Art: Dappled Glories

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Other influences besides Benton converged on him as well: the Mexican muralists of the '30s, especially Siquieros and Orozco; Picasso; Surrealism; Kandinsky; tribal art. As Varnedoe points out in his admirable catalog essay, if the notion that Pollock was some sort of cowboy isn't true, neither was he any kind of Indian. He'd seen Native American ceremonies and pictographs as a kid in Arizona, but his attachment to Indian art as a source of "primitive" authenticity came from museums and exhibitions in New York and was confirmed by other mentors he was acquiring, such as the painter John Graham. Even the sight of Hopi painters running colored sand through their hands to create a pattern on the ground below, so often proposed as the starting point of Pollock's drip painting, came to him not on a Southwestern mountaintop but inside MOMA, which had brought some Hopis to perform in Manhattan.

In art, hyperconsciousness of the tribal is one of the functions of city life. Certainly it was for Pollock, and from it stemmed his abiding interest in the "totemic"--in mythic images that were either lost to modern, Euro-American culture or buried so far back in its origins that they seemed mysterious and exotic. Pollock in the late 1930s was a boy in deep emotional trouble, drinking like a fish and undergoing Jungian analysis. Like other Abstract Expressionists-to-be (Mark Rothko, for instance), he was on the lookout for archetypes and dark, unconsulted levels of feeling, in the hope that art could release his inner shaman, antlers, rattle and all. Hence the portentous "mythic" subjects of his pictures (The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, Pasiphae and so on) and their general ooga-wooga atmosphere. As Varnedoe writes, "The godsend, liberating idea for him was the one he got simultaneously from looking at modern art and listening to his therapists: the principle that art could ultimately depend not on acquired talents but on inner resources, no matter how disturbed that inner life was." But could you make major art based largely on pent-up mythic fictions from outside your own cultural frame?

Such was Pollock's problem. The picture in which he broke free from it--and, it now seems, took American art into a larger freedom with him--was the 20-ft.-wide mural he did for Peggy Guggenheim. He painted it in one outpouring rush, in a day and a night. Mural isn't by any means an abstract painting. It retains the essence of subject matter shared by most "classical" murals, from Giotto to Matisse--the projection of human figures on a large plane surface. But the movement isn't suave. The figures are arabesques, coiling, jammed together, recognizable as figures because of their verticality but lacking most identifiable signs of the human body. They seem to repeat one another, but in fact they don't. The painting is a frieze of Dionysiac energy in which Pollock was at last able to get movement into his figures instead of confining it to the blurts and squiggles of paint around them.