the moon woman and first opened up the possibilities of
concretely layered space in late cubism.
But more important would seem to have been Pollock's own feelings for nature.
The sensation of the brilliant light of day recalls Pollock's land and seascapes of the 1930's,
for instance T.P.'s Boat, where he celebrates, though not unmarred by threat, the openness
of land and sea under a large blue sky marked by a fiery red-orange orb. Now he is
attempting to express these feelings in the modernist language that he had adopted in Bird
c. 1941, where he had first converted his feeling for landscape space, still visible in the
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related studies (see figs. 3.10, 3.11), into the mat thick paint, some of it sand-textured, on
the surface of the canvas. In The White Angel some five years later, the sand-textured
paint again carries his feeling for landscape, advanced to a confidently layered germination
of color.
The chart within the diamond-shape states Pollock's ambition to reach for the one
that is also the eight, a unitary field of spirit-matter, arena of a constantly renewing
transformative dynamism. But if in The White Angel he begins to assert control of the
pictorial surface as structured color, the challenge suggested by its imagery remains
unresolved: the relationship of spirit and instinct in the making of a painting, mirrored in
the ambiguous gendering of the protagonists, calls for further development. And
unresolved remains the relationship of structural control and spontaneity, of the hermetic
diagram and the pictorial meaning.
In April Jackson and Lee went into New York for two weeks at the time of the
opening of his third one-man exhibition at Art of This Century (April 2-20). They stayed
at their old apartment, 46 E. 8th Street, which was to remain their pied à terre in New York.
It had been taken over by the painter James Brooks, and by Jay, Jackson's brother, and his
wife. It was not a particularly happy return. Jackson was coming home practically every
night drunk.815 The exhibition, eleven paintings and eight temperas, among them Moon
Vessel, Troubled Queen, Waterfigure, The Child Proceeds. Little King, White Angel, did
receive moderately positive reviews. From Art News: "Jackson Pollock is one of the most
influential young American abstractionists, and he has reinforced his position in a recent
exhibition."816 From Greenberg, writing in The Nation: "Pollock's third show in as many
years (at Art of This Century) contains nothing to equal the two large canvases, Totem
Lesson I and Totem Lesson II, that he exhibited last year. But it is sufficient -- for all its
divagations and weaknesses, especially in the gouaches--to show him as the most original
contemporary easel-painter under forty." 817
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Chapter 14
The Key

1. The Key
After two weeks in New York at the time of the opening of his April exhibition,
Pollock returned home to the burst of an early spring.818 He had not experienced a real
country spring since his childhood. 819 Lee recalls, "He spent hours, sometimes whole
days walking around the first spring we were there. He was like a kid, exploring
everything." 820 Springs is situated at the back of Harbor, which faced onto Gardiner's
Bay and Gardiner's Island, a mysterious crescent of land lodged between the fork tines of
eastern Long Island. The house they had bought was situated where the Accabonac
Creek came into the Accabonac Harbor, Accabonac being the name of the Indian tribe
that had earlier inhabited this harbor. Jeffrey Potter, a neighbor, recalled that, "Land
meant a great deal to Jackson, and not only because of his love for the Bonac landscape.
Land to him also meant Gardiner's Bay, the Atlantic, the sky, the weather. They were
parts of a whole in which he felt as right as he could" 821 (Fig. 14.1).

Fig. 14.1. Pollock, The Springs, 1950. Photograph by Hans Namuth.

He came eventually to know "every inch of the island," as friend and fellow painter
Alphonso Ossorio put it:822 "He loved to go out and look at the dunes, the gulls, 823 loved
"the vast horizontality" of the Atlantic. 824
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From a near-by farm he brought back a mongrel puppy, white with wide patches of
black around the eyes. He named it Gyp after his childhood dog, and took him along on
his outings.825 Later he acquired and tamed a crow, the infamous Caw-Caw (Fig. 14.2).

Fig. 14.2. Pollock and Krasner with Gyp, their dog, and Caw-Caw, their pet crow, at The Springs, July 10,
1947.

Pollock is gathering his “totem animals” about him. Mercedes Matter remembers Caw-
Caw's antics, lighting on Gyp's head when the dog was eating and helping himself to the
dish, stealing shiny things from backyards and dropping them in others, taking clothespins
off wash lines so the clothes would drop in the mud. Finally Caw-Caw caused such trouble
in the neighborhood, that Pollock clipped his wings. Lee was furious; there was a big fight,
and Caw-Caw ended up with a Bonac family. 826 At the house, following his agreement
with Lee, he laid out and plowed an ambitious garden of vegetables and melons. "I'll dig
it and set it out if you weed and water it."827 "He loved to fool [around] in his garden," Lee
recalled.828 The spring of 1946 was a happy time for them. According to Lee, "cozy,
domestic, and very fulfilling."829
During this period he embarked on a series of eight paintings, that Lee was to
suggest he should call the Accabonac Creek Series, among them The Key and Waterbull.
The individual titles were Pollock's own. 830
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Fig. 14.3. The Key (Accabonac Creek Series), 1946. Oil on linen, 59 x 84". The Art Institute of Chicago.
Through prior gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Morris.

The title The Key (fig. 14.3) suggests a painting of unusual importance. It is known to be
one of the last, if not the last, painting done in the cramped quarter of the upstairs bedroom
before he made the move on June 10 to his new and bigger studio, the barn. 831 In it Pollock
reiterates the theme of male female union, but this time the unitary totemic animal that
made its appearance in The Little King is not only present, but central.
Amid the yellows, reds, blues, and greens scattered all-over the field of this large
canvas, one notices once again two tall figures to either side of the canvas: one, more
curvaceous, to the left, the other, more stiffly upright on the extreme right. The pipe
protruding from the “head” of the figure on the right, echoing that in Totem Lesson I, as
well as the nearby large circular sun disc animated by linear swirls, mark it as the male.
On the left resides the female, her eye noticeable in the upper left, below a feathered
headdress, such as the female had earlier worn in Moon Woman Cuts the Circle and Two;
from her upper torso springs her billowing flesh-colored arm with its red and lavender
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hand; below we see the voluptuous curves of her crescent womb, answered on the right by
the male’s similarly curved yellow-headed phallus, marked by thick white, red, yellow
touches of paint. The male’s dark brown, then sea green arm, tipped with a pronged hand,
extends towards the female’s floral hand. In the center of the canvas is a striking mostly
dark green triangle, marked at its top with red dots; just below the triangle a grey area is
marked with blue dots. These two areas, themselves outlined by distinct brown lines, are
placed above and below a long brown horizontal line that establishes the horizontal axis of
the painting.
In the green triangle one begins to recognize an animal, the upper half of a roughly
diamond-shaped configuration. Its head is the lighter green area to the left, marked by two
brown eyes, and two black ears; its legs, delineated with brown looping lines, are linked
by the brown horizontal line that connects male and female. The animal links the male and
the female also in more particular ways. The diagonal brown line of its back on the right
extends into the brown line demarcating the yellow and the lavender portions of the male
phallus, the transecting line now more benignly echoing the old castration threat found in
the 1944-45 engraving CR 1083. The animal's attention is directed to the left, towards a
series of seed-like green dots, in a “potential” line, leading towards the female and her great
womb. Linking male and female, this central animal also links at a more abstract structural
level, right and left of the horizontal, and above and below of the vertical axis of the canvas;
at the same time it mediates between the “thick” of paint and “the thin” of the canvas, the
literalized three-dimensional space of the painting, even as it establishes strong diagonal
alignments, capable of further mediating all these oppositions. Thus it provides the key to
that moment in Pollock’s work where for the first time he has mastered a sense of the
entirety of the canvas.
This key animal embodies Pollock's understanding of the integrating power of the
totem animal, which has grown far beyond the beastie in The Little King. Now it has some
of the function of the plumed serpent of Bird, but is more potent, for it establishes the
equilibrium of sexual instinct and spiritual aspiration, expressed in the lower half of the
painting by womb and phallus and in the upper half by pipe, sun, and Indian headdress.
Resolving the tensions first spelt out in The Guardians of the Secret, such equilibrium is
established not only within the male but in the relationship of male and female. In the
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earlier painting the four guardians were arrayed around an unknown center. Now the key
animal occupies that center, providing a key to the secret of the harmony of opposites, of
male and female, instinct and spirit, and even more fundamentally, of matter and spirit.
How did Pollock arrive at this fabulous animal? The task of going down in order
to come up is the task at hand in CR 1015, an untitled, mixed media work (crayon, pastel,
brush, and pen and ink on brown paper) that I shall call Animal Ceremony (c. 1946) (fig.
14.4).

Fig. 14.4. Animal Ceremony, CR 1015, c. 1946. Crayon, pastel, brush, and pen and ink on brown
paper, 18 7/8 x 24 5/8 ".

The symmetry that characterizes The Key is already present here. The male as phallic
sun joined to a little triangle-disc head is hard at work on the right; on the left a more
expansive female personnage topped by a triangular form looks on. In the center, cutting
the horizontal line of the composition, is a vertical alignment showing an animal world
that is split. Above we see the male’s two-eyed animal phallus as presented in ART but
now marked with feathered striations: a plumed serpent. But this totem animal, wrapped
around the vertical pole as though sacrificed, is, it would seem, not sufficient. The
male’s attention is directed down and through a split square shape, as through a cleft in
the earth, to a more richly differentiated animal configuration below, composed not just
of triangle and circle, but also of circles and rectangles. The central position and
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diamond-shape of the animal at which Pollock arrives in The Key constitutes a resolution
of the split that preoccupies the male in Animal Ceremony.
The diamond configuration of the key animal makes it rather like a philosopher’s
stone. Its three-dimensional diamond structure, right-left, up-down, in-out, and all on the
diagonal as well, includes a mediation between grey, alchemical lead, below and the dark
green with red dots above. This last in relation to the primaries below (what can be seen
as the animal’s white snout sniffs at a right angle of red and a diagonal of blue; the tip of
the male’s phallus is a diagonal of yellow) constitutes a complementary blending. The
alchemy of differentiation and transformative blending now extends to colored-matter. No
longer is Pollock’s control of space-matter just in terms of the tonal variations of black and
white as in The Portrait of H.M., nor is his mastery of a colored space-matter confined to
a discrete portion of the canvas as in The Development of the Foetus. In The Key he moves
with confidence between "thin" and "thick", between white, sized but otherwise unpainted,
surface areas to passages of enlivened thick paint. Such passages occur through out the
canvas: not only in the center -- the red dots on the green back of the animal, the blue dots
on the grey below the animal; but on the left -- the flesh tones of the female womb, the
purple and flesh tones of her florid arm; and on the male side -- the white, red, yellow
touches on the yellow phallus, the dots on the green-aqua of the male arm, the thick white
on the sun-disk. In the "thin" areas there is a striking lack of over painting, especially in
the thin blues throughout the upper region where the horizontal breaks in the floor boards
on which Pollock was painting are still visible.
That Pollock created The Key on the floor, shortly before he would turn to his
mature technique of pouring, deserves comment. The canvas was a large one, five by seven
feet. For years Pollock had been rotating paintings on the easel, upending them, or turning
them upside down, to get a new vantage point on them.832 The only way for him to do this
in the small, low-ceilinged upstairs bedroom where he was working that spring with The
Key was to put it on the floor of the room. 833 Even then, Lee recalled, it "took up the whole
space. He could barely walk around it."834 Nevertheless, its position on the floor served
naturally to emphasize those very structural qualities with which he was just coming to
grips, an all-over distribution of colored areas, balancing around a distinctive center, and a
firm control of the varying densities of paint in respect to a flat pictorial surface. It is
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striking that Pollock's first mastery of the thick and thin of line in the 1944-45 engravings
also occurred when he had the resistance of a hard flat surface to work on, digging with a
burin into a metal plate. His translation of this engraved linear spatial ductility into painted
line manifests itself in certain passages of The Key, for instance in the black lines of the
female's florid hand. But his present mastery of the in-out axis manifests itself mostly in
his handling of space-matter and space-color.
The spatial animation of colored paint through its thick and thin handling is
extended in experimentation with the spatial energies of color itself. As Ellen Landau
comments, "it is with a certain amazement that we experience the new variety and richness
of hue in such paintings as The Key, The Tea Cup, and The Waterbull."835 Searching for
a visual precedent for this sudden richness of color in Pollock's work, she cites the "broken
touch" pre-Fauve works of Matisse. 836 There a similar palette of both pale and saturated,
and somewhat dissonant colors was also precipitated by a new landscape, Collioure. In
Pollock's case, it was Springs. Pollock had written to his friend Louis Bunce, a painter
living in Portland, Oregon, of his adjustment to the "change of light and space."837 Like
Matisse, he was beginning to leave the white of the canvas exposed, to let the canvas
breathe and the colors vibrate with their own energy. 838
The Key is one of Pollock’s most colorful, lightly worked, all-over compositions
to date. And more than any other major canvas up to 1946 The Key with its color-spaces
suggests the land- and seascape, that one can still see opening up behind the Pollocks’
house. The maroon browns and greens suggest the earth; the blue the sea and the sky; the
bright yellows and strong reds the presence of the sun and bright light. The range of
lavender and lime greens suggest the colors of spring; the dark green back of the key animal
the upward regenerative force of nature. Certainly his feeling for the materia of paint in
The Key relates to his new relationship with the earth as he gardened. Later he was to
describe his painting as "gardening."839
An undated photograph of Jackson, Lee, and Gyp all walking together in the Bonac
landscape around the house, sometime in the winter season of 1949, is suggestive of the
physical and emotional reality that fed the fantasy of The Key (fig. 14.5).
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Fig. 14.5. Pollock and Krasner entering barn-studio, with Gyp, 1950. Photograph by Hans Namuth.

That spring Pollock still nurtured hopes of having children with Lee. But had he already
transferred his procreative hopes from Lee to Mother Nature? The Key at any rate is a
culminating moment in the private mythmaking that propelled his art. Perhaps, in choosing
this title, Pollock was thinking of a famous passage in Goethe's Faust, a copy of which he
owned, where Mephistopheles instructs Faust with these words: "Here, take this key./ The
key will smell out the right place from all others:/ Follow it down, it leads you to the
Mothers . . ./ You shall behold the Mothers by its light [of a fiery tripod],/ Some of them
sit, some walk, some stand upright,/ Just as you please. Formation, transformation,/ Eternal
Mind's eternal recreation./ Thronged round with images of things yet to be."840

2. Waterbull
The Key, however, is just that: a key, something that permits access to, but is not
yet itself the desired realm of "transformation," of "eternal recreation." Although the
structure speaks of the linking of opposites, even on the diagonal, and of transformation,
it is more static than dynamic. One senses Pollock's tight control as he laid in the straight
brown and back structural lines first, then applied the inflecting colored areas. For all its
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mastery of structure and color, The Key remains a diagrammatic painting. If the
dynamism and instinctuality implicit in its symbols have yet to be released, such release
takes place in The Waterbull (fig. 14.6), another large horizontal painting, 30 1/8 x 83 7/8
inches.

Figure 14.6. The Waterbull (Accabonac Creek Series), c.1946. Oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 83 7/8".
Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (gift of Peggy Guggenheim, 1950).

The title of waterbull suggests a reference to Zeus, who in the form of a bull adducted
Europa, also to Pasiphae, who mated with a bull to produce the minotaur. But it also
refers to Picasso and invites interpretation as the triumphant conclusion of Pollock’s
totem war with the master.
As so often with Pollock, the canvas, too, is the hermetic enactment of a union,
not between winged sun-hero and she-beast as in Pasiphae, but between a male force
springing from both the upper and lower right hand corners of the canvas, and a
multivalent female form placed below a red crescent moon. The ambiguous profusion of
the concatenated forms makes it impossible to offer a definite interpretation. But that
Pollock is offering here another variation on the sexual theme that preoccupied him is
clear enough. From the emphatically yellow upper right-hand corner a reddish limb
reaches downward, ending in a blue grasping hand joined to a green diamond shape. The
hand reaches for the female form lying luxuriantly along the bottom center of the canvas.
From a blue diamond-shape that seems to be the goal of the blue hand’s desiring grasp,
springs forth a more abstract passage of black "stenographic" markings amidst scumbled
yellow paint dominating the center of the canvas.
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From the yellow area in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas spring two
black linear configurations, the lower one opening to reach for the female’s body, breast,
or buttocks, the other leading to and through the moon, either to descend towards the blue
“feet” of the woman or to continue along the yellow withers of the bull and descend
along its coiling blue neck to its head positioned at the center of the extreme left-hand
edge of the painting. The waterbull, despite the aura of grunts and exhaustion
accompanied by expletive-like black markings, would appear to have attained its goal,
the union of opposites, here signaled by an eye disc and orange-tipped crescent motif.
Pollock marks his signature, and the serendipitous date 46 below, in the extreme lower
left-hand corner of the canvas.
On one level this confident union would seem to have to do with a sense of sexual
fulfillment in his relationship with Lee Krasner and perhaps with his hope for children.
But since the female for Pollock now also carries the connotations of Nature, the great
mother, Waterbull may also express his feelings about the possibility of leaving the
cramped quarters of his upstairs bedroom studio in the house and setting up a new studio
in the barn. Ever since the closing of the April exhibition, he had been thinking about the
task, which he would finally undertake on June 10, of moving the barn to a better position
between the house and the water. The move out of the house and towards the water
would position his studio in the midst of the new landscape. But while reflecting the
emotions and events of his new life, Waterbull also has its place in the private and ever-
evolving totemic fantasy that was so much a part of his life and his art. Once again the
male entity reaches down with his hand to enjoy a union with the body of the female, but
now, as bull, springs from below to possess the female even in her highest guise as moon.
In the guise of waterbull, the hero achieves union with the female, leaping, in an
interweaving of diagonals, up and down, from right to left, in and out of the surface of the
canvas and its colored paint. What Greenberg observed of the April 1946 show seems
especially pertinent here, "His [Pollock's] emotion start out pictorially; it does not have to
be castrated and translated in order to be put into a picture." 841
No doubt Pollock is thinking of Picasso's configurations of triumphant sexual
passion, for instance Bullfight: Death of the Female Toreador September 6,1933,
reproduced in the 1935 Cahiers d'Art, and later in the February-March 1942 View. In
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View the image of the beautiful woman and the horse flung over the back of the
triumphant bull elicited Robert Melville's description of it as "the heraldry of
consummated desire." 842 While attracted to this imagery in 1942 and 1943, Pollock had
been incapable of dealing with it. 843 In Guardians of the Secret the prohibitive “father
image" bore comparison rather to Picasso's dog in Three Musicians. Now Pollock
appropriates Picasso’s bull and minotaur identity. He both "kills the father" and "sleeps
with the mother," the female, with her history of association with the Picassoid muse.
Because Picasso’s art located the force of instinct in the bull, sexual desire, at
least as it erupted in a classical world, often took on the character of a rape, as the bull or
bull-man possessed the classical woman (fig. 14.7).

Fig. 14.7. Picasso, Minotaure and Nude, 1933. Lithograph, 15 1/2 x 21 3/4".

Pollock, who knew little of the classical world that still held Picasso enthralled, looked to
different symbols. In his private mythmaking Pollock had felt more comfortable
identifying with the plumed serpent or the spiritual bird-man. The destructive force of
the instinctual he had located not in the bull, but, following his own emotions, in a she-
beast. The task was to engage the instinctual, to render the power of female instinctuality
less threatening, permitting the growth of a greater instinctuality for himself. Think of
the stick-like sun-hero riding the she-beast in Pasiphae. After that the female in Pollock's
art becomes less of a she-beast, more of a moon vessel, and finally even a curvaceous
human female in The Waterbull. The bird-man does acquire his own animal phallus in
Totem Lesson I, and finally is accompanied by a unitary animal, at once instinctual and
spiritual, of equal interest to male and female, in The Key. The male unleashes the full
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force of his animal passion, as a waterbull possessing the beautiful body of the female.
More than in Pasiphae, the spiritual and instinctual aspects of both male and female are
fully engaged. But as expressed here, such engagement leaves us wondering whether
Pollock has really overcome that fear that let Picasso understand himself in the image of
the minotaur.

3. Going Abstract
Michael Fried has claimed in writing of Pollock’s mature poured paintings that
the drip method liberated line from its function of defining contour and thus finally broke
free from the Renaissance based conception of picture making. But at least since 1941, I
have argued, Pollock had begun to create a new pictorial language in which he did not
have to draw the human figure. Rather the simple sweep of an upward rising line could
begin to carry his meaning. Led on by his dream visions Pollock is now bringing his
quest to a close, translating its fruits into a play of line that, no longer in the service of
hieroglyphic meanings, is able to convey meaning through its pulse and movement.
Three explorations on paper, CR 1011 (1946), CR 1012 (c. 1946), CR 1013 (c.
1946), bear witness to what has been achieved. In CR 1011, which I shall refer to as Eros
(fig. 14.8), Pollock presents us once again with male, female, the key animal, here
acceptable to both, and an androgynous totem mother, densely massed against a spacious
blue wash.

Fig. 14.8. Eros, CR1011, 1946. Spatter, pen and black and colored inks, gouache, wash and
sgraffito on paper, 22 3/8 and 30 3/8". Location unknown.
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On the extreme right, the male depicted as a stick figure is chiefly characterized by his
circular pelvis. Divided into four quadrants, it is transected by a phallic arrow, a variant
of the phallic sun disc that symbolized the male in the Animal Ceremony drawing. The
oedipal transgression present in Waterbull gives way to a new confidence. The phallic
arrow hits the triangular pelvis of the female stick figure, her head a disc-crescent motif
and her foot a number 4. Their union is more overtly sexual than in The Waterbull and
more overtly procreative. The female spews forth raw matter in ecstatic profusion. This
raw matter almost engulfs the red diamond configuration that still hints at the key animal,
here with a yellow head and a large black and white eye. The androgyny of the vertical
stick figure of the totem mother is conveyed by her semi-circular footing, reminiscent of
the male circle, and her angular head marked by a smaller yellow female triangle. While
her head indicates her female character, she partakes of the totality signified by
“fourness,” for her head can also be read as a “4” towards which the backward “3”
appended to her footing reaches upward with a small hand.
What did this array of figures mean to Pollock? At one level the significance
seems obvious enough: the union of male and female, both fully realized. One might
expect to see a child here, but in Pollock’s private mythology this third is a key, a
philosopher’s stone, an awareness of matter-spirit not caught up in the battle of the sexes.
This awareness in turn opens up to the more encompassing androgynous realm of the
totem mother that accommodates both spiritual and instinctual expression. Her figure
gives formal closure to the overall movement from right to left and sends our eye back to
its generating point in the male. Along the top of the composition the black arrow
traversing the blue sun disc reiterates and amplifies this dynamism.
A comparison of CR 1012 (c. 1946) (fig. 14.9) and CR 1013 (c. 1946), which I
shall refer to as The Dancing Pole (fig. 14.10), attests to Pollock's progress in distilling
the presence and meaning of imagery into the all-over dance of line, even of colored line,
and free floating color.
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Fig. 14.9. Untitled, CR 1012, c.1946. Pen and black and colored inks, pastel, gouache and wash
on paper, 22 1/2 x 30 7/8".

Fig. 14.10. Untitled, CR 1013, c.1946. Brush, pen and black and colored inks, pastel, gouache and
wash on paper, 22 1/2 x 30 7/8".

In CR 1012 the symbolic figuration of Eros finds its echo in a buoyant dance: the arrow
on the extreme right echoing the male phallic sun disc of Eros, the long angular footed
stick echoing the female, the diamond shape echoing the diamond animal, the motif on
the extreme left combining disc and crescent suggesting the union of male and female
associated with the totem mother. But more important than the evolution of the symbolic
narrative embodied in this drawing is the stylistic advance, the sensation of floating dance
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rhythms. While progress has been made in condensing the image to a graphic mark, the
image remains still quite distinct from its ground of automatically applied shorter linear
marks.
In The Dancing Pole Pollock achieves an even more succinct condensation of
image into line and an even more complete meshing of this linear image with the linear
ground. One motif in particular is recognizable: the long thin black pole on the right of
the drawing tipped at either end with disc and crescent shapes, Pollock’s symbols for
male and female opposites, now aligned along a single pole and suggestive of unity or
oneness. Both the meaning and shape of the pole are echoed in the photograph taken by
Hans Namuth in 1951 of Jackson and Lee standing next to the anchor which they had
scavenged from the beach in 1945 and which Jackson had hanging in his studio for many
years, which Lee kept hanging in their house for all the years after Jackson's death. 844
The shape of the anchor is that of the venerable Egyptian symbol of union, fruitfulness,
and eternal life, the crux ansata.845 Pollock's dancing pole carries the same meaning, but
now the linear image in its condensation approaches abstraction, permitting the ever more
homogeneous integration of image with line in an all-over increasingly abstract linear
play. Even color, which before had modified image, now floats free in the web of line.
Sometimes even the lines themselves are colored. Color is integrated with line that itself
integrates image and ground. Pollock is close to the point where integration of his formal
means can carry the message of unity.
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Section IV The Labyrinth

Chapter 15
The Blue Unconscious

1. The Blue Unconscious

Fig. 15.1. The Blue Unconscious (Sounds in the Grass Series), 1946. Oil on canvas, 84 x 56". Private
Collection.

On June 10 Pollock began the job of moving the barn which was to be his new
studio. With the help of Roger Wilcox and a local fisherman, he positioned it in the midst
of the new land- and seascape. He knocked a huge hole for a window high up on the north
wall. When Lee suggested that he put in another window lower down, he replied, "No, no,
I don't want to be disturbed by the outside view when I'm working." 846 "He wanted," as
Lee remembered "his studio completely closed off." 847 For all his responsiveness to nature
in such works as Key, Pollock worked fundamentally from an inner landscape. Claiming
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to be nature he felt no need for a window that would open the space in which he was
working to the surrounding landscape.
Pollock created all of the paintings in the Sounds in the Grass series in the barn:
The Blue Unconscious, known to be the first of the series, Something of the Past, The
Dancers, Croaking Movement, Earthworms, Eyes in the Heat, and Shimmering Substance,
known to be the last.848 The title of the series suggests Pollock’s desire to have his painting
be more like nature, to have the process of painting itself be more natural, less in the service
of making symbolic hierogyphs.
In The Blue Unconscious (fig. 15.1) Pollock begins to bid farewell to the images
that for so long had accompanied him. Again and again he had relied on the narrative of
his quest to get him going as a painter. In The Blue Unconscious, too, we see one more
time the imagery of erotic union, but transposed into a different key: the clearly delineated
figures of the shaman-hero accompanied by the key totem animal in union with the female.
But her attributes now begin to dissolve into animated matter. Self-consciously Pollock
steps on the threshold of abstraction.
The Blue Unconscious is organized around a by now well understood four-fold
structure. The humanoid figure of the shaman-hero stands on the left side, his head pierced
by the arrow of desire, his phallus is large enough to make it also part of a leg, its foot at
the extreme right and middle of the painting. The key animal, marked by the primary colors
of red, yellow, and blue, is given a place in the lower left, between the male's legs, a place
that suggests that it is protected by, even as it quietly supports, the male. Opposite the male
and his animal is the female. In the upper right we can make out several of her by now
familiar attributes: a yellow triangle, eyes, a horse head and leg, breasts, and a yellow moon
shape in her pelvic area. The last is also the place where the male's phallic leg is lodged,
indicating an achieved union. Here, too, the outlines of these symbols begin to break down
and dissolve into a play of forms. The colors fade and the softly scumbled yellow and pink
pigments create a quiet glow.
Two details hint at the significance of such dissolution: the unusual position of the
male and the key animal on the left-hand side of the canvas, and the blue-brown womb-
shape, the vehicle of rebirth the male now carries on his chest. Until now the shaman-hero
had to prove his capacity for renewal by submission to female trial; now he demonstrates
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a capacity for endless self-renewal. And he would seem to gain this extraordinary ability
precisely because he is in union or communion with the great mother, and not just with her
manifestations as moon, horse, woman, and the unformed, but with the ground of her being,
named by the title Pollock chose for the painting: “the blue unconscious.”
A little drawing related to The Blue Unconscious, done on the back of an envelope,
CR 760 (c. 1946) (fig. 15.2), speaks to the way the female realm now comes to be
understood as landscape, as a surreal landscape to be found not out there, but within.

Fig. 15.2. Untitled, CR 760, c. 1946. Pencil and ink on the back of an envelope, 6 1/2 x 9 5/8", irregular.

Lee Krasner recalls, "The only time I heard [Jackson] use the word landscape in connection
with his own work was one morning before going to the studio, when he said, ‘I saw a
landscape the likes of which no human being could have seen.’" 849 CR 760 testifies to
Pollock's visionary capacities. In this dream-vision a male body -- note the phallus and
two feet to the right and the head to the left -- simultaneously hovers over and is physically
a part of a landscape. The lower leg can be read as leg, hill, and breast. Below and joined
to him along the central axis of the drawing is the body of the four-legged totem animal,
its head facing left, a startling array of eyes suspended from its belly as though it were to
see and know the material ground on which and within which it is positioned. Its female
character is indicated by the quietly coiling snake resting under the animal's nose, the moon
crescent shapes positioned under its hind legs. With its all-seeing eyes the totem animal
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provides access to the imagery and ground of the mother nature, with a new emphasis on
her landscape dimension and on the totem animal's support of the shaman's ability to both
float in the heavens and be connected with the depths of the earth. 850 The male and his
animal here appear in command of their surroundings.
The Blue Unconscious can be viewed as the culmination of a process of
transforming the late Synthetic Cubist canvas. Pollock here both acknowledges the flat
support of the canvas and gently opens it up to the third-dimension with his handling of
line and color. The beautiful tan ground of the painting is visible throughout, its surface
lovingly written on with an often very thin (the turpentine even beading) black line. The
variation of blackness and thickness of line attests to Pollock's control. Consider the
emphatic thickness of the phallic foot or the undulating curve of the breast. Following his
initial drawing in black paint, Pollock very lightly scumbles in color throughout, suffusing
the entire canvas. In There were 7 in 8 Pollock had begun to let go of the imagery; in The
Blue Unconscious he starts to surrender himself to the flux of line and the play of animated
materiality, as especially on the right side of the canvas he lets go of the imagery.

2. The Wedding of Line and Paint

I agree with Yve-Alain Bois’ claim that “Pollock, like Picasso and Braque in 1911
or Mondrian shortly after, was in search of a unitary mode of notation that would be able
to transcode anything.”851 Pollock’s step into The Blue Unconscious points the way. The
urge to abstract by dissolving figuration is explicit and results in an exquisite nudging of
black painted lines and soft gently scumbled areas of colored paint. But a striking
characteristic of this painting is the very separation of black line and colored matter. The
challenge remains: how to wed linear impulse and colored paint? In The Child Proceeds
he had already succeeded in a discrete passage of animated but still unstructured paint: the
foetus. But how was he to translate the much more differentiated understanding of his
project at which he had arrived in The Key and The Blue Unconscious into an abstract
painterly automatism? Somewhat cautiously he takes up this challenge in Something of
the Past CR 160 (1946) (fig. 15.3).852
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Fig. 15.3. Something of the Past (Sounds in the Grass Series), 1946. Oil on canvas, 56 x 38".
Private collection.

When T. J. Clark wrote “Abstract painting was a way out of the mess,”853 one of
the “overstuffed, and overwrought” paintings he had in mind was this painting: “What
painter would not retreat from Something of the Past?”854 But this painting is the very
passage to Pollock’s future: a raucous, jagged, nervous passage. Pollock returns to his old
strategy: abstraction by veiling, working specifically with layering on the third-
dimensional, in-out axis. Beneath the agitated veil of paint we can still discern the totem
animal of The Blue Unconscious in its lower left hand position, this time its pointed ears
and head facing right, directed towards a somewhat triangular area of yellow paint strokes
in the lower right, suggestive of a female presence, balanced by a forked blue line
descending from the upper left hand corner of the canvas, suggestive of the shaman's
presence. The linear impulse formerly associated with the delineation of imagery is pushed
now directly into the paint. The bold blue line in the upper left or the conversion of colored
area into linear brush strokes, as for instance in the triangular area in the lower right, force
a new union of line and paint. Perhaps because Pollock is attempting so much, the canvas
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appears overwrought. But unafraid to be ugly, he does succeed in raising his picture
making to a new level of unified abstraction. We are confronted now not so much with
hieroglyphic imagery, as with a field of painted color lines.
As an artist-alchemist Pollock continues to cast linear impulse back down into
colored paint seeking for a further wedding of line and paint. Concentrating the pictorial
excitement along the in-out axis, Pollock starts in Croaking Movement CR 161 (c. 1946)
with colored areas below and works from the top, to animate them with linear scratchings.
Then, on the topmost layer, he adds emphatic white lines, which sometimes form triangles
and circles, hinting at that union of opposites for which he seeks as he presses line into
paint. In Earthworms CR 163 (c. 1946) he begins to work with fat lines of colored paint
extruded directly from the tube, and so hits more nearly on the desired synthesis of colored
matter and linear impulse, “more like Bonnard than Max Ernst” T.J. Clark now
appreciatively writes.855
In Eyes in the Heat CR 162 (1946) (fig. 15.4) Pollock begins to experiment with
the all-over application of these colored lines of paint.

Fig. 15.4. Eyes in the Heat (Sounds in the Grass Series) 1946. Oil on canvas, 54 x 43". The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
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The scumbling here produces an all-over, sometimes dirty, mix of black-white, yellow-
green in which, as we continue to look, we see black and white, yellow and vivid red lines
play off against one another. Pollock loops these colored lines in small, roughly figure-
eight rhythms, generating relationships and elisions between opposites: black-white,
yellow-red, up and down, left-right, in-out, thick-thin. The looping rhythms generate the
“eyes” that crop up everywhere in the painting. In these eyes Mangusi-Ungaro recognizes,
here and in other paintings, “a statement about process. By including earlier paint layers
in the final design, Pollock reminds us that these underlayers do not simply represent
discarded versions of the painting. Rather they are crucial stages in the dialogue of creation
and response from which each work evolved.” 856
The move to abstraction in Eyes in the Heat is made not by simply discarding or
veiling imagery, but by a fuller possession of the process driving his art. Reaching for “8”
had been for Pollock a process where spirit fulfills itself by ever descending into matter.
The endless looping of Eyes in the Heat answers to this promise. Even as they embody
process, these eyes retain a symbolic significance, having their place in a history that
extends from the visionary eye in Bird to the many eyes of the key animal as drawn on the
envelope related to The Blue Unconscious. Pollock now understands a process for
circulating energy throughout a field of paint. Eyes in the Heat occupies that extraordinary
moment in Pollock’s career when his painting begins to fully detach itself from its referent
and starts to be what it means. 857

3. “That’s for Clem”

Pollock showed the Accabonac and the Sounds in the Grass series in his fourth
exhibition at Art of this Century. Clement Greenberg in his February 1947 review hailed
it as his best since his first one, noting the move into abstraction. "Pollock has gone beyond
the stage where he needs to make his poetry explicit in ideographs. What he invents instead
has perhaps, in its very abstractness and absence of assignable definition, a more
reverberating meaning." 858 Pollock’s art had indeed evolved to the point where meaning
is successfully invested in form, allowing Greenberg to focus on its formal properties. "As
is the case with almost all post-cubist painting of any real originality, it is the tension
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inherent in the constructed, recreated flatness of the surface that produces the strength of
his art."859
According to Greenberg Lee Krasner recalled that when Jackson finished Eyes in
the Heat, he commented, "That's for Clem,"860 although in an earlier interview he claimed
that the painting in question was Shimmering Substance. In either case, the comment casts
light on Pollock, Greenberg, and their relationship. The two men had had little personal
contact in the four years since they were first introduced in 1942. 861 But given the fact that
Greenberg had enthusiastically reviewed Jackson's exhibitions at Art of This Century, it is
hardly surprising that he should have been among the people whom Lee and Jackson
invited to visit them in their new home. Greenberg arrived for a weekend in late July. 862
In what Jackson later described to his friend John Little as a tense encounter, Greenberg
visited him in his new barn studio. 863 He particularly liked Something of the Past, for the
same qualities of abstraction and all-over composition that he had admired in Mural and
Gothic.864 He is said to have remarked, "That's interesting. Why don't you do eight or ten
of those?"865 Pollock's instinct for all-over abstraction, of course, long antedated any
acquaintance with Greenberg; he had declared his ambition to animate an all-over field of
abstract paint as early as Magic Mirror 1941. The suggestion that Greenberg, as the critic
in a position to make or break the reputation of Pollock as a painter, dictated his
developmental path, at least at this juncture, is clearly false. Still Greenberg's recognition
and approval of his ambition as manifest in the transitional painting Something of the Past
undoubtedly encouraged Pollock to persist in his journey into uncharted regions of all-over
painterly abstraction.
Just as Greenberg's critical recognition was important to Pollock, so Pollock's
artistic progress was important to Greenberg as an emerging art critic. Having begun to
articulate a new aesthetic, he had a lot to learn from the formal characteristics that emerged
in Pollock's art, as he himself noted in his April 1946 review of Pollock's third show. "What
may at first sight seem crowded and repetitious reveals on second sight an infinity of
dramatic movement and variety. One has to learn Pollock's idiom to realize its flexibility.
And it is precisely because I am, in general, still learning from Pollock that I hesitate to
attempt a more thorough analysis of his art."866 By 1946 the figure had begun to disappear
in Pollock's art, merging with the ground. Renaissance art is left behind, as the viewer is
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made aware of the qualities of the surface. These characteristics of his art would soon
make Pollock a key figure in Greenberg's establishment of a new aesthetic paradigm,
celebrating flatness and all-overness of the painting, although already in the February 1947
review he begins to wonder where this all might lead. "Pollock points a way beyond the
easel, beyond the mobile, framed picture, to the mural, perhaps -- or perhaps not. I cannot
tell."867
Even as artist and critic had a lot to offer one another, Greenberg offering Pollock
a knowing eye, encouragement, and critical acclaim, Pollock offering Greenberg
confirmation and advancement of his aesthetic theories, they understood little of each
other: an artist for whom the evolution of form was intimately bound up with the evolution
of symbols in the service of life was anointed by a critic advancing a master narrative of
art for art's sake. This difference in sensibility is clear in that February 1947 review in
which Greenberg asserted that Pollock, as a master of "recreated flatness," was the equal
of the great European painter Dubuffet, but modified his praise with the claim that the
latter’s “positivism accounts for the superior largeness of his art." Greenberg's positivism
is clearly not at all shared by Pollock. His “mystical” quest is of just the sort Greenberg
dismissed.868 It thus is not surprising that Pollock felt obliged to warn Fritz Bultman after
a conversation with him about mysticism, "Don't tell Clem any of this." 869

5. Shimmering Substance
Shimmering Substance (fig. 15.5) is the final painting of the Sounds in the Grass
series. The looping configurations of the earlier painting have here become more fluid and
open. Layering is still the means of creating the three-dimensional spatial vitality of the
painting: a mosaic of reds, blues, some purple, some black on the bottom (with the barest
intimation of figuration beneath), next an all-over flecking of white and some red-white
marks, finally an elaboration with yellow strokes. This layering is accomplished with such
a mastery of interweaving that one reads the canvas as a fluxing whole. The eye imagery
vanishes, to be replaced by Pollock's conscious evocation of a gently glowing and large
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yellowish circle, or rather oval, occupying the entire canvas, a mere halation of figure
within the all-over ground.

Fig. 15.5. Shimmering Substance. 1946. Oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 24 1/4". The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Mr. and Mrs. Albert Lewin and Mrs. Sam A. Lewisohn Funds.

As Landau notes, "this circle seems to move in front of the other strokes and to hover in
ambiguous space."870 Buried beneath it we can see traces of a black diamond
configuration. If this conjunction of diamond and oval suggests that he is continuing to
address a formal problem that already occupied him in Portrait of H.M., he now does so in
an altogether new key. The single glowing oval in Shimmering Substance provides a new
emphatic unitary structure in Pollock's art. Such structure is no longer an overriding
constraint instigating repetitive movement, as was the abstract dynamic three-dimensional
diamond configuration of Portrait of H.M.. 871 For the oval can now be differentiated in
endless looping rhythms. The viewer is either drawn to the oval as a figure that structures
and unifies an all-over field, or lets go of it, becoming absorbed in the activity of the field.
If Eyes in the Heat provides a new sense of an all-over field in painting, Shimmering
Substance provides a new sense of structure. Structure is crucial, as it will become the
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basis of new life within the abstract all-over field. Crucial, too, is the fact that the structure
is unitary. This unitary structure becomes the basis of a new order in Pollock’s painting.
Within the trajectory of the evolution of Pollock's art, the presence of this oval form
means also a reassertion and further clarification of spiritual awareness. A series of yellow
marks moving down from the upper right hand corner into the flux of the oval generates a
spiraling action, where the drama of becoming, of death and rebirth, is played out in non-
objective terms.872 The viewer is aware, now of energized matter, organized around and
within the circling oval, endlessly receding into or endlessly welling forward in space, then
of the figure of the yellow oval, then again of its dissolution into the all-over ground. In
the optical sensation of the figure’s shimmering in the field of the painting, Pollock
captures an elementary sense of endless becoming in the flux of figure and ground,
manifest and non-manifest.873
In the mystical alchemical terms of his quest, he has found the Golden Flower or
the Diamond-Body, found it not just as the primordial spirit which finds expression in the
infinity loop of eight as an endless process, but as the One, the Great Meaning, the Tao,
the origin of all opposites. 874 Kurt Seligmann continued to encourage the linking of such
alchemical mysticism with art. In "Magic and the Arts" in the October 1946 issue of View
which Pollock owned, Seligmann intoned, "To the magician, All is contained in All -- and
All is One. God and the Universe are one. They obey the same magical law that causes
every happening." 875 Thus one can say Eyes in the Heat is a manifestation of the All,
Shimmering Substance of the All and the One. Pollock always pursued the diamond, never
knowing just what it would be, even as he did have an idea that the way to it would require
a circulation of energy through matter. But once he is in command of this process in Eyes
in the Heat, the diamond-body transformed into a spiraling circular unitary structure,
appears almost inevitably. It seems natural that someone engaged in making endless
figure-eight loops should eventually want to make one big loop. As Pollock worked on
Eyes in the Heat, mastering an all-over surface, it must have become clear to him that the
pictorial field was structured no longer by the relationship of parts, whether two, three,
four, six, or eight, but as a unified field within which a multitude of oppositions could play.
Shimmering Substance manifests a new sense of pictorial structure or order. No longer is
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the painting a composition, made up of parts and presided over by some governing
intention. We meet with a very different intuition of totality.

Fig. 15.6. Untitled (Icarus), c. 1946. Gouache on cardboard, 23 7/8 x 18 7/8". Collection of Ulla
and Heiner Pietzsch, Berlin.

That Pollock does think of Shimmering Substance as the culmination of his

alchemist’s quest is suggested in a c. 1946 gouache CR 996 (Icarus) (fig. 15.6) by the
elaboration at the foot of a large and joyously dancing figure of a diamond motif. 876 There
the white trajectory of a bird-like creature not only outlines the diamond configuration but
also culminates in a hand that penetrates to its core: the black dotted outline of a circle
within its blue-colored material substance.
Greenberg chastised the Americans for their mysticism, to which he opposed the
positivism of a Dubuffet. But, however we value it, as Greenberg himself suspected, that
mysticism helped give Pollock’s art its special energy. Pollock never was able to separate
his search for a new art from his quasi-religious quest for enlightened self, the unity of the
painting from the totality of the self. Pollock had always thought of art and life as one.
And that paint was a means to spiritual awareness was a conviction that Lee embraced as
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well. Commenting on her merging of script and image, the organic and the abstract, in the
regular containment of opulently painted forms in the lyric Noon (fig. 15.7) as well as in
the little image series that followed, she said, "As I see both scales, I need to merge these
two into the everpresent. What they symbolize I have never stopped to decide. You might
want to read it as matter and spirit. The need to merge as against the need to separate." 877

Fig. 15.7. Lee Krasner, Noon, 1947. Oil on linen, 24 1/8 x 30". Private collection.

Clearly husband and wife shared much at this juncture. Their one point of
disagreement, according to Lee, was that she did not accept his belief that art and life are
one.878 While she agreed with him that in art one could merge spirit and matter, she did
not think that this achievement meant that you had solved the problems of life. But the
special energy of Pollock’s art comes from this very fusion or confusion. Discovering the
fully differentiated but integrated field of spirit-matter in Shimmering Substance he
probably did feel he had achieved self-integration. His relations with his new environs, if
not with Lee who had refused him a child, were fulfilling. He may indeed have confused,
as already suggested in The Child Proceeds, the project of self-integration with having a
child. Having a child means giving birth to another person, not to arrive at an expanded
version of yourself. Nor should giving birth to a work of art be confused with giving birth
to a child. Lee’s “no” in late spring or early summer emphatically broke any confusion
between his art and a real child that he may have entertained. His art was to be his child.
Shimmering Substance is indeed foetal stuff: the foetus of his new art.
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6. The Rebirth of Painting

Talk of a new art invites thoughts of the art that is being left behind: the art of
Picasso. Pollock had first challenged Picasso's Girl before a Mirror, its theme of creativity
in Magic Mirror, and had clarified that challenge in Male and Female, each time proposing
the promise of a new being, whether the volute foetal shape in the first or the centrally
placed diamonds in the second. Shimmering Substance can be understood as that promise
realized. This new pictorial entity leaves behind figuration. Picasso never took, nor desired
to take this step. His erotic approach to painting demanded the presence of the external
corporeal body in nature. It remained, as Lee Krasner had put it in trying to explain the
difference between Picasso and Pollock, “nature that is out there.” In The Painter and his
Model 1928 Picasso thus depicts the male artist reacting to the female model, imaginatively
transforming her in his act of creation. Throughout his career as artist Picasso needed the
occasion provided by some external object, whether to be analyzed into abstract forms in
Analytic Cubism, or to be reconstructed with the abstract forms of Synthetic Cubism, or
later, in his Surrealist period, with forms now inflected by his own more unconscious and
emotional responses to the external object. The creative act here is always an erotic tussle
between artist and object. Its sexual charge is made explicit in a late etching in which
Picasso depicts the male artist making love to his model, as he simultaneously paints her
image on a canvas. The brush is equated with the phallus. 879 A move to non-objectivity
would have contradicted and undermined Picasso’s fundamentally erotic formulation of
his art making.
Pollock, too, presented creativity in erotic terms. But the key metaphor would seem to be
procreation rather than conquest. The goal is always the creation of a new or third entity, that is
the incarnation of spirit in matter, whether foetus or diamond-body. Procreation, however, turns
out to be an ambiguous metaphor, for if Pollock’s early gendering of creativity, his understanding
of linear impulse as male and the thickness of paint as female, invites a charge of phallo-centrism,
his tendency to understand the relationship of man and woman as the figure of the relationship of
spirit and matter had to bring with it a tendency to understand the erotic relationship as a
relationship within the self, to seek woman within the self. Given such an introverted,
metaphorical understanding of intercourse, it is not surprising that in his totem war with Picasso
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he should have been led toward abstraction. An understanding of erotic union as a dynamic
interplay of opposites provided him with his key. Having discovered it, he was able to let go of
his imagery. It had done its job. He could then release his creative energies directly into a dialogue
with paint, playing on his own androgynous intuitions and sensitivity to the life inherent in paint.
Picasso’s eros aimed at mastery of “nature out there.” Pollock’s eros is a dialogue with the raw
materiality of paint, coming to fruition in the animated materiality of Shimmering Substance.
In writing of Pollock’s "search for a unitary mode of notation that would be able to
transcode anything," Yves-Alain Bois wrote: “Once it has been demonstrated that
everything can be reduced to a similar diagram, the challenge will then be to take similarity
(or unity) as a starting point, and get rid of the diagram – which is exactly Pollock will later
do with his all-over compositions.”880 Going further than Bois, I would claim that
Pollock’s sense of unity is not founded on similarity as much as on a visionary totality of
“oneness,” which becomes the basis for a new order in Pollock’s painting.
A classical order never lost its hold on Picasso. Even as he had challenged it in his
art, he was horrified when the forces of fascism, depicted in his etching Dream and Lie of
Franco, I (January 8, 1937) in the person of the bestial polyp Franco battering with a pick-
ax at the classical statue of a woman, set out in earnest to undermine what remained of
classical culture. Picasso's art was rooted in the western tradition and its idealization of
external reality. The canons of that tradition still carried moral force. And even though
Picasso himself had opened up art to the forces of the primitive, the abstract, the irrational,
he never abandoned himself to this new realm, and ultimately was caught, as Girl before a
Mirror eloquently testifies, in the tensions between the classical and the primitive. Pollock,
however, was not caught between these two worlds. He did not have the weight of a
classical past to shed. But for some schooling in the "Renaissance" tradition received from
Benton, he was largely untouched by the great tradition of western culture. Moreover, he
had no facility with the Renaissance conventions of drawing. He had set out to, and now
succeeds in discovering, another way of making forms, born of the conviction of a oneness
with nature.
Though speaking of the poured paintings shortly to follow, the words of the poet
Frank O’Hara already apply to Shimmering Substance: “In the state of spiritual clarity
there are no secrets. The effort to achieve such a state is monumental and agonizing, and
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once achieved it is a harrowing state to maintain. ... This is not a mystical state, but the
accumulation of decisions along the way and the eradication of conflicting beliefs toward
the total engagement of the spirit in the expression of meaning. ... Works of this nature are
new in the history of Western civilization, and the spiritual state of their creation is as
different from that of previous artists as is the look of the paintings different from that of
previous paintings.”881 The one qualification to be made about Shimmering Substance is
that it remains a figure for what Pollock wished to translate into the immediacy of lived
experience: a figure of future happiness. The question arises with Shimmering Substance,
as it did with Mural, how to go on, what to do next? Now the dream of “I am nature,” of
being one with the other, of overcoming the split between subject and object, seemed to
become reality. Lee’s rejection was in some ways a liberation to him: now freed -- or was
it condemned to give himself over to this oneness with nature.
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Chapter 16
The Alchemy of Pouring II

1. Pouring

Fig. 16.1. Pollock, Number 14, 1948 (Gray), 1948. Enamel on gesso on paper, 22 7/16 × 30 7/8". Yale
University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

In Number 14, 1948 (fig. 16.1), a small painting on paper, created by pouring black
enamel paint onto the ground of still wet white paint, we have an example of the break in
Pollock’s oeuvre when he launches into the making of his poured paintings of 1947-50.
Pouring had occurred before in his work, for instance in passages in the first poured
paintings of 1943 and then again in 1945 in works such as Troubled Queen. But now all
figurative imagery has been left behind. A viewer immediately senses the directness of
Pollock’s application of paint, not by the traditional brush, but through pouring, and in this
instance probably, as the conservator James Coddingham suggests -- directly from the
can.882 As Pollock pours the black enamel paint into the prepared ground of wet white
paint, the black and the white interact. 883 The black line, poured fast and thin, is sometimes
swallowed by white, poured more slowly or in greater volume, the paint thickens and takes
on a more substantial presence. The trajectory of a pour often picks up the energy stream
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of another pour. The black poured lines are alive; they have the vitality of sperm, in a
primordial whiteness. The “thickness of white” is no longer the secret that it was in
Guardians of the Secret. The division of black and white as found in Bird is no longer
mediated by a symbol, but by moving black linear impulses that have all the energy of
plumed serpents, that turn back again and again into the white paint, engaging it in constant
dialogue.
At one level this energy is unbound, the swing of the black pours sometimes moving
beyond the edge of the paper support. But this energized field is not chaotic. The vertical
axis is marked by a black line ascending from the center of the bottom edge. On the left a
thicker black crescent swirl establishes a vaguely figural presence. Traversing the central
axis, a stronger black trajectory heads to the right, experienced more as a ground. There
another black linear impulse mounts upward and with a second spurt of energy finds itself
within a circling activation of the ground. Sometimes the black line has a distinctly male
charge, sometimes a female charge, as its very circling creates the sensation of the receptive
ground. From this quiet circling in the upper right we can see the rise of another strong
black pour that turns sharply to the left to loop around and across the central axis -- or is
the direction of this pour actually in the other direction? Another and more extravagant
larger loop of black now moving on the upper left of the field dips down to touch and just
penetrate the large crescent swirl below. The erotic charge of these energies pulsing
throughout the field seems inescapable, as figure and ground, black and white, thick and
thin, merge in a continuing and omni-directional play of opposites.
Pollock works here with an almost unprecedented spontaneity. The matter that once
resisted him so horribly is now responsive. Intention and execution are not at odds. Indeed beyond
the laying of the white enamel ground and the choice of black enamel for his gestural markings,
there seems no clear intention. In a statement published in the 1947/48 issue of Possibilities a little
magazine put out by Robert Motherwell and Harold Rosenberg, Pollock described the process of
making his new paintings: “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only
after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about
making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let
it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise
there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.” Like an attentive
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lover, he is responsive to the material before him. “The painting has a life of its own. I try to let
it come through.”884 Pollock here is no longer the self-confident artist in charge of his materials,
molding them to his will. Creativity is tied to responsiveness. The reward is a spontaneity that
resolves itself with an almost utopian ease. Number 14, 1948, one of a group of black and white
pours created that year, does indeed deserve to be counted among Pollock’s “most beautiful and
understated works.”885
The poured paintings which Pollock created between 1947-50 are considered by
most people his greatest works. Energetic, spontaneous, immediate, they give off the sense
that Pollock has arrived at the style that suits him best. Greenberg likened the 1947 poured
paintings to Picasso’s and Braque’s masterpieces of the 1912-15 phase of Cubism: “There
is something of the same encasement in a style that, so to speak, feels for the painter and
relieves him of the anguish and awkwardness of invention, leaving his gift free to function
almost automatically.”886 If Pollock is a great painter, it is these poured paintings that make
him one. The originality of these tantalizing, iconoclastic works makes it easy to lose sight
of their continuity with his earlier work. Kirk Varnedoe, who organized the retrospective
of Pollock’s art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1999, thus wrote of the 1947 pourings:
“Whatever prompted it, the style certainly didn’t evolve logically or organically out of the
previous year’s efforts.”887 But while something distinctly new has emerged, such
emergence remains more evolution than revolution.

2. “Technic is the result of a need”

“Technic is the result of a need -- new needs demand new technics.” 888 These notes, made
by Pollock probably in 1950, invite the question: “What need?” At a fundamental level the need
to enact his feelings. “The modern artist,” he explained in the 1950 Wright interview, “is working
with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.”889 Thus the welter of
feelings that found labored expression in the tumultuous union between hero and beast depicted in
the images of Pasiphae, Pollock enacted in Mural, intermingling male and female forces in a more
abstract and rhythmic dialogue. Following Motherwell’s lead, many people have seen Mural as
the one major precursor in Pollock’s early work to the rhythm and scale of the later poured
paintings. Mural, however, did not make use of the technique of pouring paint, which, as we have
seen, Pollock used to enact erotic fantasies in the three poured paintings executed in 1943, and
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again in a few paintings in 1945.890 Then the pouring had always had a one-sided male charge. In
1946 and 1947 this technique expands to become the chief pictorial means to express his new
feelings of oneness with nature, of being part of a larger totality, a larger energy field. As he made
his home in the land- and seascape at Springs in the spring and summer of 1946, “I am nature”
became “I am a part of nature.” To express this sense of belonging more directly, he had already
begun to let go of his imagery in The Blue Unconscious. In Eyes in the Heat he worked towards
the realization of an endlessly dynamic transformative process of creation in the stuff of paint. At
this point, it would seem, he was poised to pour paint.
The artist Paul Brach once asked Pollock, “Why did you start to throw the paint?” “I don’t
know,” he said. “Someone tried to talk me into using a dagger striper [a paint brush used for
pinstriping automobiles,” but the sucker didn’t hold the paint long enough. I just wanted a longer
line.”891 Why a longer line? In Shimmering Substance Pollock was not simply after unending
motor activity; he wanted to communicate his sense of being part of a unified field of energy. To
his neighbor Jeffrey Potter some time after 1948, speaking of the ocean, he confided: “That ground
swell is the universe breathing, over and over, short and long. On a good day, my work feels like
that – alive, strong, all me.”892 In the more straight laced format of an interview done for radio in
1950, he stated: “The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world -- in
other words – expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.” Such energies merge
with other energies. In the same interview: “It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express
this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the renaissance or any other
past culture. Each age finds its own technique.”893 In later notes from 1950 he jotted down:
“Experience of our age in terms/ of painting -- not an illustration of -- (but the equivalent.)/
Concentrated/ fluid,” or on another sheet “energy and motion/ made visible --.”894 He needed a
way of expressing this; to capture the flow of these energies he needed a longer line: mimesis, not
as pictorial representation, but as reenactment.

3. The Role of the Image

In Full Fathom Five 1947 (fig. 16. 2) Pollock uses a combination of brushwork and
pouring, a step in the evolution of his distinctive style.895
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Fig. 16.2. Full Fathom Five, 1947. Oil on canvas with nails, tacks, buttons, keys, combs, cigarettes, matches etc.,
50 7/8 x 30 1/8". The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Peggy Guggenheim, 1952.

Pollock explained in a 1947/48 statement: “I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s
tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or
a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass and other foreign matter added.”896 The initial impastoed
layers of Full Fathom Five are painted with a brush; embedded in the impasto are clusters of nails,
a garland of upended thumbtacks, buttons, two keys, cigarette, matches, etc. Then come the thin
poured lines of mostly black and silver paint. While the topmost quick slashes of mustard yellow
and orange and white impastoed paint encircled in a ring of black poured paint might suggest a
head, what is especially intriguing about Pollock’s process of painting this canvas, as discovered
through the conservator’s x-ray photographs made at the time of the Museum of Modern Art’s
1999 Pollock retrospective, is the presence of a rough figure in the first impastoed layer to which
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Pollock then responded in subsequent layering. The issue of the role of the figurative image in the
making of Pollock’s poured paintings is thus raised.
One key embedded in the impasto, hardly visible in most reproductions, falls
unmistakably right at the crotch of the figure. 897 In this detail we recognize a literal and
concrete variation of a by now familiar theme. Pollock has always used his dream visions
to get him going as a painter. But here he has decided to bury this triggering image, for he
had begun to discover a more abstract way of translating the drama of erotic dialogue into
more purely pictorial sensations: either of being drawn down into the encrusted layers of
aqua-green and grays or of being released into the more buoyant swirls of poured silver
and black. Is it important then to ferret out through the technology of x-ray the underlying
contours of a figure? Admittedly this is fascinating. But does Pollock not himself present
to us his own painterly metamorphosis of this sexual counter -- in the potential interlock of
the mustard yellow with the two orange linear marks, his last additions of color on the
surface of the canvas?
Still, the presence of the underlying figure and the real key buried in the impasto in
Full Fathom Five serve to dramatize the issue of the role of the private narrative and
figurative image in Pollock’s poured paintings, an issue that became central in Pepe
Karmel’s contribution to the 1999 retrospective of Pollock’s art. Analyzing the films and
photographs taken by Hans Namuth of Pollock painting in 1950, Karmel discovered, with
the help of the computer that the figure continues to play a role in Pollock’s compositional
strategies, with even a work like Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950 (see fig. 21.7) being
built on a “figurative” armature. The tension between figuration and abstraction would
thus seem to remain a constant in the body of Pollock’s poured paintings. Karmel ends by
asserting, I think correctly, that the rhythmic energy animating the poured paintings “seems
in large part to have resulted from the interaction between Pollock’s figurative imagery and
his all-over, all-absorbing web.”898
Karmel’s analysis of Namuth’s first and never released black and white film
provides the clearest understanding of how Pollock began a painting with images created
by poured black lines and then proceeded via splatters to produce a black and white all-
over abstract painting, particularly beautiful both Namuth and Lee Krasner recalled, but
which seemingly disappeared, only later to be identified as the underpainting of the more
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colorful Number 27, 1950, now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York. Piecing together successive frames Karmel was able to assemble an overall
view of the images (fig. 16.3) that Pollock created as he began the painting: the first is the
roughly circular head of a humanoid figure located in the lower right of this particular
view.899 At the terminus of this head Pollock created, Karmel notes, a pair of tiny blots
connected by a stem: a miniature barbell with one end light and the other dark. In this we
recognize a variation of the foetal diamonds within the womb of the large female on the
right in a gouache Red (c. 1946): the first solid white, the second transparent, making along
their connecting line a suggestive totality of solid and void, of eight, leading to the solid
white point, the One (fig. 16.4).

Fig. 16.3. Jackson Pollock beginning work on Number 27, 1950, Frame from Hans Namuth's black and
white film.
L: Fig. 16.4. Red, c. 1946. Gouache on composition board, 18 3/4 x 23 1/4". Collection Mr. and Mrs. Charles
H. Carpenter, Jr., New Canaan, Connecticut.

Fig. 16.5. Jackson Pollock completing the first layer of Number 27, 1950. Frame from Hans Namuth's
black and white film.
R: Fig. 16.6. Blue (Moby Dick), c. 1946. Gouache and ink on composition board, 18 3/4 x 23 7/8".
Ohara Art Museum, Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture, Japan.
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Pollock continues to throw out his magical imagistic amulets, in invocation of

desired results, as he launches on the extraordinary effort of painting a roughly four by nine
foot poured painting before Namuth’s running camera. Next comes the crescent-headed
figure in the upper quadrant -- Pollock’s female, and along the lower left what Karmel
describes as a female dog or wolf with teats, akin he suggests to the female animals of
Pollock’s art in 1943 (fig. 16.5). I suggest kinship especially with an animal depicted in
the extreme upper right hand corner in Blue (Moby Dick) (c. 1946): with its long body,
pert face with antennae-like ear and more complex rear end, in 1950 suggestive of a figure
eight (fig. 16.6).900 Pollock is here recreating something like the staging of The Blue
Unconscious, the shaman’s presence supported by the key animal as he stands poised on
the brink of abstraction. In completing this poured painting Pollock pursues abstraction,
allowing, as we can see in the film, the figures to be absorbed into the evolving all-over
abstract web.
In light of these images, visible both in The Blue Unconscious and in the overview
pieced together by Karmel of the underpainting of the present Number 27, 1950, Namuth’s
record of Pollock’s description of the role of consciousness in the creation of his poured
paintings is pertinent. “The conscious part of his mind he says plays no part in the creation
of his work. It is relegated to the duties of a watchdog; when the unconscious sinfully
produces a representational image, the conscious cries alarm and Pollock wrenches himself
to reality and obliterates the offending form.” 901 The metaphor of consciousness as
watchdog is a striking one. In The Blue Unconscious the key animal supports male
consciousness in its encounter with the more abstract ground into which the female
symbols begin to dissolve. Pollock’s statement implies the totem animal’s presence is in
the poured paintings, at least in his psyche, as a watchdog as he creates the paintings.
Karmel’s detective work in fact reveals the animal’s symbolic presence, which, if we take
Pollock’s statement seriously, functions as a reminder to stay abstract, wrenching him back
to reality, suggesting the irreality of the products of his over-active imagination.
Karmel’s analyses reveal what he names two modes of image-making within the
poured paintings, one involving an evolution from figuration to abstraction, as seen in the
painting beneath Number 27, 1950, and another involving a process of creating figures,
obscuring them, and then overpainting them with new figures that in the end merge into
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the semi-abstract, semi-representational web beneath, as in One, 1950.902 The watchdog

of Pollock’s consciousness would have to have often cried alarm. On the other hand, one
might rather say that in the thrill of uncovering imagery within the poured paintings Karmel
wants to overemphasize their presence. Karmel’s enthusiasm for figuration leads him to
understand Pollock as partaking of the Renaissance tradition of figuration, that is the
tradition of solids in spatial voids,903 without understanding the degree of which Pollock’s
dream visions are more like nodes of energy, feelings and thoughts, that long to be released
into a freer and more spontaneous flow of energy that allows him to partake of a world
bigger than his own often troubled imagination.
In this particular statement recorded by Namuth Pollock makes it clear that his goal
is abstraction. Representational images are even called sinful! Why? Perhaps he
understood them finally as products of narcissistic pride. He had to break out of the privacy
of his dream visions and move to the abstract which he took to be a more universal
expression. The unconscious, from which dream visions arose, would continue to be, as
he had put it in the draft to his Possibilities statement, “the source of my painting.”904 Much
as another artist might need nature as a source of content, Pollock needs the unconscious
as a source of content in his art, whether as a source of dream images or of abstract rhythms.
In his early years Pollock had relied on dream images to trigger his visual thinking in the
making of paintings; over the years a number of these images became available as players
in Pollock’s developing narrative of his quest. The key animal is such an image, evolving
into that conscious watchdog that warns him when in the creation of an abstract painting,
images from his unconscious begin to surface. For his goal now is a more universal and
that means also, a more abstract expression. Certainly it was in such terms that his mentors
Paalen and Graham had celebrated abstraction.
And yet, as a long-time practitioner of automatic écriture, Pollock needed
something to react to, thoughts and feelings that often for him took the form of images. 905
Dream visions had always given him access to his tumultuous inner life, and he still needed
their ferment. He was, as he was to comment in 1956, “certainly not ‘nonobjective,’ and
not ‘nonrepresentational’ either. I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all
of the time. But when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to
emerge.”906 Of course already in 1952 Pollock had returned to overt imagery. Still he was
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right to insist that he is a little representational all of the time. In talking with an interviewer
from Life magazine in 1949 he explained the tension between figuration and abstraction:
“I try to stay away from any recognizable image; if it creeps in, I try to do away with it ...
to let the painting come through. I don’t let the image carry the painting. ... It’s extra
cargo -- and unnecessary. ... Recognizable images are always there in the end.” 907
Karmel is right to assert that the energy animating the poured paintings “seems in
large part to have resulted from the interaction between Pollock’s figurative imagery and
his all-over, all-absorbing web.” But this interaction needs to be understood as a figure for
something else. Pollock wanted to translate all that was in his imagery, his own thoughts
and feelings, inner forces that had to do with his erotic energies, fears and hopes, into
abstract paint. The interaction between figurative imagery and the all-over web becomes
his way of investing those same energies in the handling of abstract paint. The energies
that animate the poured webs are ultimately the complexities of human emotions: in
Pollock’s words “memories arrested in space,/ human needs and motives --/ acceptance -
-.”908

4. In a new key

Fig. 16.7. Free Form, 1946. Oil on canvas, 19 1/4 x 14". The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The
Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection.
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For Kirk Varnedoe the poured style simply “arrived full blown, and then showed
no standard, linear development over the next three years”: Free Form, one of the smallest
and earliest poured paintings dated 1946, he finds “generally consonant with” one of the
largest and last One: Number 31, 1950, 1950.909 But in light of such an accomplished work
as Number 14, 1948, the very early Free Form (fig. 16.7) with its pourings on a red ground
of an at first white oil paint topped by a black poured line is bold but crude. In the layering
of white and black he proposes a dialogue of opposites, even achieving an equilibrium in
our awareness of black and white as seen against the ground, but as yet there is no articulate
play between the opposites, no dialogue. Pollock had to work his way towards such
dialogue.
The scope of Pollock’s ambition and hopes for a new style utilizing the poured
technique is dramatically stated in Galaxy 1947 (fig. 16.8).

Fig. 16.8. Galaxy, 1947. Oil, aluminum paint and gravel on canvas, 43 1/2 x 34". Joslyn Art Museum,
Omaha, Nebraska. Gift of Peggy Guggenheim.

In Galaxy, a clearly transitional work, Pollock buried, or should one rather say cloaked, the
imagistic field of The Little King (see fig. 13.7), which he had completed in 1946, with a
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layering of brushed and poured aluminum paint, followed by splatterings of poured white
oil paint. Through this calculated layering he left tantalizingly exposed at the top center of
the canvas the triangular head with lone eye of the mother figure and at the top right the
colorful yellow, blue, orange and green attributes of the little king delineated in black: his
seven fingered hand with its distinctive eighth finger, the figure-eight infinity motif. The
Little King, as we have seen, invites consideration as an illustration of the philosopher’s
stone, “the King’s son,” a key protagonist of Pollock’s private myth. But in Galaxy the
philosopher’s stone finds not a symbolic, but a more concrete expression. That in Galaxy
the winged dragon in the upper right of The Little King is no longer visible, but overtaken
by or transformed into the mercurial shimmer of aluminum paint and poured white splatters
speaks to Pollock’s knowing transposition: one of the best known versions of the
philosopher’s stone is Mercury -- whether the divine, winged Hermes, the ancient god of
revelation, or more simply mercury, the mercurial quicksilver or “spirit-substance.”910
Both infusions of aluminum paint and the technique of pouring are distinctive new traits
of Pollock’s work in 1947, as he finds himself at the beginning of the last leg of his
alchemist’s quest. The biggest challenge of all will be not so much to get used to the new
technique of pouring, as to rediscover the nuanced differentiations that he had already
achieved in his work with symbolic imagery.
To Jeffrey Potter Pollock remarked: “Allover works on account it means no limits,
just edges. So I work to the edge, on lots of levels, too.” 911 These edges are established
by the format of the pictorial support that Pollock chooses, its size and proportions, whether
the 22 3/4 by 31 inches piece of paper for Number 14, 1948, or the 50 7/8 by 30 1/8 inches
of canvas for Full Fathom Five. From the underlying figure in Full Fathom Five and its
precisely positioned key, we know that this space or ground remains in Pollock’s
imagination female. This space is decidedly not Renaissance space, a space that has its
foundation in the eye of the spectator and is then inhabited by figures understood as solids
positioned in the measured void, nor is it the shallow and ambiguous remains of the space
found in Cubism. As long as we hold on to such an understanding of space, we run the
risk of misreading his art. 912 Karmel, for instance, states “Pollock proposed an
unprecedented fragmentation of space.” 913 Much as the Cubists fragmented the object,
Pollock fragmented space – through a sum of destructions. Restructuring Picasso’s shallow
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stage space through the process of “veiling” any preliminary stick figures and generating a
“laminar space,” which is “suggested by variations in density,” Karmel argues that Pollock
creates “the impression of a kind of pocketed space, containing many volumes instead of a
single large one.” 914 This reading presupposes that Pollock was interested in such vestiges
of representational space. Karmel thus describes the roughly trapezoidal shape in the
center of Male and Female in Search of a Symbol (see fig. 9.17) as “the end of a table seen
in perspective.”915 And it is easy to accept that interpretation, if we take Pollock to be still
working within the world as seen, or at least the remainder of such a world. In what remains
of this world, figures, though but flat graphic signs, are still fundamentally contoured
entities, and the tactility of these entities, when dissolved, dissolves into primordial
opticality.916 To the degree that Greenberg, Rubin and most recently Karmel assert the
Cubist premise of Pollock’s art, this reading follows. But in 1942 when Lee Krasner tried
to explain Cubism to Pollock, he was not interested. His space has its measure not in the
eye, but in his ever active imagination. He was interested in dream visions and the
circulation of psychological energies through symbolic forms and matter. As early as
Magic Mirror he applied this vision to the imagery and surface of Picasso’s late Synthetic
Cubism with the desire to transform it. You might say, as Karmel does, that Pollock set
out to restructure this space, but he does so in a way unimagined by Karmel. The dream
of an unbounded space, which attracted Pollock to the American Indian sand painting or
the ritual kiva space reproduced in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of Indian art in
1941 continued to inform his art making. 917 In describing the method of creating one of
his poured paintings he thus effectively evokes the spatial structure of American Indian
sand painting: that one can enter it from all four sides or directions, that one can be a part
of it, in it, and that there is a literal up and down axis created by the fact of working on the
floor.
Of course Pollock’s space is different. When what he had created on the floor was
seen on the wall, it could best be described in Pollock’s word to Busa as a “hedge” space,
that is a frontal space with extension on the horizontal, vertical, and in-out axes.918
Permeable and unbounded, such space was open to the imagination. The spatial totality at
which he first arrived in Shimmering Substance was compressed in a “recreated flatness,”
bred within the space of late Synthetic Cubism. In this space Pollock wanted sensations of
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free movement, of flight and fall, of dance, and the looping lines of his poured gestures
would in the end give him something of this. He wanted to move through matter over time
in an opened-up, unbounded space. But first he had to teach himself how to navigate
through such space.
Pollock had long experienced the promise of this potentially endless space in his
imagination. Now he had to learn how to occupy it, to fly in it. This became the task of
the first year of his poured paintings. That Pollock felt euphoric and confident as he set
out on his new task is evident in the still imagistic greeting cards that he and Lee sent out
for the New Year in 1947. In CR 767 (1946) (fig. 16.9) he depicts a linear stick figure in
what appears to be a joyous free fall head down through a linear swirl of space towards the
dotted matter and within that a circle at the core of a roughly sketched pentagram. In a
card sent to Clement Greenberg, CR 768 (1946) (fig. 16.10) we see rising up from crescent
forms below a figural form with a rotating diamond form at its center. The question was
how to realize this dynamic diamond body in his new painting.

L: Fig. 16.9. Untitled, CR 767, 1946. Ink and crayon on paper, White paper 5 1/2 x 3 1/4"; Sight, mount 6
1/4 x 4 1/2". Lost, only photo extant.
R. 16.10. Untitled, CR 768, 1946. Ink, pencil and crayon on white paper mounted on red paper. White paper
5 1/2 x 3 1/4"; Sight mount 7 x 4 1/2".
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5. Structure
“It was good to talk about your painting with him because he attacked it in a
structural way, not bringing in other meanings that a painter has that you can’t talk about
too much.”919 Thus James Brooks, Pollock’s friend and fellow painter, and not too distant
neighbor in East Hampton, appreciated Pollock’s talk about painting. That Pollock himself
was interested in such structural appreciation for his own work is suggested by a growling
question asked in 1956: “You mean you don’t see Mondrian in my work?” 920 Looking
together at Mondrian’s work in an exhibition, Pollock once commented to Tony Smith on
how his all-over paintings connected to Mondrian’s “plus-and-minus” compositions of
1913-15 (see fig. 4.4).921 While their all-over, frontal, and shallow atmospheric space
undoubtedly had, as Rubin has discussed, something to teach Pollock, another striking
feature of these compositions, especially the 1915 “pier and ocean’’ ones (see fig.4.4), is
the exquisite tension that Mondrian maintains, using only verticals and horizontals,
between sensations of multiplicity and oneness, the endless flux of the ocean and glancing
perception of the actual bi-axial symmetry that underlies and unifies this flux.922
Such intuition of presiding unity occupied Pollock in Shimmering Substance, and
continues to do so as he sets out to explore in his poured paintings its many material
manifestations.
Since Pollock had already spent years (1941 to 1946) coming to an understanding
of the structure of this total space, he was able to explore with some rapidity the various
axes or slices of this space in the 1947 poured paintings. One can understand why
Varnedoe views the poured style as having arrived “full-blown.” Although it is not known
in what sequence Pollock produced them, we see him focusing in individual canvases on
different formats emphasizing: the center, verticality, the diagonal, or horizontality, each
time bringing to bear his underlying comprehension of unitary structure. That is, each time,
whatever the starting point and whatever the journey in between, Pollock hoped in the end
for that “easy give and take,” that “pure harmony.” Improvisation, as Matthew Rohn
writes, “involves two seemingly antithetical activities, and both must be evident in the final
work. Well ordered, preconceived structures must be coordinated with freely evolved
elements that create a sense of ever-open possibilities.”923 The dialectic of image and
abstraction still plays a role in some of the poured paintings, but increasingly, as Pollock
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propels himself further into the realm of abstraction, the dialectic becomes that of structure
and spontaneity. But first Pollock rehearses and plays with structure.
The circular structure so pronounced in Shimmering Substance receives no less
than three variations in that first year of pouring: in Nest, Prism, and Vortex (fig. 16.12).

Fig. 16.12. Vortex, c. 1947. Oil and enamel on canvas, 20 5/8 x 18 1/4". Private Collection.

