Jackson Pollock’s Shamanism

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing something graspable, something that otherwise couldn’t be retained by the mind

                                                                                      -  Joseph Brodsky

Jackson Pollock's entire development partakes of the assumptions, culture, and values of his time.[i] His is an art devoted to inwardness in the form of psychologized, ritual transformation of himself and his world. His is an art created in response to the epic conflicts and destruction of both in the 1930s and 1940s and to the socio-cultural personality that was thought to have generated them: the wasteland of mass society and mass, if not fascist, man thought to be evident to the world at Nuremberg. To represent the dangerous vacuity of that society and to point the way to change, Pollock drew on what many in his generation understood to be the powers and images of the unconscious and its alleged contents, the personal and cultural possibilities of the world, ancient and modern. These pathways would recall new sources of spiritual strength and transformation, necessary for himself but forgotten in a society of urban, industrial modernity and its incessant wars.

“Creativity” was Pollock’s solution, but not just artistic creativity, a solipsistic limitation of the idea, but the principle of natural human creativity that is, perpetual change, Henri Bergson’s creative evolution, the idea of which was dominant in the interwar period from the Surrealists to Carl Jung and James Joyce.  It was the creative element that would address his needs as the needs of the era: an inner self that could not be revoked; an interiority that would germinate anew and thus defeat stultification; a repudiation of the dictates of the mass, rationalized industrial state; a new personality that would restructure both personal and public consciousness and the ego along with roots and connections to the past and to the future; an emotional depth that would transcend the emotional shallowness of modern man; and an engagement with the world that continually integrates, balances and changes. Pollock’s creativity would be the constant seeking of metamorphosis, a dynamic equilibrium that would counter and harness his and his society’s destructiveness and turn them into harmony and positive action.

Pollock sought a vital self that had a history and a past but that would be, nevertheless, a constant and renewing creative culture and consciousness in itself. To do this, Pollock would try to master and mobilize his own impulses in aesthetic form to counter the personal, social, historical, and psychological threats of his time.  The repressed and regimented “mass man” of the late 1930s, which had replaced the “common man” of the early thirties, had to be made anew and principles for this renewal discovered and cultivated. Pollock thus opposed scientific and excessive regimentation, industrialized order, and denaturalized man. He also opposed the “social man” determined by class, community, conspiracy, and order and form for their own sake.

Pollock would try to re-configure and to re-pattern consciousness, creativity and personality in modern form. Significantly, as with fellow Abstract Expressionists Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, he intensively disliked preplanned order, technology and such forms of machine-age modernity as the Bauhaus style.[ii] Seeing the psycho-cultural crisis of his time, he sought to end its conflicts. Pollock’s work is thus both personal and public in the sense of its classic formulation of his time in America – his “personality writ large.” Pollock’s new self would be more spiritual, more in tune with the intellectuals’ idealized man of the “unconscious” past and ultimately life-affirming and constructive.

Thus in Pollock’s view, it was necessary to create the future by renewing the past, a traditional idea that was newly emphasized in 1930s America. At that time, for many from Mexican and American artists and Carl G. Jung, his metaphysical inspiration, constructing something new meant digging out, reconstructing, and revivifying the successful pathway of other generations.  Those traditions had worked unlike those of the day. For Pollock, it meant unearthing the traditions and powers of other peoples, particularly Native Americans, whose imagery was that of the non-industrial, anti-modern societies, which represented the exemplary past according to his illusions of “primitivism.” Other Abstract Expressionists would seek out and make use of other “pasts” for the same reason, as much Western as non-Western, e.g., Rothko’s use of Greco-Roman form or Richard Pousette-Dart’s use of the Gothic. Pollock would create a future for himself and his time by recasting his inwardness through the recreation and emulation of the powers of other cultures and the self of the “other.”

Pollock’s Jungian conception of the unconscious and its processes best explains the fertility and creativity of the psyche, for Jung, unlike Sigmund Freud, considered the unconscious a transformative force.  Pollock underwent Jungian therapy with two therapists from 1939-41 but beyond that, Jung was very popular in Eastern intellectual circles in America in the late 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s, Pollock famously said “we’ve all been influenced by Freud. I’ve been a Jungian for a long time.” In a key definition, Jung wrote that the unconscious was a dynamic representation of the deposit of all human experience right back to remotest beginnings, not a dead deposit but a living system of reactions, that determine the individual’s life, (and encompass the entire)  heritage of man’s evolution.  Jung thus defined the unconscious as a referent (or archetype) of all of human experience and its heritage, one that connects each human being to human beginnings, past and present, in a “living” systemor network that affirmatively shapes the individual’s life and future. The visual articulation of that “living,” connected system would make Pollock famous.