In Vortex, for instance, the repetitive circlings of thin black lines poured down on a first
layer of larger colored areas (blue at the center, abutted by reds and yellows, with more
oranges further towards the edges of this squarish field) announce: circle, but a circle
opened up in space. Some of the thin black lines streak across the circling, with seemingly
little regard for the boundaries of the canvas, extending into an indefinite beyond. If
viewed on the vertical plane, this opened up space both sits on the thick brown earth-like
paint at the bottom edge of the field, and at its top edges is pinned down by wedges of this
brown and sometimes black paint, where a view through to the white-sized ground provides
some relief from the impinging weight. But more exciting, and generated by knowing and
simply seeing that Pollock must have poured the thin circling lines down onto the canvas
when it was in a horizontal position, is the precipitous sensation of vortex, a motion that
takes us “in” and “down” to the primary colors, the blue at the center. Thus the space
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encoded in Shimmering Substance is amplified and explored, especially the new axis of
“in and out,” an entirely new way of broaching the “blue unconscious.”
But was it really so new? Pollock had long concentrated on the center of his
pictorial space, in Male and Female, Guardians of the Secret, Pasiphae, the engraving CR
1080, Portrait of H.M., and of course Shimmering Substance. And we know some of his
erotic associations, his fantasies about the male diving headlong into the female body,
associations that continued to echo in his thoughts. In speaking of nature, especially the
ocean and beach, at East Hampton, Pollock told Jeffrey Potter: “It’s Woman, out there.
And it can draw you -- suck you out, then down and in, way in. You’re home again, where
it all began.”924 In Vortex we’re drawn down to primary colors, most centrally to blue.
And of course viewers are invited to respond to what is on the canvas in their own and
endlessly different ways: that Leja might find such space “explicitly threatening and
dangerous” in its unfamiliar spatial orientations is understandable. 925
Circles and centers remained important to Pollock even in the later poured paintings
of 1949-50. To Goodnough Pollock could assert in 1951: “My paintings do not have a
center, but depend on the same amount of interest through out.”926 But Karmel, with the
help of high-tech analysis of Namuth’s films, has uncovered the strong presence of a circle
on the central axis of both a now lost painting on red canvas and Autumn Rhythm,
appearing during the early stages of making the paintings, only to submerge as a hidden
lodestone into the fabric of a finally all-over composition, in which Pollock rightly claims
that the final paintings “depend on the same amount of interest through out.”927 Karmel
ends his discussion of the making of Autumn Rhythm by pointing out a bi-lateral symmetry
that underlies the entirety of the composition, the “tension between symmetry and
variation” being “largely hidden by the apparently uniform texture of the upper paint
layers.”928 Now we understand more of why Pollock could comment to Tony Smith that
the all-over poured paintings he was working on were related to Mondrian’s “plus and
minus” composition and later growl: “You mean you don’t see Mondrian in my work?”
Pollock’s ability to work with bilateral symmetry does not arrive full-blown however. In
comprehending something of the evolution of Pollock’s poured style, we have to cast back
to 1947, to the verticality of Cathedral, the diagonal of Comet, the complex horizontality
of Alchemy.
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In Cathedral (fig. 16.12) Pollock works with an unusually narrow vertical format
that serves to concentrate the strongly vertical dynamics of the composition, as trajectories
of energies course up and down. 929

Fig. 16.13. Cathedral, 1947. Oil and aluminum paint on canvas, 71 1/2 x 35 1/16". Dallas
Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Reis.

Sometimes these energies occur as long thin poured black lines that seem to streak the
entire length of the canvas, especially on the right, up -- or is it down? The way the lightly
marked rectangles at the bottom tend to extend themselves upward, generating elusive hints
of ever more elongated rectangles, gives the work that "Gothic" look Mondrian later was
to deplore in his tree paintings.930 But we also sense opposing forces. A thicker puddling
of black about three quarters of the way down the canvas suggests downward movement.
The question of “which way?” comes up again and again. Do the streaking trajectories of
thin orange, and sometimes yellow, as they also sometimes veer to left or right, mount or
descend? This vertical drama is given pride of place in this still unitary space, in which
horizontal and in-out axes are also developed. For instance, horizontal pressure is
suggested by the larger black curves that loop out towards the edges, especially on the left,
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less on the right. These same curves also read, as Hayter had emphasized, as convex and
concave, establishing an in-out dimensionality that is more excitingly created by the
“concrete construction of space”, this time not through engraved lines, but through the
actual layering of the variously thick lines of poured oil paints: its ropes and threads.
Coursing through the larger flux of blacks and whites mediated by the all-over play of
aluminum light, this taut filigree of colored lines adds excitement to the drama, where up
would seem to dominate down. As an orange trajectory streaks just to the upper edge,
slightly to the left of center, and a more unusual red one culminates in a dollop just below
a carefully delineated small black circle positioned at the center of the upper edge, we sense
that “Cathedral,” with its connotation of triumphant verticality, is indeed an appropriate
title -- although Pollock himself did not, as I shall shortly discuss, title these 1947 canvases.
The skill with which Pollock explores the dynamics of verticality rests in part on
Gothic where he first structured an all-over synthesis, emphasizing mounting vertical
rhythms. Pollock already had strong associations with these directional forces. To Dr.
Elizabeth Hubbard he explained, when she asked what a drawing, done around 1944 that
he had given her, meant: “Well, everything in it is going up.”931 Speaking of psychological
depression to Jeffrey Potter, Pollock later conveyed the intensely personal and sometimes
despairing nature of his associations: “Being down with it is like I flowed down. Trouble,
I don’t know how to flow up.”932 But in Cathedral he did know how, at least pictorially.
That Pollock was intent in 1947 on exploring the dynamics of specific axes as well
as exploring the range of material effects that could be achieved with his new technique is
clear in his rare dramatization of the diagonal axis in Comet (fig. 14).
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Fig. 16.14. Comet, 1947. Oil on canvas, 37 1/8 x 17 7/8". Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen
am Rhein.

The tensions explored along the downward diagonal thrust of Troubled Queen give way to
the purity of a demonstration by Hayter on how a north-west to south-east diagonal works,
so simple, but now complicated by the mysterious language of matter. Recall that Hayter
explained that an observer has the tendency to follow a diagonal from north-west to south-
east in a descending, and from south-west to north-east in an ascending direction. Though
the white trail of the “comet” follows the first path, Pollock forces us, by playing on our
associations with pouring, especially the manner in which this particular “comet” comes to
a head in the upper left corner of the canvas, to read the diagonal in reverse, the first of
many such reversals and ambiguities that invite contemplation. The speed of the “comet”
implied by traversing the entire diagonal of the canvas is countered by the thickness of the
white, crusted, cracking, aging matter of which it is composed. Still it manages to streak
from the black paint in the lower right towards a blue ground visible in the upper left, and
to find a passage through the central area of black -- not in reality, for the white breaks
here, but through the dynamics of vision and the impulse of imagination. The “comet” also
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gives meaning to the churning “nebulae” of marblelized aluminum greys to either side of
its path, themselves further mediations of black and white oppositions. Is Pollock here
attaining Paalen’s goal: an abstract art that with non-anthropomorphic elements could,
nevertheless, carry a human message, and even express cosmic sensations in terms of
emotion?
In September 1947 Pollock wrote his mother that he had a painting stretched on a
quilting frame, that once the painting was finished in another week, he would send along
to her. The painting was Alchemy (fig. 16.15), 3 feet 9 1/8 inches x 7 feet 3 1/8 inches.

Fig. 16.15. Alchemy, 1947. Oil, aluminum, enamel paint and string on canvas, 45 x 87". The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976.

The horizontal format that he had first mastered in Mural and revisited in There were 7 in
8 and Waterbull is re-approached through his new style. He isn’t yet, in Mothewell’s words
about Mural as the catalytic moment for Pollock’s future style, “dancing around the room,”
having “finally found a way of painting that fitted him.” Rather as T. J. Clark has noticed,
studio photographs of Pollock kneeling next to the probably already finished Alchemy (in
one he stages putting on the finishing touches) seem “to posit a degree of intimacy between
painter and canvas which is still redolent of the handmade.” 933 With daring he piles on
layer on layer of paint, especially blacks, topped by silvers, then sometimes again by black.
How much black could he bring to life? Splatterings of yellow are embedded in this, as
well as thin streaks of yellow and reds, mostly on diagonals dispersed through out the field.
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Nearing the end of the process of his making the painting, Pollock causes a number of
white lines to boldly streak down, their dolloped heads plainly visible, as they plummet
down into the field. Very close to the end, large red splatters move across the field, it
would seem from right to left, rotating into more diagonal alignments, some into a more
horizontal position in the lower left, and some diagonals and an upright converging in the
upper left. Once this movement is noticed, the raining down of the long thin white lines
suggests a counter movement. The last major one of these on the right swoops down to
pass through the loop of what looks to be a large white impastoed reclining 6. This is
answered, amid the other emphatic white marks that hover near or on the surface, by a large
number 4. This 4 is generated, on the left side of the field, by the sharp angular mark in
conjunction with the thick white bar on its right or perhaps by the abutting thin and long
streak of white. Pollock’s invocation of his lucky numbers celebrates the intermingling of
forces moving from right to left and back again, as well as swooping up and down, and
interacting in and out. The drama that he first enacted in Mural has been translated into
the abstract and material terms of Alchemy.
That the canvas is well named is suggested not only by Pollock’s evocation of the
numbers 4 and 6, whose alchemical meanings Pollock had invoked already in Stenographic
Figure, but also by a circle in impastoed paint, largely yellow, with some white, positioned
about two-thirds the way across the canvas reading from left to right which hints at the
philosopher’s stone or alchemical gold, as did the “circle” in Shimmering Substance. Now
the symbol is actualized in the entirety of this large canvas -- in the now fully differentiated
play of forces within matter on all the axes, emphatically employing the diagonal
throughout. In light of the challenge posed to “the little king” in Galaxy, to create the fully
differentiated unity of the philosopher’s stone anew using the new technique of pouring
and aluminum paint, Pollock almost certainly thought of the achievement of his new canvas
in terms of artistic alchemy, and must have found it gratifying when Ralph Manheim
recognized his accomplishments in these terms. In Manheim, who had translated Jung and
was interested in modern art, Pollock had found a sympathetic neighbor. 934 Just before the
paintings were to be sent off to the Betty Parsons gallery, Lee Krasner remembers that
Mary and Ralph Manheim came over to Pollock’s studio, and the four of them had a
naming session. Everybody contributed, with Pollock vetoing or approving titles. Pollock
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named a few, but Ralph Manheim’s titles, which included Alchemy, were predominant.935
He had translated Jacobi on Jung: “Thus from the chaos of the unconscious state,
represented by the disorder of the massa confusa which was the basic raw material of
alchemy, the corpus subtile, the ‘body of resurrection’, the ‘gold’, was produced by
division, distillation, etc., and through ever new combinations.” 936
Alchemy is hardly a relaxed painting. The straight decisive diagonals seem to call
for greater spontaneity. A similar tension existed in Portrait of H. M. and There were 7 in
8. Though in Portrait of H.M. Pollock had achieved a dynamic three-dimensional diamond
structure able to stand on its own as an abstract composition, his ambition in There were 7
in 8 had been to incorporate more of what it is to be human into his abstract expression:
more of sex, more of death, more instinctual urges, more risk taking and recovery, more
spontaneity. A similar ambition seems to underlie Lucifer (fig. 16.16). Paint that in
Alchemy suggests encrusted dark metallic ore, even if shot through with white, yellow,
and red veining, becomes in Lucifer “aerated.” Pollock’s throws of paint, in T.J. Clark’s
words, “reach out toward weightlessness: they are lacy, nebulous, blown by a horizontal
current of air.”937

Fig. 16.16. Lucifer, 1947. Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas, 41 x 105 1/2". Collection Harry W.
and Mary Margaret Anderson, Atherton, California.

For Lucifer Pollock chose a format of exaggerated horizontality, 41 inches x 8 feet

9 1/2 inches. Having primed the canvas with pale limestone cream, he brushed on two
layers of grey, one light and cool, one darker. Next he applied, as observed by the
conservator James Coddington, “staccato shots,” long thin, relatively straight, streaks of
brightly colored oils, yellow, orange, red, blue, purple, squeezed directly from holes
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punched into the oil tubes. Then he came in with black enamel paint, applied with either
brush or stick, responding to the dark grey brushwork below, but now supplying the canvas
with a wild black energy that often does not heed the edge. Still, the large, and sometimes
febrile, energies of black do not overwhelm the ground; rather they bring it into a buoyant
life. Next, and most surprisingly, Pollock transferred the canvas from off the floor to
position it upended on the vertical wall, at this junction (or just before he upended it)
applying the last throws of green paint. These, under the force of gravity, proceed to nudge
and roll their way down the canvas to create those “lacy, nebulous” throws. Only when
Pollock turned the canvas to its final horizontal axis on the wall and signed the canvas, do
these daring throws made at the culmination of the process take on the quality of being
“blown by a horizontal current of air.” This sensation opens up yet further the already
attenuated horizontality of the format to the sensation of an unbounded space.
With the move of upending the canvas and daringly, perhaps even spontaneously,
making the throws of green paint, Pollock dissolved the restraint of structure that so far he
has more or less heeded. Or should I rather say that he, more at home in the totality of
space that his art-making now occupies, undertook to work more dramatically on all the
axes at his disposal. In a few discrete but illuminating details Pollock does acknowledge a
structural armature: the strong presence of orange and yellow dabs near the center of the
right edge, and two carefully placed dabs of orange and red marking an approach to the
center of the left edge at the other end of the canvas. Or note, just under these two dabs,
the ghost of an inner rectangle brushed on in the initial layer of dark gray. Here we have
the shades of the inner rectangle of Guardians of the Secret. But now structural awareness
supports the greatest degree of automatist freedom to which Pollock has yet attained in his
art. And dark grey, rather than weigh down, contain, or suppress the automatist impulses
as it did in She Wolf, now supports and liberates these impulses. Impulses that were in the
beginning experienced as transgressive are now invited.
Manheim, we can assume, named the canvas Lucifer. Lucifer is the light bringer,
the bright angel who refusing to keep his place below God is cast into the depth. His is a
freedom that refuses to be bound. Jung had taught that “evil, the serpent, is a necessary
part of the process of growth. The dark part must be brought completely above the horizon,
so that life can go on; and the serpent raised to the sky illustrates this truth." 938 The green
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throws in Lucifer are like winged serpents that partake of the weight of matter pulled by
the force of gravity and time, even as they fly, “reach out toward weightlessness.” But
reaching out toward weightlessness they aspire to a freedom beyond our human earthbound
existence. Such aspiration is communicated by the strategy of rotation that Pollock had
employed already in Totem Lesson II, but is now played out in a much larger spatial arena,
that of his barn-studio, in which the canvas is rotated from a horizontal position on the
ground to an upended vertical position on the wall, and then to its final horizontal alignment
on the wall. All that occurs in the creative process during the course of these rotations is
compressed in the final painting as we see it. A recreated totality ensues, this time
including the dare-devilry of the green throws. The title lets us wonder: just where is
Pollock going?
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Chapter 17
“the effort of the dance”

1. Possibilities
Pollock published the description of his new approach to the act of painting in
Possibilities 1947/48. Martica Sawin has noted that at the end of the war Surrealism’s
strongest support among the New York galleries began to disappear, as did the periodicals
devoted to it. Motherwell and Rosenberg attempted to fill the gap by starting this new
journal. Possibilities was effectively a continuation of View, the last issue of which was
Spring 1947.939 In their editorial statement Motherwell and Rosenberg make a call for
artistic action, addressing evolving post war circumstances, the social and political context
pressing in on American citizens and creators alike. In 1947 President Truman had
instituted the Employee Loyalty Program to prove to the Republicans that he was not soft
on Communism;940 this was the start of the Red Scare that threatened a great conformity in
American society, compounded by the post-war conviction that American freedom was
dependent on mass consumerism in a capitalist economy. Motherwell and Rosenberg
wrote: “If one is to continue to paint or write as the political trap seems to close upon him
he must perhaps have the extremist faith in sheer possibility.” 941 Here the issue of political
and creative freedom in America is presented, and the threat to it.
That the title “Possibilities” was chosen by Rosenberg seems only natural, rising as
it does out of the discussion surrounding the nature of existential action that flourished in
artistic intellectual circles after the war. 942 Rosenberg had met Sartre in 1946; 943 both
Sartre’s “The Nationalization of Literature” and excerpts from Camus’ The Stranger were
published in the issue of View (March-April 1946), preceding the publication of
Rosenberg’s "Notes on Identity: With Special Reference to the Mixed Philosopher, Søren
Kierkegaard." In keeping with the existentialist understanding of freedom, possibilities are
given priority over facts. “Prior to essence is existence.” Freedom is privileged. Ann
Gibson has suggested that the political trap of left wing totalitarianism and right wing
fascism leaves only the choice between closure and “death” on the one hand, the anguish
of “possibility” in creative freedom on the other. 944
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Rather than choose some strong artistic position to advance, the editorial policy of
Possibilities was self-consciously, as later noted by Motherwell, a “collage” of approaches
to artistic freedom.945 In addition to Rosenberg’s existential analysis of Hamlet “The
Stages: A Geography of Human Action,” the editors included statements by Baziotes,
Rothko, David Smith, as well as Pollock, an essay by Hayter on automatism, a poem by
Arp, an interview with Miro, a play by Abel with an American Indian theme entitled “The
Bow and the Gun,” an essay by Paul Goodman written in October 1945 “The Emperor of
China,” Andrea Caffi’s “On Mythology.” Because the existential thrust of Rosenberg’s
contribution later became one of the two dominant approaches to mature Abstract
Expressionist work as embodied in his 1952 article “American action painters,” the other
being Greenberg’s formalist approach, it is important to recapture some of the complexity
of this “collage,” for there lie the fragments of a critical position that never was forcefully
articulated and that more than either Rosenberg’s or Greenberg’s position reflects Pollock’s
own “aesthetic.”946
While Rosenberg proposed the title “possibilities,” Motherwell, once Paalen’s
protégé, must have been well aware of its echoing of the title of Paalen’s periodical, Dyn,
derived from the Greek word for “possible.” 947 Some of the tenets of Paalen’s thinking,
especially an interest in art as a mediation of the individual and a larger collectivity,
memorably put forward in “Totem Art,” are advanced and updated in Andrea Caffi’s “On
Mythology.” For Caffi, a European intellectual noted for being a proponent of European
federalism and for his anti-fascism, possibility continues to reside in mythology, as distinct
from science or Marxism. 948 He defines mythology not simply as “those creations of the
collective mind which take the form of tales, dances, ritual representations and symbols of
all sorts in society designated as ‘primitive,’” but as what myth has always been from the
very beginning, “a representation and, above all, a communication of ‘things that do not
exist but are.’”949 In making the distinction between “existence” (facts) and the “being”
of things, Caffi gives priority to being. 950 But what is this being? Being is tied to a
particular outlook, a human way of being in the world. Only being thus endows facts with
meaning. “The paradox is that without this ‘nonexistent’ our existence would have no
human significance.”951 For Caffi, thus, the mythic act and mythopoeic creativity are
founded in “participation” with nature and the social communion of the sacred. Much as
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Paalen’s “Totem Art” had articulated the notion of man’s communion with the larger field
of nature, Caffi too dwells on a way of “being” in nature that opens up a field of
possibilities, very different from Sartrean freedom and estrangement from nature.
Despite its recent historical misuse by totalitarian regimes, Caffi rises to the defense
of mythology: “It is not impossible that in cannibalistic Pan-Germanism, in the Sovietism
idolizing the social ‘apparatus’ and machines of steel, in Japanese Imperialism dreaming
of revenge on the whites and ‘Greater East Asia’ – and, despite its grotesqueness – in Italian
fascism, there were elements of authentic mythology. Degraded, of course; mythological
creation is incompatible with the action of regimented masses.”952 He defines mythopoeic
creation as individual, but attuned to “the currents and rhythms of sentiment linking the
individual to his fellows,” again a position distinct from the anguished individualism of
existential man.953 “The proper field of mythology seems to me to coincide with that of the
human communion which I call society par excellence, in which the human individual free
from all commitment, and having to respect neither obligations nor sanctions, is able to
overcome 'anguish' and 'dread' in accepting (if only momentarily) as 'realities' forms with
regard to which it matters little whether or not they correspond to something in ‘the world
in which I exist.’”954
Inspired by Paalen in the early 1940’s, Motherwell and Pollock had been among
those in Matta’s circle in 1942-43 who talked excitedly of a “new image of man.” Many
of the interests that supported the earlier search for such an image are now reiterated in
Possibilities. Abel’s play “The Bow and the Gun,” dedicated to Pollock’s friends and
neighbors Ralph and Mary Mannheim, is thus an elegy on the ancient ways of the American
Indian: “No dancers for the great corn.” 955 In his story “The Emperor of China” Paul
Goodman once again returns to the fascination with Chinese wisdom only to challenge it
with Nietzsche’s knowledge of nature and the body. One must not build “the Great Wall
of China” to protect oneself from anxiety, but rather sip the elixir of vitality from the cup
of “the Master of the Way, Nietzsche, The Master of La Gaya Scienza,” who “is dancing
us the things that do not yet have a name.” 956 Whereas for Rosenberg death is the only
alternative to freedom, for Nietzsche freedom is a dance. And as dance, freedom is bound
by the body, is an embodied freedom.
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Pollock’s attraction to the metaphor of the dance dates back at least to around 1943,
when he wrote “effort of the dance” on a drawing related to Guardians of the Secret (see
fig. 9.6). And in Masson’s Nietzschean “Mythology of Being” he could see the hero
confronting the female in her guise of she-beast as a prelude to grasping the diamond of
Life: "You burst from your vein stone - You become a dancing god." That Pollock’s
approach to art-making belongs in this context is clear in his statement describing his new
technique of painting. First, placing the canvas on the ground, he involves his body: “On
the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can
walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.” Pollock’s
explanation, “This is akin to the method of Indian sand painters of the West,” finds an echo
in Abel’s play, lamenting the Indians’ loss of the old rituals with their “connection with
life … the meaning of life.”957 Pollock, too, thinks of meaningful action as submerging the
creator in a larger nature. Consider once more his already cited remark: “Pollock, too,
thinks of meaningful action as submerging the creator in a larger nature. Consider once
more his already cited remark, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. … It is only when I lose
contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an
easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”
Where Greenberg stood on the assertion of the mythopoeic, Dionysian approach to
art-making advocated in Possibilities he let everyone know in “The Present Prospects of
American Painting and Sculpture,” which appeared in the October 1947 Horizon. Since
Nietzsche was in the air, Greenberg had to recognize his presence, while shifting the
emphasis. “He [Nietzsche] knew in spite of his profession of the Dionysian: … balance,
largeness, precision, enlightenment, contempt for nature in all its particularity –- that is the
great and absent art of our age.” 958 While he recognized Pollock’s “Gothic-ness” (“a
Gothic, morbid and extreme disciple of Picasso’s cubism and Miro’s post-cubism, tinctured
also with Kandinsky and Surrealist inspiration”), he proceeded to reassert Pollock’s art as
“positivist, concrete,” as he had first done in his February 1947 review of Pollock last show
at Art of this Century.959 This perceived positivism trumped the disgust he felt.
Greenberg’s resistance to the mythopoeic position of Possibilities was re-iterated in a
December 1947 review of Gottlieb, naming him as leader of “a new indigenous school of
symbolism which includes Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Benedict Newman. ...
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I myself would question the importance this school attributes to the symbolical or
'metaphysical' content of its art; there is something half-baked and revivalist, in a familiar
American way, about it.”960 The battlelines were drawn: Greenberg’s positivist aesthetics
versus the sacralized aesthetics found in Possibilities. Pollock, since Greenberg in “Present
Prospects” had singled him out as “the most powerful painter in contemporary America
and the only one who promises to be a major one,” was in no position to contradict
Greenberg. And Greenberg did soften his antagonism: “But as long as this symbolism
serves to stimulate ambitious and serious painting, differences of ‘ideology’ may be left
aside for the time being. The test is in the art, not in the program.” 961 And indeed it is.
The mythopoeic position also relied on the strength of formal manifestation. As Rosenberg
and Motherwell together wrote “The temptation is to conclude that organized social
thinking is ‘more serious’ than the act that sets free in contemporary experience forms
which that experience has made possible.” The forms have to carry the weight of
contemporary experience.
In the fall of 1947 Pollock was indeed being buffeted by a conflicting barrage of
“possibilities.” In a painting such as Lucifer he began to experience the terrifying unbound
freedom of which his friend Rosenberg talked.

2. The Sublime
“He had that kind of overall feeling about nature -- about the cosmic -- the power
of it all -- how scary it is.”962 Thus Betty Parsons, who had taken Pollock on in her New
York gallery in May 1947 just as Peggy Guggenheim was closing Art of This Century,
described Pollock. The description fits Galaxy, Full Fathom Five, Vortex, Cathedral,
Phosphoresence, Alchemy. But in Lucifer he perhaps scared himself, stretching in his
throws of green paint for an automatist freedom that produced sensations as “cold as
ice.”963 T.J. Clark invokes Milton’s foreknowledge of the Fall: “And Satan there/ Coasting
the wall of Heav’n on this side Night/ In the dun Air sublime, and ready now/ To stoop
with wearied wings, and willing feet/ On the bare outside of this World.” Having let go of
the figures that had accompanied him in his quest for something bigger than self, Pollock
in Lucifer had also pushed beyond known structure to be brushed by “the pull of the empty
horizontal,” the boundless sublime.
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The current post-modern mood revels in such boundless sublimity. Does freedom
not entail no longer being bound by false centers or by particularities of place? At the
threshold of the modern age Copernicus showed us that our earth was no longer the center
of the universe; Descartes’ assertion of the modern thinking subject, “I think, therefore I
am,” places the free human being in opposition to nature. In Lucifer this freedom propels
him towards unbounded space.
According to Nietzsche, the Copernican Revolution is far from complete, because
we have not yet confronted the full significance of the death of God, in whom humanity
once found a meaningful center. The Madman in The Gay Science 1882 asks: “What did
we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? … Are we not plunging continually?
Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up and down left? Are we
not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has
it not become colder?”964 In the painting Lucifer “Is there any up and down left?" "Do we
not feel,” in the green throws of paint, “the breath of empty space?” These throws in
Lucifer are indeed a peak of liberation, perhaps not from God so much as from both the
Picassoid father and even from Mother Nature. Such liberation is exhilarating, but Pollock
also seems to have felt the chill. The chill has to do with the problem of meaning and its
threatened loss.965
Freedom in order to retain meaning needs to be bound, for some by belief in God,
for those committed to science by reason, for those in love by responsiveness to the other.
Pollock had long been preoccupied with such responsiveness to the other, even if all too
readily he located that other within his self, substituting for an other-directed eros the eros
of Narcissus. It is to this ambiguous erotic theme that he returns in 1948: in Number 1A,
1948, 1948, the cut-out paintings of 1948-49, and the advanced abstract pourings of 1948-
49.

3. Binding Freedom
In response to the freedom that he had discovered in pouring and especially in
response to the boundless sublime of Lucifer, Pollock, in Number 1A, 1948 (fig. 17.1),
now one of the most celebrated of his abstract poured paintings, makes a startling move:
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crouching in the middle of the canvas, he marks this 5 feet 8 inches x 8 feet 8 inches canvas
with his paint-covered hands.

Fig. 17.1. Number 1A, 1948, 1948. Oil on canvas, 68 x 104 ". The Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Purchase, 1950.

We see some eleven or so handprints in black having been pressed onto the raw beige
canvas, most clustered in the upper right of the field, and a particularly distinctive one
pressed upright against the upper left hand corner of the field, a literal human presence.
This hand seems to belong to a sharply angled arm next to what can be seen as a head with
a clearly visible black dot eye. The scale of a standing human body suggestively occupies
the full height of the 68 inches tall canvas. The unbounded sublime of Lucifer receives an
answer. Pollock grounds the abstract freedom of his art in the literal imprints of his hand
and the suggested presence of the human body.
Then, working by and large back and forth across the field, he begins to build on,
as remarked by T.J. Clark, “a pattern of rope-like (literally string thick) horizontal throws
of white, seemingly the first things to be put down; most of them overlain by subsequent
throws of black, aluminum and so on.”966 The interweaving of the linear throws of paint
is sufficiently dense to create the beginnings of a painterliness, compounded by further
spattering, patching and puddling. Mediating the fundamental chiaroscuro of this painting,
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wafts of aluminum, reflecting light differently at different angles, cover a range of the
middle values. This elusive and mercurial light helps dissolve the skeins of black and white
into an all-over tonality, occasionally spiked by throws and dabs of yellow and red, and
punctuated in the lower left hand corner of the field by two softer fleshy swabs of red color.
967 This shimmering web becomes in 1965 the occasion of Michael Fried’s eloquent
modernist formulation of the utter abstractness and opticality of Pollock’s poured skeins:
“In a painting such as Number One there is only a pictorial field so homogenous overall
and devoid both of recognizable objects and of abstract shapes that I want to call it ‘optical’
to distinguish it from the structural, essentially tactile pictorial field of previous modernist
pointing from cubism to de Kooning and even Hans Hofmann. Pollock's field is optical
because it addresses itself to eyesight alone."968
Fried beautifully captures the degree to which Pollock has attained to an abstract
“shimmering substance” -- even as he reasserts a form of figuration with his hand prints in
the initial layer of the canvas. “I choose to veil the imagery” he seems to be saying once
again. But the degree to which Fried’s appreciation of the utter abstractness holds true
testifies to the now different relationship of figure and abstraction. Earlier the goal was to
translate the energies of the characters of his mythic narrative, the shaman, the totem
animal, the moon, etc, into the abstract equivalents of the topmost layer of his mark making.
Now these personages have done their job, having carried him to the brink of the blue
unconscious and into a direct exploration of the abstract energies of Nature and the
Cosmos. So why retreat, as it were, to the overt figurative marks? Whatever these marks
suggest, they relate the sense of totality found in the previous year’s work to what is self-
evidently human.
Clustered to left and right, the handprints do serve to call attention to the distinctive
horizontal axis of the field -- the distinctiveness of which Fried, in his eagerness to present
Number 1A, 1948 as an exemplar of the general homogeneity of Pollock’s fields, does not
take note. Greenberg, on the other hand, while praising Number 1A, 1948 for its
continuation of the all-over composition that he had especially admired the previous year
in Cathedral, did point out, it would appear to his relief, that “Beneath the apparent
monotony of its surface composition it reveals a sumptuous variety of design and incident,
and as a whole it is as well contained in its canvas as anything by a Quattrocento master.”
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With the last remark he would seem, in his review of Pollock’s second exhibition at Betty
Parson’s gallery, to be quieting his fears that Pollock in either the vertically or horizontally
exaggerated format of some of his canvases was rejecting the easel tradition of western
painting -- Lucifer might be seen to be a possible culprit. Now the variety of incident is
well contained within the field. Indeed there is a roughly tripartite division within the field
of Number 1A, 1948 signaled by the hands: stretching to upper left and right, from the
implied position of a body in the center of the field. The longer one looks at the painting,
the more strongly the "sumptuous variety of design and incident" noted by Greenberg
asserts itself here. The extremities are still marked by traces of figures especially on the
left, where hand, elbow and head invite us to see a ghostly personnage with two raised
hands. These extremities are then joined by horizontal throws of paint, taut, as T.J. Clark
has observed, “to the breaking point.” Some track along the bottom and the top of the
canvas, some vertically to either side, once again as in Lucifer, hinting at the rectangle
within Guardians of the Secret.
The horizontal axis in Pollock’s art is, of course, the axis along which he has
explored erotic relationship between male and female forces ever since Male and
Female1942, dreaming of an ideal body. Pollock in Number 1A, 1948 returns to this dream
yet once more, now bringing all the exciting dare-devilry of Lucifer back into a freer and
more spontaneous interplay of opposites.
The real body that stretched its hands from the center of the field upward to left and
right is reconstituted at an “ideal” level in the abstract web - in the taut horizontality of
throws of paint from left and right and on the vertical axis in the upward rising loops of
black and white lines in the upper center of the field, rising above the tangle of the web so
as to be noticeable against the beige ground of the canvas, the black loop reaching up to a
hair’s breath of the top framing edge of the field. The mercurial aluminum binds all the
oppositions into a totality, that nevertheless is also weighted at the bottom, as though pulled
down in an abstraction of an earthly landscape. And at the very bottom center of this
weighted realm Pollock placed his signature and date. The swabs of fleshy pink color in
the lower left hint at the passions thus transposed into this ideal body. That Pollock has
such an ideal diamond body in mind is clear in another smaller drawing done in black
poured enamel on paper in Figure c. 1948-49 (fig. 17.2).969 There in what seems a
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continuously flowing line, Pollock draws an entire human figure whose torso is generated
through reiterated diamond configurations that partake of the larger circulation of linear
energy.

Fig. 17.2. Figure, 1948. Enamel paint on hand-made paper, 31 x 23". Stadelsches Kunstinstitute
und Stadtische Galerie, Frankfurt.

In Moon Woman Cuts the Circle Pollock had broken the image apart in order to
release the diamonds, the possibilities of the reconstitution of a new whole. In Number
1A, 1948 he is still striving to reconstitute that whole, although what is broken down now
is not the image, but the relative order of Alchemy, which is reconstituted as a totality more
completely charged with erotic tensions and the complexity of what it is to be fully human.
But is this effort at reconstitution perhaps too private a quest? Peter Busa’s conviction was
that Pollock’s “involvement was humanistic …. Pollock proved there was great strength
in the idea that what is peculiar to you is not necessarily alien to other men.” 970 That Pollock
himself felt this way is evident in the story of his beginning to work on Number 1A, 1948.
In the company of Vita Petersen and a number of other friends Mercedes Matter vividly
recalls seeing Pollock start Number 1A, 1948 -- a rare event in itself, and “rare partly
because he had been drinking, beer. Going into a trance, he squeezed paint from the tube
directly onto the canvas, which he had rolled out onto the kitchen floor; it was large, to
within a few inches of the walls. He made a very direct use of line, then put both hands
down on the canvas, making handprints as though he was caressing the painting. He was
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in the middle of the canvas. He looked up, smiled, and said ‘Why aren’t you all in
here?’”971 Should his “ideal body” not encompass everybody? Is not the human imprint
in Number 1A, 1948 just that, human.
Contrary to what some people thought, Pollock was not, according to Peter Busa, a
loner; indeed meeting him provided an “extended family feeling that I did not know could
exist.”972 Pollock’s extended family grew in the summer of 1948. Herbert and Mercedes
Matter and friends Gustaf and Vita Peterson along with the Petersons’ children rented a
house on Fireplace Road for June and July. They saw each other constantly; Vita Peterson
remembers: “He played with our kids like he was one of them.” One day they ran into his
studio, tracking their bare footprints over a half-finished painting. Vita and Mercedes
cringed; but Jackson only laughed, saying: “Oh, no, no, never mind. Let them come in,”
and the footprints just became part of the painting. 973 Surrogate mothers, children, and
brothers were part of this growing family. 974 Harold Rosenberg functioned very much as
an older brother; they horsed around, although Rosenberg could tell Jackson to cut it out
and sit down, Jackson beaming all the while. The relationship with Greenberg was growing
into a real friendship. John Little and Roger Wilcox were among the men with whom
Jackson shared a comraderie; and the newest additions to this family of surrogate brothers
were the charming Irishman Tony Smith and the rough and tumble Harry Jackson, who
filled the old shoes of his brother Sande. In Harry Jackson’s view, which others shared,
Lee and Jackson were “completely bound together. They were definitely in love.” 975 So
how did this extended family relate to the wondrous totality of his increasingly abstract
production? Or to put it the other way around -- how does such a production relate to
human reality, his own and that of his friends?
The scope of Pollock’s ambition for painting is daunting. T.J. Clark is right to point
out the “histrionic” edge to Number 1A, 1948, the handprints “pure pathos,” the abstract
lines hurdling across the picture surface “as if across a paper-thin firmament.”976 Opposites
strain in Number 1A, 1948: “the contraries ‘Nature’ and ‘anti-Nature’ -- skeleton and
script, thicket and palimpset, depiction and inscription, infinity and confinement,
entanglement and paper-thinness.”977 Not an easy task, that of mediating confinement and
infinity. But it is the desire for a dialogue of opposites, even of the finite and the infinite,
in a new synthesis that drives Pollock’s art. The problem of binding freedom has been
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posed in Number 1A, 1948. The problem and the hope of meeting it are even more
succinctly formulated in the cut-out paintings of 1948-49.

4. Cut-Out: “A new image of man”

Fig. 17.3. Untitled (Cut-Out Figure), 1948. Enamel, aluminum, and oil paint, glass, and nails on cardboard
and paper, mounted on fiberboard, 31 x 22 5/8". Private Collection, Montreal.
Fig. 17.4. Untitled (Cut-Out), c. 1948-56. Enamel, enamel paint, aluminum paint and plastics on board and
fiberboard. 30 1/2 x 23 1/2". Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki (Japan).

Cut-Out Figure 1948 (fig. 17.3) is a particularly brutal, even ugly painting. If in
the earlier Moon Woman Cuts the Circle Pollock cut into the traditional boundaries of finite
figuration in order to release the diamonds, symbolic promise of a future ideal body, in
Cut-Out Figure he starts by cutting into what he had already achieved in order to extract
from it a singular humanoid figure. From the fabric of another canvas, much like Alchemy
in its all-over encrusted web and angular throws of paint, although the glass and nails
embedded in it evoke Full Fathom Five, Pollock with unflinching directness and even
brutality excises the figure. This first field with its figural excision remained in his studio
until his death in 1956. Only after his death did Lee back this cut-out, create the infill
marks that we now see, and send out into the world a painting we now know as Cut-Out c.
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1948-56 (fig. 17.4).978 During his lifetime the original cut-out served as a template posing
a problem, much as did the diamond-cut out in the experimental work from around 1943
that the Matters kept.
The cut-out template Pollock kept in his studio was a reminder of the final birthing
drama in his art. If one recognizes that Pollock understands the painted web from which
the later figure is cut as the female ground, from which his hopes for a new image of man
have to be wrested, we recognize the similarities of the birthing acts of 1943 and 1948,
both violent. The story of the dagger still retains an immediacy for Pollock, as does the
mother-son emotional charge. Can one be born again from such a ground? Or does the
absent figure, cut out from the ground simply signal an aborted birth? Certainly all such
questions are embedded in this stencil for existence, that hung so long in his studio -- with
its questions.
For the moment let us concentrate on the work Pollock himself created from Cut-
Out that is Cut-Out Figure, signed and dated 1948. Here Pollock states with blunt matter-
of-factness the problem at hand. Important is that Pollock begins the work with a totality
such as he had already achieved in Alchemy, in order to rend it. By cutting the humanoid
contour into the abstract shimmering substance, Pollock seems to demand that it take on a
more human quality. That Pollock next resorts to collage echoes his use of collage in 1943
when he articulates that entity to which the Moon Woman gave birth: Sun and Jack'son’.
Now the cut-out figure in shape appears to be without sex, and its poured fabric is an
amalgam of black, white, aluminum paint clearly streaked through with red, yellow, blue.
He pastes it onto the central vertical axis of another surface, the black ground of which he
articulates with white poured lines, suggesting upright personages flanking it to left and
right. The result is diagrammatic. The distinctive tripartite composition of Cut-Out Figure
1948 can be understood as an advanced statement of the tripartite format of Male and
Female, the central diamond body now being articulated as fully differentiated matter that
still is in need of a more human expression. To left and right, the elemental opposition of
black and white takes on the more organic, sexy energies for which he is searching. All
the elements that he hopes to integrate in the poured paintings are present, but disjunctive.
The tripartite format itself underscores once more Pollock’s desire for synthesis, and the
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generation of a new totality, a new image of man, but leaves that desire anything but
fulfilled.
In Untitled c. 1948 (fig. 17.5) Pollock once again starts with the energies of a pre-
existent poured web, from which he cuts out this time two figures.

Fig. 17.5. Untitled, c. 1948. Paint and cut-out paper mounted on masonite, 31 x 23". Private Collection.

By literal cutting he differentiates the web into opposing forces, and enhances its energies
with the jazzy contours of the figures: elongated, and full of movement. These he again
collages onto a black ground, placing them as though in a dance, their vertical bodies
parallel and a bit on the diagonal. The triangular barbed upper limb of the figure on the
left jabs towards the one on the right, who “feints” as in a dance step, its lower body
buckling and long arm dropping gracefully down, establishing strong counter-diagonal
movements within the composition. This dance is further dramatized by a final and very
energetic swirl of poured white lines, that race in from outside the edges: one particularly
long spiraling line coming in from upper right to traverse the barbed torso of the figure on
the left then to swing around and lasso the personnage on the right around the buckling
limbs; its upper torso struck through with another emphatic white dollop, its sexual energy
undeniable. Thus the new linear web in which the two figures are caught up begins to
express some of the erotic tensions of their dance. First then comes the pre-existent web,
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next the jazzy figures cut from this web, finally the new and more erotically differentiated
web that springs from the dance of the two figures. We have here the beginning of a new
third or should we say of a new whole. Pollock’s use of his old imagery appears here not
so much as a retreat, but as a path forward.
Pollock does return here to his old male-female imagery -- one thinks of the stalled
flow of imagery in the spring and early summer of 1944. After having created Alchemy
and Lucifer in 1947, the question was again what to do next. There is a double edge to his
explicit return to his old images: yes, they provide him a strategy for violently
differentiating his abstract fields and with the emotional charges associated with such
violence. But they also carry the danger of already known solutions, of a too facile and
aesthetic resolution. Some of this ambiguity comes to the fore in Untitled (Shadows:
Number 2, 1948), 1948 (fig. 17.6), which repeats the logic of differentiation in figuration
that had already occurred after the initial act of rending in Moon Woman Cuts the Circle,
where the release of Jack'son’ to make two clearly differentiated male and female figures
is followed in Totem Lessons I and II by the entry of the Totem Mother.

Fig. 17.6. Untitled (Shadows: Number 2, 1948), 1948. Oil and paper cut out on canvas. 53 3/4 x 44".
Private collection.

When Pollock pursues the differentiation of figures within the web to an explicit three in
Shadows, one half-wonders whether at this point he is content with a merely formal
differentiation. In Shadows, he collages, against a soft pastel yellow, blue, and greenish
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ground the three distinct personnages, made of black paper, and sutures them into a
relationship with the ground and each other with an interlace of black poured paint, a
canvas whose aesthetic quality led Greenberg to point to it, along with six other works
done in 1948, as second only in quality to Number 1A, 1948.
In Out of the Web (fig. 17.7), executed later in 1949, roughly 4 figures, if one counts
their roughly vertical alignment, two to the left and two to the right, have been cut out of
this 8 foot long field.

Fig. 17.7. Out of the Web: Number 7, 1949, 1949. Oil and enamel on masonite, 48 x 96".
Staatgalerie Stuttgart.

Again one wonders to what degree this differentiation simply follows, at an aesthetic
remove, the logic of differentiation that Pollock had worked out earlier, for instance in the
fourfold articulation of such a multi-media drawing as Eros 1946 (see fig. 14.8). Now
collage no longer plays a role. Rather Pollock cuts his biomorphic shapes directly into a
thick pre-existent web of poured lines to reveal the brown fiberboard on which the web
was initially poured. He thus playfully inverts and thereby obscures the expected
relationship of figure and ground. By going down into the brown ground, instead of
collaging on top of it, Pollock reveals in the figural images the ground that gives theses
figures body and, at the same time, supports the painterly web in which they dance.
Through his textured scrapings the ground itself re-integrates the images and the abstract
web from which they were cut. One senses a kinship with Blue c. 1946 (see 16.6), where
Pollock celebrated the easy capacity of the images to either rise out of or to sink back into
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their oceanic source or maternal ground. The images in Out of the Web are indeed
reminiscent of Pollock’s old cast of characters: to the left a vaguely whale-like creature,
then two more clearly humanoid personnages, to the far right figuration that is less secure:
perhaps another figure with a crescent moon head, an angular hour glass shape floating to
the left of its footing. Is this the figure of the totem mother? No matter, all are caught up
in the dance of the field much as the culminating images of Eros were released into the
buoyant dance of another multi-media drawing CR 1012 (c. 1946) (see fig. 14.9). A similar
synthesis of image, ground, and now not just linear automatism and free-floating color, but
poured colored lines has been achieved. Now aesthetic accomplishment and emotions
seem to merge, an observation that should be qualified by remembering that Out of the
Web was created in 1949, not 1948.
For Michael Fried Out of the Web is “one of the finest paintings Pollock ever
made.” In it he sees a synthesis of figuration and non-figuration, the formal problem that
he perceives to be the major one for Pollock at this juncture, in which Pollock completely
succeeds in “restoring to line its traditional capacity to bound and describe figures within
the context of his all-over optical style.”979 Pointing out that the figuration is perceived as
an absence, a kind of blind spot in the visual field, Fried goes on to point out that it is
difficult to bring one’s attention to bear on the images in their sequencing, much as it is
hard to see a sequence of actual blind spots. The images “seem on the verge of dancing
off the visual field or of dissolving into it and into each other as we try to look at them.” 980
There is indeed a visually compelling aesthetic achievement here. But is this all? T.J.
Clark, who prefers the dark side of Pollock’s art, observes with some reservation that the
figures “are dancing much the same quadrille as Shadows, but more deliberately, as if the
figures were now obliged to own up to the demon facility and positively use it. Their
outlines -- in contrast to Shadows, say, or even Cut Out -- are cursive, rhymed, ‘ornamental’
….”981 But the lightheartedness of his play of figuration and non-figuration which seems
to have left behind the violence of cutting reflects something more important to Pollock, a
new feeling of being at ease with the interplay of imagery and abstraction and the
embedded emotions, which now include a joyous lyricism, emotions that begin to be
invested in the entirety of the field.
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5. The Wooden Horse

Fig. 17.8. The Wooden Horse: Number 10A, 1948, 1948. Oil, enamel, and wooden hobbyhorse head on
brown cotton canvas, mounted on board, 35 1/2 x 75". Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

The joyous mood of Out of the Web belongs, of course, to 1949. Let me conclude this
chapter with a look at one of the last paintings done in 1948, another collaged work The
Wooden Horse: Number 10A, 1948 (fig. 17.8), the descriptive title being Pollock’s own.982
Once again it is the imagery that helps to focus the emotion. The wooden head of the
“horse,” a found object, a two to three inch thick piece of brown wood suggestive of a
horse’s head with its eye like hole, is collaged on top of what had started as white and black
pours on the long horizontal brown ground; once placed there, black, white and red lines,
and “scratches of blue, red, and yellow that (almost) fill them out and give them body”
continue in an unrhythmic, recalcitrant manner, to further suggest the neck of the horse, as
it looks from its position on the left across the length of the field towards the right. Such
“wretched meandering,” to use T.J. Clark’s phrase, refuses to generate an all-over web, in
fact the very reverse, expresses a recalcitrance to do so, even to move. This recalcitrance
takes place under the sign of the yellowy-orange crescent moon that hovers in the upper
center. Thus Pollock gives voice to a mood of which he has had long experience. Think
back to the wooden pegged horses flanking the central triangular female being as it thrusts
its arrow down onto a prostrate humanoid creature in one of the drawings he gave to Dr.
Henderson during the course of therapy in 1939-40 (see fig. 2.9). Certainly the veritable
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“stampede” of equine energy about which Pollock spoke in the creation of Mural has
vanished. The collapsed horse in Composition with Sgraffito II (c. 1944) (see fig. 10.6),
reflecting the creative crisis of early 1944, is closest to his current mood. A photograph
taken c. 1948 (fig. 17.9) shows Pollock stooping to meditate on the upended canvas of The
Wooden Horse, positioned at the door into his barn studio.

Fig. 17. 9. Pollock with The Wooden Horse, c. 1948. Photograph by Hans Namuth.

Thus positioned, it echoes the prohibitive animal, the “father figure,” that earlier guarded
the entrance into the creative center in Guardians of the Secret. Now the “wooden horse,”
the female muse in her recalcitrant mood, stands sentinel at the entry to the barn studio
where he still has to work out a way to the harmonies that he desires.
In The Wooden Horse T.J. Clark sees an agon of “likeness and its opposite, the
“found” and the “unfounded,” the found piece of wood in which we so easily see a horse’s
head and the abstract lines and color that shrilly speak of modern art’s “belief that in present
circumstances it could only reinvent the possibility of making and matching by having it
be exactly that -- a possibility, not a foregone conclusion.”983 These two kinds of
representation, Clark thinks and thinks that Pollock thinks, could contradict each other,
depending on the velocity at which they collide, a kind of destructive implosion it would
seem. He asks: “What had Pollock expected of painting during the years 1947-50?
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Nothing very realistic. That it be abstract: that every last trace of likeness be harried out
of it: that it put itself utterly at odds with the world we inhabit, and discover kinds of
pleasure and agony that would put the very notion “world’ in doubt.” 984 I see Pollock up
to something else, still wanting to invest the human emotions that he had long explored
through imagery in the very materials and structure of his art.
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Chapter 18
Into the Labyrinth

1. Arabesque
Pollock called figuration a sin. But how could he overcome that sin, given the way
he depended on images having to do with sex, death and spirituality to energize his visual
thinking and feeling in an automatic écriture? The cut-outs themselves offer cues,
especially the sexy Untitled of c. 1948 (see fig. 17.5). Collage enabled Pollock there to
open up the layers of the pictorial surface literally, as he had done first already in 1943, to
establish a dialogue of opposites, not just between protagonists of his private myth, but,
translating that dialogue into the materiality of paper and paint, between black and white,
between the thickening and thinning of the white poured line, traveling on an in-out axis
within the black void.

Fig. 18.1. Number 13A: Arabesque, 1948. Oil on canvas, 3 ' x 1 1/4" x 9' 8 1/2". Yale University
Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. Gift of Richard Brown Baker.

In Number 13A, 1948: Arabesque, 1948 (fig. 18.1) Pollock leaps forward, working
once again on the same long horizontal axis along which he unleashed that wild almost
unbounded spontaneity in Lucifer. Starting with an all-over brownish red ground provided
by the canvas itself, similar in tone to the brown field of the recalcitrant Wooden Horse,
Pollock here succeeds in energizing the entirety of the red field with abstract, often
swooping, poured lines, grey, black, and especially white. The skeins of paint in Arabesque
are loose and open enough to allow us to follow their layered sequence. Coddington notes
that in many of Pollock’s poured paintings it is “exceedingly difficult if not impossible to
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deconstruct the exact order of paint application. In Arabesque, however, there are
essentially 3 colors. First is the gray. This was almost completely dry before the
succeeding layers of black and white were applied, as there is little of the wet into wet
blending of the gray with these colors. On the other hand, the white and the black appeared
to have been applied in a single session, as there is considerable wet into wet mixing of
these paints. Because of Pollock’s choice of the red canvas color, a comparatively dark-
toned base for the composition, Pollock essentially reverses the normal value relations of
the colors, for here we see the white paint popping aggressively forward and the black
receding.” The red canvas permits the energies of the white skeins to come to the fore.
Thus his “conscious control and understanding of his materials ... frees Pollock in the end
to be spontaneous in the application of the paint itself.”985
But the conscious awareness that allows the degree of spontaneity that Pollock
achieves here cannot be divorced from his understanding of pictorial structure and his
poetic approach to paint. I return to the formal and expressive challenge Pollock had posed
to himself in Cut-Out Figure 1948. There the new “image of man” is positioned in the
center of a tripartite structure framed by the more overtly erotic play of white pourings on
the black ground on the left and the right. But the desired integration here eludes him. In
Arabesque, despite its extreme horizontality, Pollock does take note of the center of the
field, marking it with a poured white “circle”, or more exactly oval loop.
The center has always been important to Pollock, ever since its articulation in the
intersection of axes in Bird, marked by diamonds in Male and Female, tantalizing present
in Guardians of the Secret, actualized in the suggestion of the circle in Shimmering
Substance. Now it becomes the site of a drama posed in terms of the polarities of black
and white. For this white oval is layered on top of the black and seems to contain it, an
understated opposition, more dramatically posed a little further to the left of center as the
eye travels along the horizontal axis. There we encounter a large ganglion of white paint,
like a nerve node with its tentacles energized, even writhing, in all directions. Compared
to the black pours within the same area, this white ganglion seems to have the upper hand.
Slightly further to the left and lower down a black ganglion begins to assert itself. But on
the left margin white once again seems to dominate.
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In addition to the opposition of black and white, Pollock also exploits that of
vertical and horizontal, his oval elongation of the central white “circle” drawing attention
to the vertical axis, accentuated by the looping line that generated it. One might well ask
whether buried in this central oval there is still a reference to a head, but by then Pollock
had come to understand figuration as a sin: in the Arabic world “arabesque” refers to
surface decoration in which the representations of living creatures are forbidden. The title
suggests the cursive flow of Arabic script. Pollock’s throws of paint do indeed suggest
writing, but a purposefully unreadable writing.
The sheer length of the canvas draws attention to the horizontal axis. The drama of
the white ganglion slightly left of center sets in motion an awareness of movement within
the white arabesques back and forth along this axis. As one begins to notice the layers, one
also becomes more aware of tensions played out there, for instance the thick arm of the
black ganglion layered over and dominating the white. From this black ganglion, already
positioned slightly lower than the white ganglion, one’s eye may be drawn, in a putative
journey, still farther down to the weight at the bottom of the canvas. This weight is created
by the mingling of black, white and grey along the entire lower third of the canvas. From
this massing pulses of white paint shoot in thinner streams, upwards, sometimes on
diagonals, for instance from just below and to the right of the central oval, in a long poured
reach to upper right. Pulses rise up, then drop back down, as though to start again. Of
course, these are but a few trajectories in an all-over field, but sufficient to suggest that
what initially might have seemed chaotic is, in fact, a three-dimensional structured
spontaneity.
Coddington is right to emphasize the way Pollock used the red ground to establish
the possibilities for this particular dance, with its skittering and triumphant whites. But
now we’re in a better position to see that it is not just Pollock’s “conscious control and
understanding of his materials that frees [him] in the end to be spontaneous in the
application of the paint,” but also his deep sense of pictorial structure that supports his
automatist freedom, as he animates matter, in the making of individual gestures and marks
and in the resolution of the many pulsing gestures into an all-over equilibrium.
While Pollock marks the center in Arabesque, he also shows us something else that
is new and increasingly characteristic of his poured paintings, especially in 1949-50, an
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internal dynamic balancing that endlessly moves: a moving center. Rather than emphasize
with Greenberg the all-over spatial fields that are the result of Pollock’s activity, I want to
underscore the dimension of time, the lived quality of Pollock’s lines, the dynamic pulse
of the painterly lines as they move, interact, battle, mingle, spring free.
Has Pollock found a way in which to differentiate the pre-existent ground of the
canvas through human impulses and nodes of energy, directly in paint, in such a way as to
achieve a new and expressive totality? The screaming tensions embedded in Number 1A,
1948 between human handprint and the paper-thin firmament has found a certain resolution
in Arabesque as the space for the “ideal body” has acquired a three-dimensionality in which
the gestured human impulses can unfurl in the discovery of what such an “ideal body”
might actually be. The literalness of the handprints has been transformed into abstraction.
Here Pollock is clearly beyond veiling imagery. But does not the abstract web still
communicate sensations of strain and lack of harmony: falling, weight, entanglement,
breaking lose and up, only to fall again, get entangled, begin again? And is this lack of
harmony in part due to the unresolved tension of literal center and moving center, of
orienting place and freedom, the finite and the infinite?

2. Enamel
In Arabesque the painterly techniques employed by Pollock still have a certain
nervous scratchiness, reminiscent of the unresolved technique of There were 7 in 8. Here
the scratchiness is perhaps due to the fact that he is still straining with the thickness of oil,
even as he begins to exploit the fluidity of enamel. Pollock had begun to buy enamel paints
in 1947 from the local country store of Dan Miller, where he could buy these household
paints in large quantities and more cheaply than oil paints. 986 These enamel paints are,
Coddington has observed “the most distinctive material feature” of the poured paintings. 987
Carol Mancusi-Ungaro points to a series of black and white pours, on paper and canvas,
executed in 1948, which represented, after the initial turn to the drip paintings in 1947,
“another departure for Pollock in which he began to play with the viscosity and variable
drying rates of enamel paint.”988
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Fig. 18.2. Pollock in his studio in The Springs, East Hampton, Long Island, 1949.

Pollock is in 1948 very much the painter-alchemist (fig. 18.2), the cook stirring his pots,
experimenting with the interactions of his materials, oil and enamel, the drying time of
enamel, the interaction of wet black line and wet white ground or the reverse, and the range
of marbleized effects in the mingling of wet white enamel with wet black enamel. Like a
musician practicing a new instrument, Pollock is getting to know a new artistic medium,
exploring various effects, learning to understand his materials and be responsive to them.
Looking once more at Number 14, 1948 (Gray) (see fig. 16.1) we realize that one
thing he is rehearsing here are the dynamics of line as he had learned them from Hayter in
1944-45 in his experiments with engraved line. Pollock seems to gladly accept Hayter’s
understanding of the abstract quality of line. Line, Hayter had insisted, is “not primarily
associated with the exact reproduction of immediate visual experience because the trace
resembles astonishingly few phenomena in external nature.”989 Rather it becomes a
convention in representation and a very evocative one at that in its capacity to articulate
the space of the imagination. But while the printmaker began with the hard metal ground
of the plate, Pollock in Number 14 began with a white, wet enamel ground into which he
poured wet black enamel, achieving now an extraordinary range of curves, spatial
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ambiguities, and rhythmic variations with striking shifts in speed and direction that digging
into hard metal did not permit.
He now orchestrates these pulses with extraordinary virtuosity. It’s as though the
entire sequential narrative through which his images had lead him is now compressed into
the activation of the wet white ground. It is as though with this ground, mother nature had
now offered him up all the gooey stuff in the world, after that initial cup of gooey green
offered in Totem Lesson I. Pollock's story is now translated into pulse: the black crescent
shape on the left releases a black impulse that after a sharp descent, and rotation, springs
free to the right and then in another spurt upward buries itself in the soft white ground, then
wonders whether it should cross the central divide again and, yes, daringly aim back down
to the black crescent to possibly begin the adventure again. Recast into the abstract
language of arabesques the solution to the problem of overcoming the oppositions that
plagued him, the transformation of pictorial into performative mimesis, seems too easy,
too beautiful, perhaps because of the unity of the white ground. He needed to complicate
the technique, to open up more breathing space (the white ground can too easily smother),
to introduce layers, create more tensions between black and white, introduce colors, these
marks of life.
This he does in another relatively small work of 1948 Number 6, 1948: Blue, Red
Yellow (fig. 18.3).

Fig. 18.3. Number 6, 1948: Blue, Red, Yellow, 1948. Oil on paper, 20 x 30". Carter Burden Collection.
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Here he is able to take further advantage, not permitted by the wet into wet technique of
Number 14, 1948, of the phenomenon that Hayter called the “concrete construction of
space,” generated in line engraving by low and high relief lines created by varying pressure
put on the burin. This concrete variation of relief, which created effects of near and far as
well as complex spatial ambiguities, is now enacted in the layering of poured lines. On a
white ground, working now with both oil and enamel, Pollock moves, building upwards,
from white to black, which then is marbled with white again, a central vertical axis being
accented with his application of a grayish blue. Then come spidery skeins of red and
yellow moving up and down, left and right, the red tending to dominate but for a heavy
massing of yellow in the lower left, with a last application of filigree whites, especially on
top of the yellow mass, to make a final web integrating the whole, including a further
dialogue with the whites below. Drama remains, but whatever traces of characters from
past narratives remain in Arabesque and Number 14, 1948 have been even more thoroughly
translated into the abstract strings and massings of black, white, and the primaries, with
mediations of grey. This work got a vote of confidence from Greenberg in his February
1949 review, perhaps due to Pollock’s continuing sense of “Quattrocento containment,”
here evident in the clear emphasis on the central vertical axis. The center, as in Number
14, 1948, still holds.

3. Yet another key

Following such experiments made on paper surfaces roughly 30 x 20 inches, of
which Pollock made many in 1948, and even more in 1949, most mounted on canvas or
fiberboard, many of them jewels in their own right, Pollock moved in 1949, using only
enamel and aluminum paints, to the much larger scale of Number 1, 1949 (fig. 18.4), 5 feet
3 inches x 8 feet 6 inches.
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Fig. 18.4. Number 1, 1949, 1949. Enamel and aluminum paint on canvas, 63 x 104". Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The Rita and Taft Schreiber Collection.

Now Pollock’s pours are purely abstract, no trace of figure or symbolic character remains.
Paalen had remarked that Picasso failed to free painting from "subject" because of fear. 990
Now, fearlessly, Pollock leaves all sense of figure and even of any self-evident structure
behind. Movement is no longer along or in resistance to the axes of his diamond structure,
but becomes a dynamic painterly line, an action or impulse realized directly in the flow of
matter coursing in boundless space. These poured lines are to use Pollock’s phrase “energy
and motion made visible.”991 Fried might well have pointed to Number 1, 1949, instead of
to Number 1A, 1948, as an instance of the extraordinary quality of Pollock’s non-figurative
line, a necessary condition to the opticality of Pollock’s all-over poured paintings.
“Pollock’s line bounds and delimits nothing -- except, in a sense, eyesight.”992
Lines that bound and delimit nothing are also extraordinarily free. Given the
extreme degree of spontaneity of gesture with which we are presented in Number 1, 1949,
one can sense, much as Hayter had advocated, that Pollock did begin automatically. In
effect he doodled, as he began to build up what Hayter would term “the space of the
imagination,” through the “concrete construction of space.” Here Pollock works with black
and whites, pinky reds, yellows, even blue suede blues, aluminum grays, as he weaves a
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web, sufficiently open for us to experience it as the space of the imagination, and not simply
as encrusted surface. Yet, despite such freedom, this web seems resolved and its way
perfect, as recognized by O’Hara’s accolade: “In Number 1, 1949, one of the most perfect
works of his life or anyone else’s, viewer or artist, Pollock gives us a world of
draftsmanship, color and tactile profundity which relates him to Watteau and Velasquez.
It is a work of purity, modesty and completion.”993
When Hayter wrote of automatism he made clear that it was not to be associated
just with chance.994 Repeated essays in automatic drawing would eventually reveal a
persistent structure or image. In the recognition of these "broad patterns of instinctive
thought" he located "a higher order of reality than in sensory observation of the phenomenal
world."995 What do we begin to see in this web? We know that Pollock has been concerned
with centers, explicitly so in Arabesque, and even in Number 14, 1948 and Number 6,
1948: Blue, Red Yellow. But in Number 1, 1949 Pollock has left explicit centers behind.
Still, the center remains potent, as demonstrated by a markedly long white pour that races
in from the upper left to loop boldly back before arriving at the center. Once alerted to the
center, we also see giant white loops, one dropping down, another rising up, to within a
few inches of each other on this large field. But as soon as one spots this centrifugal center,
one loses it, the eye is swept into an infinity of other free-wheeling traces, a myriad of
migrating centers, from which the eye constantly slides into perception of other
constellations, sometimes much larger, sometimes much smaller. The whole painting is a
“diamond-body,” that is matter activated in space and time on all the axes, left-right, up-
down, in-out with utmost spontaneity and variation. O’Hara comments: “At one time it
was thought that the “all-over” paintings of Pollock represented an infinitely extensible
field of force which could continue out into all four areas of space surrounding its
boundaries. This is true of sight, but his work is not about sight. It is about what we see,
about what we can see. In the works of this period we are not concerned with possibility,
but actuality. Number 1 could not but have exactly what it has. It is perfection.”996
Freedom and necessity have been reconciled.
In Number 1A, 1948 Pollock first clearly reasserted in the making of his poured
paintings his dream of creating a canvas that might make manifest a new image of man as
an incarnation of freedom. I posed the question whether Arabesque was not in fact a
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realization of that dream. Number 1, 1949 presents itself as another such realization. Its
rectangular format and size (5 feet 3 inches x 8 feet 6inches) echoes that of Number 1A,
1948 (5 feet 8 inches x 8 feet 8 inches). All the tensions of the latter are now resolved.
The actuality of human presence signaled by the handprints is translated into the animated
materiality of paint. The human reach now realizes itself in the seemingly endless play of
abstract gesture. This spontaneity is, however, structured by the inner lodestone of the
“diamond-body.” No diamond is present; there is no hint of figure; we are presented only
with spontaneity structured by the axes of the “ideal body.”

4. Infinite Labyrinths
But had Pollock really enacted in Number 1, 1949 spontaneity structured by the
diamond-body, prefiguring a new order. Or had he rather created a labyrinth, a place in
which to get lost? Parker Tyler illustrated an article on Pollock’s paintings published in
the March 1950 Magazine of Art, an article that “delighted” Pollock as he put it in a letter
to Tyler, with There were 7 in 8 and Number 1, 1949. The article’s title is evocative,
“Jackson Pollock: The Infinite Labyrinth.” Tyler rightly warns us: “Pollock gives us a
series of abstract images … which by their nature can never be read for an original and
indisputable meaning, but must exist absolutely, in the paradox that any system of meaning
successfully applied to them would at the same time not apply, for it would fail to exhaust
their inherent meaning.”997 With this qualification, he proposes “to define these paintings
… as labyrinths,” an identification that anyone looking at one of Pollock’s webs can
understand. He then goes on to remind us that “a labyrinth, from that of Daedalus in the
myth of the Minotaur to some childish affair in a comic supplement is a logically devised
system of deception to which the creator alone has the key, and which others can solve
only with experiment.” Pollock’s superimpositions of layers upon layers of paint create
“a deliberate disorder of hypothetical hidden orders, or “multiple labyrinths,” effectively
insolvable. But why should an artist want to create labyrinthine images?
Nietzsche, considering his own vocation in Ecce Homo, wrote “There are cases
where what is needed is an Ariadne’s thread leading into the labyrinth.” 998 In an age that
has experienced the death of God, but also recognized that scientific rationality is unable
to offer narratives that give meaning to life, the challenge is to descend into the labyrinth
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within the self, in order to recover there the ground of existence. From Masson Pollock
had learned of such a challenge to return to the labyrinth. In Masson’s own Nietzschean
versions of the story in History of Theseus 1938 and Mythology of Being 1939, the beast
is not the irrational bestial minotaur who must be slain by the hero Theseus if he is to create
a rational society. The labyrinth is rather where the life forces reside, the endless cycles of
nature, cycles of life and death.999 Theseus' task thus became the sexual engagement within
this beast. He is a hero, not because he slays its irrational aspects, but because he has the
strength to open himself to the life force.
But can we say this of Pollock? Has he found the strength to open himself to the
life-force? Is the life-force to be equated with that freedom that dreams of an existence no
longer burdened by gravity, by the body, free to fly? Is it not that freedom that creates the
infinite labyrinth of Pollock abstract paintings? To be sure Pollock wants to incarnate
freedom without surrendering the power of flight. In the diamond-body he found a figure
of the reconciliation of the opposition of body and spirit. But as the expression “diamond-
body” hints, are we given here another wooden iron?
Concluding his article Tyler asserts that Pollock’s labyrinthine “design is
conscious, the seemingly uncomposable, composed.” We can now better understand words
meant to articulate what Pollock was up to: “What are his dense and spangled works but
the viscera of an endless non-being of the universe? Something which cannot be
recognized as any part of the universe, is made to represent the universe in totality of being.
So we reach the truly final paradox of these paintings: being in non-being."1000 The rhetoric
sounds overblown, but if we return to Blue (see fig. 16.6), for instance, to Pollock’s own
symbolic characters, to his “words,” his visual thinking, and note there in the upper right
the totem animal’s startled look as it gazes down upon a flow of line rising on the far left
from the ocean into imagery and then back down again into the ocean on the far right, a
circular looping line threading through and endlessly connecting his images and
abstraction, the formed and the unformed, the manifest and the non-manifest, birth and
death, when we then try to articulate what the non-figurative lines of Number 1, 1949 might
have meant to him, we begin to understand why the phrase “the viscera of an endless non-
being of the universe” might have surfaced in a discussion with Tyler. In these words one
hears an echo of Pollock’s own words; or at least comments that “delighted” him.
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That this is Pollock’s own language in speaking about his art is clear from a
conversation with Jeffrey Potter, sometime in 1949 or after. Struggling to put words to his
convictions and to what he was doing, he explained: “Way I see it, we’re part of the one,
making it whole. That’s enough, being part of something bigger. … We’re part of the
great all, in our lives and work.” Then, trying to articulate how his work related to the one,
the all, the natural whole, he demurred, “An artist knows what he’s doing, or should. It’s
not something you can talk about, only feel –- deep, deep inside. What I do, I unite parts
of union into a bigger whole. With enough, that created whole turns into being.” 1001 In
Number 1, 1949 we have seen Pollock working with “parts of union,” opposites, however
conceived, whether black-white, fast-slow, thick-thin, left-right, up-down, in-out, male-
female -- and with enough weaving and integrating of these opposites, generating a new
totality, can we say a new “being”? A lot of big words are being thrown around, and one
has to take a deep breath, as Pollock himself did in another recorded conversation. To
Rodman, sometime in 1956, Pollock asserted “Something in me knows where I’m going,
and -- well, painting is a state of being.” Rodman asked, “You mean ‘being’ and
‘becoming’ are one?” Pollock replied, “Exactly -- I guess.”1002
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Chapter 19.
The Dance

1. Musicality
In a great number of small works executed in 1949, executed partly to encourage
sales in the 1949 exhibition at Parsons (the strategy worked), Pollock explored fragments
of what he had achieved. 1003 I will look at only two of these, variations on the theme of
black and white in Number 33, 1949 and variations on the theme of down and up in Number
20, 1949. These are non-figurative, non-objective works done in enamel paints. As Carter
Ratcliffe observes in the small works of 1948-49 “acknowledgement of the frame is casual.
No compositional order follows from it.”1004 Nor does the center of the field organize such
an order, although the way paint occupies the paper presupposes a clear awareness of edge
and center.

Fig. 19.1. Number 33, 1949, 1949. Enamel and aluminum painted on gesso ground on paper on
board, 22 1/2 x 31". Private Collection.

In Number 33, 1949 (fig. 19.1) Pollock works from a white ground, to massive areas and
spins of black, to dabbed smaller areas of aluminum grays to the fireworks of the topmost
white tracery. With the upward pulses of these thin long white lines, rising from left of
center, their traces starting from well below the bottom edge, one even moving through
and beyond the upper edge in its journey, Pollock enlivens the more massive blacks -- a
dialogue of thick and thin, black and white, mediated by grey, which itself is enlivened
with “pebbles” of black, a tour de force, in which Pollock even uses black to lighten! The
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dialogue of black, grays and white in Totem Lesson II lies in the distant past, some of the
emotional tone continues, here transposed into a joyous and bravado whoop!
He reverses the direction of the streaks of paint in Number 20 (fig. 19.2), when on
a beige ground long thin loops of black and brown enter the field from upper right to
repetitively, rhythmically swoop down, a few almost to the bottom edge, and then up.

Fig. 19.2. Number 20, 1949, 1949. Enamel on paper laid down on masonite, 28 x 20". Private
Collection.

This doodle, or should I call it a melodic fragment, has a strong downward beat, repeated
with two much smaller but especially noticeable white “down-up” beats, pulsing lines that
nest on top of earlier intersections. The lower one lands on an exciting intersection of
black, blue, red, and yellow. An impulse that Pollock has long explored, descent-ascent,
death-rebirth, is here, with the most airy freedom, set forth and spontaneously elaborated.
Leaving behind the form provided by traditional harmonies, Schönberg said “I breathe the
air of distant planets.” Pollock too, in his rhythmic variations, here touches once again, as
in Lucifer, the boundless sublime.
This may help explain why, in that Life interview with Dorothy Seiberling in July
1949, he should have named Kandinsky as one of his two favorite twentieth century
painters.1005 In an essay included in the 1945 retrospective catalogue that Pollock owned,
Kandinsky described an alternative constructive force needed once form in painting was
released from the object: musical counterpoint. "The concord or discord in various
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elements of a picture, the handling of groups, the combination of veiled or openly

expressed appeals, the use of rhythmical and unrhythmical, of geometrical or non-
geometrical forms, of continuity or separation -- all these things constitute material for
counterpoint in painting." 1006 But when Pollock was thinking of music, he was not thinking
of counterpoint, but of jazz improvisation. "Jazz?" Lee Krasner remarked, "He thought it
was the only other really creative thing happening in this country. He had a passion for
music.”1007 To Hubbard Pollock once even commented, maybe he should have been a
musician.1008 From the more than a hundred 78s in his record collection he listened to Jelly
Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins.1009 A
number of writers have called attention to the jazz aspects of Pollock’s art. “For Pollock,
it was the improvisation, not the harmonic idiom that mattered most in jazz. ... Like the
great virtuosos of jazz, he grew to feel rhythm and structure so strongly inside that his mind
was freed from those concerns, and thereby liberated to explore uncharted territories of the
creative impulse.”1010 In a work such as Number 1, 1949 our attention is drawn to a myriad
of migrating centers so that structure is no longer experienced as such. Rather it has been
converted into a rhythmic time-space interval or theme embodied in throws of paint.
Consider, for instance, the down-up loop in Number 20. The characteristic form of jazz is
theme and variation, the framework for improvisation. And at improvisation Pollock
excelled, the down-up loop eliciting response, elaboration, variation. “Riff” and “swing”
are jazz phrases not alien to the musicality of Pollock’s production: riff the repeated phrases
rhythmically oriented; swing the variety and syncopation of rhythmic conception. 1011
Perhaps Adorno should be mentioned, who criticized jazz in the 1940’s, but failed
to appreciate it, judging it, as Lorenzo Simpson observes, too much from the point of view
of European harmonies. He considered it dissonant, failed, the pain of the promise of
fulfillment broken -- rather than as an alternate good with a different set of criteria.
Adorno’s composer “privileges melody, harmony, and rhythm as notated over
performance,” and thereby misses the evaluative categories relevant to jazz. 1012 The
performative, improvisational character of jazz is crucial. Certainly Pollock embraces the
temporality of his throws with what can be described as an almost joyful verve and
spontaneity. While the dynamic structure of an individual throw of paint has its own formal
cohesion, each throw of paint opens up endless possibilities for response. As with jazz, the
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exact form that the improvisation will take is unknown.1013 Explaining that he did “have a
general notion of what I’m about and what the results will be,” when asked in 1950 whether
he started with a preconceived image of a canvas in his mind, Pollock answered: “Well,
not exactly –no- because it hasn’t been created, you see.”1014 The freedom of the
improvisational process, based as it is on theme and spontaneous variation, is open-ended,
threatening the aesthetic integrity of painting. Such a painting might go on and on, filling
whatever spatial dimensions Pollock might have at his disposal. Consider the densely
packed Number 3, 1949: Tiger.

2. The Crisis of the Easel Picture

This open-endedness in composition Greenberg had already sensed and feared in
his April 1948 essay “Crisis of the Easel Picture.” Responding to Pollock’s first all-over
paintings created in 1947, he focused, not on process (he doesn’t even mention the poured
technique) but on space, the all-overness of the composition. What was to bound such
open-endedness? Greenberg’s response was to reassert the tradition of the easel picture:
“No matter how much the picture is flattened, as long as its forms are sufficiently
differentiated and kept in dramatic imbalance it will remain an easel picture definitely
enough.”1015 While the dramatic imbalances in Number 20, 1949 and Number 33, 1949
probably would have met with Greenberg’s approval, the all-over articulation of such
canvases as Arabesque or Number 2, 1949 might well have worried him. He acknowledged
the musical quality of such painting, but just this quality seemed problematic to the author
of “Towards a Newer Laocoon”: “The ‘decentralized,’ ‘polyphonic,’ all-over picture
which, with a surface knit together of a multiplicity of identical or similar elements, repeats
itself without strong variation from one end of the canvas to the other and dispenses,
apparently, with beginning, middle, and ending.” 1016 The danger is lack of dramatic
incident and sufficient differentiation, and the accompanying specter of decoration: endless
wallpaper!
Less than a year after this essay, Greenberg in his early 1949 review of Pollock’s
second Parsons exhibition did, as we have seen, praise Number 1A, 1948, calling it “as
well contained in its canvas as anything by a Quattrocento master.” Greenberg recognized
that “Pollock has the tendency lately to exaggerate the verticality or the horizontality, as
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the case might be, of his pictures,” but he welcomed the way Number 1A, 1948 “avoids
any connotation of a frieze or hanging scroll and presents an almost square surface that
belongs very much to easel painting.”1017 The very tendency that Greenberg warns against
is, however, the one that Pollock pursues: Number 2, 1949 (fig. 19.3) is 15 feet 9 1/2 inches
long, 3 feet 2 1/8 inches high. 1018 It is a tendency that has to challenge the self-contained
easel picture.

Fig. 19.3. Number 2, 1949, 1949. Oil, duco and aluminum paint, 3' 2 1/8" x 15' 9 1/2".
Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art, Utica, NY.

Earlier Greenberg had wondered where Pollock was headed: "beyond the easel,
beyond the mobile, framed picture, to the mural, perhaps"?1019 In his 1947 application for
a Guggenheim grant, citing the precedent of his 1943 Mural, Pollock was in fact to state:
“I intend to paint large movable pictures which will function between the easel and mural.
… I believe the easel picture to be a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling is
toward the wall picture or mural.”1020 As writers such as Krauss have come to insist, “This
idea of escaping the tradition of the easel painting … became Greenberg’s central critical
model for explaining Pollock’s radicality in the years between 1947 and 1950 ….” 1021 But
in his February 1949 review (and he would not write another review of Pollock’s work
until February 1952) Greenberg remained committed to the tradition of easel painting,
which he recognized was threatened by what was happening in art. A work such as the
wall-sized Number 2, 1949 posed such a threat.1022 What was Pollock after?

3. Mimesis
If the bounds of the “almost square” panel painting no longer hold, what serves to
bind the improvisational rhythms of Pollock’s painted gestures? The energies to which he
gained access in Number 1, 1949 and which he later explored with such wild freedom in
the many small works of 1949, he chooses in Number 2, 1949 to bind with the body and
its scale. Pollock had made this choice before, when moving from the freedom of Lucifer
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1947 to his extended hand prints in Number 1A, 1948. Now the artist’s body is in motion.
On bodily scale O’Hara is eloquent: “It is, of course, Pollock’s passion as an artist that kept
his works from ever being decorative, but this passion was expressed through scale as one
of his important means. … The scale of the painting became that of the painter’s body,
not the image of a body, and the setting for the scale, which would include all referents,
would be the canvas surface itself.” 1023 In the small paintings of 1949 the gestured marks
relate to the scale of the chosen surface. But a surface some 3 feet high and some 15 feet
long allows “the physical energies of the artist” to “operate in actual detail, in full-scale.”
The rhythms traced in the “infinite labyrinth” and the scaleless space of the imagination
here come down to earth. They are now the rhythms of a body in motion; the gestures
become the traces of a dance. What Nietzsche had to say about the Dionysian dithyramb
comes to mind. “The essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; we need a
new world of symbols; and the entire symbolism of the body is called into play, not the
mere symbolism of the lips, face, and speech but the whole pantomime of dancing, forcing
every member into rhythmic movement.”1024
The scale of the body binding the gestures inescapably introduces a suggestion of
figuration. That in 1949 Pollock was still concerned with literal figuration is clear in Out
of the Web (see fig. 17.7) -- where there is also a strong sensation, as Michael Fried noted,
of dance across the picture plane. The freedom that Pollock gains in 1949 seems to permit
him to either joyously celebrate the emergence of figuration out of the web or to more
confidently translate the figural impulse into the throw of paint. In Number 2, 1949 he
allows the strong suggestion of the white throws as figuration against the red ground to
stand. Figuration remains; but it is unreadable figuration and resides in the rhythmic
painted gesture, as Pollock dances his way back and forth along the canvas. If there is a
point to the metaphor of the dance, there has to be a parallel in the understanding of the
paint surface. You can’t dance without a dance floor, a metaphor for the positioning of
that surface on the floor and its extensive format. If Pollock’s canvas is the dance-floor,
then his partner is the paint, as the gestured throws once landed elicit rhythmic response.
But more important than either canvas as dance floor or paint as partner is the nature of the
action that takes place between the two, the dance.
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That the nature of the dance-like action between artist and his material should now
be at the core of Pollock’s art-making constitutes another aspect of the crisis of the easel
painting. In the Albertian conception of representation artistic mimesis is based on the
appearance of reality; the measure of such appearance is provided by the human body as
represented in the picture. Now representation is based on an unimpeded enactment of an
experience. Such enactment has its measure in the existing, moving body. A frequently
cited example of such mimesis, freed from its older sense of imitation of nature, is the play
of children: a little girl who plays the part of a fairy queen doesn’t look exactly like the
fairy queen, but she becomes the fairy queen by enacting her. Art here is no longer a self-
sufficient aesthetic object, but increasingly life -- as Harold Rosenberg puts it, “the same
metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence.” 1025
But we do not need to wait until Rosenberg’s famous formulation of action painting
in his December 1952 article “The American action painters” to locate an understanding
of artistic mimesis as enactment. Paalen, who as an amateur anthropologist understood the
“participation mystique” with which Pollock’s own “I am nature” approach to painting was
imbued, wrote evocatively of the affective mimetism by which the Northwest Coast Indians
in their art and ritual attempted to magically identify with forces larger than themselves.
In “Totem Art” he distinguished between passive and active mimesis. Northwest Coast
Indians donned masks (passive mimetism) and engaged in dance and all kinds of mimicry
of emotions (active mimetism). The dance-like activity of Pollock’s poured art invites
discussion as an example of such active mimesis.1026
In this turn to the dance Pollock was supported on a theoretical level by the same
circle of friends and intellectuals who had long fed his art. In Mural Motherwell had
recognized the aspect of dance in Pollock’s work. In his critical assessment of Pollock in
January 1944 he drew on his understanding of Whitehead’s “process philosophy” as the
engaging of body-and-mind in a plastic automatism: “His [Pollock’s] principal problem is
to discover what his true subject is. And since painting is his thought's medium, the
resolution must grow out of the process of painting itself." 1027 Process and action were
lingua franca in the late forties. A particularly vivid description of action as dance, indeed
a Nietzschean dance, appeared in Paul Goodman’s “The Emperor of China”: “The Master
of La Gaya Scienza is dancing us the things that do not yet have a name.” 1028 The emperor
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is to embrace his humanity and his mortality, and join the small band as they “are dancing
a travel-song.” “Dancing to Pekin: that is to say, going on their legs. For they do not roll
heel over ears like wheels, or go on wheels, as once I thought to be the nature of Paradise
before I considered the nature of the earth. For the nature of earth is to be textured: ... it is
hard and rough, and our limbs are light spanners and dividers: the four limbs especially of
human beings can make bridges of all kinds in the three dimensions.” 1029 In Number 2,
1949 Pollock has realized the dance that includes the body. But still one wonders: what is
he enacting in his dance? An affective mimesis of what?

4. The Erotic Dance

In the summer of 1949 a visitor to his studio inquired about his painting: “But Mr.
Pollock how do you know when you are finished?” Very serious, he softly replied, “My
dear, how do you know when you are finished making love.” 1030 Painting as lovemaking
has by now become a familiar, but revealing metaphor. Eros is to bind freedom in a
relationship with another. Pollock’s dream was of erotic union, where that dream
sometimes took the form of the male possessing the female, sometimes the form of an
interaction in which male and female stand in a symmetrical relation. While the hope for
such union of opposites found its most succinct symbolic expression in Male and Female,
it was to change its complexion as Pollock came to see more clearly the need for a more
symmetrical relationship and woman blended into nature, nature with self. Consider the
erotic charge of the gestured throws of paint stretching back and forth taut across the
horizontal axis of Number 1A, 1948. In Number 2, 1949 Pollock dances with his paint, as
a dynamic center is constituted again and again. But what is to bring this exhilarating
dance to a close? Can the painted trace of the dance not go on and on, producing the endless
wallpaper that Greenberg feared?
But look more closely. Consider, for example, what transpires at the actual center
of the long field: an underplayed meeting of smaller red and yellow throws almost lost in
the horizontal expanse. But just to the right of this, is an extraordinary passage: two
twisting throws of white aligned on the vertical axis, one coming from the top, the other
from the bottom, both coming to a head just short of each other in the center, a potential
collision of forces. This explosive potential is stilled by the slowing of the horizontal
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rhythms into distinctly vertical throws in this central area. Just to the left of the literal
center lies another vertically aligned white throw that arcs, however, at the top in a bold
loop towards the left, inviting us to look in that direction. On the left hand side of the
canvas we see a long horizontal throw speeding in from left towards the right, a directional
force so strong that it appears not only to have activated that leftward arc, but invites us to
look further towards the right hand side of the field. There propulsions on a diagonal move
towards the upper right hand corner suggesting continued horizontal activity, even as
simultaneously this activity is closed by its echo of the large underlying black “3” on the
right end. The composition is thus open and enclosed at once, all forces having been
activated, and perhaps most stunningly compressed in the two twisting white throws just
to right of center: activating up-down, left-right, in-out. At a certain moment it becomes
apparent that further movement is too much. The dance must end.
Even if the throws were not made in the order described, we have caught sight of a
resolution of tension along the poles of the horizontal, vertical, and in-out axes, which have
provided the stage for Pollock's erotic drama, whether the dream of Male and Female, the
stalemate of Guardians of the Secret, the aggressive possession of Pasiphae, or the very
first enactment of an erotic dialogue at body scale in Mural 1943. In Number 2, 1949 such
enactment partakes of all the abstract rhythmic freedom in Number 1, 1949, while now
bound by body scale.1031 The cosmos is known through the body, and the body partakes
of the cosmos.
It was Nietzsche’s conviction that modern scientific Cartesian culture needed “to
translate man back into nature to become master over the many vain and overtly
enthusiastic interpretations and connotations that have so far been scrawled and painted
over the eternal basic text of Homo natura.”1032 In Pollock’s case the battle was not with
scientific Cartesian culture per se but with Picasso and his approach to painting. Evident
in Painter and his Model, Picasso’s urge to master the female still partook of the Cartesian
split between subject and object, and the dominance of one over the other. In search of an
alternative to Picasso’s paradigm, Pollock ventured into the labyrinth, where subject-
objects distinctions collapse, as he sought a new way of coming to know the self through
release into a flux and balancing that is the dynamism of nature itself.
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As an interpreter of Pollock’s painting I can invoke the analogy of lovemaking, but

for the viewer the painting is what it is. And the painting leaves behind any explicit
referents to male and female. The rhythmic energies animating the paint incarnate the
emotion. If Arabesque still had the lure of script, an unreadable writing, now the signified
is no longer external to the mark. The paint does not represent anything; it simply is what
it means. This may be read as the culmination of Pollock’s quest. The opposition that first
presents itself as the opposition of male and female, figuring ratio and animal, spirit and
matter, freedom and nature, has been overcome. Pollock has done “it.” But that “it” falls
apart. For gathered together in this way, these oppositions blur the distinction between an
eros that draws an individual to another most definitely not his- or herself, and a narcissistic
eros that aims at self-completion by discovering and uniting with the other, be it woman or
nature, within the self.
Such confusion attends Pollock’s quest from the very beginning, and no doubt
helped feed his passionate engagement. It is suggested by the staging of a family reunion
photograph the following summer in front of Number 2, 1949 (fig. 19.4).

Fig. 19.4. Pollock family reunion, in front of Number 2, 1949, Summer 1950. Charles Pollock
Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

When he started Number 1A, 1948, in pressing his hands to the canvas, he asked the friends
present “Why aren’t you all in here?” Should the development of the literal body scale in
an extended space in Number 2, 1949 then not welcome the presence of more bodies, this
time his family. “As the Small Group, the humanity of the magician, goes up to Pekin; --
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how shall I call it, what seems to be a small band of persons: children, parents, and friends
… ?”1033 On the occasion of the first Pollock family reunion in seventeen years, which
took place in July 1950, Pollock went to some pains to hang certain pictures: among them
Gothic and Number 2, 1949.1034 Perhaps this particular canvas was chosen as the backdrop
for the photo because it was sufficiently long to accommodate the posing of all fifteen
members of the family, but equally well its horizontality at human scale invites this human
accompaniment.
While his artist friends in 1948 and 1949 constituted a supportive extended family,
Pollock was very nervous about his real family’s reunion: could he win from them the
approval that his friends and even the larger art world were extending to him? 1035 Lee
Krasner remembered his changing moods: would it “be a bust” or a “triumph over his
family”? With this phrase we already sense trouble. The fearful expression of Pollock in
the family photograph, echoing the terror of his youthful self-portrait 1933 (see fig. 1.2),
testifies to all the unresolved emotional turmoil that lay in wait for him in the course of the
reunion. But Number 2, 1949 remains one of the greatest pictorial expressions of Pollock’s
expansive but confused approach to Eros and the “new image of man.”
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Chapter 20
Nature and the Museum

1. The Model
Peter Blake was 28 and had recently been appointed Director of the Department of
Architecture and Industrial Design at MOMA, when he met Pollock at a dinner party in
East Hampton in Fall 1948. 1036 The following morning he went over to Pollock’s barn
studio and was overwhelmed. “It was a very sunny day and the sun was shining in on the
paintings. I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. It was a dazzling,
incredible sight.”1037 “... his canvases were pinned up all over the walls, and one huge one
was still stretched out on the floor, where he had been working on it. ... The colors were
dazzling -- silver, shades of off-white, the finished canvas luminous almost translucent,
shimmering in the sunlight. ... I don’t know what I expected, but it was clearly the work
of someone who understood light and space, and the transparency of the wide, horizontal
landscape of the inlets just beyond the little shack. I had never been so moved by any
contemporary painting, and I guess Jackson knew it.” 1038 Pollock and Blake became
friends. Not that they talked much about their work; they rather went fishing in the inlets.
When Pollock asked Blake to help hang his second exhibition at Betty Parson’s
Gallery in the fall of 1949, Blake told Pollock of a fantasy that he had nurtured ever since
that first day in Pollock’s studio -- “An exhibit of translucency, paintings hanging
suspended in the magnificent expanse of landscape out here [at Springs], the landscape
penetrating them.”1039 According to Blake, Pollock grunted, seemed to get the message,
and was interested. Blake continued to explain his wish to exhibit “the paintings between
sheets of mirror that would extend the composition into infinity, and that people would
walk in among them. Jackson thought a while and said it was a very interesting idea.” 1040
The boundless sublime had attracted Pollock as early as the composition of Lucifer 1947.
Blake proceeded to make a model of a flat-roofed glazed pavilion in the manner of
Mies van der Rohe to show Pollock’s paintings “suspended between the earth and the sky,
and set between mirrored walls so as to extend into infinity.” 1041 The model of what would
have been a 50 by 100 foot interior was divided by colored reproductions of Pollock’s
paintings, some taken from an article in Life that had come out in August.1042 Blake,
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presumably with Pollock’s consent, cropped and played with these reproductions as he
needed to fit the scale of the building. 1043 For the model Pollock created three small-scale
sculptures conceived of as, in Blake’s words, “a kind of three-dimensional interpretation
of his drip paintings,” made of wire dipped in plaster and painted. 1044 According to Blake,
they were both pleased with the result. 1045 The model was displayed in the Betty Parsons
exhibition. Unfortunately it disintegrated shortly after the exhibition, and only one of the
three sculptures has survived -- in a badly damaged state. 1046 The model museum was,
however, published by Arthur Drexler in “Unframed Space: A Museum for Jackson
Pollock’s Paintings.”1047 This, along with a photograph (fig. 20.1) of Blake and Pollock
inspecting the model on display at Betty Parsons Gallery, were the best visual record of the
project until Blake undertook to reconstruct the model in 1994. 1048

Fig. 20.1. Pollock and Peter Blake with model museum designed by Blake, at Pollock’s show at Betty
Parsons Gallery, 1949. Photograph by Ben Schultz.

The reconstructed model is now displayed at the Pollock House in a bay window looking
out to the landscape behind the house. Recently it was republished in Victoria Newhouse’s
Towards a New Museum in two photographs: one of the exterior façade (fig. 20.2), the
other of the interior plan of the building with the flat roof removed (fig. 29.3).
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Fig. 20.2. Peter Blake, “Ideal Museum” for Jackson Pollock’s work, 1949. Original model lost. Replica
fabricated by Patrick Bodden, with sculptures by Susan Tamulevich, 1994-95. Reconstructed model in
landscape. Made possible by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Photograph by Jeff Heatley.

Fig. 20.3. Peter Blake, “Ideal Museum” for Jackson Pollock’s work, 1949. Reconstructed model interior.
Photograph by Jeff Heatley.

In the first photograph the model is seen directly against the backdrop of, as Blake has
described it, “the wide, horizontal landscape of the inlets just beyond the little shack
[referring to Pollock’s studio].”1049 Approaching the façade, you see a large poured
painting, Number 24, 1949, on the far left, flush with the wall and facing, in a startling
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manner, not inward but outward. Its strong orange diagonal moving from upper left down
to its center, roughly marked by a large orange circular configuration, leads the eye into
the interior of the building to The Key 1946 (see fig. 14.3).1050 Done in the spring of 1946,
this is the only painting in the museum with figuration. Certainly Blake was by-in-large
oblivious to the bizarre and gorgeous imagery of The Key, deeply rooted as it is in the
sexuality of Pollock’s private life and in his embrace of American Indian totemism and
shamanism as approaches to nature. But Blake seems to have intuitively realized that the
erotic energies contained in Pollock’s earlier canvases demanded an expanded context, and
this was, as he makes clear in his presentation of The Key, the context of nature. More
than any other major canvas up to 1946, with its color-spaces The Key suggests a land- and
seascape. The photograph of the model dramatizes this, rhyming the central horizontal
axis of The Key, marked by the brown line joining phallus to womb, with the horizontality
of the salt marsh and inlet beyond. This striking alignment alerts us to Blake’s larger goal:
“a live example of the artistic process,” juxtaposing and interpenetrating the paintings and
the landscape that, he felt, inspired them. 1051 Pollock had answered Hofmann’s challenge
that he paint from nature with “I am nature.” Blake seems to be urging him to revise that
answer and to accept nature as his muse.

2. Mies van der Rohe’s Museum for a Small City 1942

Blake cites as inspiration for his “Ideal Museum” Mies van der Rohe’s project for
a Museum for a Small City 1942. 1052 This was also a utopian project first published in a
1943 Architectural Forum setting forth ideas for “postwar buildings,” and then again in
Philip Johnson’s catalogue for the Mies exhibition, installed by Mies himself, at the
Museum of Modern Art in 1947. Much as Pollock’s The Key was at the center of Blake’s
Museum, so Picasso’s Guernica was the focal work in Mies’ Museum, at least according
to Philip Johnson: “This [project] grew out of a desire to provide a setting for Picasso’s
great painting Guernica.”1053 This too would have interested Pollock in Blake’s project.
The “Ideal Museum” would provide an opportunity to pit The Key and the poured paintings
that followed against Guernica.
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Fig. 20. 4. Mies van der Rohe, Museum for a Small City Project, 1941-43. Interior perspective.
Cut-out photographs and photo reproductions on illustration board, 30 1/2 x 40 ½". Mies van der Rohe
Archive, gift of the architect, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Mies prepared a number of collages for the project (fig. 20.4), showing how works
by Klee, Kandinsky, and Guernica would be brought into a relationship with figural statues
and nature, water and foliage. 1054 Flexible arrangement of the art works and visual access
to the surrounding nature was made possible through Mies’ distinctive “skin and bones,”
steel and glass, architecture. The arrangement of paintings on free standing partitions and
of free standing sculptures follows the open plan that that Mies had already made famous
in his 1929 Barcelona Pavilion. In his project statement Mies articulates how his fluid
spatial sensibility will serve A Museum for a Small City. “The first problem is to establish
the museum as a center for the enjoyment of art, not the interment of art. In this project
the barrier between the art work and the living community is erased by a garden approach
for the display of sculpture. Interior sculptures enjoy an equal spatial freedom, because the
open plan permits them to be seen against the surrounding hills. ... A work such as
Picasso’s Guernica ... has been difficult to place in the usual museum gallery. Here it can
be shown to greatest advantage and become an element in space against a changing
background.”1055 Architectural space thus is conceived as “a defining rather than a
confining space.” It opens the museum, and the paintings within it to nature and to
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community. We already know from the approach to the facade of the Ideal Museum that
Blake too intends to open his Museum and the paintings in it, if not to community, certainly
to nature.
That Mies’ project, according to Johnson, “is the most elaborate expression of his
theories governing the use of painting and sculpture with architecture” touches upon
Pollock’s already professed interest in muralism. Johnson goes on: “The relative ‘absence
of architecture’ intensifies the individuality of each work and at the same time incorporates
it into the entire design. Thus Guernica ... is clearly an independent painting, while
functioning architecturally as a screen that defines the space around it.”1056 In Blake’s
model Pollock’s paintings are, however, sometimes treated less as independent paintings,
than as walls. In this they are more like Mies’ onyx wall at the Barcelona Pavilion. 1057
Lifting the roof plate of the model, we find, in the second Newhouse photograph which I
will use to discuss the spatial plan for the “Ideal Museum,” that Blake not only composes
space with paintings, as did Mies, but presents a number of Pollock’s paintings as murals,
although picture-walls describes them better than wall-pictures. In this respect he is
responding to and testing an aspect of Pollock’s own aesthetic, pushing the tension that
already existed in Pollock’s work between panel painting and the mural towards muralism.
A young critic Arthur Drexler, who would one day succeed Blake at the Museum
of Modern Art, emphasizes this muralism in his article on the project in Interiors: “In its
treatment of paintings as walls, the design recalls an entirely different kind of pictorial art;
that of the Renaissance fresco. The project suggests a reintegration of painting and
architecture wherein painting is architecture, but this time without message or content. Its
sole purpose is to heighten our experience of space.’ (My italics.)”1058 As we might expect,
given his own invocation of the baroque interiors of Versailles, Blake was pleased with
Drexler’s perception.

3. Painting as Architecture
The visitor standing in front of The Key, which already has a strong sense of
symmetry and center, finds him- or herself drawn into the center of the entire plan, standing
roughly at the eighth module of the sixteen module depth of the building. The Key thus
establishes the interior co-ordinates of the building. The visitor also finds himself between
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two large mirrored walls, both at right angles to The Key, the one on the right at a narrow
remove from the painting, the one on the left abutting it. Even as Blake establishes a center
with The Key, he counters it. The mirrors extend the painting and the interior to infinity
on the horizontal axis.
Tantalized by the illusory space of the baroque mirrors, the viewer wants to explore
and find out what is really on the other side of the mirror. 1059 As in Mies’s Barcelona
Pavilion movement becomes central to the concept of form and space.1060 Taking the most
natural turn into the left of the building, one discovers three works conceived as floating
“walls”: Gothic 1944 (see fig. 10.3), Number 17A, 1948, Number 1A, 1948. Blake treats
the first two as abstractions, not as real objects -- tampering with their scale. The already
emphatic vertical axis of Gothic 1944, in reality 7 feet 5/8 inches high, is enlarged to what
would be close to 11 feet; the layered density of Number 17A, 1948 (fig. 20.5) with its
cluster of three broad white diagonal markings in the lower right of the canvas constitutes
an end wall, blown up from its true 2 feet 10 inches height.

Fig. 20.5. Number 17A, 1948, 1948. Oil on canvas, 34 1/16 x 44 1/8". Collection David Geffen,
Los Angeles.

It establishes a left-hand closure to the horizontal breadth of the building. To keep the
visitor’s physical movement and visual attention very much inside the structure, Blake uses
a curved screen of perforated brass. Here he positions a Pollock sculpture, understood by
Blake and Pollock as a three-dimensional interpretation of his poured paintings.
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While the three paintings, facing the interior of the left hand portion of the Ideal
Museum, define the axes of architectural space, its height, width, and depth, conceived of
as walls, each with its distinctive qualities, with their varying thicknesses and densities, it
is the sculpture that most loudly asserts the interior spatial dimension of these canvases. It
not only literally opens up the layers of poured paint as found in Number 17A, 1948 into
three-dimensional space, but prepares the visitor for viewing Number 1A, 1948, 1948 (see
fig. 17.1). Looking for space within the tensile trajectories of Number 1A, 1948, one begins
to look at Number 1A, 1948, not as a wall, but as a modernist painting: flat but opening.
The axes of the architectural structure are, if you will, now located within the painting
itself: horizontal, vertical, and in-out. Blake’s installation helps you to experience a
painting that you might have experienced as merely chaotic as pictorially ordered.

4. A “Dream of Space”
As we continue our journey through the Ideal Museum we arrive at the opening to
the left of Number 1A, 1948, where we gain access to a wide view of the landscape beyond.
But fully engaged now in the process of looking at Pollock’s paintings, we confront the
thickness of the paint in Alchemy (see fig. 16.15), an early poured painting done in 1947.
The back to back placement of Alchemy and The Key marks Pollock’s turn away from the
symbolic figural works that had occupied him from around 1941 through 1946 to his
adventure into poured abstractions in 1947. Even as we see that Pollock succeeded in
transforming this thick paint into the tensile skeins of Number 1A, 1948, the difficulty and
challenge of his pictorial journey is asserted. By positioning the viewer with his or her
back to the transparency of the scene outside, Blake rubs the viewer’s nose in the dense
materiality of the paint that Pollock proposes to transform a new found openness to nature.
Blake’s continuing use of mirrors in the central tri-partite unit of the Museum, this
time a plane mirrored on both sides and set at a right angle to Alchemy and at a slight
remove from it, invites one into the game of pursuing the reflections, of turning the corner
to be confronted, not with a painting, but oneself in the act of looking. No doubt you are
startled, much as the “animal-like” sculpture is at your side; I say “animal-like” because of
the “head” facing the mirror atop a linear arc curved in such a way as to suggest startled
withdrawal. Very likely we have here a private reference on Pollock’s part to the “totem
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animal” of The Key which accompanied him on his artistic journey. You and “it” are
caught between the reflection of Summertime: Number 9A, 1948 1948 and the loosened
rhythms of the actual painting (fig. 20.6).

Fig. 20.6. Summertime: Number 9A, 1948, 1948. Oil, enamel and house paint on canvas, 33 1/4 x
18' 2". Tate Gallery, London.

Turning around in this open space, one might next experience on a slightly elevated
platform the upwards spiraling and looping dance of lines spun in space of Pollock’s third
sculpture (see fig. 20.2). The shapes and rhythms of this sculpture are continued on the
long and horizontal canvas Summertime, the original canvas was 18 feet 2 inches long,
here suspended in mid-air and defining the far wall of the museum.
In terms of the contents of the Ideal Museum, Summertime is a painting in which
you might say the potentiality of The Key has been released into a free play. Now all the
potential movements are put into fluid play, at a non-objective level, and in a seemingly
endless transformative process, as a mark or a color provokes a response, which in turn
provokes another response. The erotic tensions between formal oppositions and the
primary colors held in crystalline suspension in The Key are released into the dialogue of
Pollock’s process of painting, as liquid gray, then black pours of enamel paint rhythmically
sweep and pulse, in and out, rising up and descending, back and forth engaging each other
and the white ground. The all-over elaboration is continued with Pollock’s infilling of
intersections of the gray and black interlace with discrete areas of blue, yellow, some red,
now caught up in the dancing rhythms, the whole slightly weighted with small speckles of
green-blue and brown found along the painting’s lower edge. The body scale of the
surface, originally 33 1/4 inches high, suggests the bodily movements that generate these
rhythms. The painted gestures thus, even before 1949, become the trace of Pollock’s dance
in an ever-evolving dialectic guided by an underlying sense of harmonic balancing. The
rhythms of the still “figural” red, yellow and blue shapes have yet to be translated into the
pure painterly gestures of Number 2, 1949, but already the exploration of the moving center
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has begun. In the context of the Museum the center in The Key has evolved into the
organizing principle of a moving center in Summertime.
Summertime presents to us a seemingly continuous balancing and counteracting of
rhythms. Perhaps, in its extreme length, this was the canvas that excited Greenberg’s
concern in his early 1949 review about the “connotation of a frieze.” The actual canvas
does, in a way that might mollify Greenberg and as one now expects from Pollock’s
paintings, acknowledge its containment within a given surface: for instance, liquid gray
first sets the arena, marking the vertical edge at the far right, descending in pulses within a
very long arabesque rhythm, to establish a weighted bottom edge of the canvas near its
center, then gracefully sweeping up in a vertical figure, and with élan coming to a point in
the upper left hand corner of the canvas, where Pollock placed his signature. Variations
on this general movement are next made with shorter pulsing black marks shooting and
spraying from right to left, when this directional force is baffled to left of center, the
rhythms even seeming to reverse direction, before they shoot off once again to come to a
possible conclusion in a large black loop on the far-left edge. On the other hand, Blake
takes advantage of the very quality of endlessness in Summertime when adjusting the
painting to the design of his Museum; he crops it at either end. Then mirrors positioned at
right angles to both ends of the canvas extend its emphatically horizontal rhythms to
infinity. Farewell to panel painting! Looking down the length of Summertime, one’s
attention, following the continuous and infinite extension of the reflection, is propelled out
into the landscape toward the inlet.
To satisfy this directional impulse Blake places a bench to the far side of the mirror
at the left edge of Summertime.1061 On this bench the visitor’s own physical movement
through the space of the Museum is transformed into a perceptual feast, a meditative
viewing of the landscape itself. To this viewing one brings not just an intense awareness
of its dominant horizontality, first acknowledged in The Key, but all the freedom achieved
in Summertime, the eye now disposed to scan the horizon, exploring rhythms up and down,
left and right, back and forth, aware of the changing densities of earth, water, trees, sky,
and ever changing shifts in emphasis. Summertime was indeed, as Peter Blake realized
from the day of his first studio-visit, “the work of someone who understood light and space,
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and the transparency of the wide, horizontal landscape of the inlets just beyond the little
shack.”1062
In this culminating treatment of Summertime we begin to realize a “Dream of
Space,” a phrase that Blake came up with in an imagined conversation with Pollock,
responding to an accusation made by Pollock that still rankled some 40 years later. “In all
my years of friendship with Jackson, we rarely talked about art. But one day, out of the
blue, he said to me: ‘The trouble is you think I’m a decorator.’ I was taken aback --
perhaps because he seemed so precisely on target. But the more I thought and think about
it, and I still do, some forty years after the fact, the more I think Jackson was wrong: of
course I thought his paintings might make terrific walls (after all, architects spend a lot of
time thinking about walls). But what his paintings really meant to me from the first day,
was something I can only describe as the “Dream of Space” -- a dream of endless, infinite
space in motion.”1063 Blake’s use of a Miesian conception of space in his Ideal Museum
further dramatized the fluid, opening spaces of Pollock’s painting. 1064 Using the Baroque
device of mirrors to extrapolate the fluidity between inside and outside spaces found in
Mies’ building, he exploded the architectural axis of the depth of the building into infinity,
simultaneously dramatizing his conviction that Pollock’s paintings are “not merely
definitions of space, but actually part and parcel of space--floating in mid air.”1065 The
endless space of Summertime partakes of the endless space of the landscape, an
extravagant opening to nature and its rhythms. Nature here brings infinity down to earth.
Erotic energies, at first contained within The Key and released over time into the
pulsing rhythms of poured paint in Summertime, now expand into nature. As Blake put it:
“In the four short years between the end of World War II and the publication, in 1949 in
Life magazine, of a major article on Jackson’s work [in which Summertime was featured]
.... [American painting] had broken away from easel painting and embraced all of space,
all of motion, all of action; it was as violent and as passionate and as ‘engaged’ as life
itself.”1066
As architect Blake plays upon the very tensions between the conventions of viewing
an easel painting and the explosion of these conventions that I have discussed in respect to
Number 2, 1949. He refers the visitor approaching the Museum to Alberti’s Renaissance
understanding of the pictorial surface as a “window” opening to nature -- notice the
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alignment of the central horizontal axis of The Key with the actual horizon of the landscape
visible through the transparent glass of the building (see fig. 20.2), the “head” of the
abstract sculpture on the right, even following the rules of Albertian perspective, as it sets
the human scale of the model in relation to the vertical mirrored wall of the far right hand
side of the façade. Next he draws the visitor into the privileged position of the true center
of the building, inviting him or her to stand still in front of an avowedly modernist panel
painting: The Key. But then he quickly proceeds to disorient the visitor in the fluid
environment of the Museum, a labyrinth of confusing paintings, further confused by
mirrored extensions, and by the required rotation around the central unit in which The Key
is embedded, as in the child’s blindfold game of pin the tail on the donkey. The axial
structure crystallized in The Key, with its strong sense of center, left and right, up and
down, thick and thin, exfoliates in space over time, as the visitor is forced by the
architecture to navigate the spaces that the Pollock paintings define and begins to
internalize their axes, the densities, the rhythms, almost unconsciously. Bodily and
perceptual experience is mediated by Pollock’s varied handling of paint.
Blake does not employ an aesthetic approach that emphasizes the autonomy of
individual works and an observer assigned a place before the canvas. Rather his
orchestration of space, as he brings the visitor from the relatively confined spaces of the
left hand portion of the museum into the opening-up spaces of the right, with its sensation
of liberation and infinite motion, serves to fully activate the viewer’s kinesthetic responses
to Pollock’s style, now brought to a full realization in Summertime. I have described
Pollock the artist as dancer. Now it is the spectator’s turn. A famous story recounts how
Richard Wagner, listening to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, wanted to dance it. A
poured painting is like a score that invites you to perform it. 1067 At this level we perhaps
arrive at the idea of a pre-metaphorical expression that teases T.J. Clark. Pollock does want
the picture to be put into a new relation to the world, but not another relationship of
likeness; he wants some other means of signifying experience: mimesis of nature as an
enactment of it.1068
To the degree that Pollock’s mimesis of nature invites the viewer’s bodily
participation, his art calls us beyond the old anthropocentrism, centered in the viewer as
the seeing, knowing subject, to a new emphasis on the living, moving self. Through our
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bodies we experience that we are not just thinking subjects or disembodied eyes, but indeed
part of larger nature. Of course this is just part of experience of the Ideal Museum: first
we are drawn into the center of its space to stand, if only for a moment, stationary in front
of The Key with its strong center, before being spun away into a journey opening up to
nature’s rhythms. Blake recognizes the tension between the center and the moving center,
the bound and the unbound, that marks the development of Pollock’s art – a tension that
remains open and dynamic.

5. False consciousness?
Some critics of Pollock’s art might well protest. Isn’t this constant invocation of
nature somehow “sappy”? Precisely the tension between the center and the other, between
the centripetal and the centrifugal, which for Blake counts as Pollock’s strength, T.J. Clark
finds distasteful, for both entail a strong sense of a center in nature. Pollock did at the end
of World War I, like so many, marry, settle down in the country, buy a house, plant a
garden, and want a kid. Clark as a disillusioned modernist might see The Key as hopelessly
romantic, hopelessly bourgeois. 1069 Even Summertime, “riding the range,” in the great
American landscape would count only as nostalgia. For this domestic plenitude or loss of
self in the American sublime are totalizations, which someone truly of this modern age
must realize unhappily are no longer to be had.1070 Nature, whether domestic or wild, is
but a dream of plenitude, a “religion” for those who can’t have it anymore. In it one
meditates on and feels in harmony with the larger forces, “the rhythms of nature.”
Interestingly, Mies’ project for the Museum for a Small City was an abstract idea,
submitted in response to a request from Architectural Forum for a church design to include
in a “postwar buildings” issue. 1071 Blake’s Ideal Museum could also be viewed as a sacred
space: The Key as altar and a way to the natural sublime.
But is this not false consciousness, seeking solace in a false “religion”? This raises
the question: how should art relate to nature? For Clark art should escape nature all
together. In his gnostic view “The idea of art made in outright opposition to the Natural -
- an art without melody, that is -- is a great notion, and a hopeless one”1072 Great art today
must be without hope. 1073 Watery Paths and Autumn Rhythm are both traps, to which
Pollock succumbed in 1947, and again in 1950. 1074
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Pollock is, for Clark, at his best after Number 1A, 1948, through 1949, when
Pollock pushes to escape nature. In Number 1A, 1948 the contraries strain: “especially the
contraries “Nature” and “anti-Nature” -- skeleton and script, thicket and palimpsest,
depiction and inscription, infinity and confinement, entanglement and paper-thinness.” 1075
Since the task of abstract painting, for Clark, is to cancel Nature, he celebrates Pollock’s
push to escape the body towards script, “a script none of us has read before” that speaks of
“a new order of experience.”1076 He explains “Part of the reason for them [his new
techniques], from Number 1A, 1948 onward, was to elicit a kind of touch, color and spatial
organization that could keep analogies to the world of landscape (or even sea- or skyscape)
at bay.“1077 Clark wants Pollock to resist nature, to put nature “under pressure.” 1078 If the
body or figure has to be present at all, “Let it be there as negation -- as the sign of antinomy,
not dialectic.”1079 Clark tells the “story about Mondrian in New York, dancing to his
beloved boogie-woogie, and all at once the band switches to another kind of jazz. ‘Let’s
sit down,’ says Mondrian to his partner, ‘I hear melody.’” Clark transposes: “Let’s sit
down. I see a figure.”1080 If a figure is to reappear at all amidst Pollock’s abstract skeins,
then let it be as a “cut-out,” an absence. 1081 This is Pollock at his greatest, in an instance
of dissonance, a truth-telling dissonance, expressing the pain of the truth that the longed
for plenitude is unattainable. 1082
One main hypothesis of Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes in a History of
Modernism is that “painting’s public life is very far from being extrinsic to it, ex post facto.
... the question ... [is raised] of what possible uses Pollock’s work could anticipate, what
viewers and readers it expected, what spaces it was meant to inhabit; and, above all, the
question of how such a structure of expectation can be seen, by us in retrospect, to enter
and inform the work itself, determining its idiom.”1083 Let me propose Blake’s Ideal
Museum as an anticipation by Pollock of a possible public life for his work. Here a
premium is put, not on dissonance or an escape from body and nature, but rather on an
engagement with nature. Pollock’s collaboration with Blake in the creation of the Ideal
Museum points to Pollock’s own willingness to dramatize the opening of his art up to the
body and to nature, promising to return to art its erotic, social, and even political nature.
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6. A Social Contract
Pollock’s collusion with Blake’s treatment of his paintings as murals integral to
architecture brings up the issue of his art’s public address. Even before the project of the
Ideal Museum came up, Pollock had been talking a lot with Tony Smith about the marriage
of art and architecture. Smith was practicing as an architect, designing a number of homes
in the area. The summer of 1949 he tried to interest clients, unsuccessfully, in having
Pollock do a mural.1084 Smith’s brother had contributed to Orozco’s Dartmouth murals
and was pushing Pollock to renew his interest in Orozco. 1085 Certainly Pollock was “wall-
eyed,” as he had been long ago. 1086
To his father he had praised Benton for having "lifted art from the stuffy studio into
the world and happenings about him, which has a common meaning for the masses." 1087
Muralism was a way to reach the public, and project important meanings. Over the years
Pollock held to his leftist convictions, surprising Motherwell. These convictions were
deflected by the Jungians who expected that the forces of Fascism could best be fought on
the individual turf of the human psyche, by the artist who could delve into its collective
depths to retrieve still potent archetypes that could lead mankind into the future. But in
1949 the dreams for which the Mexicans had already found images no longer seemed so
distant, for instance Orozco’s The Modern Migration of the Spirit at Dartmouth College or
Man of Fire at Guadalajara. The same excitement of endless possibilities now finds a
distinctly modernist expression in The Ideal Museum, especially in Blake’s culminating
treatment of Summertime. As baroque architectural space amplifies the endless spiritual
aspirations of the Man of Fire, so does Blake’s use of the baroque device of mirrors extend
Pollock’s paintings into infinite space. 1088 And the lessons of Siqueiros pertain. He had
earlier proposed “to produce an art which will be physically capable of serving the public
through its material form."1089 The material forms of expression are themselves now the
new reality through which spiritual aspirations pulse.
With the first rumblings of World War II Pollock’s awareness of walls and social
commitment was rendered more acute by his initial confrontation with Guernica and with
what Motherwell articulated as its uneasy equilibrium between social values, indeed moral
indignation, and the aesthetic. In his own responses to Guernica Pollock had from the start
refused to separate its moral and psychological properties from the formal. Had Pollock in
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arriving at The Key not managed to answer Guernica’s bull in the creation of a totemic
creature that could accommodate both the instincts and the aspirations of man. Had he not
in his poured paintings created a “new image of man” in which human action drew on the
whole range of being, instinctual and spiritual, answering the forces of technological
destruction by drawing on something more encompassing: the forces of nature itself.
Pollock of course never wrote any of this – but he did do a lot of visual thinking, and the
doodles tell us that as he went into the labyrinth in There were 7 in 8, Guernica was still
on his mind. Now that he was moving within the labyrinth -- even the Ideal Museum is a
labyrinth -- the way out is still an erotic openness to the other and to nature.
Could muralism in its relation to architecture maintain a social, and not just a
decorative, function, even after the war? Pollock did do a painting for an ad for a housing
project published in the September 1948 Partisan Review, aimed at its left-wing bourgeois
readers (fig. 20.7).1090

Fig. 20.7. Triad , 1948. Oil and enamel on paper mounted on composition board, 20 ½ x 25 ¾".
Collection of Art Enterprises Ltd., Courtesy McCormick Gallery, Chicago.

If one doesn’t dismiss it simply as a way to make some money, the odd drawing of a couple
dancing, cut out from the energies of a pre-existent poured web as was the couple in
Untitled c. 1948 (see fig. 17.5), seems to place the idealism of his search for a “new image
of man” at the service of the need for new housing at the end of the war. Certainly the
context of Blake’s own excitement about architecture was the war and its aftermath.
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Returning to America -- his division was the first American division to enter Berlin
just before the official surrender 1091 -- Peter Blake discovered in modernist architecture a
utopian vision for the future.1092 The editor of Architectural Forum asked him to conduct
a survey of key American cities to find out what the public and private sectors of these
cities were planning to build for the bright postwar world. Visiting Chicago where Mies,
who had left Germany in 1938, was now head of the school of architecture at the Armour
Institute (later renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology), Blake was excited by the
vision of Mies and his cohorts, who were convinced that “architecture in a chaotic,
overpopulated, self-destructive world must in some way contribute to the survival of
mankind.”1093 If Guernica, a focal point of Mies’ museum, had addressed the collapse of
democratic forces in Europe, Blake’s use of Mies’ open plan to celebrate Pollock’s organic
erotic art is itself an expression of the humanism to which the technology of the new
architecture aspired.1094 For the architects talked not of “art” but of technology, convinced
that modular standardization in building was basic to an architecture responsive to
technological breakthrough and rationalization in construction. 1095 Such construction
required social planning. What Blake like so many other avant-garde architects dreamed
of was not so different from what T. J. Clark wanted from modernism – not escapism, but
social responsibility.1096 Blake did not yet suspect the forces of capitalism and free
enterprise that were shortly to shatter such optimism. 1097
Pollock’s collaboration on The Ideal Museum suggests a willingness to share in
that dream. If, as Motherwell realized, Guernica occupied an ambiguous position between
social and formal aesthetic values, Pollock’s art was in a much more tenuous position. The
Ideal Museum remained a dream. And even if seductive with its promise of a reintegration
of art, nature, and society, did Blake’s "Theatrical Exercise," appropriating Pollock’s
abstractions, not violate their spirit as much as Cecil Beaton’s 1951 Vogue photographs of
them did treating them as backdrops for high fashion models? 1098
But is nature really that trap that Clark takes it to be? The strange abstraction at
which Pollock had arrived only seemed to alienate him from the communal audience and
responsive understanding for which he longed. Could walls in buildings help close the gap
between painter and public? Blake talked of the possibility of painting on glass. But would
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he get any mural commissions at all? He definitely wanted the model ready in time for the
November show.1099
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Chapter 21
The One and the All

1. Fame
If the Ideal Museum was an anticipation of an ideal public life for his works, then
the Life article that he agreed to in the summer of 1949 and that came out in August was
another strategy to reach a public. 1100 Both Lee and Jackson knew that agreeing to the
article was a calculated risk. Had not Life recently in December 1948 published a damning
article on Dubuffet: “Dead End Art: A Frenchman’s Mud and Rubble Paintings Reduce
Modernism to a Joke.” And hadn’t Rosenberg and Greenberg both stressed that an artist’s
alienation from the bourgeois public was necessary to artistic liberation? 1101 In Spring
1947 Rosenberg had written: "the very extremity of their isolation forces upon them a kind
of optimism, an impulse to believe in their experience and rescue it as the beginning of a
new world.”1102 Greenberg had long asserted that abstraction was for now the only way for
an artist to pursue authentic art in the face of an overwhelming tide of kitsch that the
bourgeoisie invited in its preference for illusionistic representation. But he also recognized
that the avant-garde artist’s “isolation is inconceivable, crushing, unbroken, damning. ...
What can fifty do against a hundred and forty million?”1103
Greenberg had in fact done much to bring the new abstract art to the attention of
the art world and the public. In March 1948 in his article “The Decline of Cubism” he had
seized the political moment: as America was asserting its role as defender of democracy,
freedom, and peace against world communism, he was asserting that American art was
about to replace Paris as the carrier of Western culture. 1104 At the Museum of Modern
Art’s October 1948 “Round Table on Modern Art” organized by the staff of Life and then
published as a part of their policy to educate their readers, Greenberg praised Pollock’s
Cathedral as “one of the best paintings recently produced in this country.” 1105 Time had
twice questioned Greenberg’s claims for Pollock. Now Life magazine approached Pollock
about doing an article on him. 1106 Certainly Greenberg had prepared the way. Lee and
Jackson agreed to the interview by a Life magazine staffer Dorothy Seiberling in July and
photo shots of Pollock miming his unusual painting techniques. 1107 They wanted the
exposure and needed the possible sales. 1108
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In the October 1947 issue of the British journal Horizon Greenberg declared: “the
most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a
major one ... is Jackson Pollock.”1109 This the title of the Life article, when it appeared in
the August 8, 1949 issue, inverted: “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the
United States?” In acknowledging the range of responses to Pollock’s indeed strange art
the text was surprisingly even handed: leading with the claim made by “a formidably high-
brow New York critic” (Greenberg), to “interesting, if inexplicable, decoration,” to
“unpalatable as yesterday’s macaroni.” Then a few biographical facts and excerpts from
his Possibilities statement, interspersed with the requisite choice of quizzical mocking
words, “drools,” (accompanying the staged photographs of Pollock demonstrating
technique), “dribbles,” “scrawls” completed the two and one/half page spread. One of the
three color illustrations accompanying the article is of Number Nine (only later named
Summertime). The photo (fig. 21.1) shows Pollock standing in front of the painting, its
horizontal length stretching across the two pages.

Fig. 21.1. Pollock in front of his painting Summertime 1948, photograph for the article "Jackson
Pollock," LIFE, 8/8/49 ©1949.

The question of compositional closure which also preoccupied Greenberg is reposed in

mocking tone in the caption: “The picture is only 3 feet high, but it is 18 feet long and sells
for $1800, or $100 a foot. Critics have wondered why Pollock happened to stop this
painting when he did. The answer: his studio is only 22 feet long.” As striking as the art
is the image of the artist presented in the photographs and text: an anti-artist in paint-
spattered dungarees, handling commercial enamel paints, cigarette dangling, his studio a
barn, a handsome roughhewn figure from the American West. 1110
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With the article Pollock did break through to a new public and became an
immediate celebrity. He even received fan mail. 1111 If he wasn’t already the “shining new
phenomenon of American art” before the article, he certainly was after. 1112 Responding to
the November 1949 exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery the critics treated him with a new
respect, but most significantly the up-town world of museum luminaries, including Alfred
Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, socialites, and collectors showed up at
the opening. De Kooning, who attended, remarked “Look around. These are big shots.
Jackson has finally broken the ice.”1113 The show was close to sold out! 1114
The liberal and haut bourgeois elite which consolidated power after the unexpected
reelection of the Democratic President Truman in November 1948 used Pollock’s art as
one of the standard bearers of American democracy abroad, for instance at the Venice
Biennale in the summer of 1950. Did Pollock with his old Leftist convictions find such
service to the bourgeois “politics of freedom” unpalatable? Probably not. Many left-wing
radicals of the literary and art world had moved towards the right, i.e. closer to the center;
certainly Greenberg had. 1115 If Pollock had chanced to listen to Truman’s inaugural
address in January 1949, he might have felt proud of being an American, even if the
Independent Progressive candidate Wallace had lost. Truman the “little man” from
Missouri had been reelected against all odds, over Republican wealth and big business.
Now he reaffirmed democratic government as the defender of individual freedom,
especially against communist totalitarianism. He spoke of American internationalist
aspirations for the “peace of the world,” and of America’s great wealth and knowledge that
should be shared as aid to “underdeveloped” countries.1116 Not the old imperialism of
exploitation for foreign profit, but a new world responsibility. So why wouldn’t Pollock
find Truman’s internationalism exciting, as later that summer he had pushed on to a new
image of man, in Number 1, 1949 around a hidden center opening to the world, in Number
2, 1949 exploring the theme of responsive eros, in small works celebrating freedom with
their moving center? Didn’t his work express the national mood? 1117 Why shouldn’t he
be America’s great painter at America’s great moment? 1118 Pollock had long struggled
with Guernica, come up with what he deemed an answer to it, and was eager to share that
answer with a larger public at the moment of democracy’s triumph.
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In an interview in late 1950 he could still insist that the source of art was an artist’s
inner nature, while also asserting the ability of modern art to express the modern age. First:
“The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter
outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work
from within.” Then: “Modern art is to me nothing more than the expression of
contemporary aims of the age we’re living in.”1119 Part of this age, the artist could not help
but express the larger world of which he was part, while remaining faithful to himself.
But more crucial for Pollock was the effect the new sales and exposure would have
on his relations with the “small band” of fellow artists with whom he had so long traveled.
In mid-September 1949 in his New York gallery Sam Kootz opened an exhibition “The
Intrasubjectives” intended to define the new American painting: besides Pollock the show
included Baziotes, Gorky, Gottlieb, Graves , Hofmann, de Kooning, Motherwell,
Reinhardt, Tobey and Tomlin. Kootz’s definition -- “The intrasubjective artist invents
from personal experience, creates from an internal world rather than an external world” --
is clearly one with which Pollock could agree. 1120 But “Intra-subjective” literally means
“within” the subject, confined within the subject. The voice of the mythopoeic, once a part
of the Possibilities collage and which for Caffi partook of “ the human communion which
I call society par excellence,” was now muted, despite the efforts of Motherwell to keep
the mythopoeic project alive by starting a school in fall 1948 for young artists called
“Subjects of the Artists” where he, Baziotes, Gottlieb, Rothko, David Hare, and Barnett
Newman taught.1121 When the school folded in May 1949, a group of artists organized by
Tony Smith continued Friday night seminars under the name “Studio 35,” Motherwell
acting as “Master of Ceremonies.”1122 But in “The Intrasubjectives” catalogue any hint of
the mythopoeic was now totally submerged in Harold Rosenberg’s existentialist critical
stance: “there is no use looking for silos or madonnas. They have all melted into the void.
But ... the void itself, you have that, just as surely as your grandfather had a sun-speckled
lawn.”1123
Fashionable European alienation, which may have suited war-ravished France, won
over the mythopoeic approach to the new art, which in its insistence on “metaphysical”
content had, as Greenberg had said in December 1947, “something half-baked and
revivalist, in a familiar American way, about it.” 1124 Pollock himself, in reaching to the
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liberal bourgeois public for sales and recognition, had inadvertently further undermined
the mythopoeic critical position. For the liberal understanding of freedom addresses the
maximizing of individual freedom, but not the evolution of the soul. Thus it neglects
content, as does Rosenberg’s existential embrace of pure possibility and Greenberg’s
positivism. Of course, Pollock still hoped that the forms would speak for themselves
without the help of a sympathetic critical voice. To Wright in late 1950 he explained “the
unconscious drives do mean a lot in looking at paintings. ... I think it [abstract painting]
should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed – after a while you may like it or you may not.
But – it doesn’t seem too serious. I like some flowers and others, other flowers I don’t like.
... I think at least give it a chance.”1125
While Pollock had gained confidence in his ability to “express his age,”
Rosenberg’s Sartrean approach did not mesh with Pollock’s half-baked convictions. Nor
was he comfortable with Motherwell’s intellectually sophisticated panels at Studio 35, 1126
which in Fall 1949, shortly after the Life article, transformed itself into “The Club,” a loft
at 39 East 8th Street where some 20 artists smoked, talked and argued: among them Willem
de Kooning, Franz Kline, Philip Pavia, and artists from the old days of the Project and the
American Abstract Artists, even John Graham. Tomlin jokingly called them the “salon des
refusées.” They continued to debate “the artist’s existential role” and “the nature of the
artist’s moral commitment”; hostility to Greenberg, his formalism, his pitch to the media,
was palpable.1127 Such hostility had to extend to Pollock who owed his success in part to
Greenberg. Thus when after the excitement and victory of the November show, Pollock
first came to the Club on New Years Eve 1949, the sculptor Peter Grippe, drunk and
belligerent, threw Pollock a punch. On other visits Pollock would vehemently deny that
Greenberg knew "what his pictures were about,” 1128 but he never did succeed in being
comfortable at the Club.
Pollock was, as B. H. Friedman, an early biographer, described, “aware now as he
bought gas, groceries, or paint and hardware supplies that whatever he had been – among
fellow artists and to some extent critics, dealers, and collectors – was now lifted, blown up,
distorted into grotesque fragments of public celebrity.”1129 To Lee he said, “I feel like a
clam without a shell.”1130 The price of emerging success, fame, money, was a loss of
community.1131 He even lost the company of Harold Rosenberg, who had earlier
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functioned as something of an older brother to Pollock. When in the summer of 1950 back
at Springs Lee orchestrated the now prized invitations to the Pollocks’ dinner parties, Lee
dropped some of the old friends from the guest lists, those who knew the pre-Life Pollock
best, among them the Rosenbergs. 1132 The chief critical presence was now Greenberg, who
to be sure had helped enable sales and touted Pollock’s as the most important American
artist, but who did not fully understand his art.
Among all the new faces around him, Pollock continued to spend a lot of time with
Tony Smith, who could hold forth endlessly on such topics as Jung, alchemy, shamanism,
Oriental philosophy, Joyce. 1133 He would recite to Pollock passages from Finnegans Wake,
muse on Catholic theology, continue to talk of the relation of architecture and art, and urge
Pollock to “do some really big paintings.” 1134 That mythopoeic content remained important
to Pollock is evident in his contribution that summer to the marionette theater of their new
friend Tibor de Nagy: a gaily painted marionette and a story about a Pueblo Indian boy
called “The Fireboy” that de Nagy adapted into a play. “Jackson loved to tell this story
about a little boy who wanted to be initiated into a famous clan,” de Nagy remembers, “but
he had to do three heroic things before he could become famous.” 1135 Initiatory trial had
long been a mythic mechanism in Pollock’s art: the animal trials of 1943 etc. What form
would it take in his work in the summer of 1950?

2. The Role of Nature

Arriving back in Springs after four months in New York in March 1950,1136 Pollock
took up a number of projects related to the “Ideal Museum.” Following the small sculptures
for the Museum, he produced a series of small terracotta sculptures in Roseanne Larkin’s
pottery studio – toying with the idea of more ambitiously pursuing sculpture, much as he
had done in the early 1930s. He completed the mural commission, a 6 feet x 8 feet canvas,
for the Breuer House designed for the Gellers, following the specifications of red ground
as in Arabesque. Most of June he spent on Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950 (fig. 21.2),1137
taking up the challenge posed in the Ideal Museum to open himself to nature and its
rhythms – but in a way that continued to be very much his own.
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Fig. 21.2. Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950, 1950. Oil, enamel and aluminum paint on canvas, 7'3" x 9'10".
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund.

In looking at this large squarish canvas, 7 feet 3 inches x 9 feet 10 inches, we

experience the sensation of palpable atmosphere, “lavender mist, ” Greenberg’s title for
the canvas.1138 Rather than the more distinctive and gestural throws of paint that we see in
such works as Number 2, 1949 or Number 1, 1949, here exquisite lines and smaller
markings interweave to create an all-over fabric of paint, the most delicate in terms of touch
and coloration of all Pollock’s poured paintings. With Lavender Mist, Coddington states,
“Pollock brought the pour technique to a high pitch of refinement, varying every facet of
the work – thinning the paint, pressing into it, pulling at it, always breaking the surface into
smaller and smaller bits to achieve an atmospheric, atomized quality.” On a thin white
ground, he applied thin washes of black and blue paint, functioning “as inky stains rather
than muscular throws of paint ... a means to temper the longer throws [mostly black or
white], creating small points of color throughout the work that paradoxically both unify the
composition and break it into ever smaller units.” 1139 Into this pulverized surface, an
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effusive tone created by pale pinks, blues, and silver aluminum paint and the interspersion
of off-white pigment, which echoes the color of the canvas ground, introduces a sense of
transparency.1140
The gauzy pink atmosphere of Lavender Mist might suggest to the viewer the first
flush of a dogwood spring, as one might encounter it the woods along Fireplace Road in
Springs. We might even entertain the idea that Pollock is here pursuing a cycle of nature’s
rhythms marking the seasons, as Kandinsky did in the set of paintings done for Edwin R.
Campbell's home in 1914. While Summertime was not officially so named until later,
Pollock accepted Greenberg’s suggestive title for this canvas finished in June.1141 But
Greenberg’s own writing warns us not to be too literal. Lavender Mist is certainly no
Hallmark card rendition of early summer.
Greenberg’s own conviction as expressed in “The Role of Nature in Painting” in a
January 1949 essay was: “The best modern painting, though it is mostly abstract painting,
remains naturalistic in its core, despite all appearances to the contrary. It refers to the
structure of the given world both outside and inside human beings. The artist who, like the
Nabis, the later Kandinsky, and so many of the disciples of the Bauhaus, tries to refer to
anything else walks in a void.”1142 Rosenberg’s embrace of the void is here rejected.
Nature is crucial, for its structure guarantees the unity of the work of art, and thereby
aesthetic quality.1143 Certainly Lavender Mist possesses unity, indeed an all-over unity.
But what is the structure of nature that is being tapped? This brings us back to what is
special about Pollock’s understanding of nature and its structure.
Whereas Greenberg would have “the spontaneous integrity and completeness of the
event or thing seen guide[s] the artist in forming the invented event or object that is the
work of art,”1144 Pollock turns to the energies and rhythm of nature, to forces that are
unleashed only to coalesce. In Lavender Mist close inspection reveals both. In the fabric
of the painting a number of writers have noticed the intimation of two sweeping arcs,
especially noticeable in the black tones of the one on the left, dominating the left and the
right hand portions of the canvas, and converging towards the bottom of the central vertical
axis of the canvas. Rohn calls this a “butterfly” configuration; 1145 Carmean describes “a
deep V-like depression in the center,” created by “two ovals, shapes tilted left and right
and tangent in the center.”1146 The convergence below center weights the composition; the
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outward springing arcs open up the composition in a centrifugal motion. The tension of
the bound and the unbound receives a new expression in Pollock’s work, here even more
exquisitely balanced than in Number 1, 1949. Indeed Pollock title for this work was
Number 1, 1950, before Greenberg dubbed it Lavender Mist.1147 The forces coalesce in a
unified image that Greenberg found satisfactory.
As another Number 1, Lavender Mist takes its place in the history of Pollock’s
efforts at that pictorial integration of opposing forces that with him carried inevitably an
erotic charge. Carmean in his careful study of the formal relationships of the classic poured
paintings of 1950 points out the relation of Lavender Mist to Number 1A, 1948 (see fig.
17.1),1148 where we meet with a similar “butterfly” image.1149 And why should Pollock not
be put in mind of Number 1A, 1948 once again at the start of the 1950 painting season?
Not only had Greenberg earlier praised it for its “Quattrocento containment,” but Alfred
Barr had just bought it for the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. 1150 But in this vein
Pollock could do even better. The rectangular format is retained: 5 feet 8 inches x 8 feet 8
inches for Number 1A, 1948; scaled back slightly in Number 1, 1949 to 5 feet 3 inches x
8 feet 6 inches; now stretched to 7 feet 3 inches x 9 feet 10 inches for Lavender Mist. The
content becomes more encompassing: in Number 1A, 1948 left and right, finite and infinite
are still experienced as polar opposites; in Number 1, 1949 centripetal and centrifugal
forces are brought around an absent center into a fine balance, as are human reach and
centrifugal possibility. Now, even as left and right are acknowledged, these forces are
given the added complexity of weight and upward and outward release. The up-down
movement is intensified by the roughly vertical streaking of black throws that move into
and beyond the field from outside its edges, a stretching amplified by the 7 feet 3 inches
height of the canvas and suggesting unbound sublimity. But this height, above Pollock’s
own height, is then bound by the careful imprints of his hands, another echo of Number
1A, 1948. Rather than stretching upward to left and right, they are now repeated, gently
and positively,1151 marking the upper left corner of the canvas and also rotating around its
upper right corner, tracking horizontally to turn slightly downward, bounding these upper
reaches.
The theme of the ideal body is once again raised. The two soft fleshy swabs of red
color noted especially by T.J. Clark in the lower left of the field in Number 1A, 1948, have
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now, as it were, been transformed into the beige-pink of the newly incarnate ideal body. I
return to the “specificity and closeness” with which Pollock builds up this fabric.
Coddington describes him sometimes squeezing white paint directly from the tube and then
flattening it, perhaps with a board, “shaping the paint,” creating sharp edges and exquisite
tendrils; adding beige tones throughout, using a dry matte paint, serving both to create a
visual counterpoint to more glossy areas and as well present an absorbent base for later
applications of paint, which then sink in visually, sometimes physically. The result is a
shallow space, breathing, “moving forward from the canvas and beige paint, and then back
again, again and again throughout the painting.” In addition he applies sprayed passages
lightly pigmented. “The sprays were a palpable mist, a fusion of the fluid and the
particulate – perhaps exactly the effect he was seeking.”1152
We are reminded of the extraordinary liquefaction and luminosity of paint that first
occurred in Pollock’s art in Totem Lesson I (see fig. 11.1): the face of the male shaman
suffused with a pink glow as he contemplates the gooey yellow-green paint cupped in the
large number 4, promising, along with the foetal shape and amoebic cells behind, fertility,
the dawn of a new day, the beginning of a new spiritual essence. The pink glow and liquid
gray-whites seem here to have fully matured in the “lavender mist” of 1950; the foetal
promise of Totem Lesson I evolved into a fully mature ideal body. As Coddington
concludes, “Every move he made on this painting, after all, every adjustment of prior
technique, broke the image into smaller and smaller segments until it was reconstituted as
an organic whole.”1153 Having created such an organic whole, the culmination of his efforts
at integration in the poured paintings, could there be anything more?

3. One
Having created an ideal body in the perfection of Lavender Mist, Pollock, once
again, proceeds to negate it. In the spring of 1950 Tony Smith had repeatedly urged Pollock
“to do some really big paintings,” saying that “great art demands an appropriate scale.” 1154
Sometime in July or August Pollock placed a giant roll of canvas 8 feet 10 inches in height
down on the floor of his barn studio and proceeded to unroll it, producing three
masterworks: Number 32, 1950 15 feet in length, then One: Number 31, 1950 17 feet 6
1155
inches, followed by Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950 17 feet 3 inches. Kirk
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Varnedoe has commented: “Along with New Year’s in 1944, and the advent of the poured
paintings in 1947, this was one of the defining moments that made Pollock Pollock.” 1156
Moving from the 7 feet 3 inches x 9 feet 10 inches of Lavender Mist to the 8 feet
10 inches height of Number 32, 1950 (fig. 21.3) sets the scale in relation to the body at a
sublime pitch, as does the extended horizontality, moving beyond the 9 feet 8 1/inches of
Arabesque 1948 to just short of the 15 feet 9 ½ inches of Number 2, 1949, but more
demanding given the giant white rectangular surface he faced.

Fig. 21.3. Number 32, 1950, 1950. Enamel on canvas, 8'10" x 15'. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-
Westfalen, Dusseldorf.

Whereas Lavender Mist took most of June to complete, Rudolph Burckhardt, who
photographed Pollock miming the act of painting Number 32, 1950 after it was completed,
recalls that it was finished in one session. 1157 The palette is now simply black and white,
the throws of the thinned black enamel paint soaking directly into the vast surface of the
white unprimed cotton duck canvas. 1158 The spare black markings have the energy of a
cosmic windstorm.
The sensation of movement is by and large from the upper left and towards the right
of the field, the large angular marks trailing black threads. The center is marked with long
vertical alignments. On the right hand half of the canvas diagonals from its upper left and
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lower left converge dramatically near the center of the right hand edge of canvas, the
pointed wedge giving some order to this giant windstorm of marks. This storm starts in
diffuse fashion on the far left edge of the field: in the angled mark of the upper left, in the
black mass in its center, a diagonal rising from its lower left, forces that then generate giant
black “x”s moving towards the right. Just to left of the center of the entire canvas we see
some marks that might read as moving in the opposite direction, a waffling that is then
countered in the terrific explosive conjunction on the extreme right center edge of the
canvas.
Echoing the manner in which the blacks traces melded with the wet white gesso
into which they were poured in the black and white poured paintings of 1948, for instance
Number 14, 1948, this storm of marks, identified with the surface by being soaked into it,
is also held by the matrix of the white ground. 1159 Whether Pollock is simply gleefully and
wildly opening up new formal territory with the unleashing of forces that will now
challenge him to bring them back into control, as happened in Lucifer, or whether there is
manifest here, as T.J. Clark suggests, a great moment of dissonance and rage when Pollock
realizes that fulfillment is not to be had, will have to remain an open question. 1160

Fig. 21.4. One: Number 31, 1950, 1950. Oil and enamel paint on canvas, 8' 9 7/8" x 17' 5 1/2". The
Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund (by exchange).

The finished Number 32, 1950 hung on the studio wall, as Pollock started One:
Number 31, 1950 (fig. 21.4). The relatively unbound energies of the first painting coalesce
 415

here into a more palpable rectangular composition that pulls in on all four sides from the
framing edge, and is weighted with an increased density of interweaving across the entire
bottom.1161 The lack of orientation in the first, which may account for its being published
upside down in the Pompidou catalogue, gives way to a decided up and down in the second.
Much as the wild energies of Lucifer were then bound by the interior tensions of Number
1A, 1948, the cosmic windstorm of Number 32, 1950 coalesces into a gravity-bound field
here.
We are able to peer into the creation of this all-over field of matter endlessly
differentiated and enlivened by sometimes distinctive and “graspable” longer throws of
paint1162 through the camera lens of Hans Namuth, a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar
who met Pollock at a July 1 art opening in East Hampton and asked him if he couldn’t
photograph him as he painted.1163 Pollock, after some convincing, said yes, a departure for
an artist who had restricted photographers to capturing his miming the creative act. Pollock
promised that he would start a new painting for him. Some weekends later, Namuth
arrived, only to be greeted with the news that the painting was done. Begun the day before,
it was still wet when they went into the studio. Namuth recalls: “I looked aimlessly through
the ground glass of my rolleiflex and began to take a few pictures. Pollock looked at the
painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paintbrush and started to move around
the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished. His movements,
slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance-like as he flung black, white, and
rust colored paint onto the canvas.”1164 “It was a great drama, the flame of explosion when
the paint hit the canvas; the dance-like movement; the eyes tormented before knowing
where to strike next; the tension; then the extension again ....” 1165 Namuth photographed
the entire session – perhaps a half-hour.1166
Out of the dozens of images Namuth took I will point to two that give us insight
into an important element of the structure of the painting as we see it today. In a field that
at first seems to verge on chaos, we begin to realize a rhythmic underpinning: a long
diagonal descends from the upper left of the field, initiating a movement that starts three-
quarters the way up the left hand edge of the canvas with an elegant wedge thrusting right
made by two long black throws, zig-zags to a dramatic encounter of white and black in the
center, and continues to the halation of white on the lower right hand edge of the canvas.
 416

In the center of the field the drama of black and white is noticeable as one of the “graspable”
throws, a white throw arcing from the lower left and coming to a head to confront, near the
central vertical axis of the entire canvas, a large black loop that falls down just to the right
of this white head. Below this a large area of black is enlivened with two streaking white
pours. White energies, like electricity, streak further through matter towards the right,
through white nodal points, in fine cracks, quieting in a larger halation or breath of white,
located three-quarters the way down the right hand edge of the canvas. Once one notes
this fine white tracery, one sees as well white arcs cascading down, ever smaller, towards
the bottom corner. The breath of white itself is almost caught in the sharp downward
plunge of a black wedge-like vector. But, countering this movement, energies spring
upward from both the white massing sheltered in a wedge of black pours and the white
halation at the right edge of the canvas. Tentacles from the first and from the second a blue
gray throw, accompanied by two more clearly defined black ones, rise to a point above the
center of the right edge, and send yet further impulses upwards. These impulses get caught
up once again in the general all-over flow of energy circulating through the field.
I describe these suggestive rhythms because in Namuth’s presence Pollock felt
inspired to create this white node from which emanates the white halation and release of
energy upwards. Before and after shots (fig. 21.5a and 4b) analyzed by Pepe Karmel, show
the addition of a “layer of white paint, laid down in sprays of narrow lines diverging from
a single point.”1167 From this springs the drama of the breath of new life, rising up, to be
tossed up into the dancing energies of the labyrinthine field. Before and after shots (fig.
21.5a and 5b) analyzed by Pepe Karmel, show the addition of a “layer of white paint, laid
down in sprays of narrow lines diverging from a single point.” 1168 From this springs the
drama of the breath of new life, rising up, to be tossed up into the dancing energies of the
labyrinthine field.
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Fig. 21.5a. Pollock painting right end of One, 1950, in an intermediate state.

Fig. 21.5b. Right end of One in a slightly later state, after the addition of white lines.
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Once tossed up, energies channeled in the large black upward-facing arcs in
particular begin to move the eye back across the upper field towards the left. Pollock
already had explored the steep vertical axis in Number 2, 1950. But now, for the first time
in his work, he fully integrates a drama along the vertical axis with a drama played out on
the horizontal axis. This places One in the great sequence of Pollock’s striving after
integration: Number 1A, 1948, Number 1, 1949, Lavender Mist. Into this integration has
been absorbed Pollock’s continued push to horizontal extension: Lucifer 1947,
Summertime 1948, Number 2, 1949 and Number 32, 1950. The explosive conjunction of
black vectors on the extreme right of Number 32, 1950 becomes in One the explosion of
white in the lower right, it should be noted the lower right, where white now serves to
generate buoyancy in black above, a phenomenon that finds a distant echo in the lower
right of Totem Lesson II, the willingness to go down, to fully rise up. A willingness
necessary to the excitement of the fullest integration.
Greenberg wanted to name this canvas Lowering Weather and as Greenberg
remembers, Jackson was willing to go along with this, until Ben Heller thought that this
wasn’t profound enough. Pressed by Heller to find a really significant title, “Jackson sat
around, squirming, and said ‘just call it ‘one’.”1169 This title was, as we well, know not an
innocent one. Recall that to Potter, Pollock asserted: “Fuck all the God shit! We’re part
of the one, making it whole. That’s enough, being part of something bigger. Let the
Salvation Army take over the gods. We’re part of the great all, in our lives and work.
Union, that’s us.”1170 In his foul-mouthed way Pollock was expressing his most profound
beliefs.
If the bigness of Number 32, 1950 can be held to encompass the “all,” [[wrong-
more death before rebirth]] then here in One the “All is One.” Themes that resonated in
1946 are here regained in the throes of the creative process. Pollock’s “I am nature”
becomes “I am one with the universe.” But this dream of a pictorial fusion of self and
universe had to be shattered [reaffirmed] when Namuth entered as witness, indeed a
witness given an extravagant welcome. Lee later told Namuth “until that moment she had
been the only other person who ever watched him paint.” 1171
What next? Autumn Rhythm (fig. 21. 6) shares its palette with One, lacking only
some of the green-grays.
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Fig. 21.6. Autumn Rhythm: Number 32, 1950, 1950. Oil on canvas, 8' 10 1/2" x 17' 8". The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. George A. Hearn Fund, 1957.

But now the throws, in black, white, and bronze/russet, are distinctly more weighty and
hence “graspable,” and the painterly fabric loosened. The tripartite composition, noted by
Carmean, is tracked in the process of its creation by Karmel in photo-composite images
(fig. 21.7) created by overlapping the still photos Namuth continued to shoot in his
extraordinary documentation of Pollock painting. 1172

Fig. 21.7. Autumn Rhythm in an intermediate state, after the completion of the configuration at the left end.
Still photograph composite.
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Starting on the right hand third of the canvas (as it was viewed when finished and hung),1173
Pollock then moved to the central section where he drew a full-length vaguely female
figure. Eventually he moved on to the left portion where he threw a long “pole” stick
figure, tilting up and out. Karmel notes the way Pollock amplified the original
composition, reinforcing existing forms with additional black lines or “splats”. Such
reinforcement is particularly evident in the upper part of the left-hand figure where the
major lines have become thicker and more insistent; in the central section where the effect
of the original concentric order is obscured with a succession of horizontal bars in the lower
center; in the upper right where among other marks a “lozenge” (I would be tempted to call
this a diamond shape) is reinforced. 1174 Here the buoyant rhythms and even symbols of
unity that Pollock first explored in the multi-media works he did just before he turned to
his abstract poured style, in such a work as CR 1012 (c. 1946) (see fig. 14.9) find an echo.
For all the buoyancy, a weighted density along its bottom edge characterizes
Autumn Rhythm -- more emphatic in this canvas than in One, due in part to a sparser zone
at the top of the composition. 1175 Such density, created by the interweaving of the skeins,
suggests a pictorial logic, reminiscent of Cézanne and Cubism. Such formal issues were
indeed of concern to Pollock at this time. Tony Smith remembers “that Cliff Still and
Barney [Newman] and Mark [Rothko] were interested in Monet and the Impressionists.
We were too, but Jackson and I were always more interested in Cezanne. I think it’s the
structural aspect which interested us.” 1176 Later Carmean was to respond to this canvas
with “a sense of Cézannian/cubist weight,” 1177 a reading that would’ve pleased Greenberg.
Here at the end of Pollock’s cycle of three giant paintings the specter of “bodies . . .
organized in actual space” re-enters.1178 Clark writes: “The picture is an instance of
autumn: it makes the natural category vivid again, generalizing it and aggrandizing it,
giving it room to breathe. Trees in painting should be this size, it says.” 1179 Are we then
to think of Autumn Rhythm as a graceful landing after sublime flight, a reaffirmation of
the body that has an up and a down, which, present already in the vertical axis in Bird 1941
and still vivid in the hand imprints and body scale of Number 1A, 1948, begins to reemerge
after the dare-devilry of Lucifer and Number 32, 1950?
Pointing first to the contrapuntal composition of the long frieze-like compositions
of 1949, for example Number 2, 1949, Carmean admires Pollock’s achievement: “Of the
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four large works from 1950 Autumn Rhythm is the only one to parallel fully this form of
poetic composition, in the dialogue between the black pattern and the bronze and white
layers. And unlike the earlier frieze compositions, Autumn Rhythm’s vertical weight,
which allows the thinner tracery of paint to form a greater presence above, adds yet a third
element to its visual poetry. Autumn Rhythm’s varying voices – light and dark, heavy and
light, straight and curved – can be found in other works as well, but never so emphatically
stated.”1180 In the clarification of the weighted vertical, Autumn Rhythm converts the
sublimity of One into a dance.1181
While the three dimensionality of the diamond structure is retained, a new sense of
rhythm and journey moves through it. Consider the way, acting as an incoming rhythm, a
thread of black three-quarters the way up the left hand edge enters to get caught up in the
reinforced “splat” of the upper part of the left hand pole “figure” that sets a black pulse
moving in a zig-zag pattern to the right, where, after various adventures, it exits on the right
edge as a straight slightly uptilted diagonal. Whereas, echoing the white halation in the
lower right corner of One, a white pour spills extravagantly down from the center right
edge of Autumn Rhythm, the exiting passage of black rises up on the diagonal. 1182 Rohn
observes that “Pollock wanted to emphasize the extended horizontal dynamics inherent in
Autumn Rhythm’s proportions. He used the poles [to left and right] to stress outward and
upward extension. The less structured center adds dynamically to the sensation of the
composition’s being stretched apart,” and I would say, with the exiting mark, as moving
on. The deep “V” held in the integrated fabric of Lavender Mist is now opened up, and
given an ongoing movement on the horizontal axis.
Describing Namuth’s overhead shot of Pollock working on the bottom center of
Autumn Rhythm, Karmel writes: “Bent over, with all four limbs extended toward the
canvas, he seems to be scuttling around his picture like a spider around its web.”1183 But
to the metaphor of the spider and his web, we must add that of a dance. While the metaphor
of the spider’s web suggests a center, a dance is an ongoing flow, bound by the gravitational
pull of the earth and the spiritual aspirations of man.
That Pollock did consider the horizontal rectangular formats in which he created
Number 32,1950, One, then Autumn Rhythm part of a larger continuous rhythm is clear in
his infilling of a frieze composition used for the November 1950 exhibition announcement
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card.1184 While the overall rhythm of the composition is clearly left to right, Pollock in two
of the announcement reproductions, CR 799 (fig. 21.8) and CR 800 (fig. 21.9), each a 31
inch long card folded with five vertical breaks, played with colored crayon and gouache,
variously inflecting the rhythm.

Fig. 21.8. Untitled, CR 799, c. 1950. Announcement reproduction, colored crayon and gouache, 3 x 31".

Fig. 21.9. Untitled, CR 800, c. 1950. Announcement reproduction, colored crayon and gouache, 3 x 31".