Pollock’s Jungian principle of creativity thus needed to be energized by the creativity of the past, and for Pollock the application of the principle drew roughly, as all the Abstract Expressionists did, on the “mythic method” defined by the writer T. S. Eliot whose work was so influential in America between the wars.  Eliot’s method recommended fusing the ideas of James Joyce’s Ulysses, psychology, ethnology, and the mythological material of Sir James Frazer’s widely influential The Golden Bough to give order and shape to the panorama of history. That is, confronted with the “futility and anarchy” of modern life and history (which for Eliot meant modern urban life and World War One and its aftermath), art and culture should draw on the past to find what remains significant and to produce images to re-organize man in the wake of contemporary events. And for Eliot and others of the interwar generation, after Frazer, “history” was to be found in culturally traditions whose key recurrences could be represented by ritual and myth. With Pollock as with his colleagues such as Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and others, “history” took the form of mythic event in his work. He alluded, as they did, obliquely to history and culture through the forms and ideas of Western and so-called primitive peoples. For Pollock, as for them, contemporary art eliminates the merely modern to form relationships with other cultures and peoples in space and time that generate “a usable past,” as the thirties in America did. And it is these relationships that would salvage and redeem the present. More than simply a disturbed individual working out fantasies, then, Pollock and also other Abstract Expressionists used the archaic past allegedly within to point to the future. In other words, they went “backward” to go “forward.”

To render history’s patterns and change as myth in the early 1940s, Pollock, like his colleagues, transformed his language. His work had been fairly representational even after his Regionalist period of the early to mid 1930s. Now it began to fall under the impact of the cultures of Native American peoples and, most probably, surrealism, as represented by the pictographic style of Joan Miro who had a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art from November 18, 1941 to January 11, 1942 following, the “Indian Art of the United States” show of January 22 to April 27, 1941.  (Interestingly, Pollock disliked Paul Klee’s work, which was also on posthumous exhibition in 1941.) Miro’s language of thin, stick-like figures was partially based on the new “primitivism” of the 1920s – a fascination with forms of prehistoric figures found on stones, pebbles, and walls.[iii] Pollock seems to have absorbed this idea, as did most of his colleagues. And he also admired the surrealist Andre Masson, whose complex ideational work Pollock’s early work in general resembles.

While the pictographic was not a new idea in the twentieth century -- witness Ezra Pound’s influential trumpeting of the Chinese ideogram -- it was between 1941 and 1944 that most Abstract Expressionists similarly moved from full to pictographic forms. For example, Rothko’s works of this period, from The Sacrifice of Iphigenia of 1942 to the Rites of Lilith of 1945 exemplify this tendency. So do Adolph Gottlieb’s Pictograph works such as Pictograph  # 4 of 1943 to Letter to a Friend of 1948.  Barnett Newman did likewise in the show that he curated in 1947, “The Ideographic Picture.” Newman defined the new and desirable as “ideographic” “representing ideas directly and not through the medium of their names; applied specifically to that mode of . . . symbols, figures or hieroglyphs.”[iv] Pousette-Dart often referred to the ideal of the pictograph in his work as in the Hieroglyphs of Light of the 1960s. And after many pictographic /Picassoid drawings, Pollock, too, in his Stenographic Figure of 1942 called his creations in this new vein “stenographic” suggesting that he and his colleagues all ultimately understood the conception of the pictographic -- the compressed, simplified, and direct depiction of an idea without the intermediary stage of full representational form.

Pollock’s work of the early forties and later, then, represents ideas, not the visual unconscious or the fantastical itself. The result, for him and for the Abstract Expressionists in general, was an original early style and a pathway to abstraction, for their later “abstractions” would be as ideographic as, if not more than, these earlier works.  Mature Abstract Expressionism was an art of ideas, not, as has so often been said by the “Movement” of Abstract Expressionist artists in the 1950s, of spontaneous, personal feeling for its own sake.  In the early forties, the ideas are expressed mostly semi-figuratively; later they will be rendered largely through pictorial means alone. Significantly, they are mostly the same ideas.