In the first he places a density of “fruitful” markings in the central panel, markings
reminiscent of those spilling out of the triangular cornucopia in The Shaman, CR 741, c.
1945; in the second he moves this density to the panel on the far right, the notations of
fruition themselves propelled to the right, onwards. Is this playful variation of an ongoing
rhythm, moreover from left to right, Pollock’s commentary on the rhythms that pulse
through his great trilogy: Number 32, 1950, One and Autumn Rhythm? 1185 And is the
trilogy itself the One and the All, not just One alone but the dynamism of tearing apart,
coalescing into a whole, then moving on once again? Is this not Pollock’s understanding
of nature and its structure: the dynamism of destruction and creation in an ever-evolving
transformative process -- what he had intuited for the first time much earlier in his career
in Moon Woman Cuts the Circle now played out at a symphonic scale?
The rhythm of this organic dynamic structure is condensed in an untitled frieze
composition done c. 1950, CR 797, a drawing done on paper, 11 1/8 inches high x 59 inches
long (fig. 21.10).
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Fig. 21.10. Untitled, CR 797, 1950. Enamel on paper, 11 1/8 x 59 1/16". Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany.

Again a tripartite composition in which a strong black pulse leads in from the left rising up
on a diagonal to a head, its energy then breaking into a differentiated dance that plays upon
left to right, up and down, in and out, which then in the right hand coda pulses down and
towards the lower right only to rise again and turn decidedly back to the left, as though to
begin again. It was in August 1950 that Pollock made the remark: “There was a reviewer
a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t
mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment.” 1186 Here in this drawing
Pollock condenses an understanding of eternal recurrences, endless cycles that may have
promised an answer to “the cycle of man” that so troubled Pollock in his art making at
Westchester in 1938: “moving away from infancy and parents, mating, the chaos of life
and death at top, man helping another to the left, and death at the base.” His friend Ossorio
said of Pollock “His painting confronts us with a visual concept organically evolved from
a belief in the unity that underlies the phenomena among which we live. Void and solid,
human action and inertia, are metamorphosed and refined into the energy that sustains them
and is their common denominator. ... We are presented with a visualization of that
remorseless consolation –- in the end is the beginning.”1187
But while Ossorio could give eloquent voice to what Pollock’s art might mean,
most observers were baffled. There were those viewers for whom Pollock’s mythic art,
whose symbolic content had evolved into a play of abstract forms, worked its magic. The
painter Brice Marden, for instance, later paid the extraordinary tribute to this drawing,
describing it as among the most “powerful objects in the world.” 1188 And the poet Frank
O’Hara could assert: “Nor is the meaning of these paintings ambiguous. Each is a direct
statement of the spiritual life of the artist.” 1189 For O’Hara One is “heroic,” Autumn
Rhythm is “ritualistic,” Number 32 is “dramatic”.1190 But for most viewers the works of
1950, when shown at Betty Parson’s Gallery in November 1950, remained chaotic, mute.
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In stark contrast to the success of the 1949 exhibition, boosted by the media publicity of
the Life article, this exhibition was for Pollock a devastating failure. Only one of the thirty-
two paintings shown was sold, Lavender Mist, to the ever-supportive Ossorio.1191
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Chapter 22
Two Critics

1. Art for Art’s Sake

Fig. 22.1. Mark Tansey, Myth of Depth, 1984. Oil on canvas, 38 x 89".

Mark Tansey’s post-modern canvas Myth of Depth 1984 (fig. 22.1) captures the
partial understandings and wonderment of critics and fellow artists standing in a boat as
Pollock, some distance from the boat, is depicted walking miraculously on the water’s
surface. Motherwell looks down into the water; Greenberg points arm extended toward
Pollock; the bespectacled Rosenberg stares grasping the edges of his jacket. What were
critics, especially those already familiar with Pollock’s art, to make of the work of 1950?
Only some years later do Greenberg and Rosenberg publish their assessments. And when
they do, they end by pointing, in light of their own critical parti-pris, to points of failure.
And Pollock himself is led to question the nature of his artistic achievement and enterprise.
Greenberg warned that the big paintings would not sell. In conversation with
Pollock he also sensed something else was wrong: he didn’t know what, but he did not
want to think about it.1192 He did not attend the Parsons opening November 28. Greenberg
had reviewed Pollock’s exhibitions at the Parsons Gallery three years running, but had
already skipped a review of the November 1949 exhibition, and now, perhaps more
surprisingly, did not write a review of the monumental works of the 1950 season. He was,
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however, awed by their aesthetic unity. Reviewing Pollock’s next Parsons exhibition in
late 1951, when figuration had reemerged in his work, Greenberg generalized
retrospectively: “In Pollock’s by now well-known second period, from 1947-50 with its
spidery lines spun out over congealed puddles of color, each picture is the result of the
fusion, as it were, of dispersed particles of pigment into a more physical as well as aesthetic
unity – whence the air-tight and monumental order of his best paintings of that time.”1193
Only later, in 1955 in “American-Type Painting,” did Greenberg specifically acknowledge
the November-December 1950 exhibition, mistakenly placing it in 1951. With the “four
or five huge canvases of monumental perfection" it included, it is said to remain "the peak
of his achievement so far.”1194
Unity has long been thought the sine qua non of aesthetic quality. In his January
1949 essay “The Role of Nature in Art” Greenberg had described Cubism as “that purest
and most unified of all art styles since Tiepolo and Watteau.” 1195 Such unity was said to
arise from the structure of nature. “Forced to invent an aesthetic logic ex nihilo (which
never happens in art anyway), without reference to the logic by which bodies are organized
in actual space, the cubists would never have arrived at that sense of the totality, integrity,
economy, and indivisibility of the pictorial work of art-- an object in its own turn too --
which governs genuine cubist style.” 1196 Greenberg here sounds much like his teacher
Hans Hofmann. For Greenberg Pollock’s grounding in Cubism was the foundation of the
aesthetic strength of his oeuvre, especially of his advance beyond late Cubism in the all-
over compositions of 1946 and onwards.1197 In the February 1947 review of the all-over
compositions he had specified the pertinent aesthetic criterion: “recreated flatness.” 1198
This remained the criterion by which in 1955 he assessed all of Pollock’s all-over paintings
between 1947-50: “he wanted to control the oscillation between an emphatic physical
surface and the suggestion of depth beneath it as lucidly and tensely and evenly as Picasso
and Braque had controlled a somewhat similar movement with the open facets and
pointillist flecks of color of their 1909-1913 cubist pictures. (‘Analytical’ Cubism is
always somewhere in the back of Pollock’s mind.) Having achieved this kind of control,
he found himself straddled between the easel picture and something else hard to define,
and in the last two or three years he has pulled back.”1199 True to his “Newer Laocoon,”
which insisted on the distinction of the arts of space and of time, Greenberg never admitted
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the role of process or dynamic structure in Pollock’s oeuvre. The “something else hard to
define” remained out of Greenberg’s field of vision. Perhaps he resisted, refused to see it.
Moreover, even as Greenberg paid Pollock the tribute of having created canvases
of “monumental perfection” he went on in this 1955 essay to point out what he deemed
Pollock’s aesthetic failure. Having pulverized value contrasts in such a work as Lavender
Mist and generated a field of hallucinated homogeneity, which anticipated a color field
painting that left behind the value contrasts on which the tactility of Western painting,
including Cubism, rested, Greenberg criticized Pollock for not leaving Cubism behind and
advancing to a more optical and color field based art. 1200 At the peak of his formal
achievement in 1950, Pollock failed to see or refused to take the next step that might have
kept him in Greenberg’s good graces. What Greenberg failed to understand was Pollock’s
very different conception of art, which demanded more than mute, bloodless perfection
and questioned the separation of the eye from the living, desiring body.

2. Action Painting and Private Myth

Two years after the December 1950 Parsons exhibition in his December 1952
article, “The American action painters,” Rosenberg presented a general discussion of the
work of a number of the new avant-garde painters. Given the way Pollock himself had
stressed the physical act of painting in his 1947 description of technique in Possibilities, it
seems only natural that Pollock should have recognized himself in the following
description: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after
another as an arena in which to act -- rather than a space in which to reproduce, re-design,
analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not
a picture but an event . . . The new American painting is not ‘pure art,’ since the extrusion
of the object was not for the sake of the aesthetic. The apples weren’t brushed off the table
in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color. They had to go so that
nothing would get in the way of the act of painting.”
In writing this now famous essay Rosenberg was very likely influenced by
Namuth’s photos of Pollock painting in Portfolio 1951, five of which also accompanied
Goodnough’s interpretative text, “Pollock Paints a Picture,” published in the May 1951 Art
News.1201 Pollock himself pointed to a half-drunken conversation between himself and
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Rosenberg on the train between East Hampton and New York as the source for the article’s
key ideas.1202 Certainly he and Rosenberg had shared a long history of friendship,
discussion, and uneasy collaboration, which left its traces in “The Intrasubjectives”
catalogue, Possibilities 1947/48, and before that “Notes on Identity” in the May 1946 View.
Still earlier in "Breton -- a Dialogue," which appeared in the May 1942 View, Rosenberg
had provided a critical discussion of the pros and cons of artistic mythmaking in the early
forties. Their differences, presupposing two very different ways of standing in the world,
mythopoeic versus existential, began to surface in 1946, grew clearer in Pollock’s 1947
Possibilities statement, then in Rosenberg’s essay in “The Intrasubjectives” catalogue. In
the 1952 article one can hear snatches of the conversation of the two men, who once had
been like brothers, trying to sort out their differences and to understand, after Pollock had
already retreated from his achievements of 1950, just what the poured paintings might have
meant.
Having asserted the primacy of the act of painting, Rosenberg warned against the
art critic and his aesthetic approach to art, implicitly Greenberg. “The critic who goes on
judging in terms of schools, styles, form, as if the painter were still concerned with
producing a certain kind of object (the work of art), instead of living on the canvas, is
bound to seem a stranger. Some painters take advantage of this stranger.” Pollock had
indeed allowed Greenberg to fight for him even though he felt misunderstood. Rosenberg
warns that such an alliance with the critic will cause the painter to get trapped in the
aesthetic. “Having insisted that their painting is an art, they then claim admiration for the
act as art. This turns the act back toward the aesthetic in a petty circle.” 1203
Rosenberg understood a great deal about Pollock’s approach to painting. “The
American vanguard painter took to the white expanse of the canvas as Melville’s Ishmael
took to the sea.” Although perhaps reinforced by Namuth’s photographs, this metaphor is
rooted in Pollock’s fascination with Moby Dick, which provided the original title of
Pasiphae, and the vision of sublimity in “the marvelous painting” hanging in Spouter Inn,
a prototype for the central white rectangle beckoning as a locus of transformation in
Guardians of the Secret. Setting forth on a quest as did Melville’s Ishmael, the painter
finds exhilaration in “an adventure over depths in which he might find reflected the true
image of his identity.” Explaining the type of painter who is an action painter as one
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“reborn,” Rosenberg asserts: “based on the phenomenon of conversion the new movement
is, with the majority of painters, essentially a religious movement. In every case, however,
the conversion has been experienced in secular terms. The result has been the creation of
private myths.” Here, at least for Pollock, Rosenberg is on target. Remember Birth 1941
or the rebirth of Jack’son’ in 1943 or Pollock’s experiencing his art in 1946 as The Child
Proceeds. And “the tension of the private myth is the content of every painting of this
vanguard.” Myth here no longer means an expression of supposedly timeless verities that
belong to the community and allow the individual to discover his or her place. Quite the
opposite: the private myth is a self-creation. Such self-creation demands a liberation from
supposedly binding values. The new painting enacts such private myths. The act on the
canvas then “springs from an attempt to resurrect the saving moment in his ‘story’ when
the painter first felt himself released from Value – myth of past self-recognition. Or it
attempts to initiate a new moment in which the painter will realize his total personality --
myth of future self-recognition.”1204 The liberating moment in The Moon Woman Cuts the
Circle, when the moon woman sacrifices the third eye and simultaneously releases
diamonds, might well come to mind. But Rosenberg resists interpretation of such private
myth-making in terms of timeless archetypes, although an artist may well discover in such
archetypes occasions for his own self-creation.
The key question for Rosenberg is what constitutes an act, or as Rosenberg puts it
“the dialectical tension of a genuine act”? 1205 In the summer of 1946, following the
publication of Rosenberg’s “Notes on Identity: With Special Reference to the Mixed
Philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard” in the May 1946 View and just before Pollock turned to
pouring paint as the primary method of art-making, the two had engaged in frequent
discussions.1206 Rosenberg had argued that, whether Oedipus or an artist, in order to come
to know him- or herself, an individual would have to engage not just in thought, but in
“action-philosophy,” the action precipitating a change in consciousness and thus greater
self-awareness.1207 For the artist this meant a thinking “in material,” a description that
anticipated Rosenberg’s 1952 formulation of “action painting”: “A good painting in this
mode leaves no doubt concerning its reality as an action and its relation to a transforming
process in the artist. The canvas has ‘talked back’ to the artist not to quiet him with
Sybilline murmurs or to stun him with Dionysian outcries but to provoke him into a
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dramatic dialogue. Each stroke had to be a decision and was answered by a new
question.”1208 In this existentialist fashion action is understood as a personal struggle to
wrest a sense of identity from the canvas, where every mark becomes a new given, inviting
the artist’s creative response. 1209 “To wrest a sense of identity from the canvas” is not to
discover it. Such identity will have to be created. As Rosenberg had put it in 1949: “there
is no use looking for silos or madonnas. They have all melted into the void.” 1210 As the
1952 article puts it: “Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the artist accepts
as real only that which he is in the process of creating ... the artist works in a condition of
open possibility, risking, to follow Kierkegaard, the anguish of the aesthetic, which
accompanies possibility lacking in reality. To maintain the force to refrain from settling
anything, he must exercise in himself a constant No.”1211
Rosenberg understood an action painter as a solitary self, facing a void. Pollock, on
the other hand, felt himself to be part of something larger. The process of painting was to
bring him into a more harmonious relationship with that larger reality. The painting-act
for Pollock was not existential –- but mythic. Here we come to a fine line separating two
seemingly similar, but profoundly different conceptions of myth. Rosenberg, too,
recognized a lot of the new painting as “religious,” but secularized as private mythmaking
in a search for a new sense of self. Established religion was to Rosenberg anathema, but
private mythmaking he could tolerate -- as long as it did not lead to the establishment of
some supposedly firm ground, but remained open, exercised a constant No. Pollock
appeared to exercise this constant No, pushing from one possibility to the next, always
possibilities “lacking in reality,” as the new image of man turned into a mirage, always
beckoning to a future: Number 1A, 1948, Number 1, 1949, Lavender Mist.
But hadn’t something qualitatively different happened in Pollock’s art in 1950 that
does invite understanding as a kind of homecoming? The myth of Eros had long
preoccupied Pollock. In the trilogy of Number 32, 1950, One and Autumn Rhythm it was
expanded to encompass not just “lovemaking,” but the dynamism of death and rebirth,
destruction and creation. The myth of destruction-creation encoded in Moon Woman Cuts
the Circle had blossomed and expanded, now coursing its way through three giant canvases
to the One. For Rosenberg this grand summation smacked of the Absolute, of God.
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In 1946 Rosenberg had criticized Kierkegaard's "action-philosophy" for leading to

religious belief. As a Christian Kierkegaard, rather than continue in the struggle for self-
recognition through concrete knowledge, sought to complete himself in the infinite.1212
Pollock, too, in 1950 leaps to a cosmic Oneness. This Rosenberg seems to have in mind
when discussing in his 1952 article the “Cosmic ‘I’”. Here he distinguishes between weak
and strong mysticism: “weak mysticism, the ‘Christian Science’ side of the new
movement” and “Whitman’s ‘gangs of cosmos.’ That is, between a discipline of vagueness
by which one protects oneself from disturbance while keeping one’s eyes open for benefits;
and the discipline of the Open Road of risk that leads to the farther side of the object and
the outer spaces of the consciousness. What made Whitman’s mysticism serious was that
he directed his ‘cosmic ‘I’' towards a Pike’s-Peak-or Bust of morality and politics. He
wanted the ineffable in all behaviour – he wanted it to win the streets.”1213 Weak mysticism
has no impact on reality. In Rosenberg’s mind, Pollock, as he had suspected all along, was
indulging in weak mysticism.
During the summer of 1950 Rosenberg was, as we know, less present in Pollock’s
life. More present was Tony Smith, a Catholic conversant with Jung, shamanism, and
oriental philosophies. The 1952 article would seem to aim some of Rosenberg’s judgment
against the huge canvases of 1950. “When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the
result can only be a Success. ... The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.” He continues,
“The cosmic ‘I’ that turns up to paint pictures but shudders and departs the moment there
is a knock on the studio door brings to the artist a megalomania which is the opposite of
revolutionary.” The “cosmic I” of weak mysticism simply exhibits impotent megalomania
rather than transformative choice.
And what happens to art created by such a “cosmic I”? “Once the difficulties that
belong to a real act have been evaded by mysticism, the artist’s experience of
transformation is at an end. In that case what is left? ... What is a painting that is not an
object nor the representation of an object nor the analysis or impression of it nor whatever
a painting has ever been – and which has also ceased to be the emblem of a personal
struggle?”1214 Much later in 1967, years after Pollock’s death in 1955, Rosenberg is even
more blunt: “For Pollock, the aim of painting was to achieve not a balance of antagonistic
factors, as in de Kooning, but a state of grace.” 1215 As Rosenberg criticized Kierkegaard,
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so he criticized Pollock's later poured painting. An artist whose aim was "a state of grace”
was no action painter! His painting would become “the painter himself changed into a
ghost inhabiting The Art World.”1216 -- But had Pollock’s personal struggle really ceased
to inform his painting?

3. “It”
Rosenberg’s criticism touches on aspects of Pollock’s enterprise that demand
attention: the yearning for fulfillment, plenitude, absorption in a “cosmic I” that threatens
a death-like closure. “I’ve done it, I’ve done it, you fucking whore! What more do they
want from me, what do they want?” Pollock made this angry, violent assertion and asked
this despairing question of Lee Krasner, his wife and artistic muse, in the winter of 1954-
55, well after he had turned from the great abstract poured paintings back to imagery.1217
“It” implies that Pollock did have a clear idea of what his art was meant to achieve and “to
have done ‘it’” implies that this idea was not only achievable, but had been achieved. What
was this “It”? Fame? Perhaps. Jeffrey Potter recalled that he asked Jackson that winter
how it felt “to have really made it.” The answer was, “Lousy. ... When you’ve done it,
turns out you’re done for -- in yourself you’re nowhere and no one ....” 1218 Rosenberg
would have agreed.
Of course, behind the “it” of fame lies the question, what is deserving of fame? Art
for Pollock was certainly not Greenberg’s aesthetic idea of art for art’s sake, nor was it
Rosenberg’s existential idea of art as a wrestling with the void. Rather for Pollock art was
the enactment of an unfolding story that he tells himself about art’s relation to life, its
capacity to bring a person into a healthy relation with the self, with the other (sex), with
nature (especially after his move to Springs), and with the community. Art, he thought,
can heal; it can help make you a more whole, happier, and spiritually richer person. It is
an ever-continuing quest for self-discovery, not self-definition. We come to the fine line
that separates Rosenberg’s private myths from Pollock’s mythopoetic creations.
But if the quest has an achievable goal, an “it”, the story or the quest has an end, a
particularly dangerous situation for an artist who believes that art and life are one. Having
“done it” would mean that both the art and the life no longer have a real future. So just
what did Pollock feel that he had done? What was “it”?
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The young and fascinated artist Patsy Southgate recalls Pollock's description in the
early 1950's of the process of his abstraction: "he took the image, broke it up, and put it
together again …. He felt that the American contribution he made was much better than
anything that had ever been done because it was more personal and soul-searching --
romantic and imagistic -- and that it was almost sacred to break down the image and re-
form it out of your own image. It was a very creative act." 1219 That description invites an
interpretation along the lines suggested by Rosenberg. But it also reminds us of the debt
Pollock’s private myth owed to his appropriation of the alchemical and psychological
process of solve et coagula, dissolve and reconstitute. Were not the violence of the dagger
and sacrifice integrated into and a necessary part of creativity? -- witness Moon Woman
Cuts the Circle. This remained true even in the great paintings of 1950. The “new image
of man” as located in Lavender Mist was sacrificed in Number 32, 1950 to be reconstituted
in the unity of One, which then loosened into the rhythms of an ongoing journey in Autumn
Rhythm. What human capacity did he finally discover, and actualize that summer? From
the beginning of his poured paintings Pollock had talked of “pure harmony, an easy give
and take.” Hadn’t he finally achieved this in enacting in paint the happy end of his very
personal myth of Eros as lovemaking in 1949, now extended in the trilogy created in the
summer of 1950 to a myth of destruction-creation in endless cycles, the creative dynamo
that underlies all of nature? This “new image of man” was not only a full self, but indeed
a cosmic self, at one with the great engine of creation and destruction animating all of
creation. Here Rosenberg is on target.
If in this conflation of Self and process, one focuses on process alone, one might
ask: isn’t such a cyclic creative dynamo by definition open-ended? In the untitled drawing
c. 1950, CR 797 (see fig. 21.10), Pollock condensed this endless process into another
infinity “figure eight” composition. Dreaming of plenitude and totality, Pollock drove the
eight to the one, the One and the All. The enactment of his quest myth had indeed come
to an end; he had done “it,” achieved totality, a cosmic oneness.

4. Mythic Illustrator?
Was such closure not demanded by the private myth that supported Pollock’s art-
making or, should we say, that Pollock’s art-making illustrated? In 1943, alongside CR
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704, the drawing related to Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, his image of the act that set in
motion the creativity as he began to understand it in his art, Pollock had written: “Thick/
thin// Chinese/ Am. indian// sun/ snake/ woman/ life// effort/ reality// total.” The dream of
totality was with Pollock from the beginning. Hadn’t Matta thought Pollock’s work “too
Masson”? Masson’s Emblematic Man desires, as the accompanying text in the June 1942
VVV tells us, “the one and the many”; he is “mirror of the universe.” Ideas for achieving
8 as the One became explicit in Pollock’s symbolic binge in 1946: in The White Angel in
the elaborate diagrammatic instructions within the bold diamond motif, in Red in the
striking definition of the double diamond motif within the womb of the female figure as
she dances. Indeed, hadn’t Pollock already arrived at the 8 as the One in Shimmering
Substance, and was not the translation of this achievement into the new key of pouring a
foregone conclusion?
In 1952 Rosenberg’s charge against Pollock was that he wasn’t an existential action
painter, that his art was but a kitsch manifestation of a false religion. But only after
Pollock’s death, in response to the retrospective of Pollock’s work at the Museum of
Modern Art in 1967, did he make his harshest critique of all: “Pollock was an artist with a
secret. He knew how to make magic -- a peer of the Navaho sand painters ... who rolled
their patrons in their glittering compositions as a cure for disease. ... He preferred to play
the laconic cowboy -- a disguise that both protected him from unwanted argument and hide
his shamanism behind the legendary he-man of the West.”1220 Rosenberg locates such
magical incantation in a tradition rooted in Symbolism and carried on by the Surrealists;
this tradition Pollock illustrates. “The notion of the artist as a ‘seer’ guided by outside
forces is implicit in the classical concept of the madness of the creator -- a conception
resurrected by Rimbaud in his celebrated axiom ‘I is another.’ Pollock read Rimbaud in
translation ....”1221 Rosenberg goes on: “The principle of the displaced ego of the creator,
adopted by the Surrealists as a primary article of belief and disseminated by them in New
York in the years before the war, provided sufficient hints for Pollock’s ‘When I’m in my
painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.'” He concludes: “The originality of Pollock lay
in the literalness with which he converted theoretical statements into painting practice.”
Of “masterworks like Full Fathom Five and Lavender Mist” he asserts “their immediate
derivation is not the work of any painter but Pollock’s favorite readings, from Rimbaud to
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Finnegan’s Wake.”1222 This would be painting as illustration, what is more adequately

expressed in words. The automatist technique of these paintings is but calligraphic overlay,
producing “the visual equivalent for a play on words,” as he sought “contact” with higher
powers! “What was radically new about the method of the drips was that the method was
all there was to them.”1223 No critic has been more vehement in making the charge against
Pollock of pretentious illustration.
The charge is easily supported. The quality of illustration had attended Pollock’s
project at least since 1941 when Graham first introduced him to mystical alchemy and its
goals; it certainly resurfaced in the surfeit of symbolism in 1946, and returns in 1950. If
one can cite Pico’s “On the Dignity of Man,” Seligmann’s "Magic and the Arts" and
Joyce’s description of the World Tree from Finnegan’s Wake as texts in conjunction with
Pollock’s meditations in visual thinking in 1946, Joyce and Pico were once again subjects
of conversation in 1950. Naifeh and Smith name the range of literary material being
bandied about that summer. “Into Jackson’s silences, his admirers eagerly poured
themselves, attributing to him a knowledge of Roman mythology, James Joyce’s
Finnegan’s Wake, the poetry of William Blake and T.S. Eliot, Joseph Campbell’s Hero
with a Thousand Faces, Freud’s Man and the Unconscious, the writings of Pico della
Mirandola and Alfred North Whitehead, and American literature in general.” 1224 Of course
Pollock did know some of this material. One can speculate, for example, that the universal
cosmic dimensions which Pollock’s art in 1950 embraces owe something to Campbell’s
Hero with a Thousand Faces, pointing as it does to universal patterns animating hero myths.
Tony Smith’s recitations from Finnegan’s Wake and his encyclopedic knowledge of
archetypal lore could only have fed the aura of archetypal inflation that attended Pollock
that summer. His 1956 statement that he had been “a Jungian for a long time” might well
startle, but for the Jungian environment that reemerged in his life in 1950. Even Hans
Namuth had Jungian connections. His earlier experience as a photographer was on a
journey to Guatemala in 1947 where he became friendly with the Jungian anthropologist
Maud Oakes who was studying Mayan elements in the religious practice of local Indians.
Namuth’s photographs, which included images of actual shamans, provided illustrations
for Oakes’ book The Two Crosses of Todos Santos, published in 1951.1225 One senses the
depth of Pollock’s own commitment to Jungian thinking in the despairing questions asked
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of Dr. Wayne Barker, a friend and psychiatrist, sometime in 1953: “Is Jung the answer?”
"Are Jung's ideas the answer?"1226
The questions are those of someone on the verge of losing his faith. A recollection
by Nicholas Carone speaks to the nature of Pollock's faith: "The artist is never happy, until
he finds the well of the unconscious; then, if he has a life force, there is engagement, an
encounter, and he becomes illumined by the generating force as an icon. Jackson knew --
we talked about this -- and his statement is religious. He was a genius and a genius is a
phenomenon; it is someone possessed and Jackson was possessed --absolutely. He said
that John Graham understood that infinite well of the unconscious, but tapping that source
is very dangerous."1227 The infinite is dangerous indeed because it does not allow us to
distinguish plentitude from nothingness, possession by something divine from possession
by the devil. The latter would make Graham, who Pollock thought also knew, a Luciferian
guide.
Religion points to what should bind human freedom. Should one grant archetypes
such binding power? Are archetypal patterns indeed universal truths which one could
welcome into one’s art and life? Or do we encounter here the full danger of welcoming an
all too human, all too timely construction as a timeless truth? Jungian thinking held out
the promise of a homecoming to the collective, the universal. But, once achieved or
"gotten,” this “it” threatened fascistic closure and certitude. Rosenberg’s existentialism
responds to this threat. Had World War II not just been fought to defeat such totalizing
certitude, as embodied in Nazism? Jungian thinking seemed not so very distant from
fascism; as Lee Krasner commented later, one did not dare talk of Jung following World
War II.1228
But such very real proximity should not lead us to overlook the important role
mythic thinking had to play in post-war society as a counter to nihilistic positivism.
Pollock stepped into this mythic vacuum, only to get caught in the danger of over-
identification with archetypal patterns, the very aspect of his thinking that Jung himself
warned against in the early pages of Psychology of the Unconscious. Jungian thinking,
rather than propel his art forward as it had done for so many years, now turned into a false
religion, a kitsch version of religion that provided an “it,” a golden calf, offering comfort
in a false consciousness, in Rosenberg’s damning assessment, a “weak mysticism.”
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5. Mood or "Oh, Say Can You See?"

But the charge of illustration does not do justice to the poured paintings. To claim
that “the method was all there was to them” is to overlook their perfection. There is a sense
in which Pollock had really “done it,” really was enacting “a state of grace” when making
his poured paintings in 1950. He was really responding, engaged in erotic dialogue with
his materials, letting go and recovering as he worked his way towards “an easy give and
take, pure harmony.” Rosenberg could not credit the joining of act and formal aesthetics,
at least in Pollock’s case: “With traditional aesthetic references discarded as irrelevant,
what gives the canvas is meaning is not psychological data but role, the way the artists
organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation.” This
organization for Pollock did, however, have a distinctly formal aesthetic dimension: the
three-dimensional axial structure of the canvas. Rosenberg’s 1967 declaration about the
drip paintings, that “method was all there was to them” suggests that he was not responding
to the formal underpinnings of Pollock’s actions and choices, nor therefore to the intelligent
specificity of Pollock’s gestured marks. 1229 The fact that Pollock was able to generate the
formal unities that led Greenberg to declare the large paintings of 1950 instances of
“aesthetic perfection” is a powerful counter to the charge of mere illustration or apocalyptic
wallpaper.
And it is precisely the specificity of Pollock’s forms and rhythms that make them
such powerful conveyors of mood. All specific mythic content has been left behind, had
to be left behind so that myth might continue to live in an age that seems to give no room
to myth. In the 1967 essay “The Mythic Act” Rosenberg writes in an accusatory tone: “By
discarding all traces of symbolism or visual mythology ... Pollock pushed toward a purging
of the imagination – or even its elimination. ... It was myth without myth content –- a pure
state.”1230 Precisely! In the modern world, for lack of shared public myths, we tell
ourselves private stories. But not content with just private stories, still desirous of shared
meaning, an artist such as Pollock turns to an abstract language, which resists translation
into easily grasped concepts. Nazi myths are legible; kitsch is legible. Pollock on the other
hand self-consciously drove his art towards illegibility. The story with its specific contents
gets left behind, but the mood remains and is communicated. Pollock is like a composer
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who, starting with a specific story with words sets them to music, writes first a song and
then decides to drop the words and to work with just the melody. Pollock’s painterly
enactment of the conclusion of his private myth is as specific as a composition by Mozart.
But its specificity cannot be captured in words. Kant might have called it "inexponible." 1231
But such elusiveness does not mean that it lacks meaning. This meaning may well invite
the listener to make up his or her own words in response to what is experienced. In
Pollock’s case the words that inspired his song are his dream visions and the mythic
figurative images he found in an enormous variety of sources and explored in his doodles;
the tune is the rhythmic web. In 1948-49 he did do cut-outs employing both the figurative
images and the rhythmic web. But he pushed on to create just the rhythmic web. This
abstract painting is not chaotic. It may resist words, but is not mute matter.
Meaning, indeed multiple meanings and interpretations, resides in the space
between the spectator and the painting. Reading a painting, we as spectators can’t help but
read ourselves into things and things into ourselves. Interpretation is never a translation of
what the work really means. The fact that such different interpretations as Rosenberg’s,
Greenberg’s, or O’Hara’s1232 can be given to Pollock’s poured paintings only reinforces an
appreciation of their musicality. The fact that the tune of the “Star-Spangled Banner,”
originally a bawdy house song, became the national anthem, dramatizes the fact that the
specificity of the music invites and allows for a variety of interpretation. This is not to say
that all interpretations are equally appropriate. The specificity of the music communicates
a mood that directs interpretation.
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Chapter 23
In Search of a Public

1. The Church Project

Pollock certainly thought he had, as Rosenberg put it, “found the means ... to
generate content beyond what the mind might supply. A work could be initiated without
idea or subject by a simple act of will -- the will to make a painting.”1233 What he now
needed was a receptive audience. He needed exposure, and commissions for his mural
scale work. Tony Smith not only encouraged Pollock to create big pictures, but he and
Pollock talked of taking a road trip west to drum up sales; there was persistent talk of mural
commissions in California.1234
There was as well the Catholic church project, first discussed in the summer of
1950, for which Pollock was to execute murals. 1235 Having worked on a mural for a
Catholic chapel in the Philippines, Ossorio, a devout Catholic, was on his return to East
Hampton in the spring of 1950 shocked to discover that there was not a single private
Catholic chapel on Long Island. 1236 Tony Smith, himself a Catholic, had already in 1945
designed a chapel for Fritz Bultman in Provincetown, utilizing a hexagonal module and
elevation of the building on piloti. 1237 Now that he was looking out for Pollock and possible
mural commissions, he suggested to Ossorio that he design a Catholic church that would
call for six of Pollock’s classic poured paintings, including Lucifer, a favorite of
Smith’s.1238 Ossorio responded positively and Pollock, too, was intrigued by the
proposal.1239 On January 6, 1951 he wrote Ossorio that Smith would “get to the drawings
soon.” Later in January he questioned Ossorio, “have you seen the Matisse Church [in
Vence, France] and design?” In late February he wrote him “nothing new on the
church.”1240 Not until August 1952 did Smith, Ossorio, and Pollock meet with a group of
prominent Catholics sympathetic to modernist art, including James Johnson Sweeney,
Maurice Lavannoux, the editor of Liturgical Arts, Father Ford of Columbia University,
Rosalind Constable of Time/Life, and Otto and Eloise Spaeth to present the completed
design and model.1241
Presented was a schematic drawing (fig. 23.1) showing a ground plan of the church
and an elevation in section, along with a small three-dimensional model.1242
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Fig. 23.1. Tony Smith's plan for a Catholic church, 1951-52. Church Ceiling (Floor Plan) and Section.

The design was based, echoing the Bultman chapel, on a series of interconnecting, equal-
size hexagonal spaces, the whole, but for the baptistery, elevated on piloti, and approached
by a ramp. The altar was to be under the glassed hexagonal dome in the center, reflecting
Smith's and Ossorio’s enthusiasm for the new “popularization” of faith, where participants
would see the priest celebrating the mass.1243 Lee Krasner recalls that Pollock’s paintings
were to be mounted (or perhaps suspended) freestanding, his contribution to the church
similar to what had been projected for the Ideal Museum, the all-over webs hovering within
an all-over space.1244 Here, however, the paintings would form a hexagon, a kind of sacred
enclosure.
As Krauss has explained, Smith’s ambition for modernist architecture was the
perfection of a universal language of form that would open the material enclosure to an
abstract experience of Spirit. The hexagonal cell, as the universal module, was to provide
an organic unity based on an articulation of parts (baptistry, etc) that would blend with the
conceptual unity of a floating, luminous space 1245 -- if you will, Smith’s architectural
version of the One and the All. In 1950 architect and painter seemed to share an abstract
aesthetics that Smith was intent on putting to work in his church. In later interviews with
William Rubin, Smith spoke “about a project to house the allover classic pictures, which
would look splendid ‘like a cathedral,’” 1246 as indeed the project would have, if one
envisions a likely scenario: six classic poured paintings positioned freestanding behind the
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congregation, along the six sides of the central hexagon, lit by the light flooding from the
central glassed hexagonal dome. 1247
One has to wonder: how Pollock’s poured paintings would relate to the meaning of
a Catholic church and to its very specific program? Was the Catholic faith of his friends
Smith and Ossorio something that Pollock toyed with in his search for meaning, for an
“it”? Pollock is said to have flirted with the idea of becoming Catholic in the summer of
1952.1248 To Eugene Goosen, Smith explained that Pollock’s attitude with respect to the
church project was simply that religion was important: it had made contributions to man’s
history and understanding of himself. 1249
That Pollock was not religious in any traditional sense is brought home by his
truculent expletive to Potter: “Fuck the God shit! We’re really part of the one. We’re
union that’s us.” Or “Why give Him -- faith-- a name? Like titling work -- isn’t one, or
The One, enough?”1250 These statements point to his vague belief in a oneness with
creation, in its endless union of opposites in dynamic flux. Rosenberg referred to Pollock’s
pantheism.1251 In describing his religiousness, Betty Parsons remarked: “he was also
extremely intrigued with the inner world – what is it all about. He had a sense of mystery.
His religiousness was in those terms – a sense of the rhythm of the universe, of the big
order ....”1252
We already know of the wide-ranging conversations that took place in the summer
of 1950 -- Catholicism, Pico, Whitehead, Joyce, Campbell. The Pollock library itself was
expanding at this time to include not only Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces
published in 1949, but Jung and Kerenyi’s The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries
of Eleusis (1949), Heinrich Zimmer’s The King and the Corpse (1947) and Myths and
Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (1947), both edited by Joseph Campbell, Maria
Leach's edition of a Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (1949), Jane Ellen
Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual (1948) -- the very kind of archetypal material that
Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces so passionately presented: “the one, shape-
shifting yet marvelously constant story.”1253 The task of the book, he announced, was “to
uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and
mythology.”1254
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In their many discussions that summer, 1255 Smith might well have pointed out to
Pollock the analogy between Jungian thinking and Catholicism to which Jung himself
devotes the penultimate chapter of The Integration of the Personality: “The Idea of
Redemption in Alchemy.” Catholic liturgy and alchemy share, Jung says, the
transformative process of death-rebirth. As the sacrificial mass of Catholicism
symbolically reenacts both Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection in the breaking of the
wafer and the drinking of the wine to effect a rebirth of spirit in the communicant, 1256 so
the breaking down of matter in alchemy initiates the transformative process of the
realization of spirit-matter, in the human psyche a more fully realized consciousness. 1257
Pollock’s preoccupation with the death-rebirth cycle and its distillation in the trilogy of
1950 could thus in its abstractness serve the spirit of a Catholic church. Pollock’s variations
on two of the announcement cards for the November 1950 exhibition, in which each time
he marked five vertical breaks in the long horizontal rhythmic flow of its abstract image,
to create six areas, suggests his meditation on how to address the hexagon of the church,
parsing the cosmic dynamism as it might befit the church project.
Ossorio understood the project, which was “not a specific building for a specific
site,” as “a brilliantly symbolic idea that could be produced very simply or very grandly.
It was a kernel, an acorn, from which trees could grow.”1258 As Spaeth, one of the Catholic
group to whom Ossorio, Smith and Pollock presented the project, later remarked, it was
the very abstractness of the project that led in August 1952 to its rejection. During the
course of the meeting, Smith became so frustrated, that he “stomped out the room.”1259 But
as long as the project remained a possibility it promised Pollock a way of making his
abstract art real to others. The church was to be, more than the Ideal Museum, a
collaborative project with Smith, whom Pollock greatly admired as an architect. 1260 It
would have provided not just a spatial setting for his paintings, but a social setting that
would allow their spiritual dimension to unfold. That Pollock was concerned with this
dimension of art is suggested by Smith's recollection: "He seldom talked about art, but
when he did it was often in relation to his own community -- as if it were a form of therapy,
or religion. He'd mention some old lady, or a retired broker, who had taken up painting.
He would say it in a quiet solemn way -- they had had the call." 1261
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But was there not, despite its promise, something incompatible with Pollock’s
interest in things spiritual in this church project? The very universalism it invited led
Pollock, not to Catholicism, but to the conviction that metaphysical universal truths are to
be discovered in the archetypes, expressed in the stories and accounts that fascinated him.
Jung himself had warned in “The Idea of Redemption in Alchemy” of the irreconcilable
distinction between Christianity and alchemy, between collective faith and individual
consciousness, and of the dangers of an individual over-identifying with the substance to
be transformed. “... for the Christian opus is ... to the honour of the redeeming God, on
the part of the man who needs redemption; while the alchemistic opus is the labour of man
the redeemer in the cause of the divine world-soul that sleeps in matter and awaits
redemption.”1262 Pollock was an artist-alchemist, not a Catholic. “Fuck the God Shit!” is
the shout of Promethean man, who can do without the gods, for he is “man the redeemer”
who has the power to awaken spirit in matter. The death-rebirth pattern that had long
served creativity in Pollock’s work and that might conceivably have been an expression of
religious humility to honor a redeeming God was certainly at one level, as Pollock executed
it in 1950, an attempt to become famous. No spiritual humility here, rather a gigantic self-
assertion.

2. Art and Life

A fine line separates the idea of art serving a universal faith from the idea of art as
self redemption, not unrelated to that fine line that separates the religious artist from the
private myth-maker endorsed by Rosenberg. But what makes private myths deserving of
an audience? Was not what really mattered that the artist, as this unique individual, “live
on the canvas”? In this sense art and life should be one. Pollock agreed. The conviction
that art and life are one, however, in the end had to detonate Pollock’s artistic enterprise,
for art and life are patently not the same. While art can move towards aesthetic unity and
plenitude, life must remain open to possibility, to ongoing acts, to engagement with the
other, to eros -- to remain life. Pollock had, as we have seen, pursued his art as an
enactment of a mythic story with a happy end: doing “it”. And this he felt he had achieved,
having mastered the transformative dynamism of death and rebirth. With such mastery
had come aesthetic perfection, which Greenberg so convincingly recognized. If life and
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art are one, must such perfection not be but the artistic expression of the perfect life?
Shouldn’t aesthetic plenitude be one with existential plenitude? But what could the latter
mean? Would such a state of satisfaction still allow for ongoing acts and an erotic,
responsive openness to an other? Plenitude and such openness can not be reconciled.
Plenitude in art can and should not be mistaken for perfection in life.
For an artist convinced that art and life are one, to have made a perfect painting is,
as Greenberg recognized, life-threatening. This dream had long supported Pollock’s art.
But now he had to ask himself what it was he had really done? Had he done more than
create just another well-wrought aesthetic object divorced from life, beautiful but
impotent? All the creative tensions had harmoniously ordered themselves in the plenitude
of the aesthetic. Removed from life, this art is self-sufficient and pleasing. Such success
invited repetition. But just this invitation to recycle what he had achieved, Pollock had to
reject, as he has never accepted art for art’s sake alone. Although undoubtedly excited at
the prospect of doing murals for a church, wouldn’t their execution, especially after the
accomplishment of the summer of 1950, require aesthetic repetition?
Pollock’s dream that art and life are one now turns destructive. Art, understood
aesthetically, tends towards closure and plenitude. But life, eros, openness to the other, to
the sacred, to still unknown possibilities, deny such unity. Plenitude and possibility will
not be fused. The tension was already evident in Male and Female, where the bound edges
of the achieved diamond are at odds with the openness of automatist spontaneity.
Struggling with this tension, Pollock eroticized the aesthetic. Struggling for fulfillment
and plenitude, the creation of a new whole, a new self, One, he drove his art toward ever
more convincing aesthetic perfection. But the more successful he was in this, the more he
had to lose the energy that had fueled his art. Indeed, already in the increasingly pure
musicality of the 1948-49 paintings Pollock seems to lose contact with the private myth
that had nourished him.
T. J. Clark senses this. "Number 1, 1948 contains contraries within itself, in a way
that One does not. ... some such push-and-pull is what most effectively generates passion
in art.”1263 Having emphasized the gendering of Pollock’s pouring technique, Clark
recognizes that “Lavender Mist or One or Number 1, 1949 are no longer propelled by the
myth of entry, action, and immediacy on which the drip paintings were founded.” 1264 But
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while Clark sees the “dismal category” of nature taking over in 1950, I would point to
Pollock’s emotional predilection for plenitude. 1265 Nature is not the culprit, rather
Pollock’s betrayal of his understanding of nature as what transcends him. In a subtle but
devastating shift of emphasis in that ambiguous phrase, “I am nature,” the awestruck
openness to nature as in “I am nature” becomes the self-inflation of “I am nature.” Thus
eros gives way to a narcissistic totalization, expressed as an aesthetic unity. 1266
That the aesthetic plenitude of the large canvases of 1950 should translate into
plenitude in his life was the magic promise of this art. In reinvoking the notion of a magic
as opposed to a more simply mythic art, I am returning to the very origin of Pollock’s
artistic project. Mythic stories give comprehensive pictures of how things hang together.
Mythic art thus lets the viewer recognize meaning in things, in the reality at hand. Magic
art on the other hand, demands more, wants to transform reality, wants to transform life.
Pollock’s claim that art and life are one gives voice to such a desire.
Magic is like science in that it not only wants to understand, but to have an effect
on the world, on nature. Not that Pollock was an artist-magician seeking to bring about
changes in nature, for instance rain through a rain dance, although he knew about this sort
of thing. Rather he was trying to effect changes in himself, in the nature within. Supported
by his experience of Jungian psychotherapy and American Indian shamanic art, Pollock
believed in the magic power of his art, that is its power to effect his life -- to heal. But this
conviction is shaken to its foundation in the summer of 1950. Was all this talk of magic
more than just talk? Was his art phony?

3. Life
When Namuth first met Pollock, he was happy. A snapshot of Pollock, standing
with his wife and mother in the kitchen at Springs taken a year or so before Namuth met
Pollock conveys, as recorded in Namuth’s memoirs, a sense of the Pollock Namuth
encountered in July 1950. “Pollock seems to be preparing a salad dressing as the two
women look on. A towel thrown over his left shoulder makes him look like a waiter in an
Italian restaurant, or a bartender. What is so amazing is the utterly peaceful, self-assured
expression on his face. He is beautiful -- Jackson at his best -- in command of the situation,
and the women admire him. This is what he was like when we first came to know each
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other -- peaceful, in harmony with himself, in control, often silent.” 1267 Namuth writes of
his ability to love: “Jackson was capable of great love. He loved his wife deeply, and in a
way he loved me and his friends. ... His love for others is not the only kind I wish to
mention. There was his love for the canvas, the way he handled brush and paint, letting
the paint flow so lovingly onto the linen.”1268
But an emotional earthquake was preparing itself. Recall the photograph of the
fifteen members of the Pollock family reunion that occurred in July 1950 against the long
horizontal backdrop of Number 2, 1949: Jackson on the edge of the group, fear in his eyes
(see fig. 19.4). Having gained fame with the Life article, having created a culminating
masterwork with Lavender Mist, he was now determined to use the occasion of the family
reunion to win recognition and approval from his brothers and their wives. Insisting on
calling attention to his success, in desperation he finally pulled out a copy of Bruno
Alfieri’s Italian commentary on his work in the 1950 Venice Biennale published in L’Arte
Moderna, asking if anyone knew Italian. Alfieri remarks that Pollock’s work can no longer
be judged by traditional criteria; they are marked by “chaos, absolute lack of harmony,
complete lack of structural organization, total absence of technique, however rudimentary,
once again chaos.” He then proceeds to announce: “Jackson Pollock is the modern painter
who sits at the extreme apex of the most advanced and unprejudiced avant-garde of modern
art. ... Compared to Pollock, Picasso, poor Pablo Picasso, the little gentleman who, since
a few decades, troubles the sleep of his colleagues with the everlasting nightmare of his
destructive undertakings, becomes a quiet conformist, a painter of the past.” 1269 Here was
the greatest accolade that Pollock could have desired -- he had surpassed Picasso. Since
no one knew Italian, he and Lee telephoned friends to help in a translation, but by then the
family, uninterested, had retreated to another room to play a parlor game. Throughout the
evening Pollock, determined to make his family hear, repeated the refrain: “povero
Picasso,” “povero Picasso.” Finally Alma, Jay’s wife, who had never forgiven Pollock for
his drunken cruelties, confronted him: “Is Picasso more important than your family?”1270
His mother still adored him, but the rest of Pollock’s family was not ready or willing
to offer him the recognition he felt he now deserved. Lee, too, in turning now more to her
own art seemed to desert him. She had long put her own work on the back burner, to attend
to his needs and career, entertaining guests, wooing collectors and dealers. When she had
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in the summer of 1948 returned to more serious painting and had received praise in the
press for her mosaic table exhibited in Bertha Schaefer’s Gallery, Jackson went on an
especially destructive drinking binge at a dinner party given by Schaefer. 1271 Sometime in
the fall of 1948 Dr. Edwin Heller, a local practitioner, prescribed tranquilizers. 1272 This
proved effective. Remaining stone sober at his January 1949 Parsons exhibition opening
marked the beginning of his being securely on the wagon and, not wanting to jeopardize
this success, Lee only began to work more steadily in early 1950, after the great success of
Jackson’s November1949 exhibition. 1273 Now, when visitors came to Springs to see
Jackson’s work, she insisted that they see her work as well. In July 1950 one of her
paintings won second place in the exhibition “10 East Hampton Abstractionists” at Guild
Hall, while Jackson’s won third.
Having lost a comfortable closeness with many of his old “artistic family,” realizing
now that he would probably never win the loving recognition of his real family, and
experiencing Lee’s self assertion, Pollock became, as Peter Blake remembers, during the
rest of the summer “terribly withdrawn.” 1274 Accompanying this growing self-isolation
was an enormous self-inflation, not only in his art, but in his life. The visitors who flooded
into his home and studio that summer were awed. “Entering his studio was like entering a
shrine. There was such concentration. He was there like a monk in his cell. You felt the
energy and concentration in the place. You wanted to whisper.” 1275 Even as he felt the
withdrawal of others who mattered to him, he needed others ever more desperately. At
least his art should prove him right. He needed exposure, commissions, an audience. The
church project was as yet not even on the drawing board.1276 Might it have provided the
structure that would have allowed him to bridge the abyss that had opened up between his
private desperately unhappy self and the increasingly abstract and empty universal that
beckoned him?

4. Films
In search of the other, even if only the abstract other of a wider audience and of
fame, seeking confirmation from strangers that he was indeed a great artist, Pollock agreed
to Namuth’s suggestion in August that Namuth make a film of him painting. 1277 In July
and August Namuth had shot some 500 still photographs of Pollock painting; “the proofs,”
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as Namuth said, “then as today, reveal a collaboration.”1278 The still photographs captured
the aspect of dance in Pollock’s creative process. The next logical step was to film Jackson
in motion.1279 In 1949 he and Lee had taken the calculated risk of the Life magazine article
on Pollock. Despite some emotional penalties, the article had proven a decided success,
enabling a “break through” to the broader public. The still photographs had yet to be
published -- that would come later in the 1951 issue of Portfolio, and the yet wider exposure
they received accompanying Goodnough’s article “Pollock Paints a Picture” in the May
1951 Art News. Now Pollock decided to embark on a second collaboration with Namuth,
the making of what turned out to be three films.
At the end of August Namuth, with black and white film using a hand-held camera
in natural light, shot 5 minutes 34 seconds of Pollock creating a poured painting in black
paint on a white canvas, 49 inches x 8 feet 10 inches.1280 Shooting first from the hayloft
of the studio, then from ground level, he captured both the growing speed and rhythm in
Pollock’s application of paint, and the transition from an initial imagistic layer to an
abstract elaboration. Pollock had just begun to apply a layer of white paint when the film
suddenly ran out. Years later, after Pollock’s death, when reviewing this black and white
film, which had been put in a drawer and never officially released, Lee Krasner exclaimed,
“My God, where is that painting? It’s lovely.”1281 Pollock had, as Pepe Karmel discovered,
proceeded to work more on the painting, probably in a number of different campaigns,
adding layers of yellow, white, pink, gray, and aluminum paints. This became Number 27,
1950, today in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art 1282 In analyzing
the individual frames of the film, Karmel also describes different figural images (see fig.
16.5) with which Pollock begins the process of painting this ultimately abstract canvas.
Karmel uses the trajectory from imagery to abstraction (and sometimes back to a
suggestion of figuration as a last stage) in the black and white film as an argument to
establish what he considers a major mode of image making in Pollock’s work. He
understands Pollock’s abstraction as an “erasure” of imagery, as a destruction, or a "sum
of destructions."1283 But this belies Pollock’s own understanding of such abstraction as an
enactment of an erotically charged dialogue directed at the creation of a new and abstract
totality.
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To clarify the relation of imagery to abstraction in the black and white film, it
becomes important to return to the particular images hidden in Number 27, 1950 as well
as note that this is one of Pollock’s last poured paintings. Many have commented how
lovingly Pollock draws the forms at the beginning of the film: 1284 the barbell appended to
a circular head, the crescent headed female, his key animal with its long body, terminating
in a figure eight. These motifs are indeed his old companions: the characters of his quest
as evolved through visual thinking up to the edge of abstraction. Now at its conclusion
they explicitly reemerge. Having done “it” in the summer, the test now was: could he do
“it” again?
His quest images set the drama in play: the presence first of the new male figure as
circular sun; next, constituting the lower portion of the figure, an angular wedge breaks
into a second circling shape, reminiscent of that initial sacrificial act of Moon Woman Cuts
the Circle; enter the female with her crescent head, then the key animal, and the chase is
on, the quest for yet another “diamond body.” But now the stakes have become
frighteningly high: can he achieve the abstract universalizing yet one more time? The
images that he so trustingly reveals to the lens of Namuth’s camera are his magical charms,
used to release the flow of energy toward the desired goal. Was he successful? He had
just begun to move from the layer of black throws to working with white. The film runs
out.
Both Namuth and Lee were struck by the beauty of the composition as it stood. But
then he proceeds, either immediately or later, probably in several campaigns, with more
painterly layers to produce the final Number 27, 1950. Had he in his own phrase “lost
contact” with the totality that he was in the process of forming? There is a distinct
disjunction between the first layer of black pouring and the painterly layers applied later.
In There were 7 in 8 1945 the challenge to translate imagery into linear impulse that should
then move through paint had first been put forward; its recurrence here in the fall of 1950
is unsettling. After the successes of 1949 and 1950, the disjunction in the layers of Number
27, 1950 evidences a lack of integration, hence a failure in the erotic dialogue contained
within the canvas.
Pollock and Namuth were sufficiently excited by the black and white film to pursue
the making of another film, this time in color, and outdoors to take advantage of the light.
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Paul Falkenburg, a professional film editor, was to give reactions and advice as the film
proceeded. On a concrete base Pollock placed a long horizontal red canvas. Its length and
color place it in the tradition of Arabesque and Number 2, 1949. In these canvases he had
first become comfortable with an erotic dialogue with his materials, based increasingly on
dance-like rhythms and body scale. Karmel’s analysis of the outtakes of the film (only two
sequences were used in the final film that Namuth created) reveals Pollock starting on the
right end, working his way across the length, then back again, using black paint, then, in a
later layer, aluminum paint, ultimately followed by a layer of thick white splats of paint. 1285
In the center he early on marks two concentric circles touching the top edge of the
canvas,1286 following a strategy similar to that employed in Arabesque where he first began
to extend his rhythmic composition along the horizontal axis. In the end this red canvas
was lost; Pollock must not have judged it a successful painting, due in part to the exigencies
of the film making process.
In the making of this film Pollock had committed himself to following Namuth’s
directives.1287 “Should I do it now, Hans?” became a refrain. 1288 Due to Falkenburg’s
suggestions about how to improve the film with fill in shots, filming sessions stretched
over five or six weekends. 1289 While Pollock might feel it a compliment that a painting
have no beginning and no end, Namuth realized that the film needed beginning, middle,
and end, and something was missing in the film as it stood: Jackson himself, Jackson’s face
in full view.1290 Blake and Pollock had in 1949 talked of the possibilities of Jackson
painting directly on glass. 1291 This became the solution to filming Jackson’s face as he was
painting. The 4 x 6 foot sheet of glass onto which Pollock painted what became Number
29, 1950 (fig. 23.2) was put onto tall supports and Namuth with his camera squeezed in
below.1292 In the sequence that makes it into the final film, we look up with Namuth
through the camera lens at Jackson’s face as he spreads collage elements onto the surface
of the clear glass, a spreading coil of string, shapes cut from wire mesh, strips of colored
glass, a bright orange rectangle among them. Responding to them, Pollock pours
aluminum paint directly from a small can.
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Fig. 23.2. Number 29, 1950, 1950. Black and aluminum enamel paint, expanded steel, string,
beads, colored glass and pebbles on glass, 48 1/8 x 72". National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

The composition as a whole receives O’Hara’s remarkable accolade: “A painting-

collage of oil, wire mesh, pebbles and shells composed on glass, it is majestic and does not
depend upon novelty for its effect. It is unique in that it is a masterpiece from opposite
sites of viewing. What an amazing identity Number 29 must have! -- like that of a human
being.”1293 And I might add an identity that can stand up to and in the surrounding
landscape, somewhat as Blake had first imagined Pollock’s work, floating in the landscape
of Springs. That Pollock had a similar dream for Number 29, 1950 is suggested by
photographs taken by Namuth and others of, first, Pollock holding up the glass painting to
the landscape, its bottom edge touching the horizon line behind (fig. 23.4), then later of
Cecil Downs and Sheridan Lord holding the painting lower, the horizon line of the
landscape positioned about one third the way up the composition. 1294

Fig. 23.3. Pollock holding Number 29, 1950 after the completion of filming, Fall 1950. Still from
out-takes of Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenburg's film, Jackson Pollock 1951, 16 mm film.
 452

Even as the finished painting was left outdoors in the rain and autumn leaves, Pollock
talked “obsessively” about using the painting as a framing device for the East Hampton
landscape, even entertaining the idea of installing it on their front porch. 1295 Clearly he
wanted his art to be understood as responsive, and open to surrounding nature. As other
avenues of openness to the other were closing down, nature promised to open new doors.
Years later, after Pollock’s art-making had stalled, when Blake talked of possibilities for
doing paintings on glass with nature to be seen beyond, Pollock’s eyes would, Blake
recalls, light up.1296
The experience of being filmed as he created this composition in the end left
Pollock deeply dissatisfied. Certainly the extraordinary wholeness of the composition was
not an aspect appreciated in the film; Namuth, squeezed in under the glass platform, could
only capture the lower right hand segment of the composition. And the openness of the
composition to the landscape, or more to the point his inner landscape, was contradicted in
Pollock’s experience of creating the painting, for he was looking down into the lens of
Namuth’s running camera. You see his strained face.1297 Indeed there were false starts in
making this segment of the film. One such false start makes it into the final film. He pours
paint directly down on the clean glass, weaving beautifully modulated lines through which
one sees Pollock’s face and the blue of the sky beyond (fig. 23.4).

Fig. 23.4. Pollock working on a painting on glass, in November of 1950. Frame from a color film
by Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenburg. Pollock ultimately erased this version of the painting.
 453

But then as he proceeds, he ”lost contact” with the painting as he explained in his own
voice in the voice over accompanying the shot, and is seen wiping out the painting. 1298 In
another sequence he begins again this time with the collage elements. Here O’Hara’s voice
is again helpful: “the brilliant clarity of the drawing, the tragedy of a linear violence which,
in recognizing itself in its own mirror-self, sees elegance, the open nostalgia expressed in
embracing the sharp edges and banal forms of wire and shells, the cruel acknowledgement
of pebbles as elements of the dream, the drama of black mastering sensuality and color, the
apparition of these forms in open space as if in air, all these qualities united in one work
present the crisis of Pollock’s originality and concomitant anguish full-blown.”1299
The last filming session occurred on a cold afternoon with wind blowing, one
reason for Pollock’s close work of pouring paint from the can, the wind having earlier
played havoc with his lariots of paint. When they finally finished, they embraced, “We are
done! It’s great, it’s marvelous!” 1300 But what had they done? They had finished the
ingredients for the eleven minute film on Pollock that now would have its own
compositional order: first Jackson painting as Gyp sits nearby, then Jackson’s shadow
flinging paint dramatically onto a canvas, Summertime being pulled slowly beneath the
camera, Jackson tacking Summertime onto the wall of Betty Parson’s Gallery, the music
of a cello leads into the last section of the film, the painting on glass. 1301 Meanwhile
Pollock, the artist filled with a sense of plenitude achieved at least in his art, with the trilogy
of the summer, felt strangely violated. Namuth had been filming only a segment of the
composition; his process of painting which depended so much on contact with a rhythmic
flow of energy, had been constantly interrupted; the openness to which his art aspired was
now glaringly bound by the dictates of the camera and film-making. His always precarious
sense of self which depended so much on the easy flow of his art making was also depleted.
When he and Namuth came in from the chill of the November day on which they
completed the filming, Jackson headed right for the kitchen, and poured himself a tumbler
full of bourbon, then another. He began to taunt Namuth. “You’re a phony. I’m not a
phony. You’re a phony.”1302 Namuth went off to change for the turkey dinner that Lee
had prepared for ten guests: the Namuths, the Potters, the Zogbaums, John Little, Alfonso
Ossorio, Ted Dragon, Peter Blake. Seated at the head of the table, Namuth to his right,
Jackson, now thoroughly drunk, continued the taunting. “You know I’m not a phony. I’m
 454

not a phony, but you’re a phony.” Certainly his sense of himself as an artist and a person
did not match the feast or the gathering of his friends. Clutching the end of the table with
both hands, he looked at Namuth. “Should I do it now?” Again “Now?”, and proceeded
to heave the heavy table into the air, the feast crashing to the floor. Now his external life
was in the shambles that matched his inner life as person and artist. To Dr. Violet de
Laszlo, his old Jungian therapist who happened to be having dinner that evening with
friends nearby, and whom he saw later that evening, he poured out his agony. She wanted
to comfort him, but she recalls “There was nothing I could do. I had a feeling this
depression was permanent. It was like he was at the end of his life.”1303
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Chapter 24
Portrait and a Dream

1. Portrait and a Dream

Fig. 24.1. Portrait and a Dream, 1953. Oil on canvas, 4' 10 1/8" x 11' 2 1/2". Dallas Museum of Art. Gift of
Mr. and Mrs. Algur H. Meadows and the Meadows Foundation, Incorporated.

The diptych Portrait and a Dream 1953 (fig. 24.1), which Pollock himself titled, 1304
contains his last explicit self-portrait, filling the right hand portion of the canvas, and the
“dream,” on the left. Though the portrait includes color, a new venture for Pollock in 1952-
53, and the dream is represented in the imagistic black and white style that dominated the
production of 1951-52, both are executed in oil, not a distinguishing characteristic of the
black and white work, to which I shall turn shortly. 1305 Ever since Male and Female 1942
and Stenographic Figure 1942 Pollock’s effort had been to heal splits. Now after the
integration of One, the split is all the more glaring.
To Dr. Hubbard’s husband Pollock said “That’s a portrait of me, can’t you see it?”
when, as he further explained, he was “not sober.”1306 The November debacle had
precipitated a rapid worsening. In a letter to Ossorio in late January 1951, Jackson wrote,
“I really hit an all-time low -- with depression and drinking. NYC is brutal. ... Last year
I thought at last I am above water from now on in -- but things don’t work that easily I
guess.”1307 Dr. Heller had died in March 1950. He turned to his old friend Elizabeth
 456

Hubbard for homeopathic remedies; then in March 1951 Dr. Ruth Fox, a specialist in the
treatment of alcoholism, put Jackson on the chemical remedy Antabuse. 1308
To Lee Krasner he explained that the upper right hand corner of the left panel had
to do with “the dark side of the moon.” 1309 There we see clearly an upturned crescent on
top of which Pollock made effacing black markings. In the rest of this panel in what might
be two figures engaged in a savage and erotic encounter, we see in the upper left the head
of a humanoid creature facing left holds a distinctive dagger visible on the middle left edge
of the canvas, its aggressive presence reinforced by the upward diagonal leading towards
it. The fluidity of poured paint in the shoulder area is a pathetic evocation of flight, now
long lost. The dagger and its rending action echoes the sacrificial act in Moon Woman
Cuts the Circle, a sacrifice that was simultaneously a birth, the released diamonds symbols
of hope bearing the promise of a new sense of self.
T.J. Clark has noted about Pollock’s paintings from 1947-50 “their fierce, almost
doctrinaire quality, their quality of renunciation. ... If a painting is to be abstract at all --
this seems to me the drip paintings’ logic -- then it ought to be so through and through,
down to the last detail or the first gestalt: it ought to be made into the opposite of figuration,
the outright, strict negative of it.”1310 According to Clark, “Painting was,” for Pollock, “a
way to be certain of having truly divested oneself of the ‘I'. Abstraction was worth pursuing
because it, more than any other form of painting, might lead to just such divestiture.” 1311
One should not be misled by Karmel’s excitement at the discovery of images so clearly in
the underlayer of Number 27, 1950.1312 One can speculate, as he does, that imagery might
underlie even Number 32, 1950. But to reemphasize that Pollock’s dream of what the
diamonds might ultimately be leads to abstraction, it is worth reiterating two of Pollock’s
statements. In 1949 he asserted that while imagery was "extra cargo -- and unnecessary ...
Recognizable images are always there in the end.” 1313 And in a 1951 he stated that, when
the unconscious sinfully produces images, his conscious mind “cries alarm” and wipes out
the offending image.”1314 Like his mentors, Graham and Paalen, Pollock dreamed of a new
abstract art and expected a new sense of himself to emerge from the practice of this art.
This was the deepest hope of Pollock’s conviction that art and life are one and it was
perhaps the source of his deepest disappointment.
 457

As Portrait and a Dream testifies, he had not achieved a new sense of self. The self-
portrait was of a drunk, and the dream of death-rebirth as first put forward in Moon Woman
Cuts the Circle was just that, a disturbingly violent dream. The diamonds of new self,
“ideal bodies” in abstract fields of energy, are nowhere to be found. Only a somewhat
horrifying self-portrait painted with brushed pigments of orange and yellow, and gray,
handled like molten lead. The work of transformation has not taken place; one eye of his
head is barely hinted at, buried in a gray field struck through by a downward-pointing red
arrow. The sacrifice of vision at one level of awareness, in hopes of new vision, enacted
in Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, was for naught. As Pollock later said: “It wasn’t worth
it, it wasn’t worth the pain and the sacrifice, it’s asking too much; I can’t give that much
anymore, I’m too miserable, and they never get the point anyway, they always change
things around.”1315 The dream presented on the left is now but an echo of Moon Woman
Cuts the Circle, emphasizing “the dark side of the moon,” and the aggressive presence of
the dagger, the sacrificial act, now presented simply as a death with no rebirth. And death,
as we will see in looking more closely at the black and white works of 1951-52, lurked
everywhere.

2. Black and White: Human Pathos

Fig. 24.2. Black and White Painting III, c. 1951. Enamel on canvas, 35 x 31". Collection of A.
Alfred Taubman, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
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When we encounter the image of a crucified human in Pollock’s Black and White
Painting III 1951 (fig. 24.2), it is not so much an homage to the suffering of Christ, although
in view of his flirtation with Catholicism and the archetypal reach of such an image, one
cannot deny this possibility as an expression of his own suffering as an artist and as a
man.1316 Pollock had used the same image as his parting gift to Dr. Henderson in 1940.
Psychoanalysis had provided him with tools to analyze his own suffering, but not enough
to heal his isolation. Once again this would seem to be the message: flirtations with Jungian
archetypes in 1950 had led only to archetypal inflation and extreme introversion, not to a
final healing, but to an emotional unraveling. Expressions of Pollock’s personal passion,
the black and white images contain moments of great lyricism and hope, aesthetic
innovation, but the overwhelming sense in the end is suffering, as Pollock begins to
question the wellsprings of his creativity.
In a June 7, 1951 letter to Ossorio Pollock wrote of the re-emergence of the images
in his art. “I’ve had a period of drawing on canvas in black -- with some of my early images
coming thru -- think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing -- and the kids who think
it simple to splash a Pollock out.” 1317 Pollock himself experienced this reemergence as
disturbing. Ted Dragon remembers Pollock in the fall of 1952 staring for hours at Lavender
Mist, which now hung in Ossorio and Dragon’s home, “as if trying to find something.” 1318
In front of one of the poured paintings of 1947-50 Jackson questioned Lee, “Is this a
painting?” Telling this later she elaborated “Not is this a good painting, or a bad one, but
a painting! The degree of doubt was unbelievable at times.” 1319 Others such as Ibram
Lassaw observed, “he seemed terribly unsure of himself.” Carol Braider recalls he “was
worried about the image having come back.” 1320 At the very least this return meant that
Pollock was no longer capable of doing the church murals, at least as originally conceived.
He had come down from the universalizing abstract heights of the poured paintings in 1950,
and lost the delicate symbiosis of meaningful imagery and abstract resolution that marked
such a late poured painting as the first black and white stage of Number 27, 1950.
The 1951 images were, as Pollock said, his early images. Krasner too recognized
that the images that now emerged were linked to “the great body of work that most people
didn’t see until years later,” the drawings that Pollock had begun as early as 1938-39 when
he was breaking away from Benton. This led her to say about the early drawings, as pointed
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out above, “I see no more sharp breaks, but rather a continuing development of the same
themes and obsessions.”1321 But now the images functioned differently. Before they had
been the vehicles of his visual thinking, and carried the energies of his metamorphic
imagination, energies that he converted into ever greater automatist expression. The
impetus was forward. Now these energies were baffled.
Working on the same bolts of cotton duck canvas rolled out on the studio floor,
sometimes up to twenty feet, on which he had unfurled the trilogy of 1950, he now
generated quasi-figurative forms situated either next to each other or above and below, with
little space left between the compositions (fig. 24.3).

Fig. 24.3. Black and white paintings pinned on Pollock's barn wall, 1951. Photograph by Hans Namuth.

He would finish a canvas, then cut it off; sometimes he would cut a canvas off first, then
work on it. Sometimes he wasn’t quite sure what should constitute a composition, asking
Lee in editing sessions: “Should I cut it here? Should this be the bottom?” These were
Lee recollects, “difficult sessions.” “His signing the canvases was even worse. I’d think
every thing was settled -- tops, bottoms, margins -- then he’d have last-minute thoughts
and doubts. He hated signing. There’s something so final about a signature.” 1322
Sometimes two panels in succession would be left as a triptych or a diptych, as happened
later with Portrait and a Dream. The creative process that in the poured paintings had come
to have the inevitability of lovemaking could be agonizingly halting.
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In creating these quasi-figurative canvases -- in the end there were 28 -- Pollock

still used a pouring technique to make what O’Connor has appropriately named “the black
pourings.”1323 The paintings are not in fact black and white paintings, as for instance
Number 14, 1948 (Gray) (see fig. 16.1) was. There the black enamel was poured into a
ground of wet white paint. Now Pollock poured black (or sometimes brown) industrial
enamel alone, staining it directly into the fabric of the unprimed raw canvas, itself a warm
neutral tone (not the cold white suggested by the phrase “black and white painting”). He
still used sticks or dried brushes, and now more frequently kitchen basting syringes that
functioned as giant fountain pens, through which he controlled both the gesture and the
flow of the paint. Rather than build up layers of poured skeins as most often happened in
the poured paintings of 1947-50 to achieve an extraordinary full dimensionality of space,
the play of vitalized matter now becomes flatter, as the black bleeds directly into the
ground. Though the poured black paint can still often achieve striking spatial ductility, as
for instance in Number 3, 1951 (Image of Man) (fig. 24.4), new is the degree to which the
pictorial surface itself becomes a pole in the dialectical formal tensions of Pollock’s art
making. The integration of figuration and ground is achieved in the one plane of the
pictorial support.1324

Fig. 24.4. Number 3, 1951/ (Image of Man), 1951. Enamel on canvas, 56 x 24". Collection of Robert U.
Ossorio.
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Pollock works this mono-planarity in intriguing ways, making aesthetic discoveries

even within this restricted arena, rediscovering the balance of figuration and abstraction,
of mark and ground in all-over compositions, and even more fundamentally of painting
and drawing. Pollock remarked that he was “drawing on canvas in black.” As O’Connor
suggests, Pollock used the word “drawing” probably because he felt these paintings served
the same purpose as his earlier drawings, letting the imagery “come thru.” 1325 But as
O’Connor and Thaw point out, the concerns of drawing and painting merge for the first
and only time in his career. 1326 Drawings in ink that he made on a highly absorbent
Japanese rice paper, a pad of which Tony Smith gave him in late 1950, produced marks
that bled into and even through the paper. 1327 Sometimes he would use the bleed-throughs
on the next sheet as a trigger to further variations. The range of these marks, whether line,
contour, or mass, very likely inspired a similar range of effects at the larger scale of the
paintings on canvas.1328 Even as, much more than in the work on paper,1329 Pollock in the
canvases allowed the imagery to emerge, the black mark-making generated powerful all-
over compositions.
In Number 3, 1951, one of the earlier black poured paintings that still clings to the
supposed consummation of his quest in the previous year, we recognize both an explicit
androgyny in the figure, and its expression in an all-over balancing of figure and ground:
even as the black pouring makes the contour of the profile of the face and the presence of
the eye, it also encloses the white of the canvas to make the interior of the face, in fact even
the suggestion of a white “moon” crescent that then encloses the black eye-sun in a
harmonic balancing of white and black, of moon and sun; or below, the white is sufficiently
enclosed to suggest a breast, and below that the black mark might be read as phallus. The
rhythms and directional force of the mark making still conveys dance, and the ability to
move right or left, on the diagonal, down or up, the lessons of the classic poured paintings
now compressed into figuration, yet another incarnation of the “Image of Man” as
fortuitously this painting was later named.1330 Was Pollock still dreaming with Joyce of
“the economy of heaven,” when “there are no more marriages, glorified man, an
androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself”?1331
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Fig. 24.5. Echo: Number 25, 1951, 1951. Enamel on canvas, 91 7/8 x 86". The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest and the Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller Fund.

In the suggestively named Echo 1951 (fig. 24.5) we recognize the imagery of
creative release -- also presented in an all-over balancing of figure and ground. In the upper
left of the composition we see the large eye of an ovoid head, and then on its left edge, two
thirds the way up, the triangular blade of the dagger that the moon woman once held, and
realize that the spilling, arcing rhythms in the lower left echo the creative release of the
moon woman’s sacrificial act in Moon Woman Cuts the Circle. This echoing intimation
of Pollock’s primal creative act is also an accomplished all-over painting. Black marks can
be abstract line, contour, or mass, positives or negatives. As Ben Heller remarked of these
canvases in general,” Pollock never painted the ground; he activated it.”1332 Pollock is here
once again in dialogue with the female ground, but at a very different frequency if you will
than in the classic poured paintings.
Such a canvas as Echo would seem to justify the positive aesthetic readings that the
black poured canvases of 1951-52 elicited from Clement Greenberg and later Michael
Fried. In his February 1952 review of “Jackson Pollock’s New Style” in Harper’s Bazaar,
Greenberg saw in “the references to the human form in Pollock’s latest paintings ...
symptoms of a new phase but not of a reversal of direction.” 1333 In the black pourings he
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saw an extension of the lessons of the all-over abstract phase of 1947-50, the ropey skeins
now “volatized” into bleeds of thinned out paint. 1334 Only later in 1955 did Greenberg
withdraw his approval, charging that in these paintings Pollock "took back almost
everything he had said in the three previous years.”1335 But ten years later Fried saw in the
black pourings a way to marry figuration with the optical effect of his earlier webs, “a new
pictorial synthesis of virtually limitless potential.” 1336
If one considers the way Echo returns to the meaning of Pollock’s earlier imagery,
it is easy to understand that Pollock should have found this “echo” of Moon Woman Cuts
the Circle and its creative sacrifice disturbing. For what he had first intuited in Moon
Woman Cuts the Circle, the dynamism of destruction and creation in an ever-evolving
transformative process, had been brought to magnificent fruition in the trilogy of the classic
poured paintings. Now the beginning of this process finds only an “echo.” Symphonic
creativity, a short year later, is reduced to the relatively static tensions of his marks and the
encapsulation of their meaning in the re-emergent symbols.

Fig. 24.6. Number 26, 1951, 1951. Enamel on canvas, 54 1/4 x 36 1/2". Collection of Mrs. Victoria Bado,
Rome.

In Number 26, 1951 (fig. 24.6) Pollock further reduces the meaning of such imagery to the
iconic intensity of the crescent shape at the top center of the composition pointed down,
dagger like, at the eye just below. The willingness to sacrifice the one or third eye to
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achieve a new understanding of creativity as a transformative process encompassing death

and rebirth was one of the lessons of Moon Woman cuts the Circle -- sacrifice sought as
part of the creative project.
This sacrifice is re-enacted in the transected eye of the portrait panel in Portrait and
a Dream. But by then in 1953 Pollock admitted that his access to a creative dynamo was
but a “dream.” In Number 26, 1951 the suggestion of another crescent, dagger-like, aimed
at an eye-like configuration promises, not so much creative release, as it becomes an
emblem of suffering, recalling the very stasis of Picasso’s 1938 blinded goddess (see fig.
8.5), before Pollock proceeded to reformulate the creative act as a transformative
dynamism in Moon Woman cuts the Circle.

Fig. 24.7. Number 14, 1951, 1951. Enamel on canvas, 57 5/8 x 106". Tate Gallery, London.

A more horrifying stasis characterizes Number 14, 1951 (fig. 24.7). This too
recycles the symbolic imagery through which Pollock had advanced his understanding of
a creative approach to the canvas, this time its distinctive long horizontal axis, here 8 feet
10 inches long. I agree with Carmean, that the basic compositional layout of Number 14
with its two vertical components, one at each end of the canvas, and its horizontal elements,
indicates direct comparison with such paintings as The Guardians of the Secret and The
Key.1337 The figuration in these two canvases speaks to the same emotional and pictorial
dilemmas that characterized Pollock’s art in 1943 and their resolution in 1946. The key
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animal, mediating between male and female opposites in The Key, had finally resolved the
tensions of Guardians of the Secret -- enabling Pollock to convincingly occupy the all-over
surface of a canvas. This symbolic imagery, male, female, and totem animal, remained
importantly present in his imagination and creative process even until the closing out of his
abstract poured paintings in 1950, evident, for example, in the underlayer of Number 27,
1950. Still functioning here to initiate the journey into the integrative flow of abstract
energies, these images seem to have come to a grinding halt in Number 14. The central
secret is, as it were, locked up once again. Note the way, stretching across the top
horizontal register of the canvas, the long white body of the animal, its triangular head
facing left, punctuated by an eye, is in a confrontational posture reminiscent of the “father
figure” in Guardians of the Secret. A second white horizontal bar, stretching across the
lower register of the canvas, its path of dots reminiscent of those linking male and female
in The Key, is now broken. It would seem that the female maw is in the upper right, the
bird-man persona of the male on the left, although in this murky realm one does not have
to insist on exact identification to sense the fearful distancing of one pole from the other.
Interrogating his own past creative strategies, strategies that were in part a response
to Picasso’s art, Pollock once again has to struggle with the specter of his Spanish
precursor. To make sense of Number 14, 1951 one does not have to go as far as Carmean,
who invokes Picasso’s Crucifixion as a source. Nor does one have to go as far as Krauss,
who, when trying to make sense of the related Number 11, 1951, invokes a rotation of
Guernica. Guernica was probably on Pollock’s mind; but more than addressing Picasso
directly, he was addressing his own earlier responses to Picasso.
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Fig. 24.8. Number 27, 1951, 1951. Enamel on canvas, 55 3/4 x 73". Private Collection, Switzerland.

The dual face of Girl before a Mirror seems to still lurk in Number 27, 1951 (fig. 24.8)
behind his renewed meditations on his moon woman: in the upper right a head has once
again the distinctive protruding eye of both Stenographic Figure and Moon Woman. The
left-hand panel of this canvas with its humanoid image contains clues to her identity: as
observed by Landau, the horizontal crescent and marginalia (conjunction of backward C-
shapes and criss-cross lines) can also be founded in Moon Woman. In the lower right hand
portion of Number 27, we see the dual frontal-profile face that most clearly echoes the dual
face of Girl before a Mirror. 1338 This face bears, as Landau observes, Lee Krasner’s
distinctive pointed nose and full lips. 1339 References not only to Picasso, but to his own
personal life return, the artistic and emotional matrix out of which his creative strategy had
initially emerged.

3. “Womb with a built-in tomb”

In writing of the black pourings as a whole O’Connor seems to me right when he
suggests that the psychological background to Pollock’s struggles is a negative feminine
principle. Of Number 14, 1951 he states: “The sexual implications of this configuration -
- and, indeed, through the preceding groups -- are best understood not in terms of explicit
sexual congress ... but in terms of the figure/protagonist/artist’s struggle in these works of
1951 to reestablish his sense of, and capacity for, relationship.” 1340 But while O’Connor
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responds to Pollock’s striving to break away “from the stranglehold of the mother
complex,” I see him falling emotionally back into it. 1341

Fig. 24.9. Number 5, 1952, 1952. Enamel on canvas, 56 x 31 1/2". Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Purchase made possible by a grant from the Anne Burnett and Charles Tandy Foundation.

Whether referring to Pollock’s muse, or to Lee Krasner, or to his mother, the female image
turns especially monstrous in a canvas from 1952, Number 5, 1952 (fig. 24.9), although
one can locate frightening images earlier, for instance Number 18, 1951 or Number 23,
1951/“Frogman” (a misleading name given it by its first owner). The issue in this canvas
is not the relationship of opposites, but just the overwhelming presence of a negative
female. With his black markings Pollock makes of the ground a fierce woman whose
upright figure fills the canvas, her haunted eyes peering out from its top, two sets of breast-
like forms below. The proposition of nurture suggested by the breasts is echoed by the
repeated pendant marks, especially along the right hand side of the canvas, an effort at
upwards movement in similar forms noted on the upper left. The suggestion of fertility in
this many breasted mother-goddess, reminiscent of the Diana of Ephesus, is negated by the
tomb-like womb, its ovoid form in the lower half of the canvas filled with black markings.
The great mother figure that dominated the canvas in Totem Lesson II and held within her
womb the foetus, now holds no promise.
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The many breasted figure here echoes Pollock’s muse, the putative Queen of Hearts
or Queen of Diamonds, “physically a woman with chins, protuberances of all sorts,” that
Bultman remembered from around 1943. Now the figure is definitely malevolent, more
like the nude female with pendulant breasts and hollow womb in Woman c. 1930-33 (see
fig. 1.7), Pollock’s early meditation on his mother not as nurturer, but as a force of death.
Lee Krasner recollected that Pollock sometimes complained during this period that a vision
of his mother came over him so strongly that it was impossible for him to work. 1342 That
the negative woman was now also partly Lee Krasner herself is suggested not only by
intimations of her portrait in Number 27, 1951, but even more by the facts of their life
together.
Jackson’s drinking continued. He turned from the rigorous analysis of Dr. Ruth
Fox in September 1951 to the bottled emulsions of the “bio-chemist,” recommended by
Dr. Hubbard: Dr. Grant Marks. The quart bottles of the chilled emulsion had to be
transported along with Jackson once a week in a weekly run to and from New York to
consult with Marks.1343 His binges continued unabated into mid-October 1952, when Stella
arrived in Springs so that he would settle down, as she had done before at Lee’s request in
1944, and once again there was improvement and he did produce at least some new work
for his second exhibition of black pourings in November 1952. 1344
By the summer of 1951 Krasner’s own production as an artist had never been
stronger. When reporting his own “drawing on canvas in black” Jackson noted to Ossorio:
“Lee is doing some of her best painting, it has a freshness and bigness that she didn’t get
before.”1345 Around the time when Betty Parsons finally agreed, Jackson making the final
telephone call at Lee’s behest, to give Lee a show at her gallery -- it was scheduled for
October 1952, Pollock went on a two-week bender ending up in the hospital. Such tension
between Lee and Jackson, though not at this magnitude, had marked Lee’s earlier efforts.
Then she had backed off, accepting her role as Jackson’s emotional support and manager.
But this time she persisted. 1346 As Jackson continued to produce his black pourings, she
continued to advance her art beyond the Little Images of late 1946-early 1950 to large
colorful gestural abstractions at a big scale, some canvases almost five by seven feet. And
by 1953 she produced her own Black and White, a canvas in which she as her own woman
dealt with the imagery of Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror.1347
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That summer Lee and Jackson’s personal relationship began to show signs of severe
strain. Jackson, according to some observers, wanted to torture Lee. 1348 Annabel Newman
remembers that Jackson, having purposefully gone off to a bar to get drunk and returned
with a woman whom he had picked up on his arm to taunt Lee, was embarrassed to
encounter not just Lee but the Newmans. A change came over Lee. Gone was her old
unreserved support. By the winter of 1952 she had learned to disassociate herself from
Jackson when he became too troublesome, appearing just in time to commandeer help in
getting him to bed.1349 At a dinner party given at her home Dorothy Miller of the Museum
of Modern Art remembers Jackson’s face crumpling in agony as he said to Lee, “Don’t
look at me that way.” Lee, she felt, at this point hated Jackson. 1350 He, of course, was
abusive and violent in his turn.
Pollock’s struggle to maintain in his art the sexual energy with which it had so long
been charged is suggested by his reworking of Number 11, 1951 sometime after it had been
exhibited in the November 1951 Parsons show.1351 The forbidding stark white expanse of
the large female crescent on the right hand end of this horizontal canvas is reworked with
black poured passages, some veering to a finely poured tracery, others to scabrous
smudges, a sad echo of Pollock’s first poured compositions such as Waterbirds in 1943,
when he first poured paint down on female forms in search of pictorial and emotional
diamonds.
Although, in such a work as Echo, Pollock could still work his pictorial magic,
activating the entire surface of a canvas in a balancing of black markings and white ground,
of figuration and abstraction, of drawing and painting, the standoff confrontation of
opposites along the horizontal axis of Number 14, 1951 and the debilitating stare of the
negative female principle in Number 5, 1952 suggest that in the black pourings Pollock’s
art loses its contact with the erotic impulses that had driven it since Magic Mirror. The
imprint of the negative female principle that at a deep level had always constituted the
background condition of Jackson’s emotional life was reactivated; Lee became its new
instantiation. As eros receded, thanatos advanced.
Due to Lee’s well-founded fear that Jackson’s drinking might lead to a car accident,
at her behest he had made a will in March 1951. He bequeathed his art to Lee first, then
Sande, then his brothers, admonishing the executors of his will, Lee, then successively
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Sande, then Greenberg “to maintain the paintings as intact as possible.” 1352 Despite
uniformly supportive reviews of the November 26 - December 15, 1951 exhibition at
Parsons Gallery, visitors to the show were rare and nothing sold. 1353 Jackson proceeded to
spend most of the Christmas holiday drunk, then on December 29 wrecked his dark blue
Cadillac convertible, a car he had bought in October 1950 as an emblem of his then new
found fame. He was lucky to walk away unhurt. 1354
When on the first day of 1952 his contract with Parsons gallery expired, Pollock
chose not to renew it. Betty Parsons was not being aggressive enough in selling the works
of her artists. Not until April did Lee and Jackson manage to find another dealer for the
now often drunk Pollock and his shifting work: Sidney Janis, an ace salesman whose
gallery handled the best of the European artists. But while finally Pollock had the dealer
he felt his work deserved, he was having difficulty in producing new work to exhibit in his
Fall 1952 debut at Janis. To some observers it now seemed that Lee cared less about
Pollock the man, than Pollock’s art -- which he was not producing. 1355 At a dinner party,
this time at the Pollock house when the lights failed, a drunk Jackson drove the guests out.
Tony Smith remembers that Jackson holding a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a candle
in the other, went to the kitchen, picked up a six-inch butcher knife, and pursued Lee
through the darkened house, saying “I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna kill you.” 1356 An
almost maudlin inversion, if it weren’t so real and sad, of his old artistic dream of the moon
woman’s creative act of sacrifice, wielding the dagger. The violence was now only too
real.

4. Bassesse
Negativity flooded both Pollock’s art and his life, as ever indistinguishable to
Pollock. In Number 14, 1951, for example, the subtle balancings of black mark and
responsive white ground maintained in the pictorial plane in Echo give way to harsh,
aggressive mark making. The number of overlaps creates a scabrous texture; cross-
hatching becomes scratching out. By negation, black reveals the figure of the now defunct
animal “key.” An image that before could mediate opposites and was the key to endless
creative transformations now reveals only the unresponsive matrix of the canvas. Roughly
where the transformative grey just below the green-red back of the key animal had been, a
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large scab of black paint lies on the surface. The result of thicker black Duco puddling and
pulling as it dries, these scabs had existed before in Pollock’s work, for instance in Number
32,1950, a painting sometimes invoked as a precedent for the black pourings. There the
negative charge of the scabs is still part of an overall process of creation through
destruction. In Number 14, 1951 the large central black scab speaks of untransformable
paint.
In describing the beginnings of Pollock’s transformative alchemy in the first poured
compositions of 1943, which followed the initiating sacrifice in Moon Woman Cuts the
Circle, I entertained the notion of their possible bassesse, only to reject it. Both Pollock
and Masson were in pursuit of diamonds, not of the informe, Bataille’s “base materialism.”
And Pollock did learn how to create pictorial diamonds, generating through the flight of
his lines, engaging with a responsive ground and with each other, what seemed endlessly
new and varied pictorial wholes. Now in 1951 he was himself questioning his creative
enterprise, deconstructing his artistic alchemy. He had in the black pourings reduced his
layered complexities, which before could reverberate even to infinity, to the plane of the
pictorial support. And now this plane itself resisted the dialogue through which he created
his art. But if The Key to his artistic alchemy was now but a fantasy, a ghost, a memory,
at least the matter of paint remained real, even if sometimes only “base,” abject.
In 1982 Rosalind Krauss, rehearsing her understanding of what she then took to be
the Hegelian underpinnings of twentieth century abstraction, traced it through Malevich,
Mondrian, and then Pollock, and saw in their work the movement of a dialectic aimed at
the realization of Being "stripped of every quality that would materialize or limit it in any
way."1357 In 1993 she attributed to Pollock's poured paintings a bassesse fatal to the history
of easel paintings. In her desire to undermine Greenbergian aesthetics, she embraced
Bataille (and his critique of Surrealist idealism) and applied his theory of bassesse to
Pollock’s art. According to Krauss the horizontalization of painting -- Pollock made his
poured paintings as they lay on the floor -- leads to the loss of formal gestalt or organic
unity, and hence, in the history of twentieth century painting, to the murder of easel
painting. The figuration in the black poured paintings she understands as Pollock’s retreat
to conventional pictorial verticalization. 1358 But while there is indeed a moment of bassesse
in Pollock’s art, Krauss seems to me to misplace this moment because she does not credit
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the magical significance Pollock associated with his work. Along with Clement Greenberg
she at first overemphasizes the idealism of the poured paintings and then, to combat this
idealism, flips to the other pole: shit!
Pollock's evolving understanding of the spiritual significance of his art allows us to
follow his search to integrate sex and the ideal, matter and spirit between 1941-47 and in a
different key between 1947-50: to follow the stages of his artistic alchemy. To the degree
that Pollock asserts art as alchemy, he is already beyond Hegelian idealist world-making
and on the threshold of something else, a new, or perhaps very old, more elemental relation
to matter, to nature. When Pollock made his wild brag to Greenberg, that he, in his poured
paintings sometime after 1947, could best Rubens, was he referring to this elemental
tradition in painting of discovering meaning in matter?1359
Pollock begins to question and deconstruct his alchemy in 1951. Now matter is no
longer the incarnation of spirit, but becomes abject. The importance of the metaphor of
alchemy lets one tie the moment of bassesse to the works of 1951-52, not to the poured
paintings of 1947-50! Only in the black pourings does Pollock begin to admit failure, not
aesthetic failure – with good reason Greenberg is still pushing their aesthetic quality – but
failure in terms of his own understanding of art as magic. He is no longer a successful
practitioner of artistic alchemy. The work of creative transformation was thought to begin
with a sacrifice, a death. The question now becomes will there be a rebirth? Or is there
only death?
This second possibility would seem to be the import of the image in Black and
White Painting III, an admission of not only emotional but artistic crucifixion. The
diagonal of the figure’s reaching hands to upper right and middle left edge leaves an
extraordinary untouched white expanse in the upper left region of the canvas, creating the
effect that the figure is crucified on the canvas, or should one say, by the canvas? 1360
Certainly the theme in Portrait and A Dream done in 1953 would seem to be no more
promising. The title itself admits the moon woman’s creative sacrifice is for Pollock now
but a dream or even a nightmare. The colors that he introduces in oil paint in the portrait
panel are after the black pourings of 1951-52 innovative but damning. Orange reds and
yellow golds enliven the face but where the second eye would be on the left side of the face
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is blindness: not only the transecting red mark but masses of thick grey paint that in its
leaden density can be understood as resisting all alchemical magic.
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Chapter 25
Search

1. Aesthetics?
The personal and artistic downward spiral of 1951-52 recalls a similar period of
crisis in Pollock’s art and life in 1944. Then a series of canvases, also in black (and in
1944 sometimes purple) and white, also coming upon the heels of emotional and aesthetic
achievement (Mural, Pasiphae), also explored themes of sacrifice and fearful confrontation
in the terms of Moon Woman Cuts the Circle. These 1944 canvases too were accompanied
by tempestuous tension in Jackson's and Lee’s relationship, when she in early 1944 had
brought her easel back to their apartment to work -- only to retreat, as arguments raged.
Then, too, his drinking turned so self-destructive that Stella was asked to visit and get
Jackson to stop his nightly binges. In 1944 the fearful themes of the paintings did finally
give way to the forward-looking impulses of Totem Lessons I and II. Would new totem
lessons now help Pollock find his way? Or had his quest indeed come to an end?
In 1944 Pollock had turned to the aesthetic when inspiration seemed to fail him.
He thus had repeated a segment of the rhythmic structure of Mural in Gothic. The
repetition of imagery had served in part to explore novel formal permutations, whether the
snapping tensions of black and white, or the imagistic confrontation of hero and beast under
automatist layers. In some ways work Pollock produced in the fall of 1952 repeated this
aesthetic strategy.

Fig. 25.1. Convergence: Number 10, 1952. Oil on canvas, 7' 9 1/2" x 13'. Albright Knox Art Gallery,
Buffalo, NY. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1956.
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In Convergence: Number 19, 1952 (fig. 25.1) poured imagery was executed as in the black
pourings, then topped with a layer of abstract gestured marks, made in colored oils, neon
orange, bright yellow, white and some blue. As the title suggests, the two stages in
Pollock’s work, the imagistic black pouring and the gestured colorful abstraction in oil,
converge rather than engage in an integrative dialogue.

Fig. 25.2. Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952, 1952. Enamel and aluminum paint, with glass on canvas, 6' 11" x
16'. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

The ambition to pull off another giant poured composition as symphonic as those
of the 1950 trilogy still drives Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952 (fig. 25.2), using enamel and
aluminum paints on a 6 feet 11 inches x 16 feet surface. Krasner recalled that Jackson
worked on this painting over a long period of time, re-entering it a number of times; she
saw it in several early states before he included the “poles.”1361 The apocryphal story of
the drunken Pollock, Tony Smith and Barnett Newman working on this canvas together
has now shrunk to, in Ben Heller’s account, Pollock’s showing Smith and Newman one
evening in the studio his way of “flipping” the paint onto the canvas. Each man tried a
single flip of their own.1362 To Greenberg Pollock explained that he subsequently took
“full possession” of the canvas. 1363 When he did insert the eight black-blue poles, relying
on a long two by four, he managed to pull off the buoyant rhythms that he could not in the
immediate throws of paint. With the blue poles he creates the all-over dance, whether read
from left to right, or right to left, a sense of continuity in either direction suggested by the
outward tilt of the poles at either extremity. The almost chaotic energies of the throws of
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the bold oranges and yellows, of more hidden blacks and forward off-whites, and of
shimmering aluminum are ordered by the eight poles into a magisterial sarabande. As
O’Hara writes, “What is expressed here is not only basic to his work as a whole, but it is
final.”1364 Only Pollock could have orchestrated such a composition, but is the dance of
the One by the naming of the Eight a retreat? Greenberg remembers that to Pollock, and
to Lee too, Blue Poles was “not a success.” 1365 Was there a renewal, a rebirth, another
totem lesson?

2. Easter and the Totem

Fig. 25.3. Easter and the Totem, 1953. Oil on canvas, 82 1/4 x 58". The Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Gift of Lee Krasner in memory of Jackson Pollock, 1980.

Despite his second show at the Janis Gallery in November 10-29, 1952, which was
voted, after a show of Miro, the second best one-man show of the year by the editorial staff
of Art News, his art had come to a dead stop in the winter of 1952-53.1366 1953, the year
of Portrait and a Dream, was also that of Easter and the Totem (fig. 25.3), a painting of
luminous, almost Matissean, color, not the hot orange and yellows of his self-portrait with
its leaden gray. In tall vertical panels, the arrangement reminiscent of Male and Female,
 477

Pollock creates clear distinctions of black and white near the center of the composition,
this opposition now alleviated by the introduction of colors, green, lavender pinks, touches
of blue, yellowish ochres, and earthen browns especially in the totemic panel to the extreme
left. One is reminded that Jackson, for the first time in several years, did plant a garden in
the summer of 1953.1367 Was Pollock here re-embracing his nature religion -- the great
cycles of death and renewal and his oneness with them? The title suggests so, Easter being
not only the Christian celebration of rebirth, Christ’s resurrection from the dead, but also
the great spring festival, speaking of new life. Granted, “Easter” was not his title, but Patsy
Southgate’s. She and her husband Peter Matthiessen, summer residents in Springs, having
been introduced to abstract art by Jackson, felt both liberated and argumentative. To prove
to her that he was communicating Jackson asked her to name some of his paintings. He
would say “That’s exactly what I was thinking about when I was painting it, so I am
communicating with you.”1368 “Easter” stood. He must have added “and the Totem.”
What is the significance of this addition? The most prominent of the lavender pink
passages that energize this canvas, the one in the lower right, helps to define a difficult to
read, strangely bound animal configuration, that, with its crossed limbs, recalls earlier
appearances of Pollock's key animal, as in the center of The Key and in the lower left of
The Blue Unconscious. Such a reading receives support from the way the creature in this
canvas relates to the vertical panels. To its left we see rising a tall green vertical, flanking
the left of the black panel, and mounting to one of Pollock’s womb-like shapes, giving it a
female character. Here its whiteness is marked by ochre yellow scumble. Exiting its
appendages on the right are spots of green, signs of fertility, as a long and slightly diagonal
black line swirls in this now more aerated pictorial space, where the white paint breaks
open to the right revealing specks of blue, that appear to move towards the vaguely
masculine vertical configuration on the right. Its phallic appendage relates to the animal
configuration much as in earlier paintings Pollock had linked the phallus to his totem
animal. The Easter theme, echoes of the way Pollock had represented the bound pascal
lamb in much earlier analytical studies of various versions of El Greco's Adoration of the
Shepherds,1369 and the suffocatingly bound appearance of the animal in the painting suggest
that what we see here is the bound totem animal. Drawn with jagged black lines, and
marked with broad swaths of lavender, its head area is further marked by ochre yellow and
 478

a richly scumbled passage of white, relating it to the womb shape above. This relation
communicates hope for the totem animal's rebirth, and given its figurative significance,
hope for a recovery of the artist's potency.
Jackson is stirring his magic brew once again, to invoke, it would seem, the magic
of color, the specks of green and blue, as well as the lavender pinks, and yellow browns.
This time round in the creative cycle he does not draw with his black lines, so much as
approach broader and more open fields of color. In August 1953 Tony Vaccaro visiting
Pollock’s studio observed, and photographed, a horizontal painting, leaning on the studio
wall to the right of the finished Portrait and a Dream, its fields of brilliant blue, red, and
yellow, according to Pollock “unfinished,” challenging (fig. 25.4).1370

Fig. 25.4. Pollock in his studio in August 1953. The horizontal painting at the right is an original state of
The Deep 1953. Photograph by Tony Vaccaro.

What led Pollock at this juncture to pure color? Did he turn to color to liberate
himself from darkness? Or was he looking for an alternate formal language? In 1948
Greenberg had pronounced Matisse to be “the greatest master of the twentieth century.” 1371
A major retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952. Pollock
had already responded in The Key to Matisse’s aerated canvases. Now it is not surprising,
as Lewison points out, that the palette and structure of such canvases as Matisse’s Bathers
by a River 1916 and The Moroccans 1915-16 had an impact on Easter and the Totem.1372
 479

In addition to Matisse, and even more immediately present, were the art and the persons of
Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman.
Pollock “succumbed,” as Greenberg recalled, “to Clyfford Still’s work around
1951-1952.”1373 The jagged breaks in the juxtaposition of black and white in the center of
Easter and the Totem are reminiscent of Still’s work, appearing there as early as 1944. “It
was the first time,” Greenberg remarked, “that he’d ever joined up with a group. The first
time he became one of the boys.”1374 The forty-seven year old Newman had become
something of an older brother to the forty-year old Pollock, often retrieving him from
drunken binges. Although Jackson declared that he didn’t “give a damn about Barney’s
painting,” saying “he’s just a nice guy, I like him,” certainly they shared many concerns. 1375
Newman had begun his color fields with Onement I in January 1948, having already in
1945 written of the need to challenge Mondrian's neoplastic dogma. 1376 In 1967 he would
title a mural-scale canvas Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue.
Newman’s rhetoric was at a pitch that matched the metaphysical grandeur of
Pollock’s great poured paintings of 1950, to which he still aspired in Blue Poles in late
1952. In “The Sublime is Now,” Newman’s contribution to the December 1948 issue of
the little magazine Tiger’s Eye, he had written of Mondrian: “The geometry (perfection)
swallowed up his metaphysics (his exaltation). ... I believe that here in America, some of
us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer [to a struggle over the
nature of beauty], by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of
beauty ... We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our
relationship to the absolute emotions. ... Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man,
or 'life,' we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.” 1377 His title for a large
1950-51 color field canvas Vir Heroicus Sublimis gives the male macho flavor of the
American experience of the sublime. Such rhetoric must have been balm to Pollock’s ears,
especially when in his December 1952 article “The American Action Painters” Rosenberg
attacked those American artists who aspired to the “cosmic I.” Still especially felt himself
attacked in this article, and undertook on both his and Pollock’s behalf, as he explained to
Pollock, to fire off a letter to Rosenberg, damning him as “a front man for the mass assault
on the individual.”1378 At the lofty heights at which the individual and the absolute were
one, and the sublime content made “real and concrete” in “images whose reality is self
 480

evident” (again Newman’s words),1379 Newman, Still, and now Pollock, already extremely
isolated, hunkered down together, misunderstood by the public, but understanding each
other.1380
Rather than resist “the cosmic I,” Newman and Still encouraged Pollock to pursue
it -- and in color. Of course, Pollock himself had in 1946 meditated on yellow, blue, and
red, flanking the body of the key animal in The Key.1381 Now he was proposing to confront
these primary colors directly. The stakes were high. Pollock probably already had wind
of the shifting aesthetic currents. His personal relationship with Greenberg had undergone
a distinct chill. In the late fall Pollock had called Greenberg a "fool.”1382 And Greenberg,
too, no longer took Pollock to be the most promising young painter. Thus while in his
1955 essay “American-Type Painting” he still praised paintings such as Lavender Mist and
Autumn Rhythm in which "value contrasts are pulverized as it were, spread over the canvas
like dusty vapor,"1383 in that same essay he called Clyfford Still “perhaps the most original
of all painters under fifty-five, if not the best," because his works were "the first abstract
pictures I ever saw that contained almost no allusion to Cubism.”1384 The Cubism that was
Greenberg’s argument for Pollock’s structure and defense against the charge of Pollock
being only a “grandiose decorator,” now became a lever to unseat him from the front line
of Greenberg’s aesthetic avant-garde.
In the painting photographed by Tony Vaccaro, propped unfinished on his studio
wall, Pollock was pushing himself in the direction of color, whether for emotional or
aesthetic reasons, or both is unclear. Pollock’s magic art had always had sufficient
aesthetic strength to impress Greenberg. But now without the mediating imagery of the
1946 works or of Easter and the Totem, Pollock seems to have experienced the challenge
of red, yellow and blue in this canvas as too purely aesthetic, at least not as a challenge that
engaged him emotionally. To Sidney Janis he wrote “the painting (red-blue-yellow) you
saw here this summer, I’ve destroyed. If the image was mine it will come back -- at any
rate it had me stuck and I felt necessary to break it up.”1385
As conservators have discovered, the red, yellow, blue painting ended up under The
Deep (fig. 25.5).1386
 481

Fig. 25.5. The Deep, 1953. Oil and enamel on canvas, 86 3/4 x 59 1/8". Musée National d'Art Moderne,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Photo: Jacques Faujour.

Uprighting the horizontal canvas, he proceeded to selectively brush over the earlier forms
with gray, then black, then laying the canvas down, poured black paint, especially over the
central red. Uprighting the canvas once more, he closed in the space with white paint,
brushed on so vigorously that broken hairs from the brush lodged in the paint. Finally he
laid the canvas down once again and lavishly poured liquid white paint, crossing the black
abyss of the center. Some of these pours are thicker, some very thin traces, as though with
the ever hopeful white he wishes to smother or stitch over the void, that however remains:
still, seductive. O’Hara turn of phrase is: “an abyss of glamour encroached upon by a flood
of innocence.”1387 To Greenberg Pollock later remarked that in The Deep “he was on to
something there, but he just missed it.”1388 A near miss, but a glorious miss: the primaries,
layering, the oppositions of white and black, of thick and thin, of brushed work, of traceries
of paint in possibly infinite space -- all there with abstract elemental force, but with no path
to a future.
 482

3. Undertow of death.
If in 1953 in Easter and the Totem Pollock stretches out to themes and forms of
renewal, in Ocean Greyness (fig. 25.6) he turns to themes of death.

Fig. 25.6. Ocean Greyness, 1953. Oil on canvas, 57 3/4 x 90 1/8". Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York.

While the imagery still hints at some mythic tale, paint itself, indeed the process of painting
as visible in the layers, tells much of the story. Pollock, as carefully observed by the
conservators, began with a thin, fluid, vibrantly colored paint that saturated the canvas. 1389
Then using a brush he delineated forms with traditional oil paints rising in impastoed
ridges. These he selectively covered with black enamel paints, working from all four sides
judging from the drips. Finally he applied a layer of gray, thickened with particulate matter
similar to that found in She-Wolf. In the churning field of gray one can sometimes see
down to the ground of the canvas, most notably in the conjunction of sun-light yellow and
brown-orange within the eye of a large circular head shape to the right of center. To the
upper right and to the left one can also see down to the ground, to the right, within a circular
shape suggestive of a sun, an orange glows; to the left multiple hues inhabit a crescent
moon. But most compelling is the larger upside down head, caught up in the dynamics of
paint: the gray above it seems to move down towards it; aggressive black marks, in addition
to the presence of a black dagger-like triangle near the eye, move diagonally down and
 483

around the head, whose attention in turn is directed further down to a lavender eye directly
below.
In the context of Pollock’s quest one recognizes the imagery of initiatory descent.
As in She-Wolf the hero is swallowed by the beast, but in that initiatory journey the hero
ended in Pasiphae by riding as a bird the back of the whale, mastering the female force.
This time, especially when one catches intimations of the fearful beast in Pasiphae now
encompassing the entirety of the horizontal axis of the canvas, to the far left a beaked bird
nostril, limbs not flailing so much as compressed, limbs that could even be read as the arms
of an upside down man, one senses that the hero this time will remain in the belly of the
beast. He is being swallowed, roiling in the undertow of this ocean grayness, the ocean
which Pollock had described to Potter as woman, a power that sucks you in, carrying you
back to "where it all began,” and here possibly ends.1390
Ocean Greyness has an aura of tragedy here given an American twist, that of Moby
Dick, which had preoccupied Pollock in 1943 in Guardians of the Secret and in Pasiphae.
In “The American action painters” Rosenberg had invoked Melville to describe the
vanguard painter as one who finds exhilaration in “an adventure over depths in which he
might find reflected the true image of his identity.” What image” had Pollock discovered?
The great white whale took Captain Ahab in the end to his death in the depths of the ocean.
The great American adventure had a sad ending.

Fig. 25.7. Unformed Figure, 1953. Oil and enamel on canvas, 52 x 77". Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
 484

In the stalemate of Unformed Figure 1953 (fig. 25.7) the hope for a rebirth ended. No
longer did he have the resources to reform an image, to regenerate from the depths a new
dream. The pink, yellow, green, and brown remain buoyed on the foaming dark sea of
gray, but no dialogue brings into being a new entity, a new image of man. Nor in this
abstract wasteland is there any intimation of a redeeming dream-vision.

4. A modern tragedy.
Behind Ocean Greyness lay the reality of Pollock’s increasingly obsessive
ambivalent relationship with his mother. Recall that in October 1952 Lee had asked Stella
to stay with them in Springs long enough for Jackson to produce some more work for the
first Janis show.1391 Now in August 1953 Stella arrived again, Lee and Jackson both having
agreed that, in preparation for the second Janis show scheduled for November, she should
stay with them in Springs. This time, hoping for a more permanent solution, Lee asked
Stella to live with them.1392 In Stella’s eyes Jackson was still the adored son, and Stella
was, as Greenberg observed, “culture crazy,” enjoying whatever she could overhear of the
world of art and architecture. 1393 But some incident, unnamed by the family, occurred in
late September, causing Charles to suddenly drive Stella back to Deep River. Jackson and
Lee both begged her to return, which she did, but only through late October. Naifeh and
Smith speculate that Stella may have witnessed some of Jack’s self-destructive behavior,
and treasuring her illusions about her son, did not wish to witness his self-destruction.1394
By mid-October Jackson had sent only four new works to the Janis gallery; 1395 and Janis
was forced to cancel the November show, rescheduling it for February in the next year. In
December Jackson again wanted his mother back; she did not, in the end, come. 1396 The
protective adoring mother failed him. 1397 What Dr. Henderson had seen in one of the
drawings that Jackson had brought into their sessions in 1939-40, the pathetic hands
reaching towards an unfeeling, purely schematic, female torso (see fig. 2.11), as “a problem
left unsolved and perhaps insoluble, a frustrated longing for the all-giving mother”
remained.
Little separates the adoring protective mother from the overprotective mother, the
mother who smothers, even drowns, her youngest son “in petticoats and lace,” preventing
him from becoming a man. Such a son then dreams of male assertion, of freedom,
 485

approaches the female as an other with which he has to do battle, the she-beast. That dream
fed the private myth of the moon woman cutting the circle, releasing the son, who then
experiences great freedom in his first pourings. But private dream had to collide with
reality. Pollock's hope to translate dream into reality, to realize the promise of his myth,
the story of the diamond, the lapis, the child, was shattered when Lee refused to have a
child in 1946. The only way to translate dream into reality was now to internalize the union
of male and female and to substitute the self-produced work of art for the child Lee refused
to bear. Even as he struggles to overcome his narcissism, Pollock buries himself in himself,
discovering within himself the watery deep of a female ocean grayness in which he must
drown, thrown back to the child’s opposition of the negative female and the hapless male.
To Greenberg Pollock declared that he “hated his mother.” 1398
Lee attempted to navigate this deteriorating emotional landscape, at first in the role
of the protective mother, protecting him both from drink, and from the competitive forces
of the art world. More outraged than Jackson himself by Rosenberg’s attack on Jackson in
“The American action-painters,” Lee set out to do personal battle with Rosenberg,
spreading the story that, even as Rosenberg was cultivating friendship with de Kooning,
and many people understood his essay as praise for de Kooning as the American “action-
painter,” he had stolen the idea and the phrase ‘action painting’ from Jackson. This battle
she compounded by declaring battle with de Kooning himself, accusing him of betraying
Jackson.1399 As Nicolas Carone recounts, “The whole art world was talking about de
Kooning. Jackson was all through. They were building up de Kooning and slaughtering
Pollock.”1400 All the while de Kooning and Pollock continued to admire each other. 1401
About wrestling at the Cedar Bar in New York, where the artists hung out and where
Pollock became a regular in Fall 1955, de Kooning remarked, “Oh yes. It was a joke, very
friendly. He’d go beserk -- like a child -- a small boy. We’d run, fight, jump on each other.
Such joy, such desperate joy.”1402 There was another much darker side to Pollock’s
drinking at the Cedar Bar, not just desperate comraderie but self-destruction. So when de
Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Pavia came over to hold out a peace pipe, Lee was the
one to turn the friends away: the boys would only end by getting him drunk again. 1403 Once
when Lee was not there, and Jackson did go out with them, he ended up in 1954 breaking
his ankle. In the accident de Kooning had fallen on top of him. 1404
 486

When his ankle was broken and he was confined to the upstairs bedroom, Lee took
over the living room as her studio, began to make her own circle of friends, and learned to
drive a car to get around. Once again he felt “consumed by a female” and simultaneously
abandoned. They battled round the clock. 1405 Pollock was increasingly alone. A solitude
that began in the summer of 1953 grew steadily. 1406 In the fall of 1953 he talked openly of
suicide.1407 After the February 1954 show at Janis, from which no paintings sold, Jackson
told Greenberg that “this time, he wasn’t going to come out of his drunk.” 1408 To Potter in
1955 he said: “What I’d really like is a dry well to live in down at the bottom.” Later he
told Potter this dream: “Down in [the well] everything was quiet and dark, just the way I
wanted. Then the sand walls started running, a cave-in, but I wasn’t buried, just out in the
open with all the darkness and quiet that ever was.”1409 Thinking of the entombed
Antigone, Kierkegaard invented with his Symparanekromenoi a fellowship of those who
have buried themselves while still alive. Pollock would have been a candidate for that
“Unhappiest Man” they wanted to honor. 1410
By the winter of 1955 Lee and Jackson began to talk seriously to outsiders about
divorce.1411 Encouraged by his Sullivanian therapy with Dr. Ralph Klein, which he had
begun in September 1955, Pollock looked for an alternate reality, finally in early 1956 in
an affair with Ruth Kligman. 1412 He dreamed that with this voluptuous twenty-five year
old woman he might gain a normal reality, make a new beginning, marry, have a child. 1413
He had continued to want children, even in the summer of 1955 asking various women he
knew whether they would have his baby. 1414 Was Kligman the woman to save Pollock
from himself? 1415 He took her to see, for him the second time, a production of Samuel
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The characters of Vladimir and Estragon, each attempting
suicide, then of Lucky, are all subjective modern men lost in themselves, waiting for Godot,
for the redemptive other, to no avail. When Pollock first saw it, he explained to Patsy
Southgate that he “thought ‘Godot’ expressed his despair, and that it was the most brilliant
play of our time.” He “identified very closely with being the bum with bum’s clothes --
no money, nothing to eat but a carrot and a turnip, always waiting for Godot and Godot
never shows up.”1416 Seeing the play again with Kligman, rather than find comfort in his
love for her, he “started to cry, really cry, and then the crying turned to sobs and then it
 487

went into heartbreaking moans.”1417 For Jackson, too, there was no redemptive other,
neither the mirage of his love for Kligman, nor the illusion of his art.

5. Search
Kligman in her account of their affair, of the three weeks she spent with Jackson at
the house in Springs while Lee was in Europe, recounts: “One morning Jackson woke very
early, went into the studio, and came right out again. He couldn’t work. He looked at me
very seriously and with a straight face said, ‘You know I’m a painter and must get to work
very soon now.’”1418 During the last two and a half years of his life, he made only five
major paintings.1419 Looking back even on the paintings of 1953, he told Elizabeth
Hubbard that “he wondered whether he was saying anything.” 1420

Fig. 25.8. White Light, 1954. Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas, 48 1/4 x 38 1/4". The Museum
of Modern Art, New York. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection.

In White Light 1954 (fig. 25.8), using oil, enamel, and aluminum painting, he returned to
an abstract gestured surface reminiscent in its glowing whites and yellows of Shimmering
Substance 1946. Clyfford Still now referred to Jackson’s art as “nothing but tired
impressionism.”1421 In part stung that he did not receive an invitation to 15 Years of
Jackson Pollock, Pollock’s last showing at Janis, Still wrote a note to Jackson questioning
 488

his integrity, suggesting that he had sold out to the gallery system. 1422 This note remained
for Jackson a damning from a fellow artist that saddened him to the end.
As the title Scent of a painting dated circa 1955 suggests, Pollock seems to have
lost the trail of magic.

Fig. 25.9. Search, 1955. Oil and enamel on canvas, 57 1/2 x 90". Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery, New
York.

In Search 1955 (fig. 25.9) we see the blacks and whites that so massively confronted
Pollock in The Deep broken up, dark paint stained into raw canvas, the whites thick and
fleshy with a tracery of pinks and occasionally thin blacks suggesting life, the greenish
blacks and whites throughout respecting each other, but not merging in a dialogue. Strong
reds throughout hint at the early intensity of Flame, an intensity that had been channeled
into Magic Mirror, but now that the magic mirror is gone, the painting reverts to an
elemental and opaque presence. No “it” is in sight. Pollock still relies on his pictorial
language. Red diagonals, confirmed by splatters of yellow, seem to converge on a rotation
of red marks in the lower center. But the diagonal sloping from the upper right extends
itself in thick white that encounters a second mostly white diagonal, sloping from just
below the upper left corner. Once the eye has become alerted to these diagonals, a
diamond-configuration begins to occupy the center of the canvas, but its former
significance seems to have died. Weighted down by the heavy paint, the diagonals, which
Pollock had so often used to suggest movement, have become so heavy as to stand still.
 489

Scratchy traces of pouring seem aimless. Nor do the colors, brown, yellow, red, thick
white, raw canvas, black and green stains, carry the promise of future life. Green is the
color of hope and new life. Bits of light green throughout, more clustered at the edges,
where especially in the corners they are sometimes joined by light blue, may seem to hint
at nature; but these colors of nature have been pushed to the extreme margins of the canvas.
In a conversation with Marca-Relli, Pollock lamented, “Life is beautiful, the trees are
beautiful, the sky is beautiful. Why is it that all I can think about is death?” 1423 If we look
at the diagonals once more, but in the reserve direction, ascending, we see the one on the
right rising to the greater openness in that corner. Is Pollock here desperately reaching for
a new Easter? Search is Pollock’s last canvas, done six months before his death. He still
had his language, but no longer had anything to say.
The state of his studio at the time of his death, as documented in a photograph by
Hans Namuth (fig. 25.10), speaks most strongly of his final mood.

Fig. 25.10. Pollock's studio at the time of his death. Photograph by Hans Namuth 1956.

In one corner of the studio we see Cut-Out c. 1948-56 pinned to the wall over another
painting, one of the black pourings of 1951-52, another of the crucified images, reminiscent
of both Black and White Painting III 1951 and (Figure) CR 107 (c. 1944) (see fig. 24.2 and
fig. 10.5). Pollock was still engaging in a form of visual thinking. Cut-Out, as the template
 490

for the poured paintings of 1948-50 and a reminder of the final birthing trauma in his art in
the pursuit of a new image of man, laid over a crucifixion image from 1951-52 as if to say:
the project of the new image of man had failed. This statement seems confirmed by another
painting propped just below the cut-out on the wall: Man with a Knife, that image from his
youth of the self-destructive male. The forces of death had taken over Pollock’s studio and
his life.
Just before Lee left on July 12 for Europe, she gave Jackson an ultimatum: either
it’s her or me. As Lee sailed, Ruth moved into the house on Fireplace Road. But after not
even three weeks with Jackson, Ruth retreated from Springs; Jackson made no attempt to
get in touch with her. He had in fact after Ruth’s first week sent Lee a dozen red roses in
Paris. Unexpectedly Ruth returned to Springs for a weekend visit, her friend Edith Metzger
with her.1424 On August 11, 1956 Jackson’s Oldsmobile convertible, acquired in the
summer of 1954 from the dealer Martha Jackson in exchange for two of the black poured
paintings, skid at high speed off the road with Jackson drunk at the wheel. Pollock and
Metzger were killed instantly. Kligman survived 1425
Lee buried Jackson under a boulder at Green River Cemetery, at first one of the
ones that he had piled up near the house so he could study them. 1426 Later she had an even
bigger boulder (fig. 23.11) dragged onto his grave, its raw massiveness marked only by a
brass plaque with his signature as found on his paintings.1427

Fig. 23.11. Grave at Green River Cemetery at East Hampton. Photograph by Susan Wood in 1977.
 491

Epilogue
Art and Life

At Faust’s death Mephistopheles asks the question: “Now it is over? What meaning
can one see?” What meaning can one see in this pitiful death! Drunk, speeding, with his
young mistress and her friend in the car. Hardly a fitting conclusion to the life of an artist
who is hailed as one of the great artists of the twentieth century.
This disjunction between the private life and the public reputation makes it
tempting to separate the art and the life, to see Pollock’s art as a brief, but triumphant
moment in the trajectory of Greenberg’s aesthetic understanding of art, as the culmination
of a project in which Cubism had an important part to play, but that demanded a further
evolution. But such a narrative of art in pursuit of aesthetic perfection fails to do justice to
our continued interest in Pollock's art, as it fails to address the passion it communicates,
passion that Greenberg, too, experienced.
The aesthetic narrative has its own answer to the objection that it fails to consider
why human beings should dedicate so much time and even their lives to such art. Do we
not all dream of salvation from an ever unsatisfactory reality? Art can offer, in Fried’s
phrase, “grace,” a secular counterpart to that grace once expected from God. Art thus
promises Ersatz for the lost sacred, offering an escape from life and its evils, such as
capitalism. If such an aesthetic narrative is right and there is indeed a genuine divorce of
art from life, then my story of Pollock’s art is secondary.
Pollock himself countered: "You can not separate me from my paintings. They are
one and the same."1428 In one sense this assertion is clearly false. Art is not life. But art
is an important part of life, part of humanity’s unending attempt to give expression to what
is felt to matter most profoundly. Let me repeat here Meyer Schapiro’s statement in 1937
resisting Alfred Barr’s aesthetic approach to abstract art: “To say then that abstract painting
is simply a reaction against the exhausted imitation of nature, or that it is the discovery of
an absolute or pure field of form is to overlook the positive character of the art, its
underlying energies and sources of movement.”1429 For some modern artists, “The highest
praise of their own work is to describe it in the language of magic and fetishism. This new
responsiveness to primitive art was evidently more than aesthetic; a whole complex of
 492

longings, moral values and broad conceptions of life were fulfilled in it.” 1430 For Pollock,
too, the function of art is quasi-religious, but not therefore to offer an aesthetic substitute
for the lost sacred.
To understand that special passion Greenberg sensed when comparing Pollock to
Dubuffet, saying that while Dubuffet’s “positivism accounts for the superior largeness of
his art,” Pollock has “more to say in the end,” we must realize that emotions are not free
floating; they are anchored in life. Following Pollock’s evolving private myth has
permitted us better access to this “more.”
So what is the relation of art to life? Art offers metaphors for life, inviting certain
ways of looking at life, contributing thus to the establishment of a shared sense of what
matters. What does Pollock’s art tell us about what matters? There is no simple answer.
He offers us a mix of metaphors. One dominant metaphor is all too familiar, that of the
heroic American male as the self-made man who has his way with women. This metaphor
plays on the Promethean theme, but with a bourgeois American twist. What introduces a
disturbing note is the bestiality and violence directed both to the woman and to the self.
This sour note offers a warning that the self is overburdened by the task of self-making.
Even as the individual self longs for existentialist freedom, the same individual dreams of
home, some other who shelters -- a saving other.
Even when the myth of the heroic American male is given a primitivizing twist in
the metaphor of the shaman, accompanied by his totemic guardian animal, at home in the
world of nature, we realize that nature without threatens to blur for Pollock with nature
within. Over this inner realm the self-sufficient male, himself god-like, can hope to reign.
In Pollock’s case the myth of the hero, perhaps due to the individual circumstances
of his early upbringing, leads to a movement of narcissistic introversion. Thus Pollock can
confuse the muse and the mother, his art and a child, nature within and nature without. The
woman for Pollock is ultimately the woman he bears within himself. To be sure, to escape
such introversion Pollock reaches repeatedly out to woman, for one last time and half-
heartedly in the affair with Ruth Kligman. Had Kierkegaard’s judge not asserted: “Of the
hundred men who go astray, ninety-nine are saved by a woman, and one by direct divine
intervention.”1431 But Pollock was too deeply buried in himself to be saved by a woman.
Nor was there a God to enter that well of which he dreamed.
 493

So how does Pollock make the bridge between life and art? Every artist paints for
a public. Long convinced of his greatness as an artist, Pollock had to build a bridge from
the images of the private myths that fired his imagination to a genuinely public art. Such
bridge-building offers a key to his pictorial alchemy. But such alchemy is threatened by
overly hermetic and private images. This is why to Goodnough Pollock called the
emergence of his imagery in the making of the poured paintings a “sin.” To overcome this
sin of privacy, he moved his art towards emotion, arriving at a more musical abstract
expression of feeling, incarnating his meanings in the matter of his painting. Here his art
succeeds. Even his confusion of child and work of art here plays a productive role. The
intensity of the passion we experience in his art is inseparable from his being this particular
individual, with these particular hangups, as he succeeds in creating images that have the
specificity of portraits and touch us in the same way, portraits of someone trying to cope
with a world from which God is absent. The fact that Pollock’s myths are often very private
does not mean that the humanity of his efforts fails to communicate.
At another level, the level that mattered most to him, Pollock’s art fails. He failed
to heal himself; nor can his art heal us. He hoped for magic, but to demand this is to ask
too much of art. What Pollock’s art offers us is ambiguous, deeply moving metaphors for
life, life in his time, which is still our time. Every individual who has experienced what
Nietzsche called the death of God has to labor to discover a meaning in life. This remains
our spiritual landscape. Not only Pollock, we all face the dangers of burying ourselves
within ourselves, of becoming victims of our narcissism. Pollock’s art offers mixed
metaphors of eros and its introversion. But even when it fails, it retains its relevance as a
passionate expression of the modern search for meaning.
 494

1
Barbara Rose, "Arshile Gorky and John Graham, Eastern Exiles in a Western World," Arts Magazine,
March 1976, p. 70, n. 3.
2
Nicholas Carone, quoted in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), p. 183.
3
John D. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art, ed. Marcia E. Allentuck (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press,
1971), p. 106.
4
Ibid, p. 102.
5
John D. Graham, "Primitive Art and Picasso," Magazine of Art, vol. 30, no. 4 (April 1937), p. 237.
6
Ibid., p. 238
7
Hayden Herrera, “John Graham: Modernist Turns Magus,” Arts Magazine, October 1976, p. 103. Ellen
G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), pp. 81, 472-74.
8
Graham, System, p. 141.
9
Ibid, p. 160.
10
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review, Fall 1939, in The Collected Essays
and Criticism 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) [henceforth
abbreviated as CEC], vol. 1, pp. 11-14.
11
Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," Forum Lectures (Washington, D. C.: Voice of America, 1960) in
CEC, vol. 4, p. 86.
12
Ibid., p. 87.
13
Greenberg, “'American-Type’ Painting,” Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961),
p. 211. This essay is a reworking of one by the same title originally published in Partisan Review, Spring
1955; see CEC, vol. 3, pp. 217-35.
14
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock,” The Nation, February 1,
1947, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 125.
15
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Worden Day, Carl Holty, and Jackson Pollock,“ The Nation,
January 24, 1948, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 202.
16
Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” Art and Culture, pp. 218-19.
17
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists, Jacques Lipchitz, and Jackson
Pollock,“ The Nation, April 13, 1946, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 75.
18
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock,” pp. 124-25.
19
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Albers,” The
Nation, February 19, 1949, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 286.
20
Greenberg, “’American-Type’ Painting,” in CEC, vol. 3, p. 228.
21
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock,” p. 124.
22
Greenberg, “'American-Type’ Painting,” in CEC, vol. 3, p. 233.
23
Michael Kimmelman, “How Even Pollock’s Failures Enhance His Triumphs,” New York Times, Oct.
30, 1998, p. B31.
24
Paul Richards, “Splash Dance,” The Washington Post, Nov. 10, 1998, p. B1.
25
Pepe Karmel, “Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” Jackson Pollock (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 132.
26
Kirk Varnedoe, “Comet: Jackson Pollock’s Life and Work,” Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1998), p. 40.
27
Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Partisan Review, July-August 1940, in
CEC, vol. 1, p. 35.
28
Michael Fried, "Jackson Pollock," Artforum, vol. 4 (Sept. 1965), pp. 14-15.
29
For example, in a four part article on "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition" in 1967 William
Rubin of the Museum of Modern Art devoted sections to linking "Cubism and the later Evolution of the
All-Over Style" and "Impressionism and the Classic Pollock.” See Rubin, "Jackson Pollock and the
Modern Tradition," Artforum, vol. 5 (Feb. 1967), pp. 14-22; (March 1967), pp. 28-37; (April 1967), pp. 18-
31; (May 1967), pp. 28-33.
30
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), p. 322.
31
Krauss, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and
Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 168.
32
Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, pp. 320, 322.
 495

33
In developing these ideas Krauss was joined by Yve-Alain Bois in their publication Formless: a user's
guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), originally published in France as L'Informe: mode d'emploie (Paris:
Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1996). See Bois, "The Use Value of 'Formless'," in Formless, p. 34; Krauss,
"No to ... Joseph Beuys" in Formless, p. 146, and Bois, "No to ... the Informel," in Formless, pp. 141-42.
34
Krauss, Optical Unconscious, p. 290.
35
Ibid., p. 284.
36
Ibid., p. 266.
37
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), p. 318.
38
Ibid., p. 325
39
Greenberg, “Review of the Whitney Annual,” The Nation, Dec. 28, 1946, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 118.
40
Clark, p. 316
41
Ibid., p. 344
42
Ibid., pp. 335, 340.
43
Ibid,, p. 397.
44
Ibid., p. 337
45
Ibid., p. 340.
46
Ibid., p. 365.
47
Ibid., p. 299.
48
See Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, 1997).
49
G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, ed. Michael Inwood (New York: Penguin Books,
1993), p. 9.
50
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: George Wittenborn, 1947), p. 24.
51
See Karmel, p. 107 ff.
52
Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940's (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993), p. 317.
53
Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings,
Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth
abbreviated as CR], vol. 4, p. 9. See also Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An
American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 846.
54
CR, vol. 4, doc. 27, p. 222, letter from Sanford to Charles Pollock, July 27, 1937. See NS, p. 303, and
Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons,
1985), pp. 54-55.
55
NS, pp. 304-06.
56
"Remarks," CR, vol. 4, CR 1046, p. 124. Naifeh and Smith, pp. 319-20, seem to me to misread the
couple holding the child as "two male nudes in a combative embrace."
57
Sketchbook III has traditionally been dated c. l938-39, the period after Pollock's release from
Westchester hospital in September l938 (see CR, vol. 3, p. 15). I find arguments put forward by Naifeh and
Smith for redating this notebook to 1936-37 plausible (see NS, pp. 299 and 843). More recently, Katherine
Baetjer, Liza Mintz Messinger, and Nan Rosenthal, convincing in their redating of Sketchbooks I and II
from the CR dating c. 1933-39 to c. late 1937-39, have offered no compelling argument for redating
Sketchbook III from c. 1938-39 to c. 1938-41. See The Jackson Pollock Sketchbooks in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), pp. 21, 61.
58
Lee Krasner, quoted in B.H. Friedman, “An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock,” Jackson Pollock:
Black and White, exh. cat. (New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, 1969), p. 7.
59
Charles Pollock, quoted in NS, p. 42. See also p. 812.
60
Charles Pollock, quoted in NS, p. 28.
61
Frank Leslie Pollock, quoted in NS, p. 59.
62
Marvin Jay Pollock, quoted in NS, p. 59.
63
NS, pp. 70-71.
64
Frank Pollock, quoted in NS, p.72.
65
NS, p. 80. Solomon emphasizes LeRoy's eagerness to leave Chico, p. 27.
66
For the Pollock's life in Janesville, see NS, pp. 80-86.
67
NS, pp. 87, 88, 91.
68
Frank Pollock, quoted in Potter, p. 20.
69
Sande Pollock, quoted in Arloie Conaway McCoy's (Sande's wife) unpublished children story, "The
 496

High Steps and the Low Steps," which she assembled in the late 1930's from Sande's stories about his youth
in Arizona, in turn quoted in NS, p. 60.
70
NS, pp. 22, 49, and 70.
71
NS, pp. 39, 68; interview with Elizabeth Pollock, Potter, p. 19.
72
Jack "wasn't influenced by his father; he was influenced by his mother." Frank Pollock, quoted in
Potter, p. 23. According to Elizabeth Pollock, quoted in Potter, p. 23, "Jackson was the one she adored."
73
Sande Pollock, quoted in Arloie Conaway McCoy, NS, p. 68.
74
Benton to O'Connor, March 31, l964, quoted in Francis V. O'Connor, "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock:
1912 to 1943," (PhD diss., John Hopkins University, 1965), p. 151. CR, vol. 4, doc. 40, letter from Sanford
to Charles Pollock, July 1941.
75
Interview with Tolegian, Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987), pp. 40-41
76
Ibid. See Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 250, n. 5.
77
CR, vol. 4, doc. 7, pp. 208-09, letter from Jackson to Charles, Jan. 31, 1930.
78
See NS, pp. 142-43.
79
Pollock also posed for the harmonica player in Benton’s The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green
Valley 1934. Landau, p. 28.
80
The class that Pollock took with Benton was first named "Life Drawing, Painting, and Composition," but
after the completion of the New School Murals was renamed "Mural Painting." Despite the change of
name, the content of the class remained the same. Francis V. O'Connor, "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock:
1912 to 1943," Artforum, May 1967, p. 18
81
For a detailed study of Benton's career, see Erika Doss, Benton Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism:
From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991). For a
discussion of Benton's mural painting as embodying the central ideals of the 1930's in America, see
Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), pp. 6-14.
82
CR, vol. 4, doc. 16, p. 214, letter from Jackson to his father, Feb. 3, 1933.
83
Thomas Hart Benton, An American in Art (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, l969), p. 66.
84
Matthew Baigell, Thomas Hart Benton, New Concise NAL Edition (New York: Abrams, l975), p. 58.
85
On Benton’s family, see Doss, pp. 14 ff.
86
On Benton’s modernism, see Doss, especially pp. 10, 12, 16, 38, 39, 44.
87
On producerism and cultural regeneration as themes in the New School and Whitney murals, see Doss,
pp. 87, 92.
88
See Polcari, Abstract Expressionism, pp. 9-10, 16.
89
NS, p. 183.
90
NS, pp. 170-71.
91
CR, vol. 4, doc. 11, p. 211, letter from Jackson to Charles Pollock, Fall 1931.
92
Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America, 4th rev. ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983),
p. 332. Also see NS pp. 164-65.
93
Axel Horn, "Jackson Pollock: The Hollow and the Bump," Carleton Miscellany (Summer 1966), p. 82.
See NS, p. 186.
94
On conflicting definitions of “regionalism,” Benton’s understanding of it aligned with Lewis Mumford’s
definition, stressing the essential importance of linking localized contemporary social, geographic and
economic cultures, and the opposite and restrictive understanding of it derived from the Southern
Agrarians’ promotion of the regional culture of the rural South, used in the art world to pinhole Benton’s
art, see Doss, pp. 93-94.
95
CR, vol. 4, doc. 52, p. 232, “Jackson Pollock: A Questionnaire,” Arts and Architecture, Feb. 1944. See
O'Connor, "Genesis," diss., p. 168.
96
CR, vol. 4, fig. 1, p. 203.
97
NS, pp. 191-92.
98
CR, vol. 4, doc. 21, p. 217, letter from Benton to Pollock, undated.
99
Benton to O'Connor, March 31, l964, quoted in O'Connor, "Genesis," diss., p. 1 51.
100
Benton, An Artist in America, pp. 338-39.
101
Benton, quoted in Barbara Rose, "Painters of a flaming vision: El Greco and Jackson Pollock," Vogue,
Dec. l981, p. 334.
102
See NS, pp. 105-10.
 497

103
Interview with Cooter, NS, pp. 112-13. See, e. g. CR 51, c. 1934-38; CR 52, c. 1934-38, CR 53, c.
1934-38; CR 925, c. 1939; CR 521v, c. 1939-40.
104
In a ceramic bowl CR 918, c. 1934 Pollock depicted a cowboy shooting his beautiful but lame horse; in
the paintings CR 51, CR 52, CR 53, all c. 1934-38 he depicted in the first two horses galloping free, in the
third a human attempting to hold back a rearing horse.
105
O'Connor concurs; Jackson Pollock: The Black Pourings, 1950-53, exh. cat. (Boston: Institute of
Contemporary Art, 1980), p. 13.
106
Quoted in Potter, p. 203. On Pollock's mother-anxiety, see Landau, p. 112.
107
CR, vol. 4, doc. 12, p. 212, letter from Jackson to his father, Feb. 1932.
108
Ibid.
109
NS, pp. 31, 37.
110
In early 1933 Jackson entered for a brief unsatisfactory time John Sloan's class in Life Drawing,
Painting, and Composition, soon switched to Robert Laurent's clay modeling class, only to quit that, too, in
March, to work full time with Ben-Shmuel. On Ben-Shmuel see NS, pp. 237, 241-43.
111
NS, p. 242.
112
Ahron Ben-Shmuel, "Carving: A Sculptor's Creed," American Magazine of Art, 1938-39, p. 508;
quoted in NS, p. 243.
113
Kadish, quoted in Potter, p. 39. On Pollock's friendship with Kadish, see NS, p. 202.
114
O'Connor and Thaw date the stone mask c. 1930-33; however, I concur with NS, p. 243, in dating it to
1933, after Roy Pollock's death. Kadish says Pollock carved the head in Pennsylvania (Potter, p. 45). Ben-
Shmuel had his summer place in Pennsylvania, which Jackson visited late in the spring through May; he
spent the rest of that summer with a friend, the artist Richard Davis, in the Poconos, NS, p. 245. For
resemblance to father, see c. 1932-33 photograph in CR, vol. 4, p. 215.
115
"I am devoting all my time to sculpture now -- cutting in stone during the day and modeling at night -- it
holds my interest deeply -- I like it better than painting . . ." Letter from Jackson to Stella, Sande, and Jay,
March 25, 1933, CR, vol. 4, doc. 19, pp. 216-17.
116
Axel Horn, quoted in NS, p. 243.
117
Laurance P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1989), pp. 6-7.
118
Benton, An American in Art, p. 61.
119
Charles' letter to Jackson mentions an article on Rivera in Creative Art, January 1929, on Orozco in The
Arts, October 1927, on Benton in Creative Art, December 1928 (quoted NS, p. 143). See CR, vol. 4, doc.
6, p. 208, letter from Jackson to Charles and Frank Pollock, Oct. 22, 1929.
120
Diego Rivera, "The Revolution in Painting," Creative Art, vol. 4, no. 1 (Jan. l929), p. xxx.
121
Lehman, conversation with Robert Storr, 1998, quoted in Storr, “A Piece of the Action,” Jackson
Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p.
43.
122
O'Connor, "Genesis," Artforum, p. 23, note 13.
123
Dore Ashton, Yes, but ...: a critical study of Philip Guston (New York: Viking Press, 1976), p. 34.
124
The Workers Struggle for Liberty is the title used by James Oles, Walls to paint on: American muralists
in Mexico, 1933-36 (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995), pp. 357-58; Triumph of Good Over Evil is used by
Jean Fitzgerald, A Finding Aid to the Reuben Kadish Papers, 1851-1995, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1999, Box 7, Reel 5660; The Struggle Against War and
Fascism is used by Helen Landau in her paper “Time and Ideology in Guston and Kadish's The Struggle
Against War and Fascism,” 30th Intl. Congress of the History of Art, London, England (Sept. 2000).
125
On Kadish and Sande helping Siqueiros, see Landau, p. 46.
126
See Oles, pp. 341 ff.
127
Guston reported these opinions in a letter to Harold Lehman, July 14, 1934. Quoted in Oles, pp. 336-37.
128
Letter from Kadish to Feitelson, Dec 11, 1934, Lorser Feitelson archive, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., Reel 1103.
129
For overview of Post Surrealism, see Michael Duncan, “American Surrealism Outside of NY:
Membership Open,” Surrealism USA, exh. cat. (New York: National Academy Museum, 2005), and
Michael Duncan, “Post Surrealism, exh. cat. (Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University,
2002).
 498

130
On cinematic montage, see Grace Clements, “New Content - New Form,” Art Front, vol. 11 (March
1936), pp. 8-9, quoted in Post Surrealism, p. 13. On cinema and the diagrammatic, see Duncan, “American
Surrealism Outside of NY,” p. 39.
131
Feitelson, “Notes on Genesis II,” (1934) in Post Surrealism, p. 16.
132
Peter Busa, quoted in NS, p. 298, and Tony Smith, Interview with James Valliere, August 1965, in Such
Desperate Joy; Imagining Jackson Pollock, ed. Helen A. Harrison (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,
2000), p. 226.
133
On seeing Orozco at work, see Ashton, p. 26. On trip with Charles, see NS, pp. 152-53.
134
In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche celebrates Prometheus as creator by addressing Aeschylus'
Prometheus. "In himself the Titanic artist found the defiant faith that he had the ability to create men and at
least destroy the Olympian gods. ... The splendid 'ability' of the great genius for which eternal suffering is
a slight price, the stern pride of the artist -- that is the content and soul of Aeschylus' poem ...." Nietzsche
cites Goethe's Prometheus: “Here I sit, forming men/ in my own image,/ a race to be like me,/ to suffer, to
weep,/ to delight and to rejoice,/ and to defy you,/ as I do.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and
The Case of Wagner, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 69-70. On Orozco
and Nietzsche, see Renato Gonzalez Mello, “Mysticism, Revolution, Millennium, Painting,” in Jose
Clemente Orozco: Prometheus, ed. Marjorie L. Harth (Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Perpetua Press for
Pomona College Museum of Art, 2001), pp. 50-52, and Emily S. Hamblen, “Notes on Orozco’s Murals,”
Creative Art, vol. 4, no. 1, January 1929, and How to Understand the Philosophy of Nietzsche (Haldeman-
Julius Co., 1923). For reading of the Prometheus at Pomona as Nietzschean hero, see Jacqueline Barnitz,
“Los Anos délficos de Orozco,” in Orozco, una lectura (Mexico: UNAM-Instituto de Investigaciones
Estéticas, 1983), pp. 110-11.
135
Alma Reed, "Orozco and Mexican Painting," Creative Art, vol. 11, Sept. l931, p. 203.
136
Landau, p. 48.
137
In 1929 Benton had arranged for an exhibition of Orozco's work at the Art Students League. After this
Orozco was a popular figure around the League. O'Connor, "Genesis," diss., p 177.
138
James T. Valliere, Interview with Sanford McCoy, August 1973, Archives of American Art, Microfilm
Roll 3047, frame 660. Also see NS, pp. 290, 298, 843. On persuading Guston, see Ashton, p. 32.
139
Letter of Guston to Harold Lehman, July 14, 1934, in Ashton, p. 31.
140
O'Connor, "Genesis," diss., p. 180. This drawing is from Sketchbook III in which Pollock recorded
some of his first responses to Orozco.
141
On Sande’s marriage, see NS, pp. 290, 293, 295.
142
O'Connor points out that Pollock's birth trauma, choked by the cord, is symbolized over and over in the
imagery of the Henderson drawings and the works related to them of 1939-42 by the recurrent motif of the
snake, or a rope-like shape, on or about the heads and necks of figures. He cites CR 1:63 and 71 in CR3:
489,525, 531, 533v, 557, 580r, 588, 592, 602, 615, 620, and 636 for the most explicit instances. I add CR
477r. See O'Connor, Jackson Pollock: The Black Pourings, p. 9.
143
On the permanent Orozco room with an ongoing display of Orozco's current work, including sketches
for murals, maintained in Alma Reed’s The Delphic Studios, Orozco’s New York Gallery, see Alma Reed,
Orozco (New York: Oxford University Press, l956 ), pp. 107, 190-202. Since the records for the Delphic
Studios gallery were destroyed at Reed’s death, we cannot know precisely what Pollock may have seen.
An exhibition of Orozco's works at the Hudson Dean Walker Gallery in New York in the fall of l939 and
the subsequent appearance of Orozco himself again in New York City in the summer of l940 to paint a
fresco on six moveable panels, The Dive Bomber, for the Museum of Modern Art, in conjunction with its
exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, would further dramatize his work and importance.
144
O'Connor, "Genesis," diss., p. 179.
145
Dr. Violet de Laszlo, Letter to author, March 14, l973.
146
O'Connor also relates CR 924 to Orozco's Man of Fire Dome, CR, vol.3, p.15.
147
See Stephen Polcari "Jackson Pollock and Thomas Hart Benton," Arts Magazine, vol. 53, March 1979,
pp. 120-24, and Polcari, Abstract Exptressionism, pp. 252-53.
148
Horn, p. 81.
149
Benton, "The Mechanics of Form Organization," The Arts, Part IV, Feb. 1927, p. 96.
150
See CR, vol. 3, CR 434r entry, p. 44.
151
Thomas Hart Benton, letter to O'Connor, cited in O'Connor, "Genesis," Artforum, p. 17. "occidental"
was erroneously spelled "accidental" in the original text. See letter by O'Connor, Artforum, vol. 5, Summer
1967, p. 5. A fellow student at the League recalls that Pollock's drawings were much admired. "They were
 499

so individual. They had tremendous energy. Everyone talked about them." Quoted in Dorothy Seiberling,
“A Shy and Turbulent Man Who Became a Myth.” in Such Desperate Joy, p. 59. When Kadish visited in
New York in the late 1930s, he saw that “Jackson’s self-confidence had begun to coalesce because various
people thought that he had a helluva lot on the ball." Interview with Kadish, quoted in NS, p. 283.
Burgoyne Diller, the supervisor of the mural division for the WPA, even thought he was one of most
talented artists on the Project. Interview with Jack Tworkov, April 17, 1964, quoted in O'Connor,
"Genesis," diss., p. 78.
152
For study of their relationship, see Jürgen Harten, Siqueiros/Pollock, Pollock/Siqueiros, exh. cat.
(Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Dumont Press, 1995).
153
Described in Bernard S. Myers, Mexican Painting in Our Time (New York: Oxford University Press,
l956), p. 118.
154
Interview with Kadish, quoted in NS, p. 219.
155
Kadish, quoted in NS, p. 285.
156
See photo of preparing for May Day Parade in CR, vol. 4, fig. 16, p. 22O. In a letter dated Dec. l936
addressed to "Comrades: Pollack, Sandy, Lehman" Siqueiros, referring to "our initial movement to further
the understanding of the people about our technique," speaks of his being "at more unrest with the problems
of form in art than ever." CR, vol. 4, doc. 23, p. 219.
157
David A. Siqueiros, "Towards a Transformation of the Plastic Arts," (1934) in Art in Theory 1900-
1990: Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Cambridge, U.S.A.: Blackwell,
1992), p. 412.
158
NS, p. 288.
159
NS, p. 286.
160
Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, (New York, Penguin Books, 1979), p. 67.
161
Interview with Merwin Jules, in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York:
McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 38
162
Interview with Kadish, quoted in NS, p. 286.
163
Interview with Lehman, NS, p. 281.
164
Interview with Axel Horn, NS, p. 287.
165
Bernice Rose has pointed out that the spattering in the lithograph Figures in a Landscape CR1O68-P12
(c. l937) is a reflection of Siqueiros' influence. Rose, Jackson Pollock: Works on Paper, (New York,
Museum of Modern Art and the Drawing Society, 1969), p. 14.
166
Kadish, Interview with author, May 15, 1980. Contrary to statement in NS, p. 281 that both Guston and
Kadish came to New York in fall 1935, a letter dated August 27, 1935 from Guston to Kadish in San
Francisco, indicates that only Guston came to New York in late September 1935 (Ashton, Yes, but . . ., p.
32). Kadish did, however, make at least one trip to New York in the late 1930’s (Fitzgerald, A Finding Aid
to the Reuben Kadish Papers, Biographical Note), and the Naifeh and Smith interviews do suggest that he
spent considerable time in New York in the late twenties.
167
Landau points to Orozco's Prometheus as a source of inspiration for The Flame, p. 47. In the 1936
Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art Pollock could have seen
plate XI from Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job, which was also illustrated in the catalogue: "With
dreams upon my bed, Thou scarest me and affrightest me with Visions." That Blake was an additional
source for Pollock's embrace of the Romantic visionary tradition is suggested by the fact that he had an
illustration of a work by Blake tacked to his Long Island studio wall. Virginia Allen, consultant for the
Pollock catalogue raisonné, conversation with Judith Wolfe, in Wolfe, "Jungian Aspects of Jackson
Pollock's Imagery," Artforum, Nov. 1972, p. 73, n. 16
168
Horn, p. 87.
169
Lee Krasner, Interview with author, May 2, 1975.
170
Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings,
Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth
abbreviated as CR], vol. 1, p. 60, date Birth CR 77 to c. 1938-41. I agree with the tightening of the date to
c. 1941 in Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, Jackson Pollock (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1998),
p. 159.
171
On Demoiselles as one of Pollock's favorite paintings, see Judith Wolfe, “Jungian Aspects of Jackson
Pollock's Imagery," Artforum, Nov. l972, p. 73, n. 18, and Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who was
Jackson Pollock?" Art in America, May-June 1967, p. 58. The Demoiselles was shown in the l939
exhibition of Picasso's work at the Museum of Modern Art, acquired by the Museum in the same year, and
 500

exhibited in the Museum's Masterpieces of Picasso in July - September l941. William Rubin also points to
Pollock's challenge in Birth to the Demoiselles; however, he sees the focus of the challenge in the influence
of the Eskimo mask that Graham illustrated in his l937 article. See Kirk Varnedoe, "Abstract
Expressionism," 'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art, ed. W. Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
l984), p. 641.
172
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., ed., Picasso: Forty Years of his Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939), p.
60. The exhibition catalogue was in Pollock's library, CR, vol. 4, p. 189.
173
On these similarities, see Wolfe, p. 66.
174
CR, vol. 4, doc. 1O2b, p. 263. Lee Krasner, Interview with B. H. Friedman, in W. S. Lieberman,
Jackson Pollock: Black and White (New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, 1969). Krasner and Pollock
moved to East Hampton in November 1945.
175
Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p.
102. For an overview of American artists' response to the rising crisis of World War II and the consequent
"intense determination to reshape life and society," see Steven Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the
Modern Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 16-20.
176
Robert Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's World," Dyn, no. 6, Nov. 1944, p. 11.
177
Lee Krasner, Interview with Barbara Rose, July 31, 1966, quoted in Steven Naifeh and Gregory White
Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated
as NS], p. 386.
178
Ellen G. Landau, "Lee Krasner: A Study of Her Early Career (1926-1949)," Ph.D. thesis, Newark:
University of Delaware, 1981, quoted in NS, p. 406.
179 "How a disturbed genius talked to his analyst with art," Medical World News, February 5, 1971, p. 18.
Dr. Henderson writes in a letter: "It sounded as if I had set Pollock the task of portraying the unconscious
in these drawings. This was not the case. He was already drawing them, and when I found it out, I asked
for them." Letter to B.H. Friedman, Nov. 11, 1969, quoted in Friedman, Jackson Pollock (New York:
McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 41.
180
Some of these associations derive from a childhood incident. Jack was with Stella driving a buggy into
Phoenix, when a huge bull charged. The horse reared, overturning the buggy and throwing Stella and Jack
to the ground. Although they were quickly rescued, the incident so traumatized the five-year-old Jackson
that he had vivid nightmares of terrifying bulls and terror-stricken horses for the rest of his life; Interview
with Roger Wilcox, NS, pp. 69, 815. For Frank Pollock's memory of the incident, see Jeffrey Potter, To a
Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), p. 24.
181
Fritz Bultman, Interview with author, March 25, l973. In addition to being shown at the Valentine
gallery in early 1939, Guernica and the some sixty studies for it were illustrated in the Cahiers d'Art, vol.
12, nos. 4-5, l937, readily available in New York.
182
Rudolf Arnheim, The Genesis of a Painting: Picasso's Guernica (Berkeley: University of California,
1962), pp. 10-11.
183
Ibid., p. 82.
184
See NS, pp. 323-25.
185
On Marot as teacher, social activist, and friend to Jungians, see Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract
Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940's (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp.
143-47.
186
Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life, (New York: Dial, 1982), p. 247, quoted in Leja, p. 145.
187
Marot's last manuscript, which summarized her ideas on psychology, "Oneself: A Story of Arrested
Growth and Development," quoted in NS, p. 325.
188
Cary Baynes was a Bollingen Press editor in close contact with the Analytical Psychology Club of New
York. On the Analytical Psychology Club of New York and its founders, see Leja, pp. 146-47. Henderson
had just written a preface to the reprinted edition of Cary Baynes’ husband’s book Mythology of the Soul
(1940). On the connections of Marot, the Baynes, Henderson, see Leja, pp.145, 173.
189
See NS, pp. 327-28.
190
"How a disturbed genius," p. 25. There are eight major sources for Henderson's comments on Pollock:
1. Dr. Henderson's essay, "Jackson Pollock: A Psychological Commentary" (1968), published in
part in C. L. Wysuph, Jackson Pollock: Psychoanalytic Drawings (New York: Horizon Press, 1970); in
"How a disturbed genius talked to his analyst with art," Medical World News, Feb. 5, 1971; in Friedman,
Jackson Pollock (1972), pp. 41-44.
 501