In short, the reader can see that this author believes Pollock’s work is involved in alternative issues and areas of reference than the autobiographical. The autobiographical has been taken for granted with Pollock’s art. Because of his alcoholism, and because he said that the believed that art came from the unconscious, an entire sphere of interpretation has arisen that attributed his forms and images to his own life. Even if it has been very difficult to develop any real reference to his life, his art, like all Abstract Expressionist art, has been thought of as simply personal and subjective. However, the reference to self has been overrated. In contrast, as all Abstract Expressionists did, Pollock simply included himself in the crisis of civilization and personality/psyche of his time, but, as with the Freud of Eros and Thanatos, of Civilization and Its Discontent and Moses and Monetheism, never mind Jung’ psychology, the issue of the time was the transformation of culture and civilization. Surrealism is a prime example of this psychologized cultural criticism. Such a view throws new light on Pollock’s art and its breath and depth.

Throughout their work, Pollock and his colleagues were symbolic artists.[v] They all constructed paintings of meaningful images and allusions.  For example, if we look at a Rothko, Untitled of 1941-2 (fig. 1) we see, as in Pollock’s painting, not simply irrational surrealist fantasy, but a carefully thought-through conception of an ancient Greek grave stele with multiple heads and mortuary acanthus leaves, typical of Rothko’s war-related “tragic” inventions.

Fig. 1

(Following Nietzsche, Rothko sought to create a modern tragic art.) Pollock, Rothko, and others created symbolic paintings in the early 1940s -- and throughout their careers. This does not make them literal iconographers, but rather mature artists who made deliberate, meaningful images whatever the depredations of the "unconscious." Some critics have portrayed Pollock’s painting as tight, piece-by-piece programmatic narrative. I see it as consisting of loosely federated, associate images that add up to a particular sense and consciousness, and not simply unconscious fantasies or “private myths,” as modernists have it.

In the early 1940s, Pollock cycled his emergent themes in and through mostly the thought and forms of Native American peoples.  He expressed his obsessions through this so-called primitivism as well as myth, European modernism, and indeed, the entire culture of his period, believing that he was articulating his unconscious. Of course, it was these sources that told him what was to be “found” in that unconscious. Otherwise, how would he have known what he imagined the “unconscious” to be?  Period concepts told him so just as the period concepts of the 1990s, particularly those of Lacan and Kristeva, achieved a brief popularity of the same kind in defining the unconscious and its processes. Further, as we shall see, Pollock invented a primitivizing style characterized by roughness and lack of finish, with loose edges that symbolize the “rustic,” “raw” “honesty” of the primitivist illusion. Pollock thus painted not his personal unconscious, but his idea of the unconscious as suggested in the culture and styles of his time. By examining the ideas of inwardness and its subjects drawn from his definable culture, we can begin to understand his work, its forms and images.

It has long been recognized that Pollock was interested in Native American art. Besides having spent part of his youth in the American Southwest where he was surrounded by Indian ruins, pottery, pictographs, peoples and rituals. Pollock became an inveterate gallery visitor, first in Los Angeles as a young man and then in and around New York.  Pollock knew the cultures and arts of the first Americans through travel, museums, reading and demonstrations. His life-long friend Reuben Kadish recounts that he and Pollock “were avid, avid gallery and museum goers . . . There was plenty to see, so you could go one day a week and if there was a day in which there was nothing to see, you could always go to the Museum of Natural History and he loved the Northwest; we all did. The South Pacific. Of course there, they were considered to be ‘ethnographic,’ they had nothing to do with art. But we went there to look at them because they were so exciting. Now they can hide behind the skirts of art." [vi]Another lifelong friend, Harold Lehman, also recounts trips to the Museum of Natural History, where they “were fascinated by the totem poles and the carvings of the Northwest Coast, Canadian Indians, as well of course the Mexicans: Aztecs and Mayans.”[vii] Further, Pollock had an “interest in Indian lore and ritual and things like that.” Lehman recounted that he, Pollock, and the artist Philip Guston were close to the Los Angeles County Museum where they would “have to get down on . . . hands and knees in order to see anything in the bottoms of the cases” of Native American artifacts.[viii] “We read Franz Boas, . . . Margaret Mead . . . The Golden Bough . . . Campbell.”[ix] As noted, Pollock also owned Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture among others, including modern man, anthropological studies. He visited exhibitions of prehistoric art and with one of his Jungian analysts went to see the “Indian Art of the United States” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941, an exhibition of key importance to Pollock. [x] He also examined the Heye Foundation, the Museum of the American Indian Art in New York, which was on 155th Street at that time. His brother Jay collected many Navaho blankets that he knew. Further, Benton, his teacher, would often discuss African sculpture in his classes at the Art Students League. One can thus assume that he saw most exhibitions of the “primitive” in at least New York and Los Angeles and had a well-versed if amateur belief in the “primitive.”