2. Interview with Dr. Henderson, in "How a disturbed genius," Medical World News, February 5,
1971.
3. Joseph L. Henderson, Thresholds of Initiation (Middleton, Conn: Wesleyan University Press,
1967). The anonymous patient of the text, as Henderson has acknowledged to the author, is Pollock.
4. Letter from Dr. Henderson to B. H. Friedman, Nov. 11, 1969, quoted in Friedman, Jackson
Pollock (1972), p. 41.
5. Letter from Dr. Henderson to Donald Gordon, Dec. 11, 1979, quoted in Donald Gordon,
"Pollock's 'Bird,' or How Jung Did Not Offer Much Help in Myth-Making," Art in America, Oct. 1980, pp.
43-53.
6. Dr. Henderson, Interview with author, August 13, 1974.
7. Interview with "The Source," in Potter. Potter, p. 58, explains: "In deference to patient
confidentiality, Dr. Henderson has declined to discuss Jackson's case for publication. The comments below
are by a professional source close to the case."
8. Interview with Dr. Henderson, in NS, c.1989.
191
"How a disturbed genius," p. 28.
192
In Psychological Types, which appeared in an English translation in 1923 by none other than Helton
Godwin Baynes, C. G. Jung put forward his theory of fantasy in the service of individuation. On Jung's
Psychological Types or Marot as sources for this notation, see Leja, pp. 151-52.
193
C.G. Jung, Psychological Types, a revision by F. C. Hull of the translation by H. G. Baynes (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XX, 1971), p. 428.
194
Ibid., p. 432.
195
On Post Surrealist interest in Jung’s demand for relationship of conscious values to the materials of the
unconscious, see Diane Moran, “Post-Surrealism: The Art of Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg,” Arts
Magazine, Dec. 1982, p. 128, n. 5.
196
Jeffrey Potter, ‘Jackson Pollock: Fragments of conversations and statements. Selected, extracted and
categorized, from his own notes (1949-56),” in Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock, ed. Helen
A. Harrison (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 88.
197
Henderson, letter to Donald Gordon, Dec. 11, 1979, quoted in Gordon, p. 44. See also Wysuph, p. 19.
198
Lee Krasner, Interview with Judith Wolfe, April 25, 1972, in Wolfe, p. 73, n. 10.
199
CR, vol. 4, doc. 113, p. 275, from Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-
Adair, 1957).
200
Henderson, letter to B. H. Friedman, Nov. 11, 1969, quoted in Friedman, p. 41. Contradicting this
letter, Henderson later stated to Gordon, "My treatment was supportive and I did not consciously discuss
Jung or Jungian theories with him." Quoted in Gordon, p. 44 Explaining this reversal of position,
Cernuschi points to Lee Krasner's intervening lawsuit against Hendenson for having violated the privacy of
his patient, when in 1969 he sold the drawings that Pollock had brought to him during the course of the
analysis. Henderson eventually won the case, based on the argument that the drawings were, as art,
autonomous and therefore irrelevant to the analytic sessions. Claude Cernuschi, Jackson Pollock: Meaning
and Significance (New York: Icon Edition, 1993), p. 65. While Dr. de Laszlo makes clear that she offered
a similar supportive treatment, she also offers contradictory statements about the discussion of archetypes.
In a letter to the author, March 17, 1973, describing the use that she made of the drawings that Pollock
frequently brought her, she writes "…. after we looked at them in silence, with only a few interpretative
remarks on my part, some allusions from various mythologies, I did speak of archetypes. Jackson was very
intelligent and I felt that he made himself receptive, we had a warm underground rapport one might say."
In a 1980 interview with Gordon, she stated, "We rarely discussed abstract concepts; nor do I recollect
discussing archetypes since I wished to avoid intellectualization ...." Gordon, p. 44. See also Leja , p. 150.
201
"How a disturbed genius," p. 28. As Leja points out (p. 173), Henderson's approach was in accord with
that of his friend H. G. Baynes. See Henderson, Preface to Mythology of the Soul (London: Bailliere,
Tindall and Cox, 1940), especially p. xii.
202
"How a disturbed genius," p. 28.
203
Gordon, p. 51, n. 18.
204
Joseph Henderson, “Jackson Pollock: Notes concerning the nature of his drawings and his art therapy”
[excerpts from an interview by Jeffrey Potter], in Such Desperate Joy, p. 85. The content of this interview
was published in the voice of "The Source" in Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 59.
205
Diego Rivera, "The Revolution in Painting," Creative Art, January l929, p. xxx.
 502

206
See Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes, (New York: Harcourt
Brace and Co., 1934), pp. 191, 195-98 and Psychology and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1938), pp. 6-7, 58-59. On Jung's concept of psychic collectivity and the visionary artist, see Polcari, pp.
43-45.
207
Jung, Psychological Types, p. 478.
208
Helen G. Henley, "What will become of our values?" The Psychological Aspects of the War, read Dec.,
1939, Papers of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York City (New York: Analytical Psychology
Club of New York, 1940), p. 10.
209
M. Esther Harding, "Totalitarianism," The Psychological Aspects of the War, read Dec., 1939, Papers
of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York City (New York: Analytical Psychology Club of New
York, 1940), p. 23. For an extensive discussion of "Jung and the Psychomythic Quest" and its general
importance for Abstract Expressionism, see Polcari, ibid.. Polcari asserts, "The artists' use of their
psychology is at least as much a social and public act as a primarily private and personal one," p. 45.
Arguing for Pollock’s commitment to the social function of shamanism, Polcari elaborates this position in
his essay, “L’Impact de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale,” in Jackson Pollock et le chamanism, exh. cat. (Paris:
Pinacothèque de Paris, 2008), pp. 39-41. On the other hand, Michael Leja dramatizes what he understands
as an increasing polarization of psyche and society, reviewing the turn of "Modern Man discourse" to the
irrational, mystical, and spiritual in the late 1930's, and the cultural critique this turn provoked. See Leja,
pp. 231-43.
210
Harding, "Totalitarianism," p. 22.
211
"What interested him [Dr. Henderson] was how artists 'fit the Jungian package.’" Interview with "Name
withheld by request," NS, p. 329.
212
On presentation to meetings, "How a disturbed genius," p. 25.
213
Henderson, "A Psychological Commentary," quoted in Friedman, p. 41.
214
Henderson, quoted in Wysuph, p. 13.
215
Henderson, Thresholds of Initiation, pp. 108-111. For his description of this drawing as an example of
extreme introversion, see Henderson, quoted in Wysuph, p. 15.
216
Henderson, "A Psychological Commentary," in "How a disturbed genius," p. 25.
217
Interview with Dr. Henderson, in ibid., p. 28.
218
Henderson, quoted in Wysuph, p. 16.
219
Henderson, Thresholds of Initiation, p. 109.
220
Henderson, quoted in Wysuph, p. 17. Stephen Polcari interprets this drawing as revealing Pollock’s
self-conscious embrace of the idea of shamanism. See Polcari, “L’Idée du chamanisme de Jackson
Pollock,” in Jackson Pollock et le chamanism, pp. 28, 32. I disagree with this narrow interpretation and
insist on the inclusion of Henderson’s psychological insights.
221
Henderson, Thresholds of Initiation, p. 111. Henderson saw Pollock's relationship with his mother as
central to his difficulties; quoted in Wysuph, p. 17.
222
Henderson, letter to B.H. Friedman, 11 Nov. 1969, quoted in Friedman, p. 41.
223
De Laszlo, interview with Gordon, quoted in Gordon, p. 44.
224
Carl G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1939), pp. 41-42.
225
Ibid., p. 40. According to Reuben Kadish, Pollock "was reading Jung, no doubt in my mind about
that." W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural
Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 173, personal communication with Kadish, Sept.
24, 1986. On Pollock as reader of Jung, see Leja, pp. 141, 147, 153.
226
CR, vol. 4, doc. 40, p. 226, letter from Sande to Charles Pollock, July 1941. In the summer of 1940, the
summer in which he ended his sessions with Henderson, Jackson himself wrote Charles: "I haven't much to
say about my work and things -- only that I have been going thru violent changes the past couple of years.
God knows what will come out of it all -- it's pretty negative stuff so far"; CR, vol. 4, doc. 38, p. 225.
“Negative stuff” probably refers to such works as Composition with Woman CR 65, Composition with
Donkey Head CR 61, and Naked Man With Knife CR 60, all dated c. 1938-41. CR 531, the drawing that
Henderson felt indicated "a pathological form of introversion" (see fig. 2.9) is a study related to
Composition with Woman. CR 548 (see fig. 2.5) is a study for the left hand portion of Composition with
Donkey Head CR 61 (c. 1938-41).
227
Henderson, quoted in Bernice Rose, Jackson Pollock Works on Paper: Suggestions for a Chronology --
An Annotated Worklist, Qualifying Paper, New York University, 1967, notes, p. 10. On Henderson's
 503

recognition of influence of Picasso and Orozco on Pollock's drawings, see Henderson, "A Psychological
Commentary," in Friedman, p. 41.
228
See Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), pp. 51, 60.
229
Fritz Bultman recalls Pollock's interest in the early 1940s in the Dartmouth murals and the Aztec
plumed serpent and Violet de Laszlo remembers his strong identification with Orozco. Fritz Bultman,
Interviews with author, March 22, 1973 and Feb. 1, 1980; De Laszlo, Letter to author, March 14, 1973.
230
See George Vaillant, Indian Arts in North America (New York, l939), plate 17; and F. H. Douglas and
R. d'Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the United States (New York, 1941; rpt. Arno Press, 1969), ill. p. 71.
Bultman and Dr. de Laszlo recall Pollock attending the "Indian Art of the United States" exhibition.
Bultman, Interview with Rushing, in W. Jackson Rushing, "Ritual and Myth: Native American Culture and
Abstract Expressionism," in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, exh. cat., Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, 1986 (New York: Abbeville Publishers, 1986), p. 282; Interview with Dr. de
Laszlo, in Donald E. Gordon, "Pollock's Bird, or How Jung Did Not Offer Much Help in Myth-Making,"
Art in America, Oct. 1980, pp. 48-49.
231
Orozco, quoted in Dartmouth College news release, May 25, 1932.
232
Kadish also addresses the parallel between the relationship of African art and Cubism, and that of
Indian art and American art of the 1940s. Kadish, personal communication with Rushing, Sept. 24, 1986,
quoted in W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of
Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 232, n. 90. In January l941 Art News
had dramatized the art historical importance of the Demoiselles, as containing the germ of Cubism and
demonstrating the impact of African sculpture on its creation. Pollock's desire to challenge the French was
rooted in attitudes shaped by Benton and his supporter Thomas Craven. See Landau, p. 250, n. 9.
233
For his excellent discussion of this trend, I am indebted to Rushing, chapter 4, pp. 97-120.
234
Nicolas Calas, “Mexico Brings Us Art,” View, vol. 1, Sept. 1940, p. 2.
235
Rene d’Harnoncourt, in Douglas and d’Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the United States, p. 8.
236
On Pollock's purchase of these volumes, see O'Connor, "Genesis," diss., p. 34, n. 9. The twelve
volumes are listed in Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue
Raisonne of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1978) [henceforth abbreviated as CR], vol. 4, p. 192.
237
Interview with Ossorio, in Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who was Jackson Pollock?" Art in
America, vol. 55, May-June 1967, p. 58. According to Ossorio Pollock owned fifteen volumes.
238
Bultman, Interview with Rushing, quoted in W. Jackson Rushing, "Ritual and Myth," p. 292.
239
Conversation of Sara L. Henry with Dr. Frederick Dockstoder, Director, Museum of the American
Indian, noted in Henry, "Paintings and Statements of Mark Rothko (and Adolph Gottlieb), 1941 to 1949:
Basis of the Mythological Phase of Abstract Expressionism," unpublished Master's Thesis (New York
University, New York, 1966), ch. 4, n. 42.
240
Interview with Ossorio, in du Plessix and Gray, "Who was Jackson Pollock?" ibid., p. 58. On
“experential indoctrination,” see Jeffrey Weiss, "Science and Primitivism: A Fearful Symmetry in the Early
New York School, " Arts, March 1983, p. 82. For the state of the exhibition halls in the late 1930s, when
Pollock's art first shows the influence of primitive art, see Roy Waldo Miner, ed., Exhibition Halls of the
American Museum of Natural History (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1939). On the
poetic allure of the vast gallery devoted to Indians of the North Pacific Coast, see the writing of Claude
Levi-Strauss, "The Art of the North West Coast at the American Museum of Natural History," Gazette des
Beaux-Arts, vol. 24, Sept. 1943, p. 175.
241
Bultman, Interview with Rushing, quoted in Rushing, ibid., p. 282. Bultman reported that he and
Pollock "went everywhere looking at Indian art."
242
See James T. Valliere, Interview with Reuben Kadish, 1965, Jackson Pollock Papers, Archives of
American Art, Microfilm Roll 3048, frame 834, and Interview with Kadish, NS, p. 281.
243
NS, p. 85.
244
Frank Pollock, quoted in NS, p. 84.
245
Interview with Frank Pollock, NS, p. 85.
246
James T. Valliere, Interview with Tony Smith, August 1965, Jackson Pollock Papers, Archives of
American Art, Microfilm Roll 3047, frame 803-804. On friendship with Smith, see NS, p. 562.
247
See Gareth S. Hill, "J. L. H.: His Life and His Work," in The Shaman from Elko (San Francisco: C. G.
Institute of San Francisco, 1978), p. 10.
 504

248
Henderson, "A Psychological Commentary," in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 42.
249
Henderson, "Initiation rites," Papers of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York, vol. 3 (New
York: Analytical Psychology Club of New York, 1939), pp. 11-12. The paper was read April 14, 1939 and
is on file at Kristine Mann Library, New York. This paper Pollock might have looked at, as it appears as an
item on his list of Jungian papers. For list, see Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism:
Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 150-51. Henderson
wrote particularly on snake symbolism in "A Question of Space," a short contribution to the Analytical
Psychology Club of New York's Bulletin in early 1939. As noted by Leja, p. 154, Henderson contributed
to Baynes' understanding of the snake symbolism in the Hopi snake-dance ritual in Mythology of the Soul
(1940).
250
For a well illustrated article focusing on the plumed serpent symbol and its diffusion through the
Americas, which Pollock probably knew as it appears in a publication related to “The Exposition of Indian
Tribal Arts,” see Herbert J. Spinden," Indian Symbolism," in F. W. Hodge, Oliver La Farge, and Herbert J.
Spinden, eds., Introduction to American Indian Art (New York: The Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts,
1931), Part II, pp. 7-17.
251
In Head Landau, pp. 76-77, also points to Pollock's "arrogation of Picasso's subjective engagement with
the Minotaur," noting, however, only "a devouring snake" and the disembodied eye as contributing to the
"haunted" image.
252
Henderson, “Minotaur,” Bulletin of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York, March 1940, pp. 4-5.
"Picasso Postscript Exhibition" was held at the Bucholz Gallery.
253
The female nose is marked by nostrils (openings), while the male nose is a protruding shape. The
female lips seem fuller and softer than those of the male; Judith Wolfe, "Jungian Aspects of Jackson
Pollock's Imagery," Artforum, Nov. l972, p. 68.
254
De Laszlo reports that they spoke of American Indian images in their analytic sessions and that she had
spent extended periods in the exhibition as well. See Interview with Dr. de Laszlo, in Donald E. Gordon,
"Pollock's Bird," pp. 48-49. Considering "the conceptual and compositional affinities" between Bird and
CR 589 c. 1941-42 and CR 590 c. 1941-42, Landau, pp. 65-66, dates Bird to 1941. For further discussion
of these drawings, see Langhorne, “Pollock, Picasso and the Primitive,” Art History, March 1989, p. 72.
255
On totem pole, see Jeanette Lowe, "Lo, the Rich Indian: Art of the American Aboriginals," Art News,
vol. 39, Feb. 1, 1941, p. 7. Cf. Rushing, Native American Art, p. 109.
256
On reproduction at the Museum of Modern Art, see R. d'Harnoncourt, "Living Arts of the Indians,"
Magazine of Art, February 1941, pp. 72, 76, and Rushing, ibid., pp. 110-11.
257
That spiraling circular motifs in Hopi art often signified a bird Pollock would already have known from
the many and handsome color reproductions of Hopi pottery designs illustrated in one of his Smithsonian
volumes, in Jesse Walter Fewkes, "Archaelogical Expedition to Arizona," Annual Report, Bureau of
American Ethnology of Smithsonian Institution, vol. 17, part II, 1895-6, pp. 519-742. Since as a boy
Pollock had played in Indian ruins in Arizona outside of Phoenix, he probably would have been particularly
interested in Fewkes' article, and by the Hopi murals at the Museum.
258
See Fewkes, pp. 687-8, 739.
259
Douglas and d'Harnoncourt, pp. 18, 96; d'Harnoncourt, p. 76. In the installation of the exhibition
Douglas and d'Harnoncourt, as stated on p. 11, made a point of combining aesthetic and ethnographic
approaches to the objects.
260
See Rushing, "Ritual and Myth," p. 282. The use of sand in paintings is not without precedent. The
Cubists used foreign substances such as sand and coffee grounds in their paintings to give them a raised,
slightly abrasive look. John Graham also used sand or plaster in the paint for a denser texture, a technique
that Jan Matulka taught; see E. Kokkinen, "John Graham during the l940's," Arts Magazine, Nov. l976, p.
100. The Surrealists also used sand, for example, Masson Painting l927, Ernst Birds l926-27, etc.
261
Mrs. Stevenson describes how the sandpaintings, created in the kivas, are used in rain invocation
ceremonies and in healing and initiatory rituals by the snake and antelope societies; Mrs. Stevenson, "The
Sia," Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology of Smithsonian Institution, vol. 11, 1889-90, p. 40.
Pliney Earle Goddard, in the second pamphlet of the American Museum of Natural History handbook
series, summarizes these rituals. See Indians of the Southwest (Glorieta, New Mexico: The Rio Grande
Press, 1976), a reprint of the 1913 ed. published by the American Museum of Natural History, New York,
issued as number 2 of the Museum Handbook Series, pp. 117-24. Another possible early source of
 505

Pollock's knowledge of sandpainting is Laura Armer's essay on "Sandpainting of the Navajo Indians," in
the 1931 catalogue Introduction to American Indian Art, Part II, p. 6.
262
The diorama is illustrated in R. W. Miner, ed., Exhibition Halls, p. 126. Spinden noted, "The Night
Chant of the Navajo and the Hako of the Omaha will take their place in the foreland of our national
literature as mysterious and beautiful dramas which somehow prefigure the American ideal." See Spinden,
"Fine Art and the First Americans," Introduction to American Indian Art, Part II, p. 3. Goddard in his
handbook on the Southwest Indians quotes a prayer belonging to the Night Chant, embodying the
conjunction of the aesthetic, religious, and healing aspects of Navajo art; see Goddard, ibid., pp. 171-72.
Tony Smith remembered that Pollock read American Indian poetry. Tony Smith, Interview with author,
March 6, 1973.
263
Immediately following the Night Chant prayer, Goddard notes that the deities reverenced and the myths
related about them by the Athapascan tribes of the Southwest are in the main identical. "The sun is
probably credited with the greatest amount of power and is most frequently referred to in song and
addressed in prayer. … The Mescalero songs give the moon a place second only to that of the sun." Ibid.,
pp. 172-73.
264
Jung, who traveled among the Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico in 1924-25, points to
American Indian sand paintings as examples of mandalas representing integration; “Commentary,” The
Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, ed. Richard Wilhelm (New York: Causeway Books,
1975), p. 97. De Laszlo was particularly impressed with a drawing CR 634r/v that Pollock brought to her
in late 1941 and which she interpreted as a "redemption drawing." See Gordon, "Pollock's Bird," p. 53, n.
50, and p. 47. A number of motifs on this sheet relate to Bird -- on the front in the upper right the motif of
a bird, a rooster, and on the back in the upper left a motif in which two Indian figures are seen to either side
of a central vertical axis along which a luminous human figure "resurrects."
265
A. Barr, Jr., Picasso: Forty Years of his Art, New York, 1939, p. 185. For Pollock's ownership of the
catalogue, see CR, vol. 4, p. 189. Bultman and Motherwell testify to Pollock's interest in this image. Fritz
Bultman, Interviews with author, March 25, 1973, and Feb. 1, 1980, and Sidney Simon, "Concerning the
beginnings of the New York School: 1939-1943; An Interview with Robert Motherwell," Art International,
vol. 11, Summer 1967, p. 23.
266
See Gordon, ibid., p. 48. Motherwell recalls Pollock's political consciousness around 1942. "Pollock in
fact had very Leftist political views that seemingly had little to do with his art." Quoted in ibid..
267
W. Rubin, "Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological Criticism, Part I", Art in
America, Nov. 1979, p. 123, note 58. Cf. Landau, p. 65.
268
Reuben Kadish, Interview with author, May 15, 1980; Fritz Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1,
1980; Tony Smith, Interview with author, March 6, 1973; Langhorne, "Pollock, Picasso and the Primitive,"
Art History, March 1989, esp. pp. 78-82. See also Landau, pp. 58-63 and Rushing, "Ritual and Myth," pp.
281-95, and Native American Art, pp. 169-90.
269
These Haida objects were illustrated in P. E. Goddard, Indians of the Northwest Coast, New York,
1934, issued as No. 10 of American Museum of Natural History Handbook Series (rept. New York, 1972),
p. 118. Peter Busa, Pollock's friend since their days together as Benton students, remembers "Jack had a
feeling for the transformation that the mythology of Northwest Indians have -- a bird turns into a man or
something.” Busa, quoted in Potter, p. 89. Cf. Landau, p. 58. See Goddard on shamanism, p. 117 and on
Haida myths about the metamorphic journeying of Raven, pp. 134-35.
270
Deborah Solomon Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 33.
271
Axel Horn, "Jackson Pollock: The Hollow and the Hump," The Carleton Miscellany, vol. 7, no. 3
(Summer 1966), p. 82.
272
James O. Dorsey, "A Study of Siouan Cults," Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology of
Smithsonian Institution, vol. 11, 1889-90, p. 437. Bultman remembers that Pollock got his knowledge of
the shaman's dream vision from the Plains Indians. Fritz Bultman, Interview with Author, Feb. 1, 1980.
Dorsey’s article contains lengthy and gripping descriptions of vision seeking, sacrifice and self-torture, and
the sun dance of the Plains Indian Sioux tribe, pp. 435-37, 450, and pl. XLVI. No doubt the American
Museum of Natural History's installation explaining the sun dance, the vision quest, and shamanism in the
Hall of the Plains Indians also fascinated Pollock. See Miner, pp. 124-5, and C. Wissler, North American
Indians of the Plains, New York, 1934, issued as No. 1 of American Museum of Natural History Handbook
Series (rept. New York, 1974), especially pp. 111-12, 121-24.
273
Tony Smith, Interview with Author, March 6, 1973.
 506

274
In support of Pollock's "intense identification" with shamans and their trances, Landau points to the
Untitled drawing ("Dancing Shaman") 1939-40, and the bird aspect of Naked Man and Untitled c. 1942 (p.
58), to the "stages of the spiritual transformation of a meditating shaman" in two drawings, both Untitled
1941-42 (p. 66), to "the generation of a shaman's hallucinatory experience" in Birth (p. 60).
275
CR, vol. 4, doc. 7, pp. 208-09, letter from Jackson to Charles, Jan. 31, 1930.
276
Interview with Delaney, NS, p. 168. See also pp. 163-65.
277
Lee Krasner recollects that Pollock considered Naked Man to be akin to Bird; see Rubin, ibid.
278
Fritz Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980.
279
Bultman, aware both of Pollock’s involvement with shamanism and his Jungian therapy (in 1943
Bultman himself had several sessions in Jungian analysis with Dr. Bertine), linked the two. "Jackson really
wanted to be whole, healthy, in control. The shaman learns to control the unconscious -- which for Jackson
was the Indian dream vision." Fritz Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980. "Jungian analysis
allowed the images to flow." Fritz Bultman, Interview with author, March 25, 1973.
280
CR, vol. 4, doc. 52, p. 232, interview with Pollock, Arts and Architecture, Feb. 1944.
281
Kiva murals and Navaho sand paintings exhibit these two-dimensional and symbolic spatial properties
almost self-evidently. Pollock would also have found explanations of these properties in his Smithsonian
volumes. Fewkes describes the symbolism of the cardinal directions in an Awatovi kiva shrine and also in
a sandpainting of the Tusayan Snake society. See Fewkes, pp. 613, 681. The pervasiveness of the cult of
the four quarters is described by Dorsey, pp. 527-29. Numerous diagrams of the symbolic spatial
arrangements on the floors of ceremonial houses during different tribal rituals most immediately convey the
Indians' symbolic approach to the planar surface; see C. Mindeleff, "Navajo Houses," Annual Report,
Bureau of American Ethnology of Smithsonian Institution, vol. 17, Part II (1895-96), pp. 513-14, and A.
Fletcher, "The Hako: A Pawnee Ceremony," Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology of
Smithsonian Institution, vol. 22, Part II (1900-01), pp. 31-36, 283-85. See Herbert J. Spinden, "Indian
Symbolism," in Introduction to American Indian Art, Part II, p. 14, on the Toltec ceremonies with cosmic
patterns, special colors, animals, etc. For a recent discussion of approaches to space different from those of
the modern West, see the incisive description of the Navajo hogan and sandpaintings in terms of cardinality
in David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York:
Phaidon Press, 2003), pp. 125-27.
282
See Dorsey, ibid.; Fletcher, ibid., pp. 46, 289.
283
Sandra Kraskin, “The Indian Space Painters,” in Kraskin et al., Indian Space Painters: Native American
Sources for American Abstract Art, exh. cat. (New York: Baruch College Gallery, 1991), p. 15, as quoted
in Rushing, Native American Art, p. 137.
284
Ann Gibson, “Painting Outside the Paradigm: Indian Space,” Arts Magazine, vol. 57, February 1983,
pp. 98, 101-102, as quoted in Rushing, ibid, p. 138.
285
Here we can see evidence, early on in Pollock's work, of the two models of the unconscious, the
symbolic and the energic, which Leja understands as competing for Pollock's attention in his representation
of the unconscious. The mystical symbolic model, by in large Jungian, he understands as dominant in
Pollock's artistic efforts and thinking in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the energic model, by in large
Freudian, becoming increasingly important to Pollock during 1943 and especially in 1948-50. Leja, pp.
196-97. But attention to Pollock's earlier modernist work shows not so much a shift, as a confluence of the
symbolic and energic models from the start: the symbols and structure in Bird complement the more
spontaneous, automatist, abstract pictorial expression in Birth.
286
Horn, “Jackson Pollock: The Hollow and the Bump,” Carleton Miscellany, Summer 1966, p.83.
287
John D. Graham, "Primitive Art and Picasso," Magazine of Art, April 1937, pp. 236-39, 260. Cf. W.
Jackson Rushing's discussion of Graham in Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A
History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), pp. 121-24. According to
Krasner, Pollock later told her that he "was so taken by this man's insight into Picasso that he wrote and
tried to get in touch with him"; see Ellen G. Landau, "Lee Krasner's Early Career: Part One: Pushing in
Different Directions," Arts Magazine, Oct. 1981, p. 119. The April 1937 issue of Magazine of Art
containing the article was in Pollock's library at his death; see Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw,
eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth abbreviated as CR], vol. 4, p. 197. De
Kooning remembers that Pollock once lent him an article by Graham and uncharacteristically insisted on
getting it back. Ashton, The New York School (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 68.
 507

288
Carone, quoted in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New
York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), p. 56.
289
Rose, "Arshile Gorky and John Graham," p. 63. John Graham, Sloan's student at the League in the late
1920's, was in his early interests in the primitive influenced by Sloan; see Marcia E. Allentuck,
"Introduction," to John D. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art, ed. Allentuck, (Baltimore: John Hopkins
Press, 1971), p. 12. At Sloan's death, Graham wrote that Sloan "has always been to me the most inspiring
person in art." Quoted in Rushing, Native American Art, p. 217, n. 5.
290
Graham, “Primitive Art,” pp. 237-38. On Graham's interest in psychoanalytic theory, see Eleanor
Green, John Graham: Artist and Avatar exh. cat. (Washington: The Phillips Collection), p. 141.
291
Ibid., pp. 238-39.
292
Ibid., p. 260.
293
Interviewed by Deborah Solomon, Constance Graham recollects that Graham and Pollock met in Fall
1940. Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 264.
In a letter to Donald Gordon, Pollock's Jungian analyst, Dr. Henderson, reports "I never heard of John D.
Graham," suggesting that Pollock was not yet close to Graham when Henderson left New York in the
summer of 1940. See Donald E. Gordon, "Pollock's Bird, or How Jung Did Not Offer Much Help in Myth-
Making," Art in America, Oct. 1980, p. 51, n. 14. In October 1939, Graham and his fourth wife Constance,
rented an apartment at 54 Greenwich Av. Nene Schardt, a next door neighbor, recalls that Pollock and
Graham met soon afterward. See Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American
Saga, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 346.
294
Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 81.
295
Kadish, Interview by Ellen Landau, New York, May 2, 1979; Landau, Pollock, p. 81. Robert
Motherwell, too, observed that Graham was something of "a guru" to Pollock (interview with author, Jan.
17, 1984) and Fritz Bultman, who met Graham in 1938, stated that he "would use the word either 'shaman'
or 'guru'" to describe Graham's relationship to Pollock. Interviews with author, Feb. 1, 1980 and Feb. 4,
1982.
296
According to Bultman, "Graham did not believe in worldly success. He believed in another form of
success. The reason why the Pollocks and Graham broke had to do with Lee's insistence on success."
Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 4, 1982. Pollock continued to pay his respects to Graham. Walking
along a New York street in 1956, Pollock saw Graham seated in a doorway. Graham commented, "So
you're the one now." Pollock gravely replied, "No, John, you're the one"; Barbara Rose, "Arshile Gorky and
John Graham," p. 70, n. 3.
297
Hofmann, "The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts," Search for the Real, ed. Sarah T. Wekes and
Bartlett T. Hayes, Jr., (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), p. 43.
298
Hofmann, quoted in Dore Ashton, The New York School, p. 83.
299
Krasner was a Hofman student between 1937-40. For Krasner’s biographical details and dates, I draw
on Robert Hobbes, "Chronology," in Krasner, New York: Abbeville Press, 1993), p. 111. See also Ellen G.
Landau, "Lee Krasner's Early Career: Part One,” pp. 110-22, and "Lee Krasner's Early Career: Part Two:
The Forties," Arts, Nov. 1981, pp. 80-89.
300
Barbara Rose, "Lee Krasner and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism," Arts, Feb. 1977, p. 98.
301
Interview with Lee Krasner, in Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who was Jackson Pollock?" Art
in America, vol. 55, May-June 1967, p. 49.
302
John Gruen, "A Turbulent Life with Jackson Pollock," New York/ World Journal Tribune, March 26,
1967, p. 14.
303
Cindy Nemser, "The Indomitable Lee Krasner," Feminist Art Journal, vol. 4, Spring 1975, p. 6.
304
Interviews with Edith Bunce and Peter Busa, NS, p. 406-07. Even as Landau is undoubtedly right in
asserting that "Krasner's advanced artistic background and her more mature command of the formal
innovations of Cubist art" had its impact on Pollock and in reminding us of Greenberg's assessment, "I
don't feel that Pollock would have gotten where he did without her eye and her support," ultimately Krasner
wished to learn from Pollock. See Landau, Pollock, pp. 85, 86.
305
Interview with Steve Wheeler, NS, p. 407.
306
Krasner, Interview with NS, and Krasner, Interview with Seckler, Dec. 14, 1967, quoted in NS, p. 406.
She consciously tried to "lose Cubism," "to jettison all objectivity, and reach inside herself for imagery."
Barbara Rose, "American Great: Lee Krasner," Vogue, vol. 159, June 1972, p. 154.
307
Krasner, quoted in Ellen G. Landau, "Lee Krasner: A Study of Her Early Career (1926-1949)," Ph.D.
thesis, Newark: University of Delaware, 1981, p. 141.
 508

308
Mondrian, "Towards a True Vision of Reality," exhibition pamphlet (New York: Valentine Gallery), p.
10.
309
According to Allentuck, Graham found in Mondrian's works analogues of profound and esoteric
emotional states; System and Dialectics of Art, ed. Allentuck, p. 116. On Mondrian and theosophy, see
Robert Welsh, "Mondrian and Theosophy," in Piet Mondrian, exh. cat. (New York: The Solomon
Guggenheim Museum, 1971), pp. 35-52 and Carel Blotkamp, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction, (London:
Reaktion Books, 1994), esp. pp. 14-16, 39-42.
310
Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980.
311
Motherwell, "Notes on Mondrian and Chirico," VVV, June 1942, p. 59. Later he would edit
Mondrian's essays from 1937-1943 in Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art, 1937 and Other Essays, 1941-1943,
The Documents of Modern Art (New York: Wittenborn and Co., 1945).
312
Motherwell, "Modern Painter's World" Dyn, no. 6, Nov. 1944, p. 12.
313
Mondrian, ibid., p. 15.
314
Tony Smith, conversation with William Rubin, reported in Rubin, "Jackson Pollock and the Modern
Tradition, Part III," Artforum, vol. 5, April 1967, p. 23.
315
Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980.
316
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: George Wittenborn, 1947), p. 77.
317
Kandinsky felt supported in his pursuit of the spiritual by shamanism, a Russian shamanism to be sure,
not the American Indian shamanism that fascinated Pollock. See Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia:
The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
318
See Kandinsky, p. 32.
319
Ibid., p. 33.
320
Rebay, "The Power of Spiritual Rhythm," Art of Tomorrow, 5th catalogue of the Solomon R.
Guggenheim collection of non-objective paintings, 1939, pp. 5-6. This catalogue was in Pollock’s library
at his death.
321
See Landau, Pollock, p. 259, n. 18.
322
See fig. 50 following p. 240 in Joan M. Lukach, Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spirit in Art (New York:
George Braziller, 1983).
323
For a dismissal of the letter and "biography" as simply an "ingratiating" tactic on Jackson's part, see NS,
pp. 446-47.
324
Meyer Schapiro, “Nature of Abstract Art,” (1937), in Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries,
New York: George Braziller, 1978, pp. 201-02.
325
Ibid., p. 200.
326
On Barr’s chart and this insight, see W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and
Language,” Picture Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 232-35. The red lines
appeared only in the 1936 catalogue, not in later reprints.
327
Schapiro’s Marxist awareness of the colonial circumstances of the European’s embrace of the primitive
provokes a comment on Pollock’s embrace of the Pre-Columbian plumed serpent. In the hands of the
Marxist Orozco the return of Quetzalcoatl promises the overthrow of European colonial oppression and in
the hands of Pollock a challenge to European decadence. The historical reality of Mexico’s socialist
revolution and of Europe’s struggle with fascism remind us that Pollock’s embrace of the Pre-Columbian
god is hardly a pure aesthetic event, even if it is accompanied by the birth of abstraction in his art.
328
On these affinities, Allentuck writes “Kandinsky may be said to have influenced not only Graham as
artist but as critic and disciple of the occult. … When Graham actually did read Kandinsky – whether in
Russia or in France – cannot be established. Nevertheless, the key concepts and spiritual accommodations
of Kandinsky’s highly significant treatise … recur in all Graham’s writings. Even if they did not lead him
to the occult, they certainly could have reinforced his interest and provided it with theoretical justification.”
Marcia E. Allentuck, ed., John D. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art, (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press,
1971), pp. 6-8.
329
Alfred H. Barr. Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), p. 200.
330
Feitelson’s Post Surrealist version of “girl before a mirror” in Genesis, First Version, which Barr had
included in his exhibition of Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, had
excised the very mysteries of genesis that Picasso’s intuitions and metamorphic line bring to the fore.
Genesis, First Version is illustrated in Surrealism USA, exh. cat. (New York: National Academy Museum,
2005), plate 23, p. 90.
 509

331
Discussing the face as mask, Weinberg explores the relation of Masqued Image and Girl before a
Mirror. See Jonathan Weinberg, "Pollock and Picasso: The Rivalry and The 'Escape'," Arts Magazine,
June 1987, p. 46
332
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Burt, 1874), fig. 1.
333
Francis V. O'Connor, "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock: 1912 to 1943," (PhD diss., John Hopkins
University, 1965), p.17. Also see Manuel Tolegian, quoted in Potter, p. 29.
334
On Pollock and theosophy, see NS, pp. 126-129, 138, 143, 822, and Landau, Pollock, p. 24. On
Guston’s presence, Dore Ashton. A Critical Study of Philip Guston (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), pp. 14-15.
335
Kadish, quoted in Potter, p. 42
336
Interview with Lee Krasner, in Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who was Jackson Pollock?" Art
in America, vol. 55, May-June 1967, p. 50.
337
Quoted in O'Connor, "Genesis," diss., p.19.
338
CR, vol. 4, doc. 13, p. 213.
339
Graham, System and Dialectics of Art, p. 141.
340
Dating by Alan Stone of Alan Stone Galleries, New York.
341
Pointing to a shift in Graham's style c. 1939-40, exemplified by two of his paintings, Zeus 1941 and
Interior c. 1939-40, Green notes Graham's tendency to adapt his style to explore particular problems of
painting with some other artist, this time Pollock. Green, pp. 52-3. Constance Graham remembers how her
husband raved about Jackson's work. Bultman also stated "Graham turned Pollock to his [Graham's] own
sources." Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980.
342
Constance Graham Garner, Interview with Solomon, July 1884. Solomon, p. 102.
343
On Graham and theosophy, see Landau, Pollock, p. 81; also Green, pp. 56-7, and Elia Kokkinen,
"Ivannus Magus Domini," Art News, Sept. 1968, p. 52. Graham is known to have become, by the fall of
1942, a devout practitioner of the physical discipline of hatha yoga and the erotic and mystical discipline of
tantric yoga; see Green, p. 54, p. 57 n. 2; Landau, ibid.. Naifeh and Smith place the emergence of these
esoteric interests in 1939. Naifeh and Smith, pp. 343, 346. As a matter of fact they are present already in
the frontispiece to his autobiography of c. 1936 From W to R (From White to Red), which is illustrated in
Green, p. 71.
344
Pierre Mabille,"Notes Sur le Symbolisme," Minotaure, vol. 2, no. 8, 1936, p. 1.
345
See Maurice Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (Los Angeles: Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, in conjunction with Abbeville Press, New York, 1987).
346
See Titus Buckhardt, Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul (Baltimore: Penguin Books,
1971), pp. 35, 37; Oswald Wirth, Le Symbolisme Hermetique dans ses rapports avec l'Alchemie et la
Franc-Maconnerie (Paris, Edition Le Symbolisme, 1931), p. 85.
347
On Kadish being in New York in Fall 1937, see NS, p. 310. Both Lawrence Alloway and later Landau
have suggested alchemy as a subject in Panel A, CR 37 (c. 1934-38). See Alloway, Jackson Pollock:
Paintings, Drawings, and Watercolors from the Collection of Lee Krasner Pollock (London: Marlborough
Fine Art Ltd., exh. cat., June 1961), fig. 8, catalogue notes, and Landau, Pollock, p. 177.
348
Illustrated in Surrealism USA, plate 29, p. 95.
349
Cf. Dream 58 in Carl Gustav Jung, The Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart,
1939), p. 189, and Psychology and Alchemy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XX,
1968), p. 201-02. This dream is one likely source for Graham's painting. For this and the following
alchemical interpretation of Sun and Bird, I also draw on Wirth, pp. 11, 16, and Buckhardt, p. 88.
350
Irving Sandler, "John D. Graham: The Painter as Esthetician and Connoisseur," Artforum, Oct. 1968,
p.50.
351
Kokkinen, ibid,, p.99.
352
I date the drawing c. 1939, because Graham writes his Brooklyn address on the drawing. By October
1939 he had moved to 54 Greenwich Ave. See Green, p. 142 and NS, p. 346. The Allan Stone Gallery
dates the drawing to c. 1940; John Graham: Sum Qui Sum, exh. cat. (New York: Allan Stone Gallery,
2005), p. 80. For this alchemical interpretation, I draw on Wirth, pp. 9-11, 31,36, 64.
353
Dorothy Dehner, quoted in Hayden Herrera, “John Graham: Modernist Turns Magus,” Arts Magazine,
Oct. 1976, p. 104.
354
Buckhardt, p. 70.
355
Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 329-330.
 510

356
As the owner of a wand supposedly owned by Cagliostro, Graham was no doubt aware that Cagliostro
is said to have "produced alchemically a diamond which he offered to Cardinal Louis de Rohan." See
Landau, Pollock, p. 81, and Kurt Seligmann, Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion (New York: Grosset
and Dunlap, Universal Library, 1968), pp. 472-74.
357
Picasso's Seated Woman, April 27, 1938, and his untitled drawing, Mougins, August 5, 1938 were
illustrated in Cahiers d'Art, vol. 13, nos. 3-10, 1938; the former was also exhibited in Alfred H. Barr, ed.,
Picasso: Forty Years of his Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939), listed as entry no. 350, and
owned by Mrs. Meric Callery of New York City. Birdwatcher also bears comparison with Weeping
Woman, Oct. 26, 1937.
358
While I do not wish to pursue this, it would seem that Picasso was also referring to these traditions
when he painted women with three eyes or diamond eyes or hats, under diamond suns.
359
Walter Hopps in "The Magic Mirror by Jackson Pollock" The Menil Collection: A Selection from the
Paleolithic to the Modern Era (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987) sees what I have called a flying phallus
as a "putative head form" (pp. 260-61). In support of my interpretation I call attention to the flying phallus
in CR 537r (c. 1939-40) and to CR 956 (c. 1942).
360
The reference to Girl before a Mirror is noted by Hopps; ibid.. Landau resists the importance of Girl
before a Mirror, pointing instead to the possible influence of Picasso's Woman in an Armchair 1929;
Landau, Pollock, p. 69. I grant this possibility. What matters to my interpretation is the presence of a
Picassoid woman in the canvas.
361
Reporting the findings of the conservators of Magic Mirror, Hopps notes that the canvas was cut from a
prior painting, then remounted on another stretched and painted canvas of slightly larger dimensions. It is
covered with a skin of variously thick and crusty paint mixed with a granular filler, possibly fine gravel.
There are three distinct strata of painting activity effectively masking the original composition. "The
Magic Mirror," p. 259. Hopps sees the work as a self-portrait undergoing "subjective, psychic
transformation." Ibid., p. 261.
362
Thus Graham appreciates the foetal forms found in the art of primitive man and of Picasso; Graham,
System and Dialectics of Art, p. 130.
363
In an Untitled (Erotic Drawing) c. 1941 Graham depicts a large winged phallus penetrating the torso of
a female figure; ill. in John Graham: Sum Qui Sum, exh. cat. (New York: Allan Stone Gallery, 2005), p.
136
364
Bultman distinguished between artists working from the external motif and inner images, noting that
"Pollock was coming ... only from inside." He was not the only one, "Some of the Surrealists had it, Miro,
Paalen, ... Dali .... All of that was in the air. Graham sorted it out for people." Despite Graham's effort to
work from the dream image in the period just before he turned from Picasso, he was, "you see ... also
connected with a motif, a still life. He could never do an automatic painting " He understood the flow of
line. "But Jackson was really the one for whom it flowed with what is inside ... from the time of the
Henderson drawings on.” Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980.
365
Henderson, "A Psychological Commentary," in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 43.
366
James T. Valliere, "de Kooning on Pollock, Partisan Review, vol. 34, no.4, Fall 1967, p. 603.
367
Graham spent the summer of 1939 in Mexico; see Elia Kokkinen, "John Graham During the 1940's,"
Arts Magazine, Nov. 1976, p. 99, and n. 6. Bultman recalls that Graham was very interested in the
Mexican movement and traditional Mexican art, and encouraged young artists in their interest in the
Dartmouth murals, which he held to be "very vital." Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980, Feb. 4,
1982. Considering Graham's devotion to Sloan and to primitive art, he probably had a copy of John Sloan
and Oliver LaFarge's Introduction to American Indian Art, 1931 which included Spinden's writing on the
plumed serpent, which I have suggested as a source for Pollock.
368
John D. Graham, Journal 1944-46, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,
D.C., frame 190.
369
Gordon, p. 51, n. 14.
370
Green, pp. 47, 52.
371
On Graham's knowledge of the literature on Russian shamanism paralleling Pollock's awareness of
Native American shamanic art, see Rushing, Personal Communication with Bultman, April 26, 1984, in
Rushing, Native American Art, p. 171
372
Graham, Journal, frame 202.
373
Graham, System and Dialectics of Art, p. 98.
 511

374
T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), p. 359
375
Krasner, in du Plessix and Gray, "Who was Jackson Pollock?" p. 49. On Stella looking for a new
home, see NS, p. 400.
376
Krasner, in du Plessix and Gray, pp. 49-50.
377
Krasner, quoted in John Gruen, The Party's Over Now (New York: Viking Press, 1967), p. 230.
378
I thank William Rubin, “Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological Criticism, Part II,"
Art in America, Dec. 1979, pp. 78-79, for a helpful critical reading of Male and Female as discussed in my
Ph.D. dissertation, "A Jungian Interpretation of Jackson Pollock's Art through 1946," (University of
Pennsylvania, 1977).
379
Interview with Lee Krasner, in Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1979) p. 114. In describing things that drew her and Pollock together, Krasner said "The
moon had a tremendous effect on him …. This is one of the things we had in common, because the moon
had quite an effect on me too. It made me feel more emotional, more intense -- it would build a momentum
of some sort for me. He spoke of the moon quite often." Barbara Rose, "Pollock's Studio: Interview with
Lee Krasner," in Pollock Painting, ed. Barbara Rose, (New York: Agrinde, 1978), n.p. Leja points to
Esther Harding’s Women’s Mysteries, Ancient and Modern (London: Longmans, Green, 1935), with its
exhaustive treatment of moon symbolism in myth, religion, and modern life, as a major source for
Pollock’s awareness of the Jungian moon-female-unconscious idea-chain as evidenced in the Henderson
drawings. See Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940's
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 163-70.
380
The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, trans. Richard Wilhelm, commentary by
C.G. Jung, (London: 1931; reprinted New York: Causeway Books, 1975), plate 4 and p. 138. Henderson
remembers showing Pollock a mandala illustrated in The Secret of the Golden Flower, pointing out
particularly the image of the tail-biting snake, and explaining its significance as "a simple form of mandala
which represents integration." Henderson, quoted in Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson
Pollock: An American Saga, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 333.
381
Secret, pp. 28-29, 73. That Graham probably mediated such wisdom is suggested not only by his use of
the diamond in Bird Watcher 1941, and his continuing preoccupation with diamonds, eyes, a many petalled
flower, and yoga in such a work as To Pay c. 1944 (ill. in Eleanor Green, John Graham: Artist and Avatar
[Washington D. C.: The Phillips Collection, 1987], p. 61), but by his earlier and long involvement with the
mystical diamond. In the sole remnant of his c. 1936 autobiography From W to R (From White to Red),
the frontispiece (ill. ibid., Green, p. 71), we find, in addition to the central sun marked by a large number 4,
a prominent diamond motif. Marked by the letter "G" it echoes Graham's name lettered next to it and
associates the diamond with Graham's own person. The diamond's horizontal axis extends to the left, the
head of the man, and to the right, the lower part of his back, making explicit the two polar principles of
mind and body that Graham wished to reunite. Since Graham was reading Jung as early as 1936 (see
Green, p. 141), a likely source for this diamond imagery is Jung's "Commentary" in The Secret, see
especially pp. 95, 123, 131. That he continued to describe himself in terms of the diamond is evident in his
1944 notebooks: "This life on the sharp facet (of the diamond) is result of a dislocation, discrepancy
between the body too young for my years and the mind (soul and intellect) too old for my age;" Journal
1944-46, frame 213.
382
"The marriage of K'an (moon) and Li (sun) is the magical process that produces the child, the new
man." Secret, p. 19; see also p. 34, and plate 8 with a human foetus central to the mandala. This foetus
contains within it the opposites that produced it and because of this regains contact with the One, the
undivided unity which is the Great Meaning , the Tao, the origin of all opposites. See Secret, pp. 12, 27.
383
Pollock owned F. Yeats-Brown's Yoga Explained ( New York: Viking, 1939 ). On the relation of its
principal illustration to earlier yogic aspects of Bird, c. 1941, and related drawings, CR 589, c.1941, CR
590, c.1941, and CR 581v, c.1939-42 (see fig. 3.9), see Langhorne, “Pollock, Picasso and the Primitive,”
Art History vol. 12, March 1989, p. 72.
384
Jung, "Commentary," Secret, p. 123.
385
Ibid., p. 129.
386
Ibid., p. 115.
387
Ibid., p. 110.
388
Busa continued, "It wasn't all Jungian. He knew a lot about Freudian psychology, too." Interview with
Busa, NS, p. 865.
 512

389
Nicholas Carone, quoted in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), p. 197.
390
Busa recalled the letter. Interview with Busa, NS, p. 333.
391
Tony Smith, Interview with author, March 6, 1973.
392
Secret, p. 33.
393
This process, presented as fundamental, is known as the "circulation of the Light," also as "the
backward-flowing method," because the male animus does not ascend into pure spirituality, but continually
casts itself back into matter in order to rediscover and distill the spirit hidden within all matter; Secret, pp.
24, 28, 31, 33.
394
Clark, pp. 358-59.
395
Leja's discussion of "the energic unconscious" provides a good backdrop for Pollock's involvement in
Eastern yogic thinking; see Leja, pp. 185-191. However, his thesis of the dynamic of struggle and
containment of evil in respect to Pollock (see especially pp. 16, 248-49) is contradicted by the imagery in
CR 635 which speaks of the goal of a harmonious circulation of energies, to be gained as a dialogue with
the female unconscious, the material. The two models for the unconscious, which Leja sees as competing,
the symbolic model and the energic (see pp. 196-97) are in fact for Pollock integral. Krauss, too, ascribes
to Pollock an attitude towards the unconscious contradicted by Pollock's symbolic understanding: "In the
name of the unconscious, Pollock wished to strike against form, and thus against the axis of the human
body." Rosalind E. Krauss, “Horizontality,” in Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: a user's guide (New
York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 94.
396
Clark, p. 359.
397
Ibid., pp. 356, 358.
398
Ibid., p. 362.
399
Ibid., p. 358
400
Interview with Kamrowski, NS, p. 865.
401
Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 159, and p. 259, n. 2.
402
Bultman, quoted in Potter, p. 77.
403
Krasner, quoted in Amei Wallach, "Out of Jackson Pollock's Shadow," Newsday, Sept. 23, 1981.
404
Bruce Glaser, "Jackson Pollock: An Interview with Lee Krasner," Arts Magazine, April 1967, p. 38.
405
In Systems and Dialectics Graham thus insisted that "The only legitimate abstract painting is the
painting based on and departing from hard reality and not from the imagination." John D. Graham, System
and Dialectics of Art, ed. Marcia E. Allentuck, (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1971), p. 106.
406
For an excellent and detailed overview of this culture, see Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the
Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
407
Robert Motherwell, "Painters' Objects," Partisan Review, vol. 2, Winter 1944, p. 97.
408
"Interview with André Breton," View, vol. 1, nos. 7-8, Oct.-Nov. 1941, pp. 1-2.
409
On the Surrealist myth of absolute, ideal-sexual love, and love's exceptional ability to reveal the
ultimate "surreal" truth, see Lydia Gasman, Mystery, Magic and Love in Picasso, 1925-1938: Picasso and
the Surrealist Poets (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 1346-1353.
410
Breton, "La Beauté sera convulsive," Minotaure, no. 5, May 12, 1934, pp. 8-16. See Gasman, ibid., vol.
1, p. 75 for a review of the image of the diamond or crystal in the writing of the Surrealist poets including
Picasso.
411
Minotaure, no. 11, May 15, 1938, pp. 10-13, 66.
412
“The great modern problem is to outwit the Dream and the Doubt, and to identify the Object of Desire.”
Parker Tyler, "The Fourth Dimension of Romance," View, vol.1, nos. 11-12, Feb.-March 1942, p. 8.
413
Nicholas Calas, "And her body became enormous luminous and splendid," View, series 2, no. 1, April
1942, pp. 20-21.
414
Max Ernst, "Max Ernst: The Hundred-Headless Woman," View, vol.1, no. 7-8, October-November
1941, n.p., in Poetry Supplement.
415
This complex linking of psychoanalysis and alchemy is rooted in Ernst’s personal life and his larger
hopes for new cultural meaning arising out of the forced collision of belief systems, in particular
Catholicism and Free-Masonry. Freudian ‘dream work’ and alchemical symbols of transmutation together
constitute the foundation for an aesthetic position, put in the service, Hopkins argues, of developing a kind
of alternative narrative system. In The Robing of the Bride Ernst works towards a compressed seamless
narrative, explored in serial fashion in his collage novels. See David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp and Max
Ernst: The Bride Shared (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), especially pp. 106-25, 134, 152, 174-5. The
 513

most famous of these, Une Semaine de Bonté, was in Pollock's library at the time of his death. See Francis
V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings, Drawings,
and Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth abbreviated
as CR], vol. 4, p. 190.
416
Bultman, Interview with author, March 25, 1973.
417
Numerous analogies between Pollock’s and Ernst’s symbolism exist. In the third chapter of La
Semaine de Bonté, "The Court of the Dragon," Ernst explored the spiritual and instinctual dimensions of
both the female and the male in terms of the bird and of the serpent or dragon. Most often the female was
cast in the role of dragon played off against the bird man. See for instance Max Ernst, Une Semaine de
Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage (New York: Dover Publications, 1976), p. 89. Congruence of this
narrative imagery and Pollock's own bird-serpent imagery of 1941-42 is striking, and direct influence is
probable, given the presence of Une Semaine de Bonté in Pollock's library. His early awareness of Ernst's
bird imagery is indicated in CR 611 c. 1939-42, where the bird man with outspread wings echoes the bas-
relief sculpture of Loplop, the bird man central to Ernst's personal mythology, illustrated in Cahiers d'Art,
vol. 14, no. 5-10 (1939), p. 143. For a discussion of the relationship of Ernst's bird man as he appears in
the collage-novel Semaine de Bonté 1934 to Pollock's Naked Man, see Donald E. Gordon, "Pollock's Bird,
or How Jung Did Not Offer Much Help in Myth-Making," Art in America, Oct. 1980, pp. 46-7.
418
Interview with John Bernard Myers, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An
American Saga, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 417. See also
Myers, "Surrealism and New York Painting, 1940-1948: A Reminiscence," Artforum, April 1977, p. 56.
William Rubin discusses the impact of Masson's art on early Pollock. See Rubin, "Andre Masson and
Twentieth Century Painting" in Andre Masson (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976), pp. 67-68.
419
This frontispiece and the following suite of eight ink drawings were executed in 1939, but not published
until 1942, by Wittenborn, shortly after Masson himself arrived in America in 1941.
420
Andre Masson, "L'Homme Emblematique," VVV, no.1, June 1942, pp. 10-11.
421
Masson says, "J'ai peint L'Homme emblematique. Bien different de L'Acephale, il est fait des symboles
alchemiques, mais revue par mon imagination. Cet homme porte un diamant a la place de la tete." Quoted
in Jean-Paul Clebert, Mythologie d'Andre Masson, (Geneve: Pierre Cailler, 1971), p. 55. The significance
of the diamond in Masson's work has been recognized in the literature. See e.g. Carolyn Lanchner, "Andre
Masson: Origins and Development," in Andre Masson, p. 159.
422
Sidney Simon, "Concerning the beginnings of the New York School: 1939-1942; An Interview with
Peter Busa and Matta," Art International, vol. 11, Summer 1967, p. 19.
423
VVV (1942-44) and View (1940-45) were available at Gotham Book Mart at 47th St. in New York
City. Pollock became very friendly with John Bernard Myers, an editor at View. See Ellen G. Landau,
Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 94. In the Pollocks' library at the time of Pollock's death
were the following issues of View: Number 2, series 3, 1943; and issues for Fall and December 1944,
November 1945; January, February, May, Fall and December 1946, and Spring 1947. See CR, vol. 4, p.
198. As noted in ibid., p. 187, a large quantity of magazines and clippings was destroyed sometime after
Pollock's death when a shed on a neighbor's property, in which Lee Krasner Pollock had stored them,
burned down. Bultman kept a complete set of View. Bultman, interview with author, Feb. 4, 1982.
Motherwell, "Notes: On Mondrian and De Chirico," VVV, no. 1, June 1942, pp. 59-61.
424
See "Georges Duthuit a Andre Breton" in "Vers un Nouveau Mythe?" VVV, no. 4, p. 45. Something of
a cult complete with rites grew up around the review Acephale which Duthuit describes.
425
Illustrated in "Vers un Nouveau Mythe?” p. 44. See also Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings, 1927-1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), esp.
p. xix
426
"Manifesto for a Sacred Sociology," in Vertical: A yearbook for Romantic-Mystic Ascension, ed.
Eugene Jolas (New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1941), pp. 109-11.
427
"Three-fold Ascent, Verticalist Manifesto: 1941" in Vertical, p. 13. Vertical 1941 was a sequel,
published in the United States, to Transition: An Intercontinental Workshop for Verticalist Transmutation,
a literary and art review published in Paris between 1932-38. Pollock read Transition in the late 1930's;
Krasner, Interview with author, May 2, 1975. And Graham regularly brought back this review with him
from Paris to show to his artist friends. In 1935 the editor Eugene Jolas had called for a new kind of
creator, who “redevelops in himself ancient and mutilated sensibilities that have an analogy with those used
in the mythological-magical inside of thought in the primitive man, with prophetic revelations, with orphic
mysteries, with mystic theology such as that of Dionysius Areopagita, with the Kabala, Tao, Hindoo
 514

philosophy, with Egyptian wisdom, with Gnostic rapture, with mantic experiences like those of Van
Ruysbroeck, Boehme, Master Eckhardt, St. John of the Cross, with the attitudes of the early romantics,
with the mental habits still extant in folklore and fairy tales, with clairvoyances, day and night dreaming,
even with subhuman or psychotic thinking"; "Workshop," Transition, no. 23, July 1935.
428
Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi ideologue, published Myth of the Twentieth Century in 1930. For
review of literature on Surrealist desire for a modern myth, see Hopkins, p. 126.
429
André Breton,"The Legendary Life of Max Ernst: Preceded by a brief discussion on the need for a New
Myth," View, series 2, no. 1, April 1942, p. 5.
430
Ibid., p. 28.
431
Ibid., p. 30.
432
View , series 2, no. 2, May 1942, n.p.
433
Ibid.
434
Ibid.
435
Ibid.
436
Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's World," Dyn, vol. 1, no. 6, November 1944, p. 13.
437
Interview with Kadish, NS, p. 424.
438
Sidney Simon, "Concerning the beginnings of the New York School: 1939-1943; An Interview with
Robert Motherwell," Art International, vol. 11, Summer 1967, p. 21.
439
Ibid., p. 439.
440
See Don Quaintance, "Modern Art in a Modern Setting: Frederick Kiesler's Design of Art of This
Century," and "Plates" with commentary by Quaintance and Valentina Sonzogni, in Peggy Guggenheim
and Frederick Kiesler: The Story of Art of This Century (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2004), pp.
206-73, esp. pp. 250-59, and fig. 116, p. 254, illustrating the Shadow Box viewing Mechanism, Kinetic
Gallery, AoTC, 1942, as published in "Design Correlation," VVV (March 1943). For reconstructed plan
(2004) of Art of This Century based on Kiesler's 1942 design, see p. 183, and another of the "Perspective
Views of Reconstructed 3-D Model," p. 202. For further photographs of the viewing mechanism for
Duchamp's Boite-en-Valise and for the Shadow box mechanism for viewing artworks, rigged not for
Breton's Portrait of the Actor A.B. but initially for Paul Klee's Magic Garden 1926, see pp. 196-97.
441
Andre Breton, "The Most Recent Tendencies in Surrealist Painting" in Surrealism and Painting (New
York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 145. Dickran Tashjian stresses Matta's role at this time in implementing a
radical shift within Surrealist psychic automatism from the verbal back to the visual realm, A Boatload of
Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde 1920-1950 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995),
p. 227.
442
On divination, Wolfgang Paalen, "The New Image," Dyn, vol.1, April-May 1942, p. 8. William Rubin
describes the actual techniques in Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1968), pp. 139-140, 166.
443
On oil technique, and on drawing technique see Nancy Miller, "Matta, The First Decade," in Matta, The
First Decade, exh. cat. (Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, 1982), pp. 20-
21.
444
See David Rubin, "A Case for Content: Jackson Pollock's Subject was the Automatic Gesture," Arts,
March 1979, p. 108. Bultman confirmed that Pollock admired Matta's drawings. See Landau, p. 94.
Pollock, Krasner, and most of their friends found Matta's paintings of the early 1940's too worked over and
theatrical. Ibid.
445
Sidney Simon, " An Interview with Robert Motherwell," p. 21.
446
Simon, "An Interview with Peter Busa and Matta," p. 18.
447
Simon, "An Interview with Robert Motherwell," p. 21.
448
Simon, ibid., pp. 18-19.
449
David Rubin, p. 105. Busa states, "We didn't meet together as a group until the fall of 1942. We
started meeting in October and continued through that winter." Simon, "An Interview with Peter Busa and
Matta," p. 18.
450
On Matta's increasing abstraction early in 1942, see Miller, "Matta, The First Decade," p. 27
451
Kurt Seligmann, "Magic Circles," View, vol.1, nos. 11-12, February-March 1942, p. 3. Although this
issue of View is not listed as an item in the Pollock library in the catalogue raisonne, CR, vol. 4, p. 198,
Landau asserted in 1981 that Krasner still had a copy of this issue in her library. Ellen G. Landau, "Lee
Krasner's Early Career: Part Two: The 1940’s," Arts Magazine, Nov. 1981, p. 85.
452
Andre Breton, "Matta," 1944 in Surrealism and Painting (New York: Harper and Row, Icon Editions,
 515

1972), p. 184. Cf. Eliphas Levi, The History of Magic, trans. A. E. Waite (New York: Samuel Weiser,
1969), p. 39.
453
Miller, "Matta, The First Decade," pp. 27-28.
454
On astral eggs, see ibid., p. 27. On philosopher's stones, see conversation of Irene Clurman with
Onslow-Ford, Feb. 22, 1969, quoted in Clurman, Surrealism and the Painting of Matta and Magritte,
Stanford Honors Essay in Humanities, no.14 (Stamford, California, 1970), p. 19, n. 49.
455
“Morphology is used in botany, anatomy, zoology, and biology to follow the growth of things –- the
seed all through the transformations, from the flower to the fruit. ... I got myself involved in morphology
as a way of finding this new image of human being.” Matta quoted in Miller, "Matta, The First Decade," p.
12.
456
Ibid., pp. 20, 28.
457
Fritz Bultman, in conversation with David Rubin, New York City, Nov. 22, 1976, quoted in David
Rubin, p. 103. Eliphas Levi, by whom Matta was heavily influenced, describes Astral Light as the source
of all dreams and inner images, much as Jung describes the collective unconscious as the source of all
archetypal images. See Levi, pp. 39- 40.
458
William Rubin, "Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological Criticism, Part II," Art in
America, Dec. 1979, p. 75.
459
Max Kozloff, "An Interview with Matta," Artforum, vol.4, no. 1, September 1965, p. 25, and Simon,
"An Interview with Peter Busa and Matta," p. 18.
460
D. Rubin, p. 105
461
D. Rubin, Interviews with Ethel Baziotes, Lee Krasner, Peter Busa. Ibid. This activity reflects Matta’s
serious interest in eros. "And then [c.1942] I started getting interested in life. Eros was a god that was there
before all gods, so there is life in everything. Vertigo of Eros [1944], the name of one of my paintings,
means the vertigo of life." Matta, quoted in Miller, Ibid., p.12
462
D. Rubin, Interview with Lee Krasner, New York City, April 8, 1977. Ibid.
463
D. Rubin, Interview with Fritz Bultman, New York City, Nov. 22, 1976. Ibid.
464
Busa, quoted in NS p. 427.
465
Baziotes letter to Francis M. Celantano, Celentano, "The Origins and Development of Abstract
Expressionism in the United States," (M.A. thesis, New York University, 1957), Appendix V.
466
Simon, "An Interview with Peter Busa and Matta," p. 17.
467
Ibid., p. 19.
468
Ibid.
469
Jacqueline B. Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim (New York: Dutton, 1986), p. 305.
470
Bultman, Interview with author, 1 Feb. 1980.
471
Jimmy Ernst, A Not-So-Still Life, (New York: St. Martin's, 1984), pp. 241-42.
472
Ibid., pp. 241-42.
473
Interview with Krasner, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga,
(New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 445
474
Interview with Kadish, NS, p. 446
475
Sidney Simon, "Concerning the beginnings of the New York School: 1939-1942; An Interview with
Peter Busa and Matta," Art International, vol. 11, Summer 1967, p. 19.
476
Ibid.
477
The gestural dimension of Pollock's automatism builds on a number of sources, including Masson's
fluid improvisational freedom. Pollock's early attraction to Masson's art is evident in CR 527 (c. 1939-40)
(see fig. 2.10). There he makes a free copy, just below the large skeletal figure, of Masson's Battle of
Fishes 1926, the masterpiece of Masson's early linear automatism owned by the Museum of Modern Art.
Masson, who developed an art inflected by a high degree of linear automatism in the 1920's, returned to it
in the late 1930's in such works as Mythologie de la Nature 1939. There Masson displays both the
symbolism, elaborated in a mythology, and the metamorphic style, characterized by a high degree of linear
automatism, that made his art doubly interesting to Pollock. In CR 594, and Birth itself, Pollock broaches
Masson's linear automatism, to record his reaction to the theme of the serpent rising in a process of birth.
Peter Busa remarked on the young Americans' early attraction to automatism, "We'd already known about
Masson's work which was quite free." Simon, "An Interview with Peter Busa and Matta," p. 18.
478
Gerome Kamrowski, letter to B. H. Friedman, quoted in Jeffrey Wechsler, "Surrealism's Automatic
Painting Lesson," Art News, vol. 76, April 1977, pp. 45-46. William Rubin describes diverse experiments
with automatic techniques in the 1920's through 1940's, for instance by Ernst in 1942, Hans Hofmann in
 516

1940, 1943, and how these differ from Pollock's final automatic style. See Rubin, "Jackson Pollock and the
Modern Tradition," Artforum, vol. 5, May 1967, pp. 28-33.
479
Interview with Busa, NS, p. 417; Busa, Interview with Lader, May 26, 1976, quoted in Ellen G.
Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 261, n. 9.
480
Interview with Busa, NS, p. 417.
481
Busa, Interview with Lader, May 26, 1976, quoted in Landau, p. 261, n. 9. Breton, "Matta," Surrealism
and Painting, p. 184. The language suggests the fluid mercurial transformative stuff of alchemy, what
Breton also calls in his essay "the medium of creation" and "universal sperm," pp. 184, 188.
482
For discussion of Graham's concept of "automatic écriture" and its influence on Lee Krasner, see
Barbara Rose, "Lee Krasner and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism," Arts, February 1977, p. 98.
483
John D. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art, ed. Marcia E. Allentuck, (Baltimore: John Hopkins
Press, 1971), p. 135.
484
Ibid.
485
Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's World," Dyn, no. 6, Nov. 1944, p. 13.
486
On Motherwell's role as theoretician of this new movement in painting, see Dickran Tashjian, A
Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde 1920-1950 (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1995), pp. 230-33.
487
Sidney Simon, "Concerning the beginnings of the New York School: 1939-1943; An Interview with
Robert Motherwell," Art International, vol. 11, Summer 1967, pp. 21-22; NS, p. 427.
488
See NS, pp. 440-41.
489
Peggy Guggenheim, interview with Melvin P. Lader, quoted in Landau, p. 255, n. 4.
490
On Matta's support, see Landau, p. 103.
491
See NS, p. 442.
492
Interview with Kadish, NS, pp. 443-44. On Putzel, see Paul Lader, "Howard Putzel: Proponent of
Surrealism and Early Abstract Expressionism in America," Arts Magazine, vol. 56, March 1982, pp. 85-96.
493
For Putzel's great support, see NS, p. 443.
494
I am grateful to William Rubin for alerting me to certain shortcomings of the reading of Stenographic
Figure I had advanced in my dissertation. See Rubin, "Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of
Psychological Criticism," Art in America, vol. 67, Part I, Nov. 1979, pp. 116-17, and Part II, Dec. 1979, p.
80.
495
CR, vol. 4, doc. 52, p. 232, interview with Pollock, Arts and Architecture, Feb. 1944. Barbara Rose has
proposed that "Miro was a major catalyst, if not in fact the catalyst, in freeing Pollock from Picasso and the
Mexican muralists, who dominated his work until 1941." Rose, Miro in America (Houston: The Museum
of Fine Arts), 1982, p. 20.
496
On Pollock attending Miro exhibition, see Landau, p. 256, n. 25. Landau also points out that Pollock's
interest in Miro was undoubtedly stimulated by his friend Putzel, who proselytized for Miro's work in
California in the 1930's and who exhibited the work of Miro and Ernst in conjunction with Onslow-Ford's
lectures on Surrealism at the New School of Social Research, ibid., p. 255, n. 13. The catalogue for the
1941 Museum of Modern Art exhibition was in Pollock's library. See CR, vol. 4, p. 190.
497
Peggy Guggenheim, ed., Objects-Drawings-Photographs-Paintings-Sculpture-Collages, 1910-42 (New
York: Art of this Century, 1942), p. 112.
498
Rose, Miro, p. 18.
499
See especially Miro's Two Personages and a Flame 1925 which was also exhibited at Peggy
Guggenheim's gallery. Miro's exploration of "the logic of the stretcher bar" in work from 1923-24 through
1927 (this logic is evident in Two Personages and a Flame) is pertinent to Pollock's own understanding of
the axial structure of the canvas as a support for growing automatist freedom. See Carolyn Lanchner, Joan
Miro (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1993), pp. 33-46.
500
Kurt Seligmann, "Magic Circles," View, vol.1, nos. 11-12, Feb.-March 1942, p. 3.
501
See Carl G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1939), pp. 40-
41.
502
Ibid., p. 37.
503
For instance, the ultimate goal of meditation in The Secret of the Golden Flower is to cast the conscious
spirit back into the body through meditation so often and so completely that conscious spirit is transformed
into primordial spirit. "When the conscious spirit has been transformed into the primordial spirit, then only
can one say that it has attained an unending capacity for transformation, and departing from the cycle of
births, has been brought to the six-fold (6) present, golden spirit.” The Secret of the Golden Flower: A
 517

Chinese Book of Life, trans. Richard Wilhelm, commentary by C.G. Jung, (London: 1931; reprinted New
York: Causeway Books, 1975), p. 33. This creative power (66) is simultaneously a differentiated power,
and equals (=) a fourfold awareness (4), and a conscious union of opposites (2).
504
Interview with Busa, NS, p. 432.
505
Krasner, Interview with Judith Wolfe, quoted in Wolfe, "Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock's
Imagery," Artforum, Nov. l972, p. 73, n. 40.
506
Cf. Rubin, "Pollock as Jungian Illustrator," Part II, Dec. 1979, pp. 79, 80, 82, 83.
507
Krauss discusses the "automatic writing" on Stenographic Figure as an early instance of Pollock's effort
to cancel the image, a strategy which she sees at work in the first poured paintings of 1947. See Rosalind
E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 265, 284, 289.
Canceling or striking at the figure is theorized as "the trace"; the violence of the trace is understood in
terms of graffiti. Ibid., pp. 259-60.
508
Arguing that Pollock from around 1943 increasingly reflects and represents Freud's energic model of
the unconscious and its attendant tragic view of life, Michael Leja, in Reframing Abstract Expressionism:
Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940's (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), opposes the general
thesis of Robert C. Fuller in Americans and the Unconscious (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986):
"Where Fuller emphasized an American tendency to figure the unconscious so as to symbolize 'harmony,
restoration, and revitalization' rather than 'rift, alienation, and inner division' (pp. 5-6), I would argue that
both sets of qualities were crucial, the latter increasingly so as the century progressed toward World War
II"; p. 200. I tend to side with Fuller. Pollock remains committed to the restorative function of the
unconscious, instinct, matter, a belief central to Jungian-yogic-alchemical thinking. For an excellent
overview of the positive values, especially that of rebirth, that governed the thinking of the Abstract
Expressionists, see Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 3-56, see esp. pp. 33-35, 44-45.
509
Fritz Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980. On “release,” Bultman, Interview with author,
March 25, 1973. In talking of the Americans' response to his call for "new images of man," Matta
remarked, "I must say that one of the first that started doing something in that sense was Pollock. He
started using many different images of man, and in serial fashion." Max Kozloff, "An Interview with
Matta," Artforum, vol. 4, Sept. 1965, p. 25.
510
For argument for a dating to early 1943, with which I agree, see David Freke, "Jackson Pollock: A
symbolic self-portrait," Studio International, vol. 186, Dec. 1973, p. 219.
511
Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980.
512
Bultman, Interview with author, March 25, 1973.
513
Rosalind E. Krauss, "Jackson Pollock's Drawings," Artforum, vol. 9, Jan. 1971, p. 61.
514
Carl G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1939). p. 227. The
alchemical dragon appears in Plate VII, opposite p. 227. "The dragon symbolizes the experience, the vision
of the alchemist who works in the laboratory." The dragon is also described as “a symbol combining the
earth-principle of the serpent and the air-principle of the bird,” effectively a plumed serpent (pp. 226-27).
This is the probable source for the tail-biting serpent in CR 704, and one that does not contradict the Hopi
source found in one of Pollock's Smithsonian volumes. See the plumed serpent, identified as the great god
of the Hopi, illustrated in J. W. Fewkes, "Archaelogical Expedition to Arizona," Annual Report, Bureau of
American Ethnology of Smithsonian Institution, vol. 17, part II, 1895-6, fig. 266.
515
See Harold Coward, Jung and Eastern Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985),
pp. 10-11, 16-17.
516
Jung, p. 47.
517Jung, p. 227. The first step in creating the lapis, the philosopher’s stone or diamond, is a violent act: “a
sword … divided the egg containing the seed, the sperma or semen mercurii.” Jung, p. 46. All this lore is
to be found compressed in two pages in the chapter Pollock studied in 1940 when he made his
diagrammatic drawing of Jungian functions (see fig. 2.13) and in the pages to either side of the illustrated
dragon that makes its way into CR 704 (pp. 46-47, 226-28). See also M. Esther Harding, "A Short Review
of Dr. Jung's Article: Redemption Ideas in Alchemy,” Papers of the Analytical Psychology Club of New
York I (1938), esp. pp. 4, 11-12. A notation to this review, one of 10 titles appearing on a list in Pollock's
own handwriting dating from c. 1940-41, was found among Pollock's papers. See Michael Leja, Reframing
Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940's (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993), p. 151. While no copy of Jung’s Integration of the Personality or of the text of Harding’s review
exists in the Pollock library, the circumstantial evidence suggests that Pollock looked at Jung’s book with
 518

its plates and associated text. He was prepared to absorb its central message by Kadish’s mural A
Dissertation on Alchemy 1936-37.
518
Bultman remembers a long afternoon spent with Pollock talking about a painting, which he recalled as
The Queen of Hearts or The Queen of Diamonds, in terms of "the bestial and the beautiful" and more
particularly in terms of alchemy and magic. The painting hung on the wall in the 8th St. apartment. It has
since disappeared and asked by Bultman, Lee Krasner said, "we could never figure out what happened to
it." According to Bultman, "it was very, very important to Jackson. It was even more explicit than these
[referring among other paintings to Moon Woman Cuts the Circle] because it was a portrait, physically a
woman, with chins, protuberances of all sorts." Bultman, Interviews with author, Feb. 4, 1982, Feb. 1,
1980. Although no painting of either title survives, Bultman's recollections are pertinent to Moon Woman
Cuts the Circle. Perhaps this painting disappeared under Waterbirds. Mancusi notes that there the black
pours occur over an aged paint film; Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, "Jackson Pollock: Response as Dialogue,”
Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1999), p. 120.
519
Bultman recalled Pollock’s attraction to the notion of a "release of images ... as growth, individuation."
The putative Queen of Hearts "permitted this release." In a subsequent interview he spoke of "a release of
subject matter, of subjective matter," and Pollock’s understanding of "the psychological implications of
alchemy as growth.” Bultman, Interviews with author, March 25, 1973, Feb. 1, 1980.
520
VVV, nos. 2-3, March 1943, p. 27.
521
Masson elaborated this detail in somewhat different terms as the major theme of Plate II of Mythology
of Being, "Up surges birth--open break" (see fig. 6:3), which shows the male head breaking free from the
feminine world of nature in a moment of birth amid cosmic swirls and underneath the comet-like flight of
the diamond, promise of a heightened awareness of the play and union of opposites.
522
Pollock may well have been aware of certain of Bataille's articles published in Documents in 1929 and
1930, for in later years John Graham showed the publication to his young artist friends. See Bataille,
"l'Oeil," Documents, no.4, 1929; "Le bas materialisme et la gnose," Documents, vol. 2, no.1, 1930, pp. 1-8;
"Soleil Pourri" in the special issue of Documents, vol. 2, no. 3, 1930 devoted to Picasso; "L"Art primitif,"
Documents, vol. 2, no.7, 1930, pp. 389-97; "La mutilation sacrificielle et l'oreille coupee de Vincent Van
Gogh," Documents, vol. 2, no. 8, 1930.
523
Alberti comes to mind, who called Narcissus, who traumatized by his knowledge of the rape of which
he was the issue, turned away in disgust from woman, only to fall in love with his own image, the father of
painting. Here already the origin of painting is tied to a refusal of heterosexual eros. Bataille offers us a
variation on this theme.
524
Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), vol. I, p. 253.
525
Rosalind E. Krauss, "No More Play," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 54.
526
Bataille, “Rotten Sun,” Documents, vol. 2, no. 3, 1930, reprinted in Visions of Excess: Select Writings,
1927-1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stockl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 58.
527
Krauss, ibid., p. 80.
528
Illustrated in the exhibition catalogue of Picasso: Forty Years of his Art (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1939), fig. 344, p. 184.
529
Such images, reproduced in the 1938 Cahiers d’Art, also attracted the attention of John Graham, who
emphatically accepted the wound, as the first lesson of the would-be occultist. See Christian Zervos,
"Tableaux Magiques de Picasso," Cahiers d'Art, vol. 13, 1938, pp. 73-196, particularly the drawings dated
June 13, 1938, p. 155, and August 5, 1938, p. 169. Even as he retreated from Picassoid abstraction in his
1943 Omphale (see fig. 4.18), the woman, by now idealized in Renaissance fashion, is wounded, as if by a
knife, and cross-eyed, another form of mutilation. Graham understood such wounding of a classical beauty
as an acceptance of the imperfection of things, of suffering, of death as part of life. See John D. Graham,
Journal, 1944-46, Archives of American Art, microfilm roll 96, p. 2.
Motherwell, as well, was interested in a 1938 Picasso drawing, Woman in an Armchair, a woman
wearing a large diamond marked hat and holding a dagger pointing outwards. See E.A. Carmean, Jr., The
Collages of Robert Motherwell: A Retrospective Exhibition, (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1972), p. 41,
n. 7. Wounding was the subject of a number and even the title of one of Robert Motherwell's first collages,
Wounded Personage 1943, later titled Surprise and Inspiration. See Robert S. Mattison, Robert
Motherwell: The Formative Years, (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), fig. 26, p. 178.
 519

The image of cutting an eye or gouging it out of the forehead was common in Surrealist art.
Krasner was a devotee of the films of Bunuel, whose image of the cutting of an eyeball with a razor blade
is unforgettable; she used his methods and images, among others, as a source of inspiration for the 1942
War Services Division photocollage compositions. See Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York:
Abrams, 1989), p. 104, p. 255, n. 6. Victor Brauner’s 1931 premonitory self-portrait with one eye gouged
out (he inexplicably lost one eye in 1938, a loss that was widely said to have left him happier and more
creative) was reproduced in Pierre Mabille, "L'Oeil du Peintre," Minotaure, no. 12-13, 1939, p. 53.
530
Peter Busa, Interview with Melvin P. Lader, Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 27, 1976, typescript, p. 30,
collection of interviewer, quoted in Landau, p. 256.
531
Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980
532
Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980. Bultman remembers that Pollock in 1942-43 "talked
about the dream-vision all the time. This is what the Indian in order to be become the brave, several grades
of it, he goes out and fasts, some even hung themselves in trees. In order to become a shaman, they would
go through immolation, extreme. Dream vision is what everyone had to have who was a brave, because it
was the thing that was revealed to you after a certain degree of starvation, fasting, and abstinence. It all has
to do with abstinence with Jackson -- it's a ritualistic thing. The periods when he wasn't drinking, he was
very aware of abstaining." Pollock valued the Indian concept of "discovering one's own image" and "the
nature of the self” through shamanic experience. Bultman, personal communication with Rushing, April
26, 1984, in W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of
Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 189, and p. 232, n. 116. Tony Smith
recalled that Pollock associated blinding with vision. Tony Smith, Interview with author, March 6, 1973.
Pollock's early attraction to such a theme occurs in his response in CR 410r in Sketchbook I to El
Greco's Healing of the Blind. There he drew a rare self-image, showing only the left half of his face thus
emphasizing his eye, juxtaposed not just with a passage from the Healing of the Blind, but with passages
taken from two other El Greco paintings, Holy Family with Bowl of Fruit and Bethrothal of the Virgin.
533
The Sia ceremony of initiation into the Snake Order is described in Mrs. Stevenson, "The Sia," Annual
Report, Bureau of American Ethnology of Smithsonian Institution, vol. 11, 1889-90, pp. 76-91. On Sioux
Sun Dance, see Ch. 3, n. 47. Cf. discussion of Pollock's and others' response to ecstatic Indian culture as
neither good or bad, but authentic, in Rushing, p. 191.
534
In her thorough discussion of the influence of Indian art and culture on Pollock's art Edith von Kiparski
places special emphasis on the Aztec ritual of human sacrifice, pointing to the importance for Pollock's art
making of James George Frazer's A Study in Magic and Religion. The Golden Bough (New York:
Macmillan, 1940), a book in the Pollock library. See Edith von Kiparski, Symbol, Mythos und das
Dämonische im Werk von Jackson Pollock. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rezeption indianischer
Kunst und Kultur, Tübingen dissertation, 1999, esp. pp. 80-85.
535
Pollock also spoke to Bultman of the work of the Mexican artist Posada. Bultman recalls that he and
others in the late 1930's, including Graham, responded to the Mexicans, particularly Orozco's, concern with
ritual killing and sacrifice. He and Kamrowski talked about "the tradition in Melville, Poe, and all
American writing, in the vitality of death, that it played a strong role in American art." Fritz Bultman,
Interview with author, Feb. 4, 1982. Also see Fritz Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980.
536
Pollock's gift of just this painting to his mother -- the only painting he is known to have given her --
after his brother Jay had refused to accept it as a gift, points to its special significance. See Francis V.
O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings, Drawings, and
Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth abbreviated as
CR], vol.1, CR 60, "History," p. 46. Landau notes the gift and its psychological relevance, mentioning that
in an earlier gouache version of the painting, CR 939, Pollock had depicted a female victim, p. 51.
O'Connor has suggested that Naked Man with Knife was meant as a self-portrait; see Landau, p. 251, n. 17.
537
Busa, quoted in Landau, p. 117.
538
James Elkins, What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy
(New York, Routledge Press, 1999), p. 4.
539
Ibid, p. 19.
540
Ibid, p. 37.
541
Ibid, p. 7.
542
Ibid, p. 48.
543
Ibid, p. 55.
544
See Mancusi-Ungaro, p. 120.
 520

545
See CR, vol. 3, CR 652, "Remarks," p. 180. With illustrations and accompanying text Jung points out
the equation of son and sun as expressions of spirit in the alchemical work. See Jung, plates VIII and IX,
and p. 242.
546
See Landau, pp. 103-04.
547
Sidney Simon, "Concerning the beginnings of the New York School: 1939-1943; An Interview with
Robert Motherwell," Art International, vol. 11, Summer 1967, p. 22.
548
Bois, "The Use Value of 'Formless'," in Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: a user's
guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 27.
549
For stylistic reasons David Freke dates CR 1024 after Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, more specifically
to May 1943. David Freke, "Jackson Pollock: A symbolic self-portrait," Studio International, vol. 186,
Dec. 1973, p. 219. I would concur and also date CR 1023 around May 1943. The iconography of the two
collages offer additional reasons for the dating. Both contain material postdating Moon Woman Cuts the
Circle, pertaining to the newly released "sun-son." The collage Pollock created for the exhibition does not
seem to be extant. Motherwell and Baziotes sold the pieces they made for this exhibition; Pollock did not.
Motherwell believes that Pollock destroyed his collage after the show; Landau, p. 104.
550
Bataille, "Base Materialism and Gnosticism," Documents, second year, no. 1, 1930, reprinted in Visions
of Excess, p. 51.
551
Jung, p. 40.
552
Jung, p. 41.
553
See Krauss, "The Destiny of the Informe," in Formless, p. 245.
554
On symbolism of number 4 and 7, see Jung, pp. 41, 117-18.
555
Martica Sawin's appreciation of the play of horizontal and vertical axes in Masson's Meditation on an
Oak Leaf and of his desire "to deal with what was happening simultaneously within the earth and above
ground" suggests how Pollock might have found this painting an inspiration in his move to pouring. See
Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1995), pp. 227, 329. Masson himself had exhorted the artist: "Lay the canvas flat on the floor. Seize your
inspiration in that state of ecstasy and paroxysm in which mind and body coincide and regain their lost
unity. Let execution be a lightning-swift and automatic act." Masson, "Painting is a Wager," Horizon, vol.
7, no. 39, March 1943, quoted in Sawin, p. 175.
556
Jung, pp. 228-229. See Harding, p. 12.
557
The summer of 1942 Max Ernst also experimented with allowing paint to pour through a hole in the
bottom of a paint can as he swung it in arcs over a canvas placed on the ground. This technique he used in
several canvases, for instance in Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly 1942-47. The
technique and the resultant neatly arcing patterns would have almost certainly been known to Pollock, the
Ernst canvas being published as one illustration to Andre Breton's “Situation du Surrealisme entre les deux
guerres,” VVV, March 1943, p. 48.
Another closely related Ernst drawing, subtitled "d'où le haut et le bas cessent d'être percus
contradictoirement,” and illustrated p. 52, contains a pair of Ernst's own moon women (their association
with the moon is clear in the subsequent illustration) depicted within a poured linear matrix, twice but in
reverse positions, having flipped, via a depicted spiraling action, from an upright position to an upside
down position. This flip illustrates the theme of a place "from where the high and the low cease to be
perceived as contradictory," hence its subtitle. This theme, as Breton points out, is at the very core of
Surrealism; ibid., p. 51. Ernst had already represented the human female in the midst of a backward flip as
the The Key to Songs within the Element of the unknown in the seventh and last chapter of La Semaine de
Bonté, a copy of which Pollock owned. Pollock's pouring technique will itself achieve "a coincidence of
opposites" but of an entirely different order -- possessed of the drama of movement and a libidinal force
foreign to Ernst.
558
Story told in Frank A. Seixas, "Jackson Pollock: An Appreciation," The Art Gallery, vol. 7, no. 1, Oct.
1963, p. 13. Quoted in NS, p. 541.
559
Victor Brauner created the image that most vividly expressed the female sexual aspect of the eye,
depicting it in place of the vulva in an image of the female torso in a 1927 image illustrated in the 1939
article in Minotaure, "L'Oeil d'un Peintre." Kurt Seligmann in his own article "The Evil Eye" cites this
image as he speaks of the eye as an image of man's own fear of female sexuality. See VVV, June 1942, p.
48
 521

560
Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock," The Nation, Feb. 1,1947, in
The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2 Arrogant Purpose 1945-1949, ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 125.
561
Alfieri’s accusation is quoted in Time, 20 Nov. 1950, p. 71. Pollock's telegram to editor, Time, Dec.
11, 1950, p. 10.
562
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), p. 284.
563
Bois, "Dialectic," in Formless, p. 71; Krauss, "Jeu Lugubre," in Formless, pp. 111-14.
564
Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 275; NS, p. 541.
565
"Remarks" on CR 92 in CR, vol. 1, p. 82.
566
Naum Gabo, “Toward a Unity of the Constructive Arts,” Plus, No. 1, Dec. 1938, pp. 3, 4. Matter’s
design was for the announcement of a supplement to Plus, for which he also did the first two covers. The
editors included Wallace K. Harrison, William Lascaze, and James Johnson Sweeney.
567
See designs that Matter did for the Container Corporation of America in the early 1940s; Mark S.
Reeve, Herbert Matter: translating the modernist soul (Baltimore: Company Time Graphics, c. 1994), figs.
28, 33 (Come and Get It -- Out of Paperboard!, 1942), 34 (Fair Today -- Everyday!). See the photographic
motion studies that Matter did of dancers and of the mobiles of his friend Alexander Calder. Reeve, figs.
22, 23, 24. The tension between a diamond structure and intuitive forces he continued to exploit in his
design for De Beers Consolidated Mines in the late 1940s; ill. in Reeve, p. 57, C-4, C-5.
568
Mercedes Matter, quoted in NS, p. 397.
569
“Mercedes Matter Biography,” Pollock Matters 2006, 2005-2006, http://www.pollockexhibit.com.
570
See John Sawyer interpretation in Kermit Champa, et al., Flying Tigers: Painting and Sculpture in New
York 1939-1946 (Providence, Rhode Island: Bell Gallery, Brown University, 1985), p. 83. Also compare
the multi-dimensional movement in Burning Landscape with movement of forces around the globe stressed
in war related graphic design in the early 1940 s by both Lee in displays for the War Services Project,
assisted by Jackson and others, and by Herbert Matter for the Container Corporation of America. See
especially the WSP designs related to radio and spherical trigonometry, Landau, Lee Krasner, Catalogue
Raisonne, CR 198-201, and Matter, “World Travelers --All! Paperboard Packages Everywhere!, early
1940s, ill. in Reeve, fig. 28.
571
For the details of this visit, I draw on NS, pp. 448-50.
572
NS, pp. 449, 864.
573
See David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998). Matta paid explicit homage to the erotic enterprise as initiated by Duchamp, when he called one of
his psychological morphologies or transformational inscapes The Bachelors, Twenty Years After 1943; see
Sawin, pp. 320-21. John F. Moffitt presents a persuasive brief for a reading of Duchamp's oeuvre in terms
of alchemy, see Moffitt, Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp (Albany: State,
University of New York Press, 2003).
574
Friederick Kiesler, "Design Correlation," Architectural Record, vol. 81, 1937, pp. 53-58.
575
Duchamp, Interviewed by Jouffroy, in Une revolution du regard (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 118.
Quoted in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Abrams, 1969), p. 197.
576
Jacqueline Bograd Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim (New York: Dutton, 1986), p. 305 and
NS, p. 450.
577
CR, vol. 4, p. 228.
578
Peter Busa, quoted in Sidney Simon, “Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School: 1939-43,”
Art International, vol. 11, no. 6 (Summer 1967), p. 20.
579
Carol Mangusi-Ungaro, “Jackson Pollock: Response as Dialogue,” in Jackson Pollock: New
Approaches (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999), p. 119.
580
Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), pp. 119-20.
581
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Paradiso and Purgatorio, Temple Classics series, vol. 1, (London: J.M. Dent,
1941), p. xxx . The notes point out that Dante’s she-wolf is the wolf of incontinence and avarice, and
foreshadows one of the three divisions of Hell. Given the fact that Pollock abstained from drinking while
he worked, did his choice of title refer to the ordeal of abstinence as he embarked on this series of new
work for the show? "There would be long stretches of work and then he did not work. He drank before
and after these cycles." Interview with Lee Krasner, in Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who was
Jackson Pollock?" Art in America, vol. 55, May-June 1967, pp. 48-49.
582
In Sidney Janis, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944), p.
113.
 522

583
Interview with Tony Smith, in du Plessix and Gray, "Who was Jackson Pollock?", p. 53.
584
The falling figure is reminiscent of Picasso's Swimming Woman 1929, illustrated in Alfred H. Barr, Jr.,
ed., Picasso: Forty Years of his Art (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1939), p. 150, or of the sense of
upset and falling in Miro's In Reverse (Le Renversement) 1924, illustrated in James Johnson Sweeney, Joan
Miro, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1941), p. 29.
585
The wisdom of the tao stipulates that one must not only be able to raise one's spiritual consciousness,
but to let it fall down or back into the material body, where it can serve to refine and ennoble matter, thus
creating a diamond-body, a strong union of spirit and matter. This is the purport of "the circulation of the
light" or "the backward-flowing method": “In the midst of primal becoming, the radiance of the Light [the
Golden Flower] is the determining thing. In the physical world it is the sun; in man the eye. The
emanation and dissemination of spiritual consciousness is chiefly brought about by this power when it is
directed outward (flows downward). Therefore the meaning of the Golden Flower depends wholly on the
backward-flowing method." The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, trans. Richard
Wilhelm, commentary by C.G. Jung, (London: 1931; reprinted New York: Causeway Books, 1975), p. 34.
To suggest the importance of the “backward-flowing method” to Pollock, I point to five other
diagrammatic expressions of it: CR 651v (c. 1942), CR 109 (c. 1944), CR 750 (c. 1945), CR 740 (c. 1945),
CR 767 (1946), all various expressions of descent along a vertical axis, whether the drop of a sun-moon eye
into the jaws of a snake, or the diamond located at the bottom of a vertical axis, or a figure plummeting
head first in a fall.
586
Matta’s interest in the theme of the animal during the time of Pollock's closest contact with him is
evident in the March l943 VVV Almanac in his illustrations for "Le Jour est un Attentat."
587
To Bultman, Pollock commented "Finally Masson is painting." Fritz Bultman, Interview with author,
March 25, 1973. For overview of the iconography and style of Masson’s Telluric and Theseid paintings,
see William Rubin, "Andre Masson and Twentieth-Century Painting," in Andre Masson (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1976), pp. 47-61.
588
Carl G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1939), pp. 243-44.
589
Ibid., pp. 245, 279.
590
Lee Krasner, Conversation with David Freke, Feb. 1972, in Freke, "Jackson Pollock: A symbolic self-
portrait," Studio International, vol. 186, Dec. 1973, p. 220.
591
Melville, Moby Dick (New York: The New American Library, 1961), p. 30.
592
Pollock’s conception of this realm in Guardians of the Secret as female is clear in a related drawing,
CR 679 (c. l943). There two large fish and teeming stick figures occupy the belly of the human-headed
she-animal.
593
Melville, p. 196.
594
Also noted by Landau, pp. 126, 136.
595
Recorded conversation with Lee Krasner Pollock, April 1967, cited in William Rubin, "Pollock as
Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological Criticism," Art in America, vol. 67, Part I, November
1979, p. 117. Also Lee Krasner, Interview with author, May 2, l975. The painter Alfonso Ossorio,
Pollock's friend from the late l940s, comments, "The few art criticisms he made were couched in
psychoanalytic terms, rather than in aesthetic ones … [The] psychiatrist's vocabulary was the only trained,
technical vocabulary he had." Interview with Alfonso Ossorio, in du Plessix and Gray, “Who was Jackson
Pollock?” p. 58.
596
Bernice Rose, Jackson Pollock: Works on Paper, l969, p. 30. Pollock depicts the sex of the attacking
animal as sometimes male, see CR 717r (c. l944), and as sometimes female, see CR 682 (c. 1943).
597
"Point of View," View, series 3, no. 1, April l943, p. 5.
598
Benjamin Peret, "Magic: The Flesh and Blood of Poetry," View, series 3, no. 2, June l943, pp. 66, and
62-63.
599
Also see Motherwell's discussion of "the father image" in De Chirico's The Child's Brain l914 in
"Notes: On Mondrian and Chirico," VVV, vol. 1, no. 1, June l942, p. 60.
600
William Rubin, "Pollock as Jungian Illustrator," Part I, November 1979, p. 117 and n. 61, and Part II,
December 1979, p. 88.
601
Kurt Seligmann in "It's Easy To Criticize," View, April l942, had pointed to Picasso's Three Musicians,
focusing on what he conceived as its spatial inadequacies. His largest concern is, unusual for a Surrealist
writer, space construction, particularly a deep space that "can be a medium of affective expression." Since
this new space is not yet invented, he is unclear about exactly what it might be. But he is clear about what
the artist is reacting against. "Since cubism we try to pulverize the magic diamond. The enchanted world
 523

in which Picasso's three musicians live is only a few feet deep. The sound of their instruments is a praise of
claustration, of happiness within the four studio walls. In our epoch of air attacks these four walls may
crumble, they do not secure meditation and protection anymore from a world of indifference."
602
Matilda Cox Stevenson, "The Sia," Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology of Smithsonian
Institution, vol. 11 (1889-9O), p. 88.
603
Ibid., plate XIV, opposite p. 80.
604
W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural
Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 180.
605
On temenos, see Jung, p. 146. Following Rubin’s emphasis on the traditional pictorial convention of “a
picture-within-a-picture” (Rubin cites Picasso’s La Vie) as an influence on the composition of Guardians of
the Secret, an emphasis that Landau and Karmel also subscribe to, even Rushing, recognizing the American
Indian influences, fails to fully appreciate the symbolic dimension of Pollock’s pictorial space (see
Rubin,"Pollock as Jungian Illustrator,” Part II, p. 88; Landau, p. 125; Pepe Karmel, “A Sum of
Destructions,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, pp. 78-81, Rushing, pp. 181-82). Such appreciation
is crucial as symbolic spatial structure helps free Pollock from the Renaissance based optical conventions
which still govern Picasso’s art, and support his emerging improvisational style. For Karmel Pollock’s
space, in work from 1942-46 and even in the mature poured paintings, remains fundamentally rooted in
traditional representational space, especially as derived from Picasso’s studio paintings of 1927-28; see
ibid., pp. 80-81, 92-94.
606
Landau and I are fundamentally in agreement about two of these upper guardians: the foetus and the
rooster; pp. 126-27. I join with Rushing in his rejection of her suggestion that the mask-like configuration
refers to an African reliquary figure; however, I do not find his suggestion that it refers instead to the
Northwest Coast cannibal spirit mask convincing; Rushing, pp. 175, 180, 231.
607
Landau proposes an elaborate reading of female personnage to the left in Guardians of the Secret; pp.
125-26.
608
O'Connor, Jackson Pollock (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, l967), p. 28.
609
Ibid., p. 29.
610
In support of this reading I point to two drawings, CR 665 (c. l943) and CR 727 (c. l945), showing the
snake in conjunction with and dominating the triangular-headed animal, the type that also appears in
Wounded Animal.
611
One can point to a number of other external sources bearing on Wounded Animal such as paleolithic
cave art, or even the culminating moment in the Sia rain and initiatory ceremonies (when the ho'naaite
takes the fetish made of bird feathers from the tail of the sand-painted cougar, and, holding it in his left
hand while placing the palm of his right hand to the cougar, ritually draws breath from it, after which the
sand-painting is erased). On influence of cave art, see Landau, p. 121. On Sia ceremony and related
cosmogonic myth, see Stevenson, "The Sia," pp. 85, 89, and 45, 46.
612
Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Marc Chagall, Lyonel Feininger, and Jackson Pollock," The
Nation, November 27, 1943, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1 Perceptions and Judgments
1939-1944, ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 165-66.
613
Greenberg, “’American-Type’ Painting,” Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press,
1961), p. 211.
614
CR, vol. 4, fig. 26, p. 230, facsimile of 1943 Art of this Century catalogue.
615
CR, vol. 4, doc. 50, p. 230, letter from Pollock to James Johnson Sweeney, Nov. 3, 1943.
616
Krasner, quoted in Francine du Plessix and Cleve gray, “Who was Jackson Pollock?” Art in America,
vol. 55, no. 3 (May-June 1967), p. 51. For discussion of the dating of Male and Female in Search of a
Symbol, see Karmel, “A Sum of Destructions,” n. 31, p. 96.
617
Jung, pp. 159-60, 164. Masson's male initiate in Mythology of Being achieves his goal of the
possession of the diamond in the eighth image. The infinity loop figures boldly on the first frontispiece of
VVV, June l942.
618
Rubin, "Pollock as Jungian Illustrator,” Part II, p. 74, and Landau, p. 124. Presenting a very different
interpretation, Edith von Kiparski offers an "ethnological interpretation" of the ritual significance of
Pasiphae, understanding the action as a sacrifice not so very different from that enacted in Moon Woman
Cuts the Circle. According to her, the fertility symbolism in Pollock's art is "no longer connected with eros
and sexuality, but with the ritual of sacrifice as such. What explains the terrifying is the fact that there is no
erotic glossing of the celebration of the sacrifice." Symbol, Mythos und das Dämonische im Werk von
Jackson Pollock. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rezeption indianischer Kunst und Kultur,
 524

Tübingen dissertation, 1999, p. 132. I do not think it necessary to oppose so rigorously ritual sacrifice to
the erotic. In Pollock's work they are inseparably linked.
619
Sweeney, quoted in Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1987), p. 139. Except for this quote and the following Landau quote, I rely for an account of the titling
session on Rubin, ibid.
620
Landau, pp. 123-24. These notes, which include references to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s
Aeneid where further details of the story could be found, survive in the Pollock Archive.
621
That Pollock might quite literally have been thinking of a whale in formulating the monster of his
canvas is indicated by the large whale motif in an untitled drawing CR 719 (c. l944).
622
Rubin, ibid.
623
For the pronged motif as a bird symbol, see fig. 36 in A. Fletcher, "The Hako: A Pawnee Ceremony,"
Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology of Smithsonian Institution, vol. 22, Part II (1900-01). For
an instance of Pollock's use of two three-pronged motifs to symbolize wings, see the little serpents within
the double phallus of the sleeping woman in CR 636 (c. l939-42).
624
G. Baldwin Brown, The Art of the Cave Dweller: A Study of the Earliest Artistic Activities of Man
(New York: Coleman, l931), p. 75. This book Pollock owned.
625
Calas, "Apes, Warriors, and Prophets," View, December l943, p. 112.
626
Calas, p. 113.
627
Calas, p. 114
628
Pollock may well have been thinking of the large, almost ten feet long, Northwest Coast Indian mural
painting on wood showing “Thunderbird carrying away Killer Whale” in The Museum of Natural History’s
collection, which had been loaned to the Museum of Modern’s Art for its “Indian Art of the United States”
exhibition in 1941. Illustrated in Douglas and d’Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the United States, p. 159. The
cover of Paalen's Amerindian issue of Dyn, no. 4-5, December 1943 displays a Northwest Coast image of
the killer whale, its nose traditionally beak-like, a trait repeated by Pollock. In his article "Totem Art"
Paalen gives three illustrations of a Kwakiutl “Amalaid” headdress representing the myth of the Raven and
the Whale; p. 24.
629
Jacqueline Bograd Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim (New York: Dutton, 1986), p. 306.
630
CR, vol. 4, doc. 44, p. 228, letter from Jackson to Charles, July 29, 1943.
631
Harry Jackson, letter to Francis V. O'Connor, Nov. 25, 1965, pp. 3-4, quoted in O'Connor, "Jackson
Pollock's Mural for Peggy Guggenheim: Its Legend, Documentation, and Redefinition of Wall Painting," in
Peggy Guggenheim and Frederick Kiesler: The Story of Art of This Century (New York: Guggenheim
Museum, 2004), p. 161.
632
In CR, vol. 4, doc. 44, p. 228, Jackson specified the dimensions of the mural as 8' 11 ½" x 19' 9". The
mural's dimensions today are 7 feet 11 ¾ inches x 19 feet 9 ½ inches. O'Connor explains that "someone
forgot nearly a foot of height ... when the stretcher was ordered," a mistake that caused problems in the
installation of Mural. See O'Connor, pp. 157-60.
633
See O'Connor, p. 154, and p.166, n. 12.
634
Kadish, quoted in NS, p. 467.
635
Carol Mangusi-Ungaro, “Jackson Pollock: Response as Dialogue,” in Jackson Pollock: New
Approaches (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999), p. 152, n. 6. For readiness for November 9 party,
see O'Connor, p. 154. Cf. Henry Adams, Tom and Jack. The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and
Jackson Pollock (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), pp. 269-70.
636
David Anfam, "Pollock Drawing: The Mind's Line," in No Limits, Just Edges. Jackson Pollock
Drawings on Paper (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2005), pp. 31-33. Adams, p. 278
637
Stephen Polcari, "Jackson Pollock and Thomas Hart Benton," Arts Magazine, vol. 53, March 1979, pp.
120-24. Adams, p. 270.
638
I join O'Connor in disagreeing with both Rushing’s assertion that Mural depicts Native American flute
players, and David Anfam's discernment of a procession of maenads. See O'Connor, p. 168, n. 46.
639
O'Connor, p. 161. O'Connor, p. 168, n. 46, accepts the plausibility of Harry Jackson's account.
640
See NS, pp. 468, 866.
641
Motherwell, quoted in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw
Hill, 1972), p. 63.
642
See Bernice Rose, Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980),
and Rosalind Krauss, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk
Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 160.
 525

643
While Motherwell was very aware of Pollock’s relation to Picasso, I reject his assessment, and Pepe
Karmel’s agreement with this assessment, of Pollock as “violently cross[ing] out Picasso’s images” and
then at a certain moment realizing “he didn’t have to make the Picasso thing at all, but could directly do the
crossing out or dripping, or what have you”; Karmel, “A Sum of Destructions,” Jackson Pollock: New
Approaches (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 88. On the grounds of Pollock’s own
imagery and automatist style I see a content-full response to Picasso’s art, which is much more than a
violent crossing out of Picasso, simply destruction or “a sum of destructions,” as Karmel asserts. Thus I
disagree with Karmel’s formal understanding of Pollock’s automatist interlace “as one means (among
others) of reworking and obscuring an image” and instead understand the growing abstraction in Pollock’s
automatism in Mural as facilitating his enactment of an erotically charged dialogue, painting as
“lovemaking.”
644
Quoted in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York: J. P.
Putnam's Sons, l985), pp. 76, 80.
645
Landau, p. 147.
646
Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon," Partisan Review, July-August 1940, in The
Collected Essays and Criticism [henceforth CEC], vol. 1 Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John
O'Brian, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 35.
647
Harold Rosenberg, “The American action painters,” Art News, Dec. 1952, p. 48.
648
Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Josef Albers," The
Nation, Feb. 19, 1949, in CEC, vol. 2, pp. 285-86.
649
Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon," p. 34.
650
Manny Farber, “Jackson Pollock,” The New Republic, vol. 112, no. 6 (June 25, 1945), in Jackson
Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
1999), p. 54.
651
CR, Vol. 4, Doc. 53, p. 233. The organizers of a Pollock retrospective in 1982 highlighted a section of
Mural which they compared with Gothic. See Jackson Pollock, exh. cat.(Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou,
Musée national d’art moderne, 1982), ill. p. 126.
652
Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Worden Day, Carl Holty, Jackson Pollock," The Nation, Jan. 24,
1948, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 202. On titling, see Rubin, Part II, p. 75.
653
NS, p. 481.
654
Ellen G. Landau, "Lee Krasner's Early Career: Part Two: The 1940’s," Arts Magazine, Nov. 1981, p.
81.
655
CR, vol. 4, doc. 99, p. 261.
656
In the Feb. l944 issue of VVV, largely in French and for which Breton, Duchamp, and Ernst were the
advisors, see particularly articles by Patrick Waldberg, Pierre Mabille, and Leonora Carrington.
657
Peter Busa recalls that Pollock wished to go beyond the Cubist idea of figuration. "He thought the idea
which Indians worked with was beyond Picasso's preoccupation with Cubism, and he would talk about the
space around the objects. He liked the sand paintings for their flatness and he was intrigued by the spatial
idea -- which is negative, which is positive." Busa, quoted in Potter, p. 88.
658
Naifeh and Smith, Interview with Kadish, quoted in NS, pp. 483-84.
659
Reuben Kadish, Interview with author, May 15, 1980.
660
NS, pp. 480-81, 486-89.
661
NS, p. 489.
662
Potter, p. 78. See NS, 492. O'Connor notes that Pollock began treatment with Dr. Hubbard in August
1943; "A Documentary Chronology," CR, vol. 4, p. 229.
663
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Pollock,” The Nation, April 7, 1945,
in The Collected Essays and Criticism 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986) [henceforth abbreviated as CEC], vol. 2, p. 17.
664
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), p. 360.
665
Ibid., pp. 358-59.
666
“Pico della Mirandola’s very elegant speech on the dignity of Man,” (1487) Part I, View, series 4, no. 3,
Fall (Oct.) 1944, and "Pico della Mirandola's very elegant speech on the dignity of man," Part II, View,
series 4, no. 4, Dec. 1944. Both issues survive in the Pollock library.
667
Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 4, 1982.
 526

668
Masson, Chapter VII, in Anatomy of my Universe, (New York: Curt Valentine, February 1943), n.p.
Anatomy of my Universe, another of Masson's schematized mythologies, consists in some thirty plates with
accompanying text.
669
“Pico della Mirandola’s very elegant speech on the dignity of Man,” (1487) Part I, p. 89.
670
Ibid., p. 101.
671
Ibid., p. 90.
672
Bultman, Interview with author, Feb. 4, 1982. Pollock and Bultman discussed the "whole
transmigration of the spirit through the corporeal, the animal, the high spiritual, and to the divine likeness."
Pollock was aware of the division of the demonic and the divine as "very central to his art and to art in
general.” He talked "about the need for integration and that one passed through all of these intermediary
stages."
673
“Pico della Mirandola’s very elegant speech on the dignity of Man,” (1487) Part I, p. 90.
674
Ibid.
675
Fletcher, “The Hako, a Pawnee Ceremony,” Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology of
Smithsonian Institution, vol. 22, Part II (1900-01), p. 33. In the related diagram, fig. 171, p. 36, this holy
place is a rectangular space very like the central white panel in Pollock's painting.
676
Ibid., pp. 318, 331, 337
677
Ibid., pp. 285, 325
678
Ibid., p. 126
679
Ibid., p. 129
680
Ibid., p. 336
681
As noted in Landau, Krasner confirmed that both she and Pollock were aware of Paalen’s writings and
Dyn magazine, in a letter to Robert Saltonstall Mattison, June 28, 1979; Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock
(New York: Abrams, 1989), n. 31, p. 258. For a short introduction to Paalen, see W. Jackson Rushing,
Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1995), pp. 124-26.
682
Wolfgang Paalen, editorial, Dyn, “Amerindian Number,” nos. 4-5, Dec. 1943, n. p., back of
frontispiece.
683
Paalen, “Totem Art,” Dyn, “Amerindian Number,” nos. 4-5, Dec. 1943, pp. 20, 25. For a history of
Paalen's intellectual involvement with primitivism and modern anthropology, see Amy Winter, Wolfgang
Paalen: Artist and Theorist of the Avant-Garde (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), pp. 17-24, 36-43.
684
Paalen, “Totem Art,” pp. 25-26.
685
Ibid., p. 27.
686
For ruminations on the bisexual aspects of the original totem poles and earliest divinity, see ibid., p. 29.
In Totem Lesson I the totem mother additionally becomes a three-dimensional container figure. This
aspect Pollock explores in a drawing CR 717v, where the large figure dominating the sheet, seen at a slight
angle, contains a smaller humanoid creature in its womb area. His painting of the totem mother echoes the
striking Brown Bear totem screen, illustrated by Paalen in “Totem Art,” plate III (in Plate IV he relates a
myth about 2 Bear Women). Plate III shows the screen in situ, fronting the community house of the Chief
Shakes family: through it one reaches the door of the house as though one is entering the innards of the
female animal. The Northwest Coast Indians had a vivid and literal sense of existing within some
enormous animal. Claude Levi-Strauss makes this point in "The Art of the Northwest Coast at the
American Museum of Natural History," Gazette des Beaux-Arts no. 24 (6th series), l943, p. 181. The
Surrealists had also been fascinated with this idea, especially Breton and Matta in l942 and l943. See
Breton's description of "The Great Invisibles" within the "Prolegmena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism
or Else" VVV, No. 1, June 1942, p. 25, accompanied by Matta’s illustration.
687
Quoted in Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York:
Clarkson N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 492.
688
NS, p. 492.
689
Lee Krasner to W. S. Lieberman, June 1982, in W.S. Lieberman's "Introduction" to Jackson Pollock:
The Last Sketchbook (Johnson Reprint Corporation, Harcourt-Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 12.
690
In homeopathic medicine the drugs that will cure a sick person with certain symptom complexes are the
very drugs that produce similar and artificial symptom complexes in a healthy person. A drug will effect a
cure if the "totality of symptoms" of the drugs and the sick person mesh. See Edward C. Whitmont,
"Nature, Symbol, Imaginal Reality," Spring, 1971, p. 71.
691
Later Dr. Hubbard suggested that Pollock consult Dr. Grant Mark, a biochemist. See Lieberman, p. 12.
 527

Pollock began an intensive biochemical treatment for his alcoholism with Dr. Mark in September 1951.
This continued until the fall of 1953.
692
Clement Greenberg, “Review of the Whitney Annual,” The Nation, December 28, 1946, in CEC, vol.
2., p. 118.
693
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Pollock," p. 17.
694
Greenberg, “Kandinsky,” (1948/1957) in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 111.
695
Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Pollock," The Nation, April 7, 1945,
in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2 Arrogant Purpose 1945-1949, ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 15-16.
696
See NS, p. 591.
697
Jackson Pollock, Interview with William Wright, late 1950, in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles,
and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 21.
698
Kandinsky, "Painting as a Pure Art," in In Memory of Wassily Kandinsky, ed. Hilda Rebay, published
by Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, on occasion of The Kandinsky Memorial Exhibition, March 15-
May 15, 1945, at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, p. 42. In Memory of Wassily Kandinsky was a
separate volume, published in conjunction with the exhibition catalogue. The latter was in Pollock’s library
at his death.
699
Kandinsky, "Painting as a Pure Art," p. 43.
700
Quoted in Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p.
150.
701
Lois Fichner-Rathus also points to CR 1077 as "the most ambitious and accomplished print in the
series." See her "Pollock at Atelier 17," The Print Collector's Newsletter, vol. 13, no. 5 (Nov.-Dec. 1982),
p. 165.
702
Bernice Rose and most recently Pepe Karmel, following Greenberg in his emphasis on Pollock’s
engagement with Cubism, stress the structure that Cubism provides Pollock as he pushes towards the all-
over configuration of his mature work. In speaking of his engravings, particularly of CR 1077, Rose points
to the all-over accents derived from Analytic Cubism, via Masson and Miro, which once mastered served
as the armature for further non-objective elaboration; Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting (New York,
1980), pp. 9-10. Karmel refines this discussion by pointing to the roots of what he names Pollock’s
interlace style in the stage-like space of Picasso’s Synthetic Cubist studio paintings, a space that Pollock
proceeds to fragment through layering with interlacing of lines; Karmel, “A Sum of Destructions,” pp. 71-
72, 83, 92. Just what the spiritual or magical approach, which fulfills itself in art as music, argues instead
we can see in turning to the thoughts of Wolfgang Paalen.
703
Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1995), pp. 272-75, presents Paalen as a “missing link” in the “genesis of abstract expressionism”;
Amy Winter's Wolfgang Paalen: Artist and Theorist of the Avant-Garde (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003)
brings Paalen's importance back into focus. Through his father's friend, the German art critic Meier-
Graefe, known as the progenitor of the art and theory of The Blue Rider artists, Paalen was, growing up in
Vienna, early on exposed to Kandinsky's thinking which helped mold his aesthetic convictions. In 1935
Kandinsky visited Paalen's studio in Paris, giving him encouragement and support. See Winter, pp. 5-6,
10-12, 42.
704
Bultman, Interview with W. Jackson Rushing, quoted in W. Jackson Rushing, "Ritual and Myth: Native
American Culture and Abstract Expressionism," in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, exh.
cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986 (New York: Abbeville Publishers, 1986), p. 282.
705
Sawin, p. 267.
706
For a further comparison of Paalen and Graham, see Winter, pp. 187-89. His rejection of metaphysics
in favor of science also separates him from Kandinsky's spirituality. See Winter, p. 12.
707
"The New Image," Dyn, no. 1, April-May l942, p. 9. Paalen's notion of the "prefigurative image"
presented in "The New Image" informed Matta and the Americans' discussions of "new images of man" in
1942-43. When Matta and Motherwell visited Paalen in Mexico in the summer of 1941, Motherwell stayed
on, settling near Paalen until nearly Christmas. Crediting the importance of this time, Motherwell stated:
"it was with him that I got my postgraduate education in Surrealism." Simon, "An Interview with Robert
Motherwell," p. 21. Motherwell translated "The New Image" from French for its publication in Dyn. On
the tensions between Matta and Motherwell who constantly invoked Paalen in 1942-43, see Winter, p. 131.
The deepest roots for Paalen's preoccupation with "the new image" trace back to Nietzsche, and
this in part through Meier-Graefe's rhetorical use of Nietzsche’s concept of the “New Man,” the
 528

Übermensch, as articulated in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85). For Dyn, certainly aware of Nietzsche's
famous description of Prometheus as artist, he wrote under the pseudonym Charles Givor "Promethée
Parle," (Dyn, no. 3, Fall 1942) and under his own name "Birth of Fire" (Dyn, nos. 4-5, Dec. 1943). In the
latter he enriches the Promethean theme with his ethnographic knowledge, citing the Northwest Coast
Indians' Yehl, the totemic raven who brought fire to mankind, and Quetzalcoatl. See Winter, pp. 6, 13-14,
200-201. See also Ann E. Gibson, "Theory Undeclared: Avant-Garde Magazines as a Guide to Abstract
Expressionist Images and Ideas," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware, 1984, pp. 287-89.
708
Greenberg, “Kandinsky,” p. 111.
709
Paalen, "Surprise and Inspiration," Dyn, no. 2, July-August 1942, p. 8.
710
Ibid.
711
Paalen, “Totem Art,” p. 20
712
Paalen "On the Meaning of Cubism," Dyn, no. 6, Nov. 1944, p. 8.
713
Paalen "Art and Science," in Form and Sense (New York: Wittenborn, 1945), p. 62.
714
Paalen "On the Meaning of Cubism," p. 5.
715
Ibid.
716
Ibid., pp. 5-6.
717
B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York, 1972), p. 15.
718
Seligmann, "It's Easy to Criticize," View, April 1942, p. .
719
Rose, p. 9.
720
Paalen "On the Meaning of Cubism,” p. 6.
721
Ibid., pp. 6-7
722
Ibid., p. 7.
723
Ibid.
724
Rose, p.17.
725
Paalen, "On the Meaning of Cubism," p. 7.
726
Ibid., p. 7. On the importance of Kandinsky to Paalen, see Winter, pp. 10-12.
727
Dyn, vol. 1, no. 6, Nov. 1944, n.p.
728
See Joann Moser, "The Impact of Stanley William Hayter on Post-War American Art," Archives of
American Art, vol. 18, no. 1, 1978, pp. 2-11.
729
Quoted in Solomon, p. 149. After having in 1942 joined the Army as a member of the War Artist Unit,
serving in India and Southeast Asia during World War II, Kadish in 1944 returned to New York City where
he worked for Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17. Jean Fitzgerald, “Biographical Note,” A Finding Aid
to the Reuben Kadish Papers, 1851-1995, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 1999.
730
CR, vol. 4, doc. 90, p. 253, undated holograph statement, probably from 1950.
731
Piri Halasz, "Stanley William Hayter: Pollock's Other Master," Arts Magazine, November 1984, p. 73.
732
Stanley William Hayter, "Techniques of Gravure, Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, August 1944, vol.
12, no.1, pp. 6-13; "Line and Space of the Imagination," View, vol.4, no. 4, Dec. 1944, pp. 126-28, 140;
"The Convention of Line," American Magazine of Art, March 1945; "The Language of Kandinsky,"
American Magazine of Art, May 1945; "Paul Klee: Apostle of Empathy," American Magazine of Art, April
1946.
733
See Hayter, "Of the Means," Possibilities, no. 1, Winter, 1947-48, p. 77. Also Rosalind Frost, "The
Chemically Pure in Art: W. Hayter, B. Sc., Surrealist," Art News, May 15-31, 1941, p. 13.
734
Hayter, "Line and Space of the Imagination," p. 127.
735
Ibid., p. 126.
736
Greenberg, “Kandinsky,” p. 111.
737
Hayter, "The Language of Kandinsky," p. 177.
738
Pollock overpainted with watercolor and gouache impressions taken from three of his engravings, CR
1082, CR 1085, and CR 1077, resulting in three mixed-media works: CR 990, CR 988, and CR 989. This
use of the engravings speaks of his ambition to apply what he learned about line through engraving to
colored pigments, and ultimately to paintings.
739
See Rose, p. 15, and Gail Levin, "Miro, Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Expressionism" and
"Jackson Pollock," in Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years (New York, 1978), pp. 27-40, 98, 102.
740
Hayter, ibid., p.178.
741
Hayter used one of Herbert Matter’s time-lapse photographic studies of Calder’s mobiles to illustrate
"The Convention of Line," p. 92.
 529

742
For an overview of the influence of Kandinsky on Abstract Expressionism, see Levin’s essay in Gail
Levin and Marianne Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-garde 1912-50
(Boston: Little Brown, 1992), pp. 192-217. Relevant here is her comparisons between Pollock’s Untitled
CR 724 and Kandinsky’s First Abstract Watercolor 1910, Light Picture 1913, and Black Lines 1913, the
latter two owned by the Museum of Non-Objective Painting since its inception in 1939; Levin, p. 213.
743
Hayter, "Line and Space of the Imagination," p. 127.
744
Ibid., p. 140.
745
Hayter, "The Convention of Line," p. 92.
746
Ibid., p. 93.
747
Ibid., pp. 93, 94.
748
Hayter, New Ways of Gravure (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 231.
749
See Moser, pp. 3-4.
750
Stanley W. Hayter, "Orientation, Direction, Cheirality, Velocity and Rhythm," in Gyorgy Kepes, ed.
The Nature and Art of Motion, New York,1965, p. 71.
751
Ibid., p. 72. Pollock’s awareness of such structure partially undermines Krauss’ argument for
understanding Pollock’s mature poured paintings as examples of material bassesse. Whatever structure one
detects in Pollock’s poured paintings is, for her, but a "reading in" of structure, which happens as a
"secondary style elaboration" when the canvases are dragged off of the floor and onto the wall; Rosalind E.
Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 304, 307. There they
are co-opted into an optical realm of perception where we read into the "molecular milling" the
"anisotropic" structure that, according to gestalt psychology, all vertical fields invite when beheld -- that is,
the mirrored projection of the organization of the viewer's body, with a top, bottom, left, right; p. 303.
Such "reading in" applies to the "latter-day interpretation" of the "optico-gestaltist", Matthew Rohn; pp.
307, 329. But, as I show, Pollock was quite aware of these very aspects of structure.
752
Ibid., pp. 76, 78.
753
Ibid., p. 78.
754
CR 1070 is one of three states of P13, CR 1074 one of three states of P14.
755
Hayter, "Line and Space of the Imagination," p. 140.
756
James Johnson Sweeney, "New Directions in Gravure," Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, August 1944,
vol. 12, no. 1, p. 4.
757
Hayter, "Orientation, Direction, Cheirality, Velocity and Rhythm," p. 76.
758
Ibid.
759
See Langhorne, "Pollock, Picasso, and the Primitive," Art History, March 1989, p. 67.
760
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), p. 337.
761
Pollock’s desire to apply what he had learned is evident in a number of mixed-media works, for
instance CR 989 c. 1945, where he takes an impression of the drypoint engraving of ART (CR 1077) and
paints over and around the underlying imagery with watercolor and gouache. He chooses CR 1085, the
castration image, and CR 1082, an image of cosmic swirling space, as the underlying prints for CR 988, c.
1945 and CR 990, c. 1945.
762
Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 142.
763
The male-female imagery is yet clearer in CR 1086.
764
See CR, vol. 1, p. 124. If one entertains the possibility that H.M. does refer to Helen Marot, her portrait
in terms of a flow of energy seems appropriate in light of "her Bible," Sir Charles Sherrington's The
Integrative Action of the Nervous System. Recall that she believed in the restructuring of the flow of
physiological impulses to achieve personal growth.
765
Ann Gibson, "The Rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism," in M. Auping, ed. Abstract Expressionism: The
Critical Developments (New York: Abrams, 1987), p.81.
766
Paalen, “Art and Science,” Dyn, no. 3, Fall 1942, p. 4.
767
See the crowned female figure with a diamond-shaped body, linked by a strong diagonal line to the
male who accompanies her, in CR 718v (c. 1944).
768
Motherwell suggests such a comparison in "Painter's Objects" when he paired his revised assessment of
Mondrian, praising the expressive rhythms of Broadway Boogie Woogie, with his singling out of Pollock
as "one of the younger generation's chances;" Motherwell, "Painter's Objects" Partisan Review, January
1944, p. 97.
769
Piet Mondrian, statement, c. 1943, from "Eleven Europeans in America," Bulletin of the Museum of
 530

Modern Art (New York), XII 4-5 (1946), in Herschel B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley,
1968), p. 363.
770
See Landau, pp. 196, 262 and pp. xxx below.
771
Mondrian, "Towards a True Vision of Reality," p.15.
772
Karmel, “A Sum of Destructions,” pp. 84, 86, see also pp. 83, 92
773
Lee Krasner, quoted in B.H. Friedman, “An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock,” Jackson Pollock:
Black and White, exh. cat. (New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, 1969), p. 7. Lee Krasner, when
questioned by William Rubin, confirmed that Pollock made the remark, "I choose to veil the imagery,"
referring to There were 7 in 8. See William Rubin, "Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of
Psychological Criticism, Part II," Art in America, Dec. 1979, p. 86.
774
Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Pollock," p. 15
775
Kandinsky, "Uber die Formfrage," Der Blaue Reiter (Munich: R. Piper, 1912), pp. 74-100; trans.
Kenneth Lindsay, in Herschel B. Chipp, ed. Theories of Modern Art, p. 158
776
Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings,
Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth
abbreviated as CR], vol. 4, doc. 52, p. 232. Interview with Pollock, Arts and Architecture, Feb. 1944.
777
Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 148.
778
Lee Krasner speaking of their time with the Kadishes says it was "a weekend." Naifeh and Smith report
that the visit was for six weeks and that Krasner in later interviews reduced the time from six weeks to a
weekend in "revenge" for Reuben Kadish's having continued to drink with Pollock that summer; Steven
Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter,
1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 501.
779
NS, p. 500.
780
Interview with Barbara Kadish, Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson
Pollock (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), p. 81.
781
NS, p. 501.
782
Potter, p. 81.
783
Lee Krasner, quoted in Grace Glueck, "Krasner and Pollock: Scenes from a Marriage," Art News , Dec.
1981, p. 60.
784
Michael Stolbach, Interview with Krasner, quoted in NS, p. 498.
785
Potter, p. 86.
786
Quoted in Nemser, Art Talk (New York: Scribner's, 1975), p. 87. Glueck, "Krasner and Pollock," p. 60.
787
Quoted in Nemser, ibid.
788
Interview with Lee Krasner, NS, p. 503.
789 Interview with May Tabak [Rosenberg], Potter, p. 87. When Lee asked Peggy Guggenheim to be a
witness, she refused. Told that the other witness was to be May Rosenberg, Guggenheim may have
confused the name with that of the editor with whom she had had editorial disputes over the manuscript of
her memoirs. In any event she said she had a previous lunch date she intended to keep. "You're married
enough," she told Lee. "Why do you have to get more married?" See B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock:
Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 82 and NS, p. 503.
790
Quoted in Jacqueline Bograd Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim (New York: Dutton, 1986), p.
343; cited in NS, p. 503.
791
As noted in the remarks accompanying CR 741, the date on this work is illegible. It has been variously
published as 1943, 1944, 1947. I concur with the catalogue raisonné date of c. 1945. See CR, vol. 3, p.
238. Pollock also celebrated his marriage in a painting titled Direction and dated on the stretcher 10-45, the
month and year of the marriage. For date, see CR vol. 1, p. 30. Amid an array of symbolic shapes and
color, his "lucky numbers" 4 and 6 in white stand out.
792
Interview with Noguchi, Potter, p. 79. On Lee's possessiveness, see NS, pp. 501, 504, 509, 511.
793
NS, p. 513.
794
See CR, vol. 1, CR 145, references, p. 138.
795
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), p. 344.
796
Naifeh and Smith state that Waterfigure is the last known painting done before the move to Springs; p.
872. This may be correct, but they give no source for the assertion other than the date 11-45 on the
stretcher.
797
Although this particular issue of View was not in the Pollock library at the time of his death, though
 531

many others were, the accumulation of possible visual references, in The Child Proceeds, The Little King,
White Angel, Key, argue that Pollock did see this issue.
798
Seligmann, "Heritage of the Accursed," View, Dec. 1945, p. 7.
799
Interview with May Tabak, Potter, p. 81.
800
NS, pp. 502, 871.
801
Interview with May Tabak, Potter, p. 190. May Rosenberg recalls, "She [Lee] said she wouldn't have a
child by him ever. He had been drinking in the past, and she didn't want to have a child because she didn't
know when he might start drinking again. " She also recalls his reaction, "He went beserk. The whole
thing was to be married and have children." Interview with May Tabak Rosenberg, quoted in NS, p. 531.
802
NS, p. 745.
803
For Naifeh and Smith this canvas simply appears as evidence of an emotionally incestuous tie between
Pollock and his mother, and his desire for rebirth through her. Though very narrow, their reading of this
canvas hits upon an aspect of the emotional complexities that lie behind Pollock's art making; NS, p. 512.
804
Interview with Ronald Stein, Potter, p. 190.
805
Interview with Tony Smith in Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who was Jackson Pollock?" Art in
America, vol. 55, May-June 1967, p. 54.
806
The title itself suggests this, for both Jung and Harding in her synopsis refer to the alchemical legend
about the resurrection of "the King's son," the divine spark hidden in matter, as a goal of the alchemist's
work. See Harding, pp. 15, 17, and Carl G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and
Rhinehart, 1939), plate X with its reference to p. 246, where the image is explained as the king’s son,
united with the king by the central figure Mercury. Such a reunion occurs after the death of the king’s son
and his night journey, described p. 242 ff.
807
The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, Richard Wilhelm, ed. (New York:
Causeway Books, 1975), pp. 33, 35.
808
Jung, p. 227, and Harding, p. 11, explain that the winged dragon appears both at the beginning and the
end of the alchemist's work.
809
Illustrated in Seligmann, "Heritage of the Accursed," p. 7.
810
For a related reading, which also refers to Seligmann, of the androgyny of the picture, see Jonathan
Welch, "Jackson Pollock's The White Angel and the Origins of Alchemy," Arts, March 1979, p. 139.
811
Pollock owned and read Finnegan's Wake. He was especially fond of listening in a recording to Joyce
read from “Anna Livia Plurabelle.” See Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p.
174, p. 260, n. 26. For an overview of Pollock's and his contemporaries' interest in Joyce, see Evan R.
Firestone, "James Joyce and the First Generation New York School," Arts Magazine, June 1982, pp. 116-
21.
812
For ownership see CR, vol. 4, p. 194. James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake (New York: Viking Compass,
1959), p. 504; and Joseph Campbell and Henry M. Robinson, A Skeleton Key to 'Finnegan's Wake (New
York: Viking Compass, 1961), p. 312.
813
Joyce, p. 502.
814
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Pollock,” The Nation, April 7, 1945,
in The Collected Essays and Criticism 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986) [henceforth abbreviated as CEC], vol. 2, p. 17.
815
Deborah Solomon Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 164.
816
817
Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists, Jacques Lipchitz, and Jackson
Pollock," The Nation, April 13, 1946, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 75
818
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York: Clarkson
N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], pp. 515-516.
819
In Janesville, NS, p. 516.
820
Interview with Lee Krasner, NS, p. 516.
821
Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York: G.P. Putnam's
Sons, 1985), p. 175.
822
Interview with Ossorio, in Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who was Jackson Pollock?" Art in
America, vol. 55, May-June 1967, p. 58.
823
Interview with Lee Krasner, in du Plessix and Gray, p. 51.
 532

824
Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds. Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings,
Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth
abbreviated as CR], vol. 4, doc. 52, p. 232 , Interview with Pollock, Arts and Architecture, Feb. 1944.
825
Deborah Solomon Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 165. In
the 1950's the Pollocks acquired a black poodle they named Ahab. See NS, p. 878.
826
Mercedes Matter, quoted in Potter, p. 97.
827
Interview with Lee Krasner, in du Plessix and Gray, p. 51.
828
Ibid.
829
LK, quoted in Grace Glueck, "Krasner and Pollock: Scenes from a Marriage," Art News , Dec. 1981, p.
60.
830
On Lee's suggestion, see Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 161. On
titles as Pollock's own, see Ellen H. Johnson conversation with Lee Krasner, Oct. 22, 1971, in Ellen
Johnson, "Jackson Pollock and Nature," in Modern Art and the Object (New York: Harper and Row, 1976),
p. 114.
831
About moving the barn, see NS, pp. 518-19.
832
Interview with Lee Krasner, quoted in NS, p. 521.
833
Interview with Roger Wilcox, quoted in NS, p. 521.
834
Barbara Rose, “Pollock’s Studio: Interview with Lee Krasner,” Pollock Painting, ed. Barbara Rose
(New York: Agrinde Publications, 1980), n.p.
835
Landau, Jackson Pollock, p. 161. Greenberg writes in his February 1947 review, "[Pollock] has now
largely abandoned his customary heavy black-and-whitish or gun-metal chiaroscuro for the higher scales,
for alizarins, cream-whites, cerulean blues, pinks, and sharp greens." Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions
of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock,” The Nation, Feb. 1, 1947, in The Collected Essays and Criticism 4
vols., ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) [henceforth abbreviated as CEC],
vol. 2, p. 124.
836
Landau, Jackson Pollock, pp. 161-2. Landau points out that Krasner had adapted Matisse's "aerated"
surfaces to her own purposes when she painted in front of the still-lifes set up at the Hofmann School in the
late 1930's; Landau, "Lee Krasner’s Early Career, Part One: ‘Pushing in Different Directions’,” Arts
Magazine, vol. 56, Oct. 1981, pp. 110-22. The only influence Krasner would ever admit she had on
Pollock was to introduce him to the art of Matisse; Landau, Jackson Pollock, chapter 9, n. 7, p. 259.
837
Pollock to Bunce, postmark June 2, 1946, quoted Mard Naman, “Jackson Pollock’s Letter to a Friend,”
San Francisco Chronicle, This World, Sunday magazine, May 6, 1984, p. 11.
838
As Landau points out, Greenberg discussed the impact of Matisse's "aerated" surfaces on American
artists: "What should be noticed is how Matisse laid on and stroked varying thinnesses of paint so that the
white ground breathed as well as showed through. But even when he laid on his paint evenly or more
densely, or when he used a palette knife -- which was seldom--the paint surface would still manage to
breathe." Greenberg, "Influences of Matisse," Art International, vol. 17, Nov. 1973, p. 28. Gail Levin also
interestingly points to many parallels between The Key and Kandinsky's work of the Bauhaus years, noting
colors, shapes, and their arrangement. Levin and Marianne Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky
and the American Avant-garde 1912-50 (Boston: Little Brown, 1992), p. 214.
839
xxx
840
Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act 1, lines 6259-6290, cited in Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Bollingen
Series XX, 5 (1956; rpt Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 206.
841
Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists, Jacques Lipchitz, and Jackson
Pollock," The Nation, April 13, 1946, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 75. Greenberg continues to characterize the
pictorial structure on which Pollock relies as Cubist: "Pollock submits to a habit of discipline derived from
cubism; and even as he goes away from cubism he carries with him the unity of style with which it
endowed him when in the beginning he put himself under its influence." I, on the other hand, emphasize
the nature of Pollock's sense of structure as centralized, mandaloid, not Cubist, that is, not referring,
whether analytically or synthetically, to perception of external nature.
842
Robert Melville, "Picasso in the Light of Chirico,” View, Feb.-March l942, p. 2. Pollock might first
have been drawn to Picasso's Bullfight in reproduction in the l935 Cahiers d'Art, vol. 10, nos. 7-10, p. xxx.
843
Pollock’s attraction to Picasso's eroticized corrida imagery is evident in a number of drawings: CR 507
(c. 1939-40), CR 639 (c. l939-42), CR 604 (c. l940-42), CR 670 (c. l943).
844
Illustrated in Landau, Jackson Pollock, p. 157.
845
Jung comments in Symbols of Transformation that "the various forms of the crux ansata have the
 533

meaning of 'life' and 'fruitfulness' and also of 'union' which can be interpretated as the hierogamos of the
god with his mother for the purpose of conquering death and renewing life." Jung, ibid., p. 269.
846
Quoted by Lee Krasner, in Barbara Rose, "Pollock's Studio: Interview with Lee Krasner," in Pollock
Painting, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Agrinde Publications, 1980), n. p.
847
Ibid.
848
Landau states that all the Sounds in the Grass series was created in the later half of 1946, and that
Shimmering Substance is the final painting of the series. Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York:
Abrams, 1989), pp. 163, 166. Naifeh and Smith state, though without substantiation, that The Blue
Unconscious was begun before the move to the barn and finished afterwards. Steven Naifeh and Gregory
White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth
abbreviated as NS], p. 520.
849
B. H. Friedman, Interview with Krasner, 1969, in Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds.,
Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth abbreviated as CR], vol. 4, doc. 102c, p. 264.
850
This dual ability is a classic shamanic experience of two-in-one, of simultaneous ascent and descent.
Pollock’s experience as manifest in his imagery provides many parallels with shamanic experience as
detailed by the comparative religion scholar Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ectasy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964, Bollingen Series LXXVI) pp. 33, xx.
851
Yve-Alain Bois, “Jackson Pollock: Early Sketchbooks and Drawings,” Artforum, Feb. 1998, p. 84.
852
Wilcox, who helped Jackson move the barn, recalls The Blue Unconscious as already begun at that
time; Interview with Wilcox, NS p. 873. Lee recalls that Something of the Past was one of the first
canvases that Jackson started after the move to the barn; Interview with Krasner, NS p. 873.
853
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), p. 344
854
Clark, p. 321.
855
Clark, p. 319.
856
Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, "Jackson Pollock: Response as Dialogue,” Jackson Pollock: New
Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 151.
857
For a semiotic analysis of Eyes in the Heat, cf. Ann Gibson, “The Rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism,”
Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments, ed.Michael Auping (New York: Abrams, 1987), pp.
76-77, and cf. Richard Shiff, "Performing an Appearance: On the Surface of Abstract Expressionism,"
Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments, p. 98.
858
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock,” The Nation, Feb. 1, 1947,
in The Collected Essays and Criticism 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986) [henceforth abbreviated as CEC], vol. 2, p. 125.
859
Ibid.
860
Greenberg, quoted in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New
York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), p. 113. Solomon says, drawing on an interview with Greenberg, Dec.
1983, that Shimmering Substance is the subject of Pollock's comment, "That's for Clem." Deborah
Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 169.
861
Landau, p. 86.
862
NS, p. 873.
863
Interview with John Little, NS, p. 524.
864
Interview with Greenberg, NS, p. 524.
865
Interview with John Little, NS, p. 524.
866
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists, Jacques Lipchitz, and Jackson
Pollock,“ The Nation, April 13, 1946, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 75.
867
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock,” The Nation, February 1,
1947, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 125.
868
See Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb," The Nation, Dec. 6,
1947, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 189.
869
Interview with Bultman, NS, p. 551. Bultman also recalled that one of the most striking aspects of a
conversation that they had about Free Masonry while at Springs (Pollock was impressed that the grocer
there was a Free Mason) was the warning not to raise such matters with Greenberg. Bultman, Interview
with author, Feb. 1, 1980.
870
Landau, p. 166.
 534

871
Pollock had also broached unitary structure before, in the abstract cosmic swirling vortex of the
engraving CR 1082 and in his watercolor and gouache response to it in CR 990.
872
For a similar reading, see Matthew L. Rohn, Visual Dynamics in Jackson Pollock’s Abstractions (Ann
Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1987), p. 65, and p. 66, fig. 8. The difference in our interpretations
is due to the fact that I place more emphasis on the yellow marks in the upper right of the canvas, while he
places more emphasis on similar yellow marks in the lower left.
873
Serge Guilbaut's interpretation of Shimmering Substance as a response to the Bikini atomic tests has
initiated an interpretation of Pollock's 1946-50 art as a response to the modern Atomic age. He writes:
"What Pollock depicts is a source of energy that is not merely powerful but also destructive. What is
shown, in short, is not the sun but its equivalent, the atomic bomb, transformed into myth." Guilbaut, How
New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 97. See T.J. Clark, "Pollock's Smallness," in Jackson Pollock:
New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 29 and
Omri Moses, "Jackson Pollock's Address to the Nonhuman," Oxford Art Journal, vol. 27, no. 1, 2004, pp.
14-15. While Pollock himself names the atom bomb, along with the radio and the airplane, as aspects of
the modern age which a modern painter addresses, in his interview with William Wright, late 1950, in
Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 1999), p. 20, such interpretation, more appropriate to the explosive force of Number 32, 1950, must in
response to Shimmering Substance be tempered by an awareness of Pollock's preoccupation with death-
rebirth cycles inflected at this juncture with thoughts of foetal stuff.
874
The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, trans. Richard Wilhelm, commentary by
C.G. Jung, (London: 1931; reprinted New York: Causeway Books, 1975), p. 12.
875
Seligmann, "Magic and the Arts," View, Oct. 1946, p. 16.
876
The exhibition catalogue of No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock, Paintings on Paper (Deutsche
Guggenheim, 2005), organized by Susan Davidson, also dates CR 996 to 1946; see fig. 47, p. 91. For
earlier and various dating of CR 996 to c. 1945 and c. 1946, see entry for CR 996, CR vol. 4, p. 71.
877
Cindy Nemser, “A Conversation with Lee Krasner,” Arts Magazine, April 1973, p. 44.
878
Conversation with Lee Krasner, in John Gruen, "A Turbulent Life with Jackson Pollock," New York/
World Journal Tribune, March 26, 1967, p. 15.
879
See Picasso, Raphael and La Fonarina, 1968, ill. in Michel Leiris, "The Artist and his Model," in
Picasso in Retrospect, ed. Roland Penrose and John Golding (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 260.
880
Bois, ibid. Bois was writing in particular of Pollock’s diagrammatic studies of Old Master figural
compositions in which simplification to a common denominator included figure and interstitial spaces
occupied by drapery.
881
Frank O’Hara, “Excerpts from: Jackson Pollock” (1959), in Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson
Pollock, ed. Helen Harrison (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 127.
882
James Coddington, “No Chaos Damn It,” Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and
Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 102. On terminology drip or pour, see Coddingham
p. 114, and Karmel, “Introduction,” Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 13, n. 1.
883
Enamel paints are the most distinctive material feature of the poured paintings, but they are not, as has
often been assumed, nitrocellulose-based enamel paints. Rather in works analyzed by conservators, they
are almost exclusively oil-modified alkyd paints. Coddingham, p. 106.
884
Jackson Pollock, “My Painting,” Possibilities, Winter 1947-48, in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles,
and Reviews, p. 18.
885
Coddingham, p. 102.
886
Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Worden Day, Carl Holty, and Jackson Pollock,“ The
Nation, January 24, 1948, in The Collected Essays and Criticism 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986) [henceforth abbreviated as CEC], vol. 2, p. 202.
887
Kirk Varnedoe, “Comet: Jackson Pollock’s Life and Work,” in Jackson Pollock, exh. cat. (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 49
888
Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings,
Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth
abbreviated as CR], vol. 4, doc. 90, p. 253, Jackson Pollock handwritten statement, c. 1950.
889
CR, vol. 4, doc. 87, p. 250, Jackson Pollock, Interview with William Wright, The Springs, Long Island,
New York, late 1950.
 535

890
Jeremy Lewison, Interpreting Pollock (London: Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd., 1999), p. 33. For Lewison
Mural becomes a key to understanding the 1947-50 paintings due to the manner in which Pollock uses
black markings, functioning, as might figures although the markings do not represent figures, to control the
over all field of color; see pp. 40, 54. For Lewison Pollock is caught up in Leja’s conception of modern
man's battle for control, and the use of linear motifs, sometimes with vestigial human reference, constitutes
the strategy that Pollock adopts “to confer some kind of order and to create some kind of space,” p. 54.
891
Paul Brach, “From a symposium, ‘Jackson Pollock: Portrait and a Dream,’ Guild Hall Museum, East
Hampton, NY, June 8, 1986,” in ” Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock, ed. Helen Harrison
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 277.
892
Quoted in “Jackson Pollock: Fragments of conversations and statements, selected, extracted and
categorized, from his own notes by Jeffrey Potter 1949-56,” in Such Desperate Joy, p. 86.
893
CR, vol. 4, doc. 87, pp. 250, 249.
894
CR, vol. 4, doc. 89, p. 253, Jackson Pollock handwritten statement, c. 1950, and doc. 90, p. 253. To his
biographer B. H. Friedman he made a similar statement: “My concern is with the rhythms of nature ... the
way the ocean moves.” Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972),
p. 228.
895
Francis V. O’Connor helpfully points out twelve permutations of the pouring technique in “The Jackson
Pollock Watch, Review No. 9A, Pollock in Utopia: A Tour of the Exhibition,” Dec. 1, 1998,
http://members.aol.com/FVOC/archive.html.
896
Pollock, “My Painting,” p. 18.
897
Coddingham, p. 103.
898
Pepe Karmel, “Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” in Jackson Pollock exh.
cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 129.
899
See Karmel, “Pollock at Work,” pp. 107-08 and fig. 38.
900
When Red and Blue were exhibited in the 1967 Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York, they were both dated 1946. Then both, without explanation, were redated to c. 1943 in CR,
entries for CR 970 and CR 971. Again without explanation Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel in the
catalogue for the 1999 retrospective redated Red (now referred to as Red and Blue) to c. 1943-46; Kirk
Varnedoe, with Pepe Karmel, Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), pp. 166-67.
For iconographic reasons, I prefer to date both works c. 1946, especially because of the iconographic
detailing of the One and the Eight in Red, and of the animal’s meditation on the relation of abstraction and
figuration in Blue, as it looks down upon the cycling of form from the non-manifest in the ocean to the
more recognizable images in the sky. Both works’ stylistic relation to Miro’s Constellations series, shown
in New York only in 1945, also argues for a later date.
901
Namuth, quoted in “Jackson Pollock,” Portfolio: The Annual of the Graphic Arts (Cincinnati) vol. 2,
no.1, 1951, n.p.
902
Karmel, “Pollock at Work,” pp. 118, 127.
903
Ibid., p. 131. Krauss also rejects Karmel’s analysis of Pollock’s figuration in terms of Renaissance
figuration; “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, p. 156.
904
CR, vol. 4, doc. 72, p. 241, Jackson Pollock, holograph draft for “My Painting,” Possibilities, Winter
1947-48.
905
As Coddingham, in studying Pollock’s paintings, concluded: “At a fundamental level, it seems,
Pollock’s creative process involved a response to an existing image,” p. 115, n. 18.
906
Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), p. 80.
907
Jackson Pollock, Interview for Life magazine, Time/Life Archives, July 18, 1949, quoted in Steven
Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter,
1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 591.
908
CR, vol. 4, doc. 90. To Goodnough Pollock explained: “He feels that his methods may be automatic at
the start, but that they quickly step beyond that, becoming concerned with deeper and more evolved
emotions, which carry the painting on to completion according to their degree of strength and purity.”
Robert Goodnough, “Pollock Paints a Picture,” Art News, May 1951, p. 60.
909
Varnedoe, “Comet,” p. 50.
910
Carl G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1939), p. 227.
911
Quoted in “Jackson Pollock: Fragments of conversations and statements,” p. 93.
 536

912
Rohn, using the framework of Arnheim’s gestalt perceptual psychology. appreciates the difference of
Pollock’s approach from Renaissance based aesthetics; see Matthew L. Rohn, Visual Dynamics in Jackson
Pollock’s Abstractions (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1987), pp. 1-8.
913
Karmel, “A Sum of Destructions,” Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, p. 93.
914
See ibid., pp. 72, 92- 93
915
Ibid., p. 79.
916
Karmel states “Pollock’s achievement, in his pictures of 1947-50, was to transform graphic flatness – to
show that by piling layer upon layer, sign upon sign, you could generate a pictorial sensation equivalent to
that of the primordial visual field.” “Pollock at Work,” p. 132.
917
For a stimulating discussion of human cardinality, living movement, and real space, as the basis of a
post-formalist art history, see David Summer, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western
Modernism (New York: Phaidon Press, 2003), especially pp. 36-45, and on Rothko's art in these terms, pp.
648-49.
918
Peter Busa, quoted in Christopher Busa, “’Being a Great Man is a Thesis Invented by Others’ Peter
Busa on Jackson Pollock,” in Desperate Joy, p. 198.
919
James Brooks, interviewed by James T. Valliere, Nov. 1965, in Desperate Joy p. 240. Pollock’s talk
was not solely structural. “Other times he would go into a very interesting monologue about things in
painting that you’d done that had provoked him in a psychological way -- the images -- the strange
formation that you were bringing out or repressing. Even things such as bulls’ heads or goats’ heads he
would mention in a combination of mystical and psychological knowledge.”
920
Quoted in Paul Jenkins, “The Arabesque and the Grid,” Jan. 1984, in Desperate Joy, p. 174
921
On Pollock poured paintings and Mondrian, see William Rubin, "Jackson Pollock and the Modern
Tradition, Part III," Artforum, vol. 5, April 1967, p. 23; E.A. Carmean, Jr., “Jackson Pollock: Classic
Paintings of 1950,” The Subjects of the Artist (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1978), p. 153; Ellen
G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), pp. 196, 262 n. 28.
922
Robert Rosenblum, who appreciates Mondrian’s world as a “mystic’s world of immaterial nature and
spirit,” writes of Pier and Ocean (1914) owned by the Museum of Modern Art: “Confronted with such
visual complexity, one realizes only at second glance that the picture is virtually symmetrical, except for
the most subtle variations of width, length, and texture in the application of the crayoned lines. And in
concentrating on the unity rather than the diversity of the work, one realizes further that the restless,
interlocking rhythms of line and plane are ultimately resolved into a large cross that seems to emanate
serenely and quietly from beneath the agitated surface.” Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art
(New York: Abrams, 1966), p. 238. Rosenblum has linked Pollock to a tradition of the abstract sublime in
“The Abstract Sublime,” Art News, vol. 59, no. 10 (Feb. 1961), pp. 39-41, 56-57.
923
Rohn, Visual Dynamics, p. 117.
924
Quoted in “Jackson Pollock: Fragments of conversations and statements,” p. 86.
925
Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940's (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993), p. 309. See also p. 198.
926
Goodnough, p. 60.
927
Karmel, “Pollock at Work,” pp. 114, 121. Greenberg, as Karmel points out, also observes that
Pollock’s all-over paintings tend to be “concentric in their patterning” or based on “overlapping concentric
patterns”; “Jackson Pollock: Inspiration, Vision, Intuitive Decision,” Vogue, April 1, 1967, in CEC, vol. 4,
p. 246.
928
Karmel, ibid., pp. 123-24.
929
See Rohn on these vertical dynamics, ibid., p. 95
930
Piet Mondrian, "Statement, c. 1943," in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics,
comp. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 362.
931
“Remarks,” CR, vol. 3, CR 720, p. 223
932
Quoted in “Jackson Pollock: Fragments of conversations and statements,” p. 88.
933
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), p. 322.
934
Translations by Manheim include: 1943 Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung, Yale University
Press; 1948 Georges Vantongerloo, Paintings, sculptures, reflections; 1952 Arp, Dreams and Projects; 1955
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2 Mythical Thought, Yale University Press; 1955
Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, Bollingen Press, etc. He also translated all the Eranos Yearbooks.
 537

935
For the first record of the titling session, see Judith Wolfe, "Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock's
Imagery," Artforum, Nov. l972, p. 72, and n. 41. Offering a different account, but also writing after more
time had elapsed, Landau asserts that Krasner confirmed Manheim as the source of the titles for all of the
works in Pollock’s first Parsons show, p. 169. To Rubin, Manheim confirmed that he named Alchemy; see
William Rubin, "Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological Criticism, Part II," Art in
America, Dec. 1979, p. 90, n. 14.
936
Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 143. Manheim
may have even seen in the sensations of transmutation from black to white, then to red, and finally yellow,
with a pervasive role for quicksilver, the classic steps of alchemical transformation that Jung outlined in
Integration of the Personality; see pp. 208-09. Pollock himself was undoubtedly aware of alchemical color
symbolism, as it is outlined in Jung’s discussion of his patient’s drawings in terms of alchemy, a discussion
to which Pollock turned in both 1940 and 1943. See especially p. 48. However, the colors that occur in
Alchemy are so embedded in the now long history of Pollock’s own usage of them that he may not have
been aware of their specifically alchemical complexion. For a review of this issue, see Rubin, ibid., pp. 75-
76.
937
Clark, p. 337.
938
Jung, pp. 40, 153.
939
Two other short lived publications also moved into the void left by View: Instead, a broadside that
came out in eight numbers put together by Matta and Lionel Abel in 1947-48, and Tiger’s Eye, starting
October 1947. These perpetuated and augmented what remained of the automatist approach to art and of
the Art of This Century/American Surrealist circle for another two years. See Martica Sawin, Surrealism in
Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 407, 409.
940
Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and
the Cold War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 143.
941
Robert Motherwell, Harold Rosenberg, “Statement,” Possibilities I, Winter 1947/8, n.p..
942
Ann Eden Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism: the artist-run periodicals (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1990), p. 38.
943
Ibid., p. 43.
944
Ibid., p. 39. For Rosenberg the backdrop of action is non-existence, death. “Once this void [of non-
being] has been sensed, with what desperation must each man cling to the hollow of the one stage [of life]!
For he knows it is possible not to act – and then he will not exist.” Rosenberg, “The Stages: A Geography
of Human Action,” Possibilities I, p. 48.
945
Gibson, p. 35.
946
“Gorky’s death [in 1948] was used to justify the collective amnesia regarding the Surrealist emigrés
that for decades militated against a historical understanding of the genesis of abstract expressionism. When
Robert Motherwell said in 1982, ‘ There is no account of those five years that corresponds in any way with
what actually happened,’ he was, in effect, acknowledging the conspiracy of silence on the subject.”
Sawin, p. 410.
947
On the link between the title of Possibilities and Dyn as speculative, see Gibson, p. 37. Winter notes
Motherwell’s variations in his testimony regarding his relation with Paalen, more generous in 1965, more
distancing in 1982; see Amy Winter, Wolfgang Paalen: Artist and Theorist of the Avant-Garde (Westport,
CT: Praeger, 2003), pp. 109, 112, 113, 118.
948
Echoing Hem’s, Shem’s and Rem’s discussion in Rosenberg’s “Breton -- a Dialoque,” 1942, Caffi in
“On Mythology” updates the positions. The scientific position, now occupied by “Taylorism” and other
“iron laws of ‘technico-economic determinism’” in a consumer society, is soundly rejected, and even the
Marxist call for “a man all new, completely naked, guided by reason alone … necessary for the creation of
the ‘good’ society, in which a knowledge of reality, of all reality, and of nothing but reality, shall govern
life” is questioned -- in favor of mythology; Possibilities I, p. 91.
949
Ibid., p. 87.
950
The distinction between existence and being occupies a central position in the philosophy of Martin
Heidegger.
951
Ibid., pp. 87, 88.
952
Ibid., p. 91.
953
Ibid.
954
Ibid., p. 95.
955
Ibid., pp. 68, 73.
 538

956
Paul Goodman, “The Emperor of China,” Possibilities I, p. 13.
957
Lionel Abel, “The Bow and the Gun,” Possibilities I, p. 73, accompanied by Motherwell’s drawing
Indians 1944, p. 74.
958
Clement Greenberg, “The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture,” Horizon, October
1947, in The Collected Essays and Criticism 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986) [henceforth abbreviated as CEC] vol. 2, p. 168. For the historiography of Nietzsche and
Abstract Expressionism, see Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, (New York,
Penguin Books, 1979), Ann Eden Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism: the artist-run periodicals (Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990), Stephen Polcari, Abstract Exptressionism and the Modern Experience (
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, Amy Winter, Wolfgang Paalen: Artist and Theorist of the
Avant-Garde (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), W. Jackson Rushing, "The Impact of Nietzsche and
Northwest Coast Indian Art on Barnett Newman's Idea of Redemption in the Abstract Sublime, Art Journal,
vol. 47, Fall 1988, pp. 187-95.
959
Greenberg, ibid., p. 166.
960
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb,“ The Nation, December 6,
1947, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 189.
961
Ibid.
962
Interview with Betty Parsons, in Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who was Jackson Pollock?" Art
in America, vol. 55, May-June 1967, p. 55.
963
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), p. 338.
964
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. And trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Viking, 1959), p. 95.
965
Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001), p. 10.
966
Clark, p. 312.
967
For discussion of painterliness and all-over tonality in the poured paintings, see William Rubin,
"Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition," Artforum, March 1967, pp. 28, 33.
968
Michael Fried, "Jackson Pollock," Artforum, vol. 4, Sept. 1965, pp. 14, 15.
969
To his friends Pollock joked about this work, "That's Mercedes dancing." Ellen Landau, in
conversation with the author, February 2006. [Change. See Matter catalog, p. 33]
970
Quoted in Christopher Busa, “Being A great man is a Thesis Invented by Others: Peter Busa on Jackson
Pollock,” May 2000, in Such Desperate Joy, pp. 202-03. Pollock reiterated this attitude to Goodnough.
“At first he is very much alone with a picture, forgetting that there is a world of people and activity outside
himself. Gradually he again becomes aware of the outside world and the image he has begun to project is
thought of as related to both himself and other people. ” Robert Goodnough, “Pollock Paints a Picture,” Art
News, May 1951, p. 60.
971
xxx
972
Christopher Busa, p.198. Barney Rosset, “A Recollection,” in Such Desperate Joy, p. 299.
973
Interview with Vita Peterson, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American
Saga, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 561.
974
See NS, pp. 548-65
975
Interview with Harry Jackson, NS, p. 565.
976
Clark, p. 311.
977
Clark, p. 314.
978
See Hans Namuth, photograph of Pollock’s studio, 1956, illustrated in Clark, p. 352, and Clark’s
discussion, p. 351.
979
Michael Fried, "Jackson Pollock," Artforum, vol. 4, Sept. 1965, p. 16.
980
Ibid.
981
Clark, p. 350.
982
On dating, see NS, p. 566. On title, see Clark, p. 353.
983
Clark, pp. 355, 354.
984
Clark, p. 343.
985
Jim Coddington, “Jackson Pollock’s Number 13A, 1948: Arabesque,” Yale University Art Gallery
Bulletin 1999, p. 141.
986
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York: Clarkson
N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 553.
 539

987
James Coddington, “No Chaos Damn It,” Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and
Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 106.
988
Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, "Jackson Pollock: Response as Dialogue,” Jackson Pollock: New
Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 147. In
preparing for the 1999 Pollock retrospective these conservators simulated the black and white enamel pours
in order to better understand Pollock’s technique. See the illustration in Mancusi-Ungaro, p. 149.
Discussing Pollock’s experimental use of materials in his poured paintings and the refinement of the drip
technique, Storr points to Pollock’s earlier exposure to similar techniques used in Siqueiros’ workshop; “A
Piece of the Action,” Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1999), pp. 58-59. See also Chapter 1, p. 35 above.
989
Stanley William Hayter, "Line and Space of the Imagination," View, vol.4, no. 4, Dec. 1944, p. 127.
See Chapter 12, pp. 19-21 above.
990
See Chapter 12, p. 13 above.
991
CR, vol. 4, doc. 90, p. 253, Jackson Pollock handwritten statement, c. 1950.
992
Michael Fried, "Jackson Pollock," Artforum, vol. 4, Sept. 1965, p. 15.
993
Frank O’Hara, Jackson Pollock (New York: George Braziller, 1959), p. 25.
994
"To continue merely automatically is as much a sin against the creative spirit as to start work without
inspiration." Hayter, "Paul Klee: Apostle of Empathy," American Magazine of Art, April 1946, p. 128.
995
Hayter, "Of the Means," Possibilities, no. 1, Winter 1947-48, p. 77.
996
O’Hara, p. 26.
997
Parker Tyler, “Jackson Pollock: The Infinite Labyrinth,” Magazine of Art, March 1950, p. 92.
998
Friedrich Nietzsche, "Early Version of Ecce Homo," in Samtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed.
Giorio Colli and Mazzino Monyinari (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1980), vol. 14, p. 497.
999
In the thirty odd plates and accompanying text of Anatomy of my Universe, published by Curt
Valentine in February 1943, Masson elaborates on his version of the Theseus myth. In his Chapter VI,
"The Elan of Myth," he states that while Theseus contains the bird, the Phoenix, his Nietzschean Ariadne
contains, even dreams that she is, the labyrinth. In Plate XXVI the female labyrinthine earth mother
contains within her depths, pictured below and upside down, the minotaur, identified in the text as the
primal life cycle, "pre-natal life, bestial murder, death." Thus in the depths of the female realm lie hidden
the primal and bestial force of nature's cycle. Masson celebrates the theme of the beast as the locus of a
primal creative power, separated from the Theseus-minotaur story, in the Telluric painting Meditation on
an Oak Leaf l942.
1000
Tyler, p. 93.
1001
Jeffrey Potter, “Jackson Pollock: Fragments of conversations and statements. Selected, extracted and
categorized, from his own notes (1949-56),” in Such Desperate Joy; Imagining Jackson Pollock, ed. Helen
A. Harrison (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 89.
1002
Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957),
p. 82.
1003
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York: Clarkson
N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 589.
1004
Carter Ratcliffe, “Big for the Eye,” Jackson Pollock: Drip Paintings on Paper 1948-49, exh. cat. (New
York: C&M Arts,1993), n.p.
1005
The other artist was Willem de Kooning. See NS, p. 591.
1006
Kandinsky, "The Art of Spiritual Harmony," quoted in Kandinsky, ed. Hilda Rebay, published by
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, on occasion of The Kandinsky Memorial Exhibition, March15-May
15, 1945, at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, p. 37.
1007
B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York, 1972), p. 15.
1008
1009
Pepe Karmel, “Jackson Pollock Jazz,” Jackson Pollock Jazz CD (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1998).
1010
Andrew Kagan, “Notes on Jackson Pollock and the Black Contribution to American High Culture,”
Arts Magazine, March 1979, p. 99. Karmel makes distinctions in Pollock’s taste in jazz, saying he once
claimed only to like Dixieland music – and, indeed, "ragtime rhythms echo through records he owned by
Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong. But it is clear from his collection that he was also drawn to the
sophisticated harmonies of Duke Ellington, the pathos of Billie Holiday, and the muscular lyricism of
Coleman Hawkins. (Surprisingly, Pollock rejected the bebop of Charlie Parker, who is sometimes seen as
 540

his musical counterpart.)” Daniel Belgrad , however, follows Lee Krasner in asserting “the profound
influence of bebop on Jack Pollock during the crucial year, 1946, when he developed his gesture-field style
of painting.” Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 194-95.
1011
On riff and swing, see Lorenzo Simpson, The Unfinished Project; Toward a Postmetaphysical
Humanism (Routledge, 2001), pp. 50, 53.
1012
Ibid., pp. 55, 57.
1013
Writing about jazz improvisation as a compositional practice, Garry Hagberg explains: “To put it
Platonically, these musical practices give us sonic embodiments without mental ideals behind those
embodiments; and to put it in terms of sound patterns, one may indeed have patterns of sound, but the
patterns do not predate the sounds.” “Jazz Improvization,” in Michael Kelly, ed. Encyclopedia of
Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) vol. 2, p. 480.
1014
Jackson Pollock, Interview with William Wright, late 1950, in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles,
and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 22.
1015
Clement Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” Partisan Review, April 1948, in The Collected
Essays and Criticism 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) [henceforth
abbreviated as CEC], vol. 2, p. 222.
1016
Ibid. He develops the analogy of this art to the music of Schonberg, who “makes every element, every
voice, and note in the composition of equal importance --different but equivalent …. But these painters go
beyond even Schonberg by making their variations upon equivalences so subtle that at first glance we
might see in their pictures, not equivalences, but an hallucinated uniformity” p. 224.
1017
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Albers,” The
Nation, February 19, 1949, in CEC, vol. 2, pp. 285-86.
1018
This frieze format Pollock found satisfying for he repeated it a number of times, for instance CR 227
[Horizontal Composition] c. 1949 is 10 inches x 10 feet 1 7/8 inches, Number 10, 1949 18 feet x 8 feet 11
inches, Number 7, 1950 2 feet x 9 feet 1 3/4 inches.
1019
See Chapter 15, p. 13 above.
1020
CR, vol. 4, doc. 67, p. 238, Jackson Pollock, application for Guggenheim Fellowship 1947. Krauss
sees Pollock as a ventriloquist of Greenberg’s theorizing; “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” Jackson
Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p.
166.
1021
Ibid., p. 157. Robert Storr in discussing the relationship of Pollock’s painting to muralism, especially
as formulated by the Mexican muralist Siqueiros, asserts that from the time of Pollock’s production of
Mural 1943, “Greenberg was urging Pollock to make the move toward the wall.” “A Piece of the Action,”
Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, p. 37.
1022
On Greenberg’s ideas as articulated in 1955, see Krauss, ibid., p. 158.
1023
Frank O’Hara, Jackson Pollock (New York: George Braziller, 1959), p. 28.
1024
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 40.
1025
Harold Rosenberg, “The American action painters,” Art News, Dec. 1952, p. 23.
1026
24 Cf. Catherine M. Soussloff's welcome call for a third way to interpret Pollock's abstract poured
paintings that would move beyond their "opticality" or the meaning of the nonrepresentational and
representational marks found in them to performance as ritual in "Jackson Pollock's Post-Ritual
Performance: Memories Arrested in Space," TDR/The Drama Review, Spring 2004, Vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 60-
78. I disagree, however, with her psychological interpretation, following Hubert Damisch, that Pollock in
the poured paintings "sought not only a temporary, partial return to the deceased father, but more
importantly, relief from the pain of his departure from childhood" (p. 71).
1027
Robert Motherwell, "Painter's Objects" Partisan Review, Jan. 1944, p. 9.
1028
Paul Goodman, “The Emperor of China,” Possibilities I, Winter 1947-48, p. 13.
1029
Ibid., pp. 8-10.
1030
Frank Seixas, “Jackson Pollock: An Appreciation,” in Such Desperate Joy; Imagining Jackson Pollock,
ed. Helen A. Harrison (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 218. That the summer is 1949 is clear
from Seixas saying that his visit was after the Pollocks’ remodeling of the house, which Naifeh and Smith
describe happening in winter 1948-49. NS, p. 577.
1031
Examining also the back of the painting, Francis O'Connor has given us a careful analysis of the
sequence in which the colors were applied. This analysis is of interest in that it shows "that this painting
 541

has been carefully thought through in its details and meticulously retouched to create an aesthetically
balanced whole." "Jackson Pollock's Number 2, 1949," in Masterworks of American Art in the Munson-
Williams-Proctor Institute, ed. Paul D. Schweizer, et. al. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989), p. 178.
O'Connor's claim that such analysis reveals also "one of the 'signature' characteristics of most large-scale
Pollocks: the major design elements always flow from left to right, as if written out in longhand" must,
however, be questioned, in view of the fact that Karmel observes three times in Namuth's films of Pollock
painting that he worked from right to left. In the case of Number 27, 1950, see Pepe Karmel, “Pollock at
Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” in Jackson Pollock exh. cat. (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1998), pp. 107-08 and fig. 38; in the case of Autumn Rhythm, see p. 119; in the case of the
now lost painting on red canvas in Namuth's outdoor filming, see p. 113.
1032
Friedrich Nietzsche, "Jensiets von Gut und Böse," VII, 230, Samtliche Werke, Kritische
Studienausgabe, ed. Giorio Colli and Mazzino Monyinari (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1980), vol. 5, p.
169. Omri Moses in "Jackson Pollock’s Address to the Non-human” turns to Nietzsche to illuminate such
paintings as Stenographic Figure, Male and Female, and Guardians of the Secret and some of the poured
paintings from 1947-50, attributing to Nietzsche an aesthetics that would have the artist "seek a recognition
of all that is non-human in the very basic facts of one’s existence,” an attribution called into question by the
above quote which calls for a return to what is natural in man, not for a destruction of man for the sake of
the inhuman. Moses nevertheless succeeds in drawing our attention to the importance of the non-human in
these works. Oxford Art Journal, vol. 27, no. 1, 2004, p. 3.
1033
Goodman, p. 8.
1034
Looking at photos that Marvin Jay Pollock had kept of the family reunion, Naifeh and Smith name the
paintings hanging as Gothic and Arabesque; NS, pp. 645, 888. However, they misidentify the painting in
the family photo as Arabesque, p. 642. Whether Arabesque was hanging is unclear; on the other hand the
family photo clearly shows that Number 2, 1949 was hanging.
1035
NS, p. 642.
1036
Peter Blake, No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1993), pp. 110-11.
1037
Blake, quoted in Victoria Newhouse, Towards a New Museum (New York: The Monacelli Press,
1998), p. 130.
1038
Blake, ibid.
1039
Peter Blake lecture audiorecording, “Unframed Space: Working with Pollock on the ‘Ideal Museum’,”
Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, NY. A Project of the Stony Brook Foundation,
State University of New York, July 30, 1995.
1040
Blake, "Unframed Space."
1041
Blake, No Place Like Utopia, pp. 111-12. Blake states his project was based on Mies’ 1942 proposal
for an Ideal Museum for a Small City.
1042
Victoria Newhouse, Towards a New Museum (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998), p. 131.
Number 17A, 1948 and Summertime: Number 9A, 1948 were illustrated in Dorothy Seiberling, “Jackson
Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” Life, August 1949.
1043
Blake variously refers to his model as “a large, somewhat abstract ‘exhibit’ of Pollock's work -- a kind
of ‘Ideal Museum’,” and an “Ideal Exhibition” of his work. Peter Blake, ibid., p. 111.
1044
Ibid., p. 112.
1045
Blake, "Unframed Space." Newhouse writes “Jackson Pollock’s museum was designed not by the
artist but by the architect and critic Peter Blake, though with the artist’s approval. Pollock’s paintings were
such an integral part of the architecture, however, that the museum appears to be as much by him as by
Blake.” Newhouse, p. 130.
1046
See fig. 1049 in Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue
Raisonne of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1978) [henceforth abbreviated as CR], vol. 4, pp. 126-27.
1047
Arthur Drexler, “Unframed Space: A Museum for Jackson Pollock’s Paintings,” Interiors, vol. 109, no.
6, Jan. 1950, pp. 90-91.
1048
Replica fabricated by Patrick Bodden, with sculptures by Susan Tamulevich, 1993-94; Newhouse, p.
283.
1049
Blake, No Place Like Utopia, pp. 110-11.
1050
Indicative of the spirit of Blake’s “somewhat abstract ‘exhibit’,” he enlarges Number 24, 1949 from its
original dimensions of 26 ¾ inches x 12 inches to wall size. No record exists to show how this panel was
 542

shown in the Parsons November 1949 exhibition. When later sold this panel was one of a “triptych” and
hung vertically; CR, vol. 2, p. 43.
1051
Newhouse, pp. 131-32.
1052
Blake, ibid., p. 112; Newhouse, p. 130.
1053
Philip C. Johnson, Mies van der Rohe (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1947), p. 154.
1054
This collage is the one that Blake has twice reproduced, in his autobiography No Place like Utopia, p.
112, and in his book on Mies, Mies van der Rohe: Architecture and Sculpture (New York: Penguin Books,
1960), p. 164.
1055
Mies van der Rohe, "Museum," The Architectural Forum, May 1943, p. 84.
1056
Johnson, pp. 54, 156.
1057
A structural difference between Blake’s original model and the reconstructed model reveals this
emphasis. In the original model he follows Mies’ reduction of structure to floor slab, columns, roof plate,
and exterior walls which, being of glass, scarcely function visibly as walls. Using the materials he had at
hand, Blake removed the exterior walls, leaving the floor (a piece of plywood) and a frosted glass roof (a
two-by-four-foot sheet of plastic) supported by I-shape brass extrusions that indicated columns; Newhouse,
p. 130. In the reconstructed model he leaves the columns out altogether, supporting the roof plate with
mirrored panels, marble slabs, and perforated brass wall panels asymmetrically distributed near the
perimeters, with two large mirrored panels near the center.
1058
Arthur Drexler, "Unframed Space," pp. 90-91. Drexler is quoted by Blake who italicizes the last
sentence; Blake, ibid., pp. 112-113.
1059
Besides Mies’ Museum, the second influence that Blake cites on his imagining of the Pollock museum
is Barry’s Reform Club in England, in particular its mirrored stairwell that creates for the viewer a
vertiginous extension into infinity; Blake, "Unframed Space."
1060
About the Barcelona Pavilion Blake wrote that Mies “made space move and transformed it into pure
magic.” Blake, No Place like Utopia, p. 55. As Franz Schulze notes of the visitor to the Barcelona
Pavilion: “No matter how he visited the pavilion and even if he bypassed the central space, he was obliged
to describe a circuitous route.” Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 156.
1061
Sitting on the bench, the visitor would also notice to their left the back of another long horizontal
painting, most likely Number 10, 1949 c. 1949. Helen A. Harrison of the Pollock-Krasner House and
Study Center, Conversation with author, June 2002.
1062
Blake, ibid., pp. 110-11.
1063
Ibid., p. 114.
1064
Blake felt that Jackson and Mies shared “a very similar attitude toward the nature of space.” Blake,
ibid., p. 112. A further analogy between the space of Mies and Pollock lies in their understanding of an
“organic principle of order,” Mies’ phrase used in his Armour Institute inaugural address. See Blake, Mies
van der Rohe, p. 73.
1065
Peter Blake letter to Francis V. O’Connor, Dec 11, 1963, quoted in CR, vol. 4, p. 126.
1066
Blake, No Place Like Utopia, p. 116.
1067
For Karmel “Namuth’s photographs and films [of Pollock painting] suggest a serious problem with
what we might call the kinesthetic reading of Pollock’s works – that is, the reading that sees Pollock’s
lines, splatters, and pools as signs evoking not conventional images but the dance-like movements that
created them. The problem is that the kinesthetic sensation evoked by a given mark is often the exact
opposite of the movement that actually produced it.” Pepe Karmel, “Pollock at Work: The Films and
Photographs of Hans Namuth,” Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 129. In
answer I would point out that, no matter how the marks are actually made, the desired rhythms are put into
play; these in turn elicit kinesthetic responses.
1068
T. J. Clark, "Jackson Pollock's Abstraction," Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and
Montreal 1946-1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 207, 197.
1069
T.J. Clark states his position since the Fall of the Wall, “If I cannot have the proletariat as my chosen
people any longer, at least capitalism remains my Satan.” Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a
History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 7-8
1070
Clark cites Hegel: “For Hegel ... the essence of Spirit or Consciousness is the being-together of both in
One. But the essence of modernity, for him, is the failure to grasp that. ... The Unhappy Consciousness
knows it is twofold and divided, but does not know, or cannot accept, that this division is its unity.” Clark,
p. 329.
 543

1071
Newhouse, p. 131.
1072
Clark, p. 365. Clark writes, p. 340: “Nature returns -- Lavender Mist, Autumn Rhythm, One --
metaphors whose very breathing completeness carries within it the sign of a practice coming to an end.”
1073
Clark vents his animus against Nature as false consciousness in a discussion of the work of Hans
Hofmann. “A good Hofmann has to have a surface somewhere between ice cream, chocolate, stucco and
flock wallpaper. Its colors have to reek of Nature -- of the worst kind of Woolworth forest-glade-with-
waterfall-and-thunderstorm-brewing. ... It is a picture of their 'interiors,' of the visceral-cum-spiritual
upholstery of the rich. ... Take them or leave them, these ciphers of plenitude -- they are all that painting at
present has to offer.” Clark, p. 397.
1074
See Clark, pp. 335, and 340.
1075
Clark, p. 314.
1076
Clark, p. 365.
1077
Clark, p. 340.
1078
Clark, p. 339.
1079
Clark, p. 365.
1080
Ibid.
1081
Clark, p. 347.
1082
Clark, p. 337, cites Adorno who says, “Dissonance is the truth about harmony. Harmony is
unattainable.”
1083
Clark, p. 305.
1084
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York: Clarkson
N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 587. Blake brought Marcel Breuer to the Nov. 1949
exhibition at Parson’s Gallery, who then did commission a mural from Pollock for a house he was
designing for the Bertram Gellers. Today the mural (CR 259, 1950) is in the Tehran Museum of Art in
Iran. NS, p. 600.
1085
Robert Storr, “A Piece of the Action,” Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe
Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 56.
1086
Storr, p. 52.
1087
CR, vol. 4, doc 16, p. 214, letter from Jackson to his father, Feb. 3, 1933. On Benton’s ambition to
promote social change and political reform through regenerative art, see Erika Doss, Benton Pollock, and
the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 56-57. She argues for Benton’s influence on Pollock’s muralism, especially in
1950. “In color, size, and energy the drip paintings Alchemy and Autumn Rhythm reflect Benton’s guiding
hand and Pollock’s abiding interest in creating public art.” Doss, p. 348.
1088
In the late 1940s Pollock told Tony Smith of his interest in the baroque when he first came to New
York, especially as taught by Benton. James Valliere, "An Interview with Tony Smith and Paul Feeley,”
August 1965, in Such Desperate Joy; Imagining Jackson Pollock, ed. Helen A. Harrison (New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 223.
1089
David A. Siqueiros, "Towards a Transformation of the Plastic Arts," (1934) in Art in Theory 1900-
1990: Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Cambridge, U.S.A.: Blackwell,
1992), p. 412.
1090
Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and
the Cold War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 185.
1091
Blake, Ibid, p. 76.
1092
Encountering Pollock’s art, Blake felt that Pollock had already accomplished what he hoped modern
architects might. “... in four short years, Jackson and one or two others changed the direction of modern art
and shifted the center of gravity of the Modern Movement from Paris to New York. It was absolutely
staggering. To young architects like myself, that a similar shift of emphasis was possible in our art, this
accomplishment seemed enormously encouraging.” Ibid., p. 116.
1093
Ibid., p. 90.
1094
Clark comments: “Modernism is caught interminably between horror and elation at the forces driving
it -- between 'Less is More' and 'NO CHAOS DAMN IT.' In the Ideal Museum a deeper appreciation of
'No chaos damn it' is enabled by 'less is more' architecture" (p. 8).
1095
Blake, ibid., p. 96. Mies' cohorts were Buckminster Fuller and Konrad Wachsmann. Certain modular,
repetitive, structural, mechanical systems could generate the universal spaces, that would then enable
flexibility, lending themselves to the range of uses that the postwar world needed; Blake, Mies, p. 77.
 544

1096
T.J. Clark sees one dream of modernism as being "the social reality of the sign.” Clark, pp. 9-10.
1097
Blake, ibid., pp. 98, 103.
1098
The exhibition announcement read "Murals in Modern Architecture. A Theatrical Exercise Using
Jackson Pollock's Paintings and Sculpture. By Peter Blake." Francis V. O'Connor, Jackson Pollock (New
York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1967), p. 48. On Beaton photographs, see Clark, p. 302-04.
1099
NS, p. 588.
1100
"Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" Life, vol. 27, Aug. 8, 1949, pp.
42-43, 45.
1101
I draw on Guilbaut’s excellent discussion of the theme of alienation in the critical writing of Rosenberg
and Greenberg. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 158-163.
1102
Harold Rosenberg, "Introduction to Six American Artists," Possibilities I, Winter 1947-48, p. 75.
1103
Clement Greenberg, “The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture,” Horizon, Oct.
1947, in The Collected Essays and Criticism 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986) [henceforth abbreviated as CEC], vol. 2, p. 170.
1104
Greenberg, “The Decline of Cubism,” Partisan Review, March 1948, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 215. See
Guilbeau, pp. 172, 174, 193-94.
1105
Greenberg, quoted in Russell W. Davenport and Winthrop Sargent, "A Llfe Round Table on Modern
Art," Life, vol. 25, October 11, 1948, pp. 56ff. For Life’s more even handed treatment of modern art than
generally credited by artists or historians, and a thorough discussion of the 1949 article on Pollock, see
Bradford R. Collins, “Life Magazine and the Abstract Expressionists, 1948-51: A Historiographic Study of
a Late bohemian Enterprise,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 73, June 1991, pp. 283-308.
1106
Collins, p. 289, n.24, and Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American
Saga, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 593.
1107
On miming, see Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 182.
1108
NS, p. 590.
1109
Greenberg, “The Present Prospects," p. 166.
1110
NS, p. 594.
1111
NS, p. 596.
1112
"Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" p. 42.
1113
Recounted in NS, pp. 597-98. On critics, see NS, pp. 599-600.
1114
For sales and the financial situation of the Pollocks, see NS, p. 600, and Collins, p. 300. With the
1949-50 gallery season, plus the 1950 summer sales, the Pollock’s annual income was $6500. “At a time
when the average blue-collar worker earned $2,800 in a year and the average white-collar worker only
$3,500, $6,500 was a solid, even bourgeois, annual income.” NS, p. 624.
1115
Guilbaut discusses the advanced liberal ideology set forth by Schlesinger in The Vital Center as the
politics of freedom. He locates the shift from a traditional liberal democratic pluralism to an advanced
liberal ideology in 1949. Guilbaut, pp. 165-66, 184, 188-89, 191.
1116
David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 730-31. Pollock’s anti-
isolationist, universalist stance was stated clearly in 1944: “The idea of an isolated American painting, so
popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me ... The basic problems of contemporary
painting are independent of any one country.”
1117
Serge Guilbaut, taking the part of the artist as disillusioned Marxist (p. 196), argues that New York
School artists, who during (p. 77) and after the war asserted their art to be apolitical (p. 190) and their
position vis a vis society “alienated” (p. 143), desired in their abstract forms to “represent the diffuse
anxiety and fear that defined modernity” (p. 196). While he recognizes the phenomenon as articulated in
Possibilities of hanging “around in the space between art and political action” in 1947-48 (pp.156, 166) and
the desire to cling to a universalist humanism (p. 175), he follows the artists’ embrace of their alienation
(pp. 158-59, 183). However, through the very ambiguity of their abstract forms these artists unwittingly (p.
190) and “without really wanting to” (p. 202) let their art be “co-opted” (p. 200) or “borrowed” (p. 202) as
a political weapon by powerful bourgeois liberal ideologues. In the case of Pollock I find such talk of
alienation and co-option one sided.
Following Guilbeau, Leja compounds distortion by emphasizing the theme of alienation in his
discussion of the poured paintings. According to Leja, appealing to Pollock's proported Freudianism in the
late 1940s, Pollock's automatist style speaks of unruly instinctual irrational forces erupting and then being
brought into reasoned control through the all-over order of the modernist surface. Thus liberal ideologues
 545

could present Pollock's paintings to the world as images of the autonomous, rational, though now tragically
conflicted and alienated self. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting
in the 1940's (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 187, 216, 245-249, 283.
1118
Given the fearful specter of atomic war that reared its head in September 1949 when the Soviets
detonated their atom bomb and the virulence of McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt in early 1950 (see
McCullough, pp. 765, 767), would it not become even more inviting to be associated with democratic
freedom?
1119
CR, vol. 4, doc. 87, p. 250, Jackson Pollock, Interview with William Wright, The Springs, Long
Island, New York, late 1950.
1120
Samuel Kootz, in The Intrasubjectives, exh. cat. (New York: Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, Sept. 14-Oct.
3, 1949).
1121
For more on the “Subjects of the Artists” school, see Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American
Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 213, and Robert Saltonstall
Mattison, Robert Motherwell: The Formative Years (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), pp. 185,
195-96. Sandler lists the artists who lectured at the school during the 1948-49 season: John Cage ("Indian
Sand Painting or the Picture that is Valid for One Day"), Richard Huelsenbeck ("Dada Days"), Hans Arp
(whose talk was translated by Kiesler), De Kooning ("A Desperate View"), Fritz Glarner ("On Relational
Painting"), Julien Levy ("On Surrealism in America"), Gottlieb ("The Abstract Image"), Reinhardt
("Abstraction"), and Harry Holtzman ("Everyman His Own Hero").
Guilbaut states, “In the final analysis, what the art of this period [by 1949] was supposed to
articulate was a style associated with the modernist tradition (as defined by Greenberg) allied with an art
that responded to the modern anxieties emphasized by Rosenberg and Newman” p. 183. See Amy Winter
on the recycling of Paalen’s thinking through Newman, chapter 10: “The New Man in Barnett Newman,”
Wolfgang Paalen: Artist and Theorist of the Avant-Garde (Westport, Ct: Praeger, 2003), pp. 193-207.
1122
NS, p. 636.
1123
Rosenberg, in The Intrasubjectives. Quoted in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 136. For Motherwell's countering of Rosenberg’s existentialist
interpretation by referring to “an energetic field of force,” see Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity:
Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 110.
Belgrad clarifies the distinction between “existentialism’s mind-body dualism” (p. 113) and the mind-body
holism that characterizes Motherwell’s thought in the early 1940s onward, especially as it was influenced
by Whitehead’s “process philosophy” (pp. 110, 127). “Gesture-field painting’s reformulation of
subjectivity to reject the culturally dominant mind/body dualism is the most radical aspect of abstract
expressionism” (p. 115). He points especially to Pollock. “As opposed to the Cartesian dualism, Pollock’s
paintings dramatize the holistic connection between 'mind' and 'body' in human experience. His technique
of controlled pouring allowed him to use his whole body in dialogue with the paint”(p. 113). Belgrad also
points to the pervasiveness of energy field theory in popular and artistic cultures. See Belgrad on Paul
Goodman and poets, musicians, dancers, pp. 149 ff.
1124
Guilbaut, p. 183, names Rosenberg and Newman as emphasizing an art that responded to modern
anxieties. On alienation as fashionable, see Guilbaut, pp. 191-92. I agree with Doss in her assessment:
“Pollock’s drip paintings embodies the tensions of postwar America. But, in their mythical capacity –
derived from their assimilation of Jungian theory and American Indian culture, Pollock’s pictures also
proposed a kind of empowerment which could free him, and his audience, from the alienating conformity
of postwar consensus.” Erika Doss, Benton Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to
Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 350.
1125
CR, vol. 4, doc. 87, p. 249, Jackson Pollock, Interview with William Wright, The Springs, Long
Island, New York, late 1950.
1126
NS, p. 637. See also p. 602.
1127
NS, p. 635.
1128
On Grippe, see NS, p. 636. On denying Greenberg, Interview with Carone, NS, p. 637.
1129
Friedman, p. 139.
1130
Ibid., p. 140.
1131
The phenomenon affected many artists. ”The nature of the working relationship between the New
York School artists and the popular media that was heralded by the Life articles on Pollock and his circle
directly contradicted, and thus undermined, the system of values by which the artists had previously
 546

worked. ... a fairly close-knit community of highly ethical men and women was split asunder.” Collins, p.
301.
1132
Interview with Rosenberg, NS, p. 609.
1133
On Smith, see NS, pp. 587, 607, 664-65, and Bultman, interview with author, Feb. 1, 1980.
1134
NS, p. 607.
1135
NS, p. 609.
1136
On Pollock's activities at this time, see NS, pp. 607-8.
1137
NS, p. 614.
1138
E.A. Carmean, Jr., “Jackson Pollock: Classic Paintings of 1950,” E.A. Carmean, Jr., "Introduction,"
The Subjects of the Artist (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1978), p. 148.
1139
James Coddington, “No Chaos Damn It,” Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and
Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), pp. 106-09.
1140
Carmean, p. 130.
1141
Summertime was, Lee Krasner recalls, Pollock’s name for the canvas, as was Autumn Rhythm, a title
that Pollock later gave to Number 30, 1950. On Summertime, see "Remarks," CR 205, in Francis V.
O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings, Drawings, and
Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth abbreviated as
CR], vol. 2, p. 26; on Autumn Rhythm, see T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of
Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 342.
1142
Clement Greenberg, “The Role of Nature in Modern Painting,” Partisan Review, January 1949, in
CEC, vol. 2, p. 275.
1143
“It is not because they are abstract that the works of the later Kandinsky and his followers fail to
achieve coherence and substantiality, remaining for the most part mere pieces of arbitrary decoration; it is
because they lack a sense of style, a feeling for the unity of the picture as an object; that is, they lack almost
all reference to the structure of nature.” Ibid.
1144
Ibid., p. 274.
1145
Matthew L. Rohn, Visual Dynamics in Jackson Pollock’s Abstractions (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI
Research Press, 1987), pp. 65- 69.
1146
Carmean, p. 129.
1147
"Remarks," CR 205, CR, vol. 2, p. 86.
1148
Number 1, 1948 was renamed Number 1A, 1948. The 1948 works Pollock exhibited at the Betty
Parsons Gallery in Jan.-Feb. 1949 were numbered 1 through 26. Later in Nov.-Dec. 1949 he showed
another sequence of works at the Parsons Gallery, numbering them 1 through 35. In order to distinguish
the unsold 1948 from the 1949 works with identical numbered titles, Parsons placed an "A" after the
numbers of the 1948 works which remained in her inventory. CR, vol. 2, p. 1.
1149
Carmean, p. 129.
1150
Ibid., p. 130.
1151
Clark, p. 311.
1152
Coddington, p. 109.
1153
Ibid.
1154
Tony Smith, quoted in NS, pp. 607, 613.
1155
Carmean, p. 149. Whether Number 32, 1950 was painted before or after the family reunion which
occurred in July is not known. The sense of dare-devil rage is in accord with Pollock's frustrations at this
time.
1156
Kirk Varnedoe, “Comet: Jackson Pollock’s Life and Work,” in Jackson Pollock, exh. cat. (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 60.
1157
Carmean, p. 135.
1158
Carmean, p. 138.
1159
The relationship to the 1948 black and white pours is noted by Carmean, p. 138.
1160
See T.J. Clark, pp. 337, 342, 358.
1161
Weighted density pointed out by Carmean, p. 139 and Rohn, p. 57.
1162
Carmean, p. 138.
1163
See Pepe Karmel, “Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” in Jackson
Pollock, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 89 ff.
1164
Hans Namuth, “Photographing Pollock,” in Pollock Painting, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Agrinde
Publications 1980), n.p.
 547

1165
Namuth, quoted in a caption in “Jackson Pollock,” Portfolio: The Annual of the Graphic Arts
(Cincinnati) vol. 2, no. 1, 1951, n.p.
1166
Karmel suggests some work may have been done the following day as well, pp. 89, 124.
1167
Ibid., p. 125, see figs. 93 and 93.
1168
Ibid., p. 125, see figs. 93 and 93.
1169
Clement Greenberg, Interview with James Valliere, 1968, in Such Desperate Joy; Imagining Jackson
Pollock ed. Helen A. Harrison (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 254.
1170
“Jackson Pollock: Fragments of conversations and statements, selected, extracted and categorized,
from his own notes by Jeffrey Potter 1949-56,” in Such Desperate Joy, p. 89.
1171
Namuth, quoted in a caption in “Jackson Pollock,” n.p. Naifeh and Smith comment that Lee's
statement was “a boldface lie.” NS, p. 619.
1172
Carmean, p. 140. For analysis of Autumn Rhythm from photo-composite, see Karmel, pp. 119-124.
1173
Autumn Rhythm, like Number 32, 1950 and One, was probably never raised to a vertical position for
study. Carmean, p. 135
1174
See Karmel on central circular configuration, reinforcement of left figure, and on lozenge, pp. 121,
124.
1175
Carmean, p. 139.
1176
Tony Smith, in conversation with Carmean, Feb. 12, 1978, quoted in Carmean, p. 146.
1177
Carmean, pp. 150, 146.
1178
Clement Greenberg, “The Role of Nature in Modern Painting,” p. 274.
1179
Clark, p. 342.
1180
Carmean, p. 140.
1181
Clark describes Autumn Rhythm as a “dance, a choreography, measure and repetitive and (with its
cantilevered loops and rectangles) even a trifle florid,” p. 342.
1182
Rohn, p. 52.
1183
Karmel, p. 91, see fig. 6.
1184
Alexey Brodovitch, art director at Harper's Bazaar and Namuth's teacher at the New School, designed
the announcement card, and as Lee Krasner recalled, owned a long running panel by Pollock, probably the
original painting on paper CR 798 from which the reproduction on the card was made. The panel was
destroyed when Brodovitch's East Hampton house burned in 1956. See "Remarks," CR 798, CR, vol. 3, p.
280.
Brodovitch's own interest in motion is evident in his 1945 book Ballet:104 Photographs, where he
used a blur technique to capture the dramatic movement of the dancers as blurred shadowy ciphers.
Namuth in turn used the blur when photographing Pollock painting. Brodovitch, as noted by Karmel, p. 91,
published Namuth's photographs in the 1951 Portfolio in filmstrip style, following them with a page spread
of details from CR 798 and another calligraphic painting CR 797. These details he reproduced as
alternating negative and positive images, seen against a series of black and white bars, his presentation thus
commenting on Pollock's rhythmic friezes.
1185
Pointing to continuity between these paintings, Carmean, p. 137, notes that the black pattern of
Number 32, 1950 is shared by all three.
1186
CR, vol. 4, doc. 85, p. 247, Jackson Pollock, quoted in Berton Roueché, "Unframed Space," The New
Yorker, August 1950.
1187
Alphonso Ossorio, “Essay for the Catalogue of Jackson Pollock’s Solo Exhibition, Betty Parson’s
Gallery, New York” (1951), in Such Desperate Joy, pp.107-08.
1188
Brice Marden, quoted in Brenda Richardson: Brice Marden," in Abstraction, Gesture, Ecriture:
paintings from the Daros Collection (New York: Scalo, 1999), p. 94.
1189
Frank O’Hara, Jackson Pollock (New York: George Braziller, 1959), p. 29.
1190
Ibid., p. 26.
1191
NS, p. 656.
1192
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York: Clarkson
N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 650.
1193
Greenberg, "Jackson Pollock's New Style," Harper's Bazaar, February 1952, in The Collected Essays
and Criticism 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) [henceforth
abbreviated as CEC], vol. 3, p. 106
1194
Greenberg, “'American-Type’ Painting,” Partisan Review, Spring 1955, in CEC, vol. 3, p. 226.
 548

1195
Greenberg, “The Role of Nature in Modern Painting,” Partisan Review, January 1949, in CEC, vol. 2,
p. 271.
1196
Ibid., p. 274.
1197
Greenberg, “'American-Type’ Painting,” p. 225.
1198
Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock,” The Nation, February 1,
1947, in CEC, vol. 2, p. 125.
1199
Greenberg, “'American-Type’ Painting,” pp. 225-26.
1200
Greenberg praised Pollock’s huge ‘sprinkled’ pictures done in 1950 in which “value contrasts are
pulverized as it were, spread over the canvas like dusty vapor (the result was two of the best pictures he
ever painted.)” ibid., p. 233. He was thinking, as he later told Valliere in an interview, of Lavender Mist
and Autumn Rhythm. Clement Greenberg, Interview with James Valliere, 1968, in Desperate Joy;
Imagining Jackson Pollock, ed. Helen A. Harrison (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 254.
Pursuing distinctions between sculpture and painting made in “Newer Laocoon,” he later distinguishes
between spatial vitality in painting achieved through tactile value contrasts or through the optical
experience provided by color. See Greenberg, "Sculpture in Our Time," Arts Magazine, June 1958, in
CEC, vol. 4, p. 60.
1201
For a discussion of the impact of Namuth's still photos of the painting of Autumn Rhythm on
Goodnough’s article in Art News and on Rosenberg's "The American action painters," see Pepe Karmel,
“Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” in Jackson Pollock, exh. cat. (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1998), pp. 94-99.
1202
Greenberg, “How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name,” Encounter, Dec. 1962, in CEC, vol. 4, p. 138.
1203
Harold Rosenberg, “The American action painters,” Art News, Dec. 1952, p. 23.
1204
Ibid., p. 48.
1205
Ibid., p. 49.
1206
In the summer of 1946 the Rosenbergs often had dinner with the Pollocks. They would talk endlessly.
The two men respected and even admired each other, but Pollock would often end up saying to Rosenberg,
"You talk too much." Deborah Solomon Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1987), p. 166.
1207
Harold Rosenberg, "Notes on Identity: With Special Reference to the Mixed Philosopher, Søren
Kierkegaard," View, May 1946, pp. 7-8, 24, 28-29. "The problem of individual identity is the dilemma of
philosophy. If it confronts the problem, philosophy begins to move in the direction of action and past the
borders of generalization," p. 8. "'Know thyself' is the link between philosophy and drama," p. 8. Drama is
"self-knowledge through concrete action," p. 28. The transcendence of philosophy as abstract thought
becomes "action-philosophy," p. 24. Rosenberg also briefly directs his idea of "action-philosophy" to the
making of art. "To Valery, in his essay on Leonardo as a philosopher, it appeared that the thoughtness of
thought was overcome by the artist who thinks in materials,” p. 24.
1208
Harold Rosenberg, “The American action painters,” p. 48.
1209
Existential action is through conscious choice as “the only source of freedom in a meaningless physical
universe.” Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 110
1210
Harold Rosenberg, in The Intrasubjectives, exh. cat. (New York: Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, Sept. 14-
Oct. 3, 1949), in Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, ed. Ellen G. Landau (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2005), p. 156.
1211
Rosenberg, “The American action painters,” p. 48.
1212
Rosenberg, "Notes on Identity,” pp. 28, 30.
1213
Rosenberg, “The American action painters,” p. 48.
1214
Ibid., p. 49.
1215
Harold Rosenberg, "Mythic Act" (1967), in Such Desperate Joy; Imagining Jackson Pollock, ed. Helen
A. Harrison (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 130.
1216
Rosenberg, “The American action painters,” p. 49.
1217
Interview with Nicolas Carone, who witnessed this scene, in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An
Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), p. 193.
1218
Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 192.
1219
Interview with Patsy Southgate, in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson
Pollock (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), p. 188. A slight variation in Southgate’s wording occurs
 549

in Potter, "Excerpt from an Interview with Patsy Southgate" (1980), in Such Desperate Joy, p. 273: “What
he said was that he took the image and broke it up and put it together again in his own image.”
1220
Rosenberg, "Mythic Act," p. 131.
1221
Pollock would have found this axiom in Paalen's "Surprise and Inspiration," Dyn, no. 2, July-August
1942, p. 8.
1222
Rosenberg, "Mythic Act," p. 132.
1223
Ibid., pp. 133-34.
1224
NS, p. 610.
1225
See Karmel, pp. 88, 90.
1226
Interview with Dr. Wayne Barker, in Potter, p. 180.
1227
Nicholas Carone, quoted in Potter, p. 197.
1228
Lee Krasner, Interview with author, May 2, 1975.
1229
Rosenberg, "Mythic Act," p. 134.
1230
Ibid., pp. 133-34.
1231
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, par. 49, A190/B193; trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Harper,
1951), p. 157.
1232
Karmel, pp. 91-105, reviews other distinctive responses, those in the manner of Rosenberg by
Goodnough, Kaprow, Arnheim, and those in the manner of Greenberg by Fried, Rubin, Carmean.
1233
Harold Rosenberg, "Mythic Act" (1967), in Such Desperate Joy; Imagining Jackson Pollock, ed. Helen
A. Harrison (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 129.
1234
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York: Clarkson
N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], pp. 607, 613.
1235
For church project, see E.A. Carmean, “The Church Project: Pollock’s Passion Themes,” Art in
America, Summer 1982, p. 110. For the project’s origination in the early summer of 1950, see NS, p. 607.
Carmean’s proposal that the quasi-figurative images, emerging in Pollock’s black pourings of 1951-52,
refer to Christian themes and may even have been created as Pollock’s part in a project to build a Catholic
Church elicited Rosalind Krauss’ rebuttal in “Contra Carmean: The Abstract Pollock,” Art in America,
Summer 1982, pp. 122-31. Carmean, p. 118, concludes that, while the black pourings were probably not
done as studies for the church project, Pollock does deal with Christian themes during this period given the
fact that the church project remained alive through August 1952.
1236
NS, p. 607 and Carmean, p. 122.
1237
Robert Storr, "A Man of Parts," in Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculptor, exhibition catalogue (New
York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 40, ill. p. 54.
1238
Lee Krasner in conversation with Carmean, p. 122, n. 40. Krauss, “Contra Carmean,” p. 129.
1239
When Carmean in 1982 raised the possibility of Pollock illustrating a particular iconographic program
for a Catholic church, Lee Krasner’s Jewish, iconoclastic horrified response was “First it was Carl Jung,
and now, and now it’s Jesus!” See Krauss, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” Jackson Pollock: New
Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 155.
1240
CR, vol. 4, doc. 93, p. 257, letter from Jackson Pollock to Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon, Jan. 6,
1951. CR, vol. 4, doc. 94, pp. 257-58, letter from Jackson Pollock to Alfonso Ossorio, between Jan. 23 and
29, 1951. CR, vol. 4, doc. 95, p. 258, letter from Jackson Pollock to Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon, late
February, 1951.
1241
NS, p. 681.
1242
The schematic drawing is illustrated in Carmean, p. 111. The model is illustrated in Storr, p. 66.
1243
Ossorio in conversation with Carmean, pp. 112, and 122, n. 8.
1244
Krauss, “Contra Carmean,” p. 129. On freestanding or suspended, see Rosalind Krauss, "Early Images
Coming Thru Pollock's Black Pourings," in Abstraction, Gesture, Ecriture: paintings from the Daros
Collection (New York: Scalo, 1999), p. 26, n. 8.
1245
Krauss, “Contra Carmean,” p. 128. Krauss, p. 129, presents Smith's goal: the visual meaning of
Pollock’s paintings would echo, by transposing to a different key, the religio-esthetic aspirations he had for
the church.
1246
Krauss, “Contra Carmean,” p. 126
1247
On June 14, 1951, after the screening of the film, Smith said how impressed he was with the painting
on glass sequence; Pollock asked if painting for the church could be done in this fashion, on glass? The
answer was yes. See Krauss, "Contra Carmean," p. 124. That the idea of painting on glass remained in
play is suggested by Ossorio's statement: "The church was to be a hexagon, like a honey-comb, interlocking
 550

and cantilevered, and Jackson was to do the undulating ceiling with a band of stained glass going around
it." Interview with Alfonso Ossorio, in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson
Pollock (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), p. 154.
1248
B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 203, and
Interview with Ossorio, NS, p. 688.
1249
Smith discussed Pollock's attitude to the church project with Eugene Goosen, who related it to
Carmean, p. 115.
1250
See Potter, p. 88.
1251
Rosenberg, "Mythic Act," p. 133.
1252
Interview with Betty Parsons, in Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who was Jackson Pollock?" Art
in America, vol. 55, May-June 1967, p. 55.
1253
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press,
1968), p. 3. Other relevant books in the Pollock library include Suzanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New
Key (1942-49), a 1951 edition of the Bahagavad Gita, Simone Weil’s Waiting for God (1951), among
others. In 1951, to the several bibles and religious tracts already in the house when Lee and Jackson moved
in, Lee added, buying them from a traveling salesman, the New World Translation of the Christian Greek
Scripture and What Has Religion Done for Mankind? See CR, vol. 4, p. 195. Clearly Pollock was
attracted not to what was distinctive about each myth or religion, but to what they might share. Krasner
also had a religious impulse. To Eleanor Munro, she explained that when she was young, and growing up in
an Orthodox Jewish family "I was religious. I observed. ... It is possible that what I found later on -- art --
would be a substitute for what religion had been for me earlier." Eleanor Munro, Originals: American
Women Artists (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 104, 109.
1254
Campbell, p. vii.
1255
Naifeh and Smith place Pollock’s quizzing of Tony Smith on Oriental philosophies and reliving his
earlier flirtations with Krishnamurti and Jung, as recollected by Jane Smith, in summer 1952. NS, p. 688.
During this summer Pollock began visiting the nearby summer house of N. Vashti, an Indian dance
instructor, and his wife Pravina, talking a lot about Hindu beliefs, and pantheism. NS, p. 688. Betty
Parsons noted: “He had Indian friends, a dancer and his wife, (Mr. and Mrs. N. Vashti) with whom he
talked at length and who influenced him greatly.” Interview with Betty Parsons, in Francine du Plessix and
Cleve Gray, "Who was Jackson Pollock?" Art in America, vol. 55, May-June 1967, p. 55.
1256
C. G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939), pp. 234, 236.
1257
Ibid., p. 261.
1258
Ossorio, quoted in NS, p. 607.
1259
Ossorio, interview by Forrest Selvig, Nov. 19, 1968, quoted in NS, p. 681. Despite suggestions that
they proceed with the project, Smith refused to respond. By that time Pollock’s art had slid back into
figuration and he was drinking steadily.
1260
On admiration for Smith, see NS, p. 665.
1261
Interview with Tony Smith, in Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who was Jackson Pollock?" Art
in America, vol. 55, May-June 1967, p. 54.
1262
Jung, p. 270.
1263
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), p. 314.
1264
Ibid., p. 356.
1265
Ibid., pp. 339, 342.
1266
See Karsten Harries, "Narcissus and Pygmalion," Philosophy and Art. Studies in Philosophy and the
History of Philosopy, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press,
1991), pp. 53-72.
1267
Hans Namuth, “Photographing Pollock” (Nov. 17, 1979) in Such Desperate Joy; Imagining Jackson
Pollock (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 260.
1268
Ibid., p. 271.
1269
Bruno Alfieri. "A Short Statement on the Painting of Jackson Pollock," L'Arte Moderna, June 1950, in
Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 1999), pp. 68-69.
1270
NS, pp. 642, 646-47.
1271
NS, pp. 570-71.
1272
NS, p. 577.
 551

1273
NS, p. 640.
1274
Peter Blake, interview with Naifeh and Smith, quoted in NS, p. 647
1275
Vita Peterson, quoted in NS, p. 610.
1276
Naifeh and Smith, p. 657, comment when Osorio left for Paris, the plans for the chapel fell into “the
enthusiastic but dilatory hands of Tony Smith.”
1277
Pollock had, as his friend Cecile Downs noted, very ambivalent feelings about fame. At one level he
hated the whole apparatus of fame. He would rather be loved and understood by those who could look at
paintings. And yet he also wanted to be numero uno with everyone loving him. "He never got over the
fact that people don’t love you as much when you’re big and successful as they did as when you were poor
and a non-entity.” Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 265, n. 14.
1278
Namuth, quoted in NS, p. 619.
1279
NS, p. 647.
1280
For a full account of this black and white film and its creation, see Pepe Karmel, “Pollock at Work:
The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” in Jackson Pollock, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1998), pp. 106-111.
1281
Krasner, quoted in Namuth, “Photographing Pollock,” p. 266.
1282
Karmel, ibid., p. 107
1283
Karmel, “A Sum of Destructions,” Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe
Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 88. T.J. Clark also characterizes the trajectory of imagery
to abstraction as found in the black and white film as a destruction; Clark, "Pollock's Smallness," in
Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1999), p. 26.
1284
Namuth, “Photographing Pollock,” p. 266; Clark, ibid.
1285
See Karmel, “Pollock at Work," 113-17.
1286
Ibid., p. 114.
1287
NS, p. 648.
1288
NS, pp. 648-49.
1289
Namuth, ibid.
1290
Namuth, ibid.
1291
Peter Blake, No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1993), p. 118, and Victoria Newhouse, Towards a New Museum (New York: The Monacelli
Press, 1998), p. 132.
1292
For section of composition actually filmed, see Karmel, ibid., p. 113, fig. 58.
1293
Frank O’Hara, Jackson Pollock (New York: George Braziller, 1959), p. 26.
1294
Photo of Cecil Downs and Sheridan Lord holding Number 29, 1950, ill. in Namuth, ibid., p. 272.
1295
Barbara Rose cites Krasner’s comment that Pollock “first considered installing it on their porch, setting
it into the structure.” Rose, "Namuth's Photographs and the Pollock Myth, Part II: November 29, 1950," in
Pollock Painting, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Agrinde Publications, 1980), n.p. See also Landau, pp.
197, 204, and Namuth, ibid., p. 268. In summer 1951 Number 29, 1950 was installed outside Pollock’s
studio and when Ossorio visited Pollock in August, “Pollock drew Ossorio’s attention to the glass
immediately upon his arrival, saying that he was studying the painting’s relationship to the view of the sky
and the landscape behind it.” Ossorio's conversation with Carmean, related in Carmean, p. 114.
1296
Blake, p. 123.
1297
Namuth noticed that Jackson was "full of tension [and] it was not just the cold.” Quoted in NS, p. 651.
1298
Pollock narration, quoted in Karmel, ibid., p. 112.
1299
O’Hara, ibid., p. 27.
1300
Namuth, ibid., p. 269.
1301
Ibid., p. 267.
1302
Pollock, quoted in NS, p. 652. I use Naifeh and Smith’s account of the event.
1303
Dr. Violet de Laszlo, quoted in NS, p. 653.
1304
Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 217.
1305
Ibid.
1306
Quoted in ibid., pp. 217-18.
1307
CR, vol. 4, doc. 94, pp. 257-58, letter from Jackson Pollock to Alfonso Ossorio, between January 23
and 29, 1951.
 552

1308
See Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York:
Clarkson N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], pp. 659-661. On Heller, NS, p. 601.
1309
Lee Krasner, quoted in B.H. Friedman, “An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock,” Jackson Pollock:
Black and White, exh. cat. (New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, 1969), p. 8.
1310
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), p. 330.
1311
Ibid., p. 332.
1312
Pepe Karmel, “Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” in Jackson Pollock,
exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 110.
1313
Jackson Pollock, Interview for Life magazine, Time/Life Archives, July 18, 1949, in NS, p. 591.
1314
Namuth, quoted in “Jackson Pollock,” Portfolio: The Annual of the Graphic Arts (Cincinnati) vol. 2
no.1, 1951, n.p.
1315
Ruth Kligman, Love Affair (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1974), pp. 127-28. Also quoted in
Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings,
Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth
abbreviated as CR], vol. 4, p. 275.
1316
For an interpretation of this figure as a female monkey, see O'Connor, Jackson Pollock: The Black
Pourings, 1950-53, exh. cat. (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1980), p. 13.
1317
CR, vol. 4, doc. 99, p. 261, letter from Jackson Pollock to Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon, June 7,
1951. For external circumstances related to Pollock's turn to black and white, O’Connor notes the
exhibition Black and White: Paintings by European and American Artists held at the Samuel Kootz Gallery
in early 1950. O'Connor, Jackson Pollock: The Black Pourings, p. 5.
1318
NS, p. 698.
1319
Lee Krasner, quoted in B.H. Friedman, ibid., p. 9.
1320
Lassaw and Braider, quoted in NS, p. 669.
1321
Lee Krasner, quoted in B.H. Friedman, ibid., p. 7.
1322
Lee Krasner, quoted in B.H. Friedman, ibid., p. 10.
1323
O'Connor, ibid., p. 6.
1324
Jeremy Lewison too notes this integration of figure and ground. Lewison, Interpreting Pollock
(London: Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd., 1999), pp. 60-61.
1325
O'Connor, ibid., p. 8.
1326
CR, vol. 3, p. 283. For excellent overview by Bernice Rose of Pollock’s concern with fusion of
drawing and painting, see Rose, Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1980).
1327
On Smith, NS, p. 667.
1328
Lewison, p. 61.
1329
Pollock did another series of drawings on Howell paper.
1330
When reproduced along with other Pollock paintings in Peter Selz, New Images of Man (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1959), p. 124, the title of this painting was given as No. 3, 1951.
1331
James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), p. 213.
1332
Ben Heller untitled essay, in Jackson Pollock: Black Enamel Paintings, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian
gallery, 1990), p. 23.
1333
Clement Greenberg, "Jackson Pollock's New Style," Harper's Bazaar, February 1952, in The Collected
Essays and Criticism 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) [henceforth
abbreviated as CEC], vol. 3, p. 106.
1334
Clement Greenberg, "Feeling is All,” Partisan Review, Jan.-Feb. 1952, in CEC, vol. 3, p. 105.
1335
Greenberg, “’American-Type’ Painting,” Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press,
1961), p. 228. This essay is a reworking of one by the same title originally published in Partisan Review,
Spring 1955; see CEC, vol. 3, pp. 217-35.
1336
Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Cambridge, Mass: Fogg Museum of Art, 1965) p. 19.
1337
E. A. Carmean, Jr., “The Church Project: Pollock’s Passion Themes,” Art in America, Summer 1982,
p. 120. This reading opposes O’Connor’s categorization of Number 14, 1951 as a “recumbent figure” in a
grouping of black pourings. See O'Connor, ibid., p. 22.
1338
Lewison, p. 63, sees references to Girl before a Mirror in Number 11, 1951.
1339
Landau, p. 217.
1340
O'Connor, ibid., p. 25.
 553

1341
In effect the process that O’Connor sees as happening in the 1951-52 black pourings, I see as
happening in 1943-46: “The over-riding drama of all these dark paintings is the eternal struggle to break
away from the stranglehold of the mother complex and to assert, first independence, and then the
willingness to risk, freely and knowingly, love.” O’Connor’s generally positive assessment of Pollock’s
struggle in 1951-53, and the degree to which I differ from it is evident in this statement: “Portrait and a
Dream of 1953 perhaps stands as the ultimate resolution of the conflict: the marriage portrait.” Ibid.
1342
Landau, p. 214. According to Cile Downs, in Potter, p. 204.
1343
NS, p. 674.
1344
NS, p. 695.
1345
CR, vol. 4, doc. 99, p. 261.
1346
On scheduling of Lee’s show at Parsons, see NS, p. 672; on rampage at Schaefer's, see NS, pp. 570-71;
on Lee beginning to push her own work in early 1950, see NS, p. 640.
1347
See fig. 64 in Sandor Kuthy and Ellen G. Landau, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock: Künstlerpaare,
Künstlerfreunde, dialogues d’artistes, résonances (Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, c.1989), p. 142.
1348
NS, p. 673.
1349
NS, p. 693.
1350
NS, p. 694.
1351
For installation shot of Number 11, 1951 before reworking, see CR, vol. 4, p. 265.
1352
CR, vol. 4, doc. 96, pp. 259-60, Jackson Pollock's will, March 9, 1951, and doc. 97, p. 260, Jackson
Pollock, letter to Lee Krasner, Sandy McCoy, Clement Greenberg, Alfonso Ossorio, March 9, 1951.
1353
On reviews, see NS, p. 678. On visitors and sales, see NS, p. 675.
1354
NS, pp. 675-76.
1355
NS, p. 693.
1356
NS, p. 695.
1357
Rosalind E. Krauss, “Contra Carmean: The Abstract Pollock,” Art in America, Summer 1982, p. 130.
1358
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), p. 302.
1359
Clement Greenberg, Interview with James Valliere, 1968, in Such Desperate Joy; Imagining Jackson
Pollock, ed. Helen A. Harrison (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 252.
1360
This image of crucifixion echoes the splayed human-horse figure in (Figure) CR 107 (see fig. 10.5),
attached by scraffito lines to the corners and edges of the all-over surface of the pictorial plane.
1361
Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings,
Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth
abbreviated as CR], vol. 2, CR 367, "Remarks," p. 193.
1362
Ben Heller untitled essay, in Jackson Pollock: Black Enamel Paintings, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian
gallery, 1990), p. 29, n. 15.
1363
Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 223.
1364
Frank O’Hara, Jackson Pollock (New York: George Braziller, 1959), p. 31.
1365
Greenberg, quoted in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New
York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), p. 163.
1366
"The Year's Best," Art News, vol. 51, Jan. 1953, p. 43.
1367
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (New York: Clarkson
N. Potter, 1989) [henceforth abbreviated as NS], p. 716.
1368
Jeffrey Potter, Excerpt from an Interview with Patsy Southgate (1980), in Such Desperate Joy, p. 273.
In August 1953Janis had persuaded him to go back to conventional titles; NS, p. 716. On Southgate and
Matthiessen, see NS, p. 735.
1369
See for instance Pollock’s copies of El Greco's Adoration of the Shepherds in CR 411v in CR, vol. 3,
p. 25.
1370
Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, “Jackson Pollock: Response as Dialogue,” Jackson Pollock: New
Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 149; ill. fig. 9, p.
150.
1371
Greenberg, “Letter to the Editor of The Nation," The Nation, January 31, 1948, in The Collected
Essays and Criticism 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) [henceforth
abbreviated as CEC], vol. 2, p. 205.
1372
Jeremy Lewison, Interpreting Pollock (London: Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd., 1999), p. 67. He also
suggests Pollock’s response to Matisse in the black pourings.
 554

1373
According to Naifeh and Smith Pollock gravitated to Still and Newman especially in Fall 1952; NS, p.
688. In 1955 Pollock told Rodman, "... Cliff Still ... Rothko, and I -- we've changed the nature of painting."
Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), p. 85.
1374
Clement Greenberg, Interview with James Valliere, 1968, in Such Desperate Joy, pp. 251-52.
1375
Pollock in conversation with Roger Wilcox, quoted in NS, p. 690.
1376
See Barnett B. Newman, "The Plasmic Image" (1945), in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and
Interviews, ed. John P. O'Neill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 141.
1377
Newman, “The Sublime is Now” (December 1948), in Ann Eden Gibson, Issues in Abstract
Expressionism: the artist-run periodicals (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990), pp. 165-66.
1378
NS, p. 691.
1379
Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” p. 166.
1380
See NS, p. 689 on Newman and the rejection of his Parsons' show.
1381
There is as well the tantalizing possibility that Pollock meditated on the primary colors and their
significance in an intended trilogy around 1946: CR 143 (Sun-Scape) 1946 with its brilliant yellow ground
and secure date, Blue (c. 1946), Red (c. 1946). This hypothesis depends upon accepting the dating for Blue
and Red as c. 1946; see discussion in chapter 16, n. 19. The size of the works further argues for their
intended grouping. Sun-Scape 18 3/4 x 23 1/4 inches; Blue 18 3/4 x 23 7/8 inches; Red 19 1/8 x 24 inches.
The respective media are: oil on masonite, gouache and ink on fiberboard, gouache, tempera and ink on
fiberboard. The iconography of the imagery further argues for their relationship. All three works include
the animal and its role in Pollock's quest story. In (Sun-Scape) the triangular female, aligned with a phallic
sun disc, pursues the bird and ever higher goals indicated by the symbols, a diamond shape and the
numbers 6 and 8, within a womb shape; in Blue the animal witnesses the endless transformative dynamism
at work within the realm of nature; in Red the animal and a humanoid head submit to sacrifice as a great
mother figure dances pregnant with diamonds detailing the Eight and the One. Pollock's metaphysics, his
"exaltation" to use Newman's phrase, in respect to the primary colors is here full-blown.
1382
When at the November 1952 opening for the retrospective of eight of Pollock's paintings at
Bennington College, Vermont, someone offered Pollock a drink, Greenberg warned the person against it.
Pollock said "Nothing doing," and added "You fool." Interview with Greenberg, NS, p. 697.
1383
Greenberg, “'American-Type’ Painting,” in CEC, vol. 3, p. 233.
1384
Greenberg, “'American-Type’ Painting,” p. 228.
1385
CR, vol. 4, doc. 109, p. 271, letter from Jackson Pollock to Sidney Janis, c. late November or
December 1953.
1386
Mancusi-Ungaro, p. 150.
1387
O’Hara, p. 31.
1388
Greenberg, Interview with James Valliere, in Such Desperate Joy, p. 255.
1389
Mancusi-Ungaro, p. 151.
1390
Quoted in “Jackson Pollock: Fragments of conversations and statements, selected, extracted and
categorized, from his own notes by Jeffrey Potter 1949-56,” Such Desperate Joy, p. 86
1391
NS, p. 695.
1392
NS, p. 722.
1393
Greenberg, Interview by Shorthall, Nov. 9, 1959, quoted in NS, p. 723.
1394
NS, pp. 725-26.
1395
The four works were Ocean Greyness, Unformed Figure, Sleeping Effort, Ritual. NS, p. 727.
1396
NS, pp. 729-30
1397
This felt abandonment occurred again in February 1955, when Lee once again asked Stella to come
live in Springs permanently to take care of Jackson, and the family's answer was no. NS, p. 741.
1398
Greenberg, quoted in NS, p. 768.
1399
For war on de Kooning and on Rosenberg, see NS, pp. 708, 710-12.
1400
Carone, quoted in NS, p. 714.
1401
In 1949 Pollock declared his admiration for de Kooning to Dorothy Seiberling in 1949; NS, p. 709. De
Kooning remarked on Pollock wanting to be recognized as the painter, “He was it. A couple of times he
told me, ‘You know more, but I feel more,’” but de Kooning also went on “I was jealous of him -- his
talent.” de Kooning on Pollock, Interview with James Valliere, 1967, in Such Desperate Joy, p. 247.
1402
Ibid. On friendship of Pollock and de Kooning, see NS, p. 709.
1403
NS, pp. 710, 718.
1404
NS, p. 736. Again drunk, Pollock broke the same ankle a second time in Spring 1955. See NS, p. 742.
 555

1405
See NS, pp. 733, 737-38, 743-44.
1406
See NS, pp. 716, 759.
1407
NS, p. 720.
1408
NS, p. 732.
1409
Potter, pp. 223, 226. For Francis O’Connor commentary on this dream as an allegory of Pollock’s art,
see O'Connor, "Jackson Pollock: Down to the Weave, a Commentary on a Selection of Key Works,"
Eleventh Annual Pollock Krasner Lecture, August 16, 1998, Guild Hall, East Hampton, in Such Desperate
Joy, pp. 178-79.
1410
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, vol. 1, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson; with
revisions and a foreword by Howard A. Johnson (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1971), pp.
222-230.
1411
NS, p. 753.
1412
On therapy, see NS, pp. 747, 769-70.
1413
Jackson, though with no definite plans of divorce from Lee, did propose marriage to Kligman. See
Ruth Kligman, Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock 2nd ed. (New York: Cooper Square Press,
1999), p. 86. Naifeh and Smith recount that Kligman lied about being pregnant; she does not mention this
in her account. NS, pp. 780-81.
1414
NS, pp. 744-45.
1415
Pollock knew he had cirrhosis of liver that was gradually killing him. NS, p. 756.
1416
Patsy Southgate, quoted in Potter, p. 230.
1417
Kligman, p. 68.
1418
NS, p. 127.
1419
CR, vol. 2, p. 199.
1420
Hubbard, quoted in NS, p. 727.
1421
Interview with Jon Schueler, NS, p. 747.
1422
B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 224.
1423
Quoted in NS, p. 789.
1424
Kligman’s account stresses Jackson’s continued love, saying that when she retreated from Springs for
around three days, Jackson missed her terribly, but did not expect her to bring back with her a friend Edith
Metzger. Unsettled by her retreat, however brief, and her return with a friend, he began drinking. See
Kligman, p. 186, 189.
1425
For an account of these last days, see NS, pp. 781-93. On car, see NS, pp. 738-39.
1426
William S. Wilson, "Jackson Pollock: Images To Think With" (May 2000) in Such Desperate Joy, p.
207.
1427
Pollock expressed his own thoughts on Green River Cemetery. “Those graves at Green River
Cemetery are part of the landscape, and the landscape is part of the sky. So we’re all one, that’s what.”
Potter, ‘Jackson Pollock: Fragments of conversations and statements. Selected, extracted and categorized,
from his own notes (1949-56),” in Such Desperate Joy, p. 91.
1428
As reported by Krasner in John Gruen', "The Turbulent Life with Jackson Pollock" p. 15. Krasner
went on, "The one feeling that we did not share . . . was Jackson's conviction that art and life are one.".
1429
Meyer Schapiro, “Nature of Abstract Art,” (1937), in Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries,
(New York: George Braziller, 1978), pp. 201-02.
1430
Ibid., p. 200.
1431
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, c1987), vol. 2, p. 207.
 556

Image credits

I would especially like to thank Helen Harrison, Director of the Pollock-Krasner House
and Study Center, East Hampton, NY, for her very generous help in obtaining the many
illustrations in this book from the Jackson Pollock Catalogue Raisonné Archives.

© Copyrights - Photos (Fig. Number)

Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY (25.1)
Allan Stone Gallery, New York (4.10, 4.13, 4.16, 4.17, 4.18)
CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY (8.1, 25.5)
Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona ©1991 Hans Namuth
Estate (14.5)
Courtesy of Phyllis and David Adelson (2.10, 2.11)
Courtesy of Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center © Hans Namuth Ltd. (14.1, 16.3,
17.9, 21.5a, 21.5b, 23.3, 23.4, 24.3, 25.10)
Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York (8.13,15.7)
Courtesy of the McClain Gallery, Houston, Texas (8.17)
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C (21.2)
Dallas Museum of Art (16.13, 24.1)
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, N.Y.
(1.17, 1.19, 2.2, 3.4, 3.8, 3.12, 3.13, 4.3, 4.6, 4.8, 5.6, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, 9.4, 9.9, 9.10, 10.3,
12.2, 12.10, 15.5, 16.2, 16.7, 17.1, 21.4, 24.5, 25.3) [[27- 1 too many, maybe CR
Archives]]
Giraudon/The Bridgemen Art Library (3.16)
Helen Harrison (13.9)
Hickey-Robertson, Houston (4.16)
Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, New Hampshire (1.12a and b, 1.14, 1.15)
Image Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art (9.18)
Indiana University Art Museum (4.14)
Jackson Pollock Catalogue Raisonné Archive, Pollock-Krasner Study Center (1.1, 1.2,
1.5, 1.7, 1.9, 1.13, 1.18, 2.5, 2.6, 2.8, 2.9, 2.13, 2.14, 3.2, 3.5, 3.6, 3.10, 3.11, 3.14, 3.19,
3.20, 4.5, 5.4, 5.5, 8.2, 8.7, 8.9, 8.10, 8.11, 8.14, 8.18, 9.2, 9.3, 9.7, 9.8, 9.11, 9.12, 9.15,
9.16, 10.4, 10.5, 10.7, 10.8, 11.2, 11.4, 12.1, 12.5, 12.6, 12.7, 12.11, 13.1, 13.6, 13.7,
15.2, 15.4, 16.9, 16.10, 16.12, 16.14, 17.2, 17.3, 17.5, 17.6, 10.16, 20.5, 21.8, 21.9, 23.2,
24.2, 24.4, 24.6, 24.8, 24.9, 25.2, 25.8.)
James Goodman Gallery, New York, USA/ The Bridgeman Art Library (19.1, 19.2)
John Bigelow Taylor/ Art Resource, New York (2.3)
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska (16.8)
Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler (3.9)
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (21.3)
Lee Stalsworth (8.16)
M. Lee Fatherree (11.1, 16.16)
Modern art Museum of Fort Worth (4.7)
Moderna Museet, Stockholm (17.8)
Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute/ Art Resource, NY (19.3)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (18.4)
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (13.3)
 557

New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut (1.4, 1.6)
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida (10.9)
Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan (17.4)
Peter Schibli, Basel (4.15)
Philadelphia Museum of Art/ Art Resource, NY (2.4, 5.1, 7.4, 8.21)
Photo © 2012 Tony Smith Estate (23.1)
Photo © Arnold Newman/ Getty Images (18.2)
Photo © Arnold Newman/ Getty Images, Text: LIFE The Picture Collection Inc. (21.1)
Photo © Mark Tansey, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photograph by Robert McKeever
(22.1)
Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln (25.7)
Photo © The Art Institute of Chicago (14.3)
Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art (21.6)
Photo © Tony Voccaro/ Archive Photos/Getty Images (25.4)
Photo © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (13.4)
Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York (1.8, 4.2, 5.2, 14.2,
15.1, 15.3, 15.6, 19.4, 20.1, 20.2, 20.3, 23.11)
Reuben Kadish (1.10, 4.12, 9.14)
Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, the Netherlands (4.4)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (9.6)
Schenck and Schenck (1.10, 1.11)
Staatgalerie Stuttgart (3.15, 17.7, 21.10)
Tate Gallery, London/ Art Resource, NY (2.1, 3.1, 20.6, 24.7)
Tel Avi Museum of Art Sammlung (6.9)
The Bridgeman Art Library (11.6)
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (8.12)
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (5.3, 6.1, 7.3, 12.4, 16.15, 25.6)
University of Iowa Museum of Art (10.1, 12.9))
Yale University Art Gallery/ Art Resource, NY (8.20, 18.1, 16.1)
Zwirner Gallery, New York (25.9)

© Copyrights - Artists (Fig. Number)

© Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012: Jackson Pollock (1.1, 1.2,
1.3, 1.7, 1.9, 1.5, 1.6, 1.13, 1.17, 2.1, 2.5, 2.6, 2.8-11, 2.13, 2.14, 3.1, 3.2, 3.5, 3.6, 3.9-11,
3.14, 3.16, 3.19, 3.20, 4.5, 4.7, 4.16, 5.1, 5.3-5.5, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.7, 8.9-14, 8.16-18,
8.20, 9.1-3, 9.6-8, 9.11, 9.12, 9.15-18, 10.1, 10.3-10, 11.1, 11.2, 11.4, 11.6, 12.1,12.5-11,
13.1-7, 13.9, 14.3, 15.1-6, 16.1, 16.2, 16.7-10, 16.12-16, 17.1-8, 18.1, 18.4, 19.1-3, 20.5,
20.6, 21.2-4, 21.6, 21.8-10, 23.2, 24.1-9, 25.1-3, 25.5-9), Lee Krasner (15.7).
© VG Bild Kunst, Bonn 2012: José Clem. Orozco (1:11, 1:12a and b, 1:14-16, 8.8),
David Alf. Siqueiros (1:19), Hans Hoffman (4.1), Max Ernst (6.1), André Masson (6.2-7,
8.4, 11.3), Roberto Matta (6.8, 6.9), Stanley Will. Hayter (12.3), Wassily Kandinsky
(12.4), Mies van der Rohe (20.4), Tony Smith (23.1).
© Succession Picasso/ VG Bild Kunst, Bonn 2012: Pablo Picasso (2.2, 2.3, 2.7, 3.7, 3.15,
4.15, 5.6, 8.5, 8.6, 9.9, 9.10, 12.2).
© T.H. Benton and R.P. Benton Testamentary Trust/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012: Th.
Hart Benton (1.4)
 558

© Succession Miro/ VG Bild Kunst, Bonn 2012: Juan Miro (7.3, 7.4)
© Succession Marcel Duchamp/ VG Bild Kunst, Bonn 2012: Marcel Duchamp (8.21)
© 2012 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International USA: Piet Mondrian (4.4)
© The Estate of Philip Guston (1.10, 2.4)
© Reuben Kadish Art Foundation (4.12)
© Mark Tansey (22.1)