While Pollock’s interest in Native American culture was well known for some time, what was unknown until recently was his interest in shamanism. Shamanism was an interwar mode for modern artists. The Surrealist map of the world famously emphasized the region of the very shamanic Northwest Coast Indians while ignoring the existence of the continental United States. The Surrealist Max Ernst was attracted to Native American art and shortly after he fled to the United States in 1940, he traveled to the American Southwest to investigate the art and culture that then influenced his work at that time.  Joan Miro collected examples of the Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnography (to be called BAE). These publications contained articles and illustrations of the art, culture, rituals, language and other significant aspects of the various peoples of Native America.

Americans collected these publications, too. Pollock purchased twelve copies of the Annual Reports in the 1930s. And it is now known that he was aware of many of the other annuals, too, because Thomas Hart Benton knew of them and it was probably he who introduced Pollock to them. Benton’s father was a Congressman who was on the committee that regulated government interaction with Indian peoples and cultures. As a result of his committee work, Congressman Benton was presented with the annual publications. Benton most likely inherited them when his father died in 1926 and thus made them known and may well have shown them directly to Pollock in New York or Missouri. Probably as a result of this exposure, Pollock bought his own copies on Fourth Avenue, the bookseller’s street in New York at that time.

The fist-thick annuals consisted of the American government and the Smithsonian Institution’s attempts to document culture, art and ritual in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They made up perhaps the most informative sources of Native American life, discussing and copiously illustrating all aspects of life, arts and cultures. At the very least, these publications were known world-wide by the Surrealists, and by the influential Joseph Campbell, who discovered them as a boy. Pollock drew on them for information that greatly furthered the knowledge of myth and “primitive” life that he found in Frazer, Modern Man literature (generic popular discussions of psychology, anthropology and other subjects of which Pollock had a few examples[xi]), Campbell, and many other locations. Thus, Pollock was informed about the peoples of Native America and he was interested in them for their cultural expression and their artistic forms, for he had learned to be conscious of “culture” and patterns of thinking and behavior from Thomas Hart Benton, his early teacher and mentor, and others of his time. Ultimately, ideas from these sources formed the basis of much of his new art and symbolism, largely, but not completely, replacing gradually his earlier interest in the art and imagery of Benton and the Mexican muralists.  As Kadish said of the results of his interest: "In a lot of Jack's drawings you can see motifs with . . . [Native American] reference points."[xii] Pollock's ideas are not only primarily aesthetic, however, but cultural, too.

The scholar W. Jackson Rushing is most responsible for revealing Pollock’s interest in shamanism.  In interviews with Pollock’s friend, the artist Fritz Bultman, Rushing learned of Pollock’s commitment to shamanism and of his knowledge of its ideology and many of its particulars. Bultman noted that Pollock was well acquainted with the “whole shamanistic dream culture of Indians” and talked of it.[xiii] Further, Pollock’s good friend the Russian John Graham also knew about Russian shamanism, probably as Wassily Kandinsky did, for it was part of the living culture of Russia even in the twentieth century. And, of course, the Smithsonian Annual Reports often mentioned shamanism in their articles and the American Museum of Natural History published studies in the 1930s on Native American life. In its famous grand hall, the museum, also described shamanic ritual, particularly of the Northwest Coast, as the basis of the artifacts and art on display.

The shaman shares in the spiritual condition of his people. He is initiated into shamanism through heredity transmission, illness or personal quest. The neophyte shaman searches for an “ecstatic” experience through dreams, trances, or visions. In other words, he has a psychic crisis in which he exhibits at first moodiness, isolation and strange behavior. In this psychopathological disorder, called initiatory “chaos,” he retreats to a precosmogonic “death.” In death and chaos, the future shaman represents the dissolution of his profane, everyday self and the preparation of a new “personality” for birth.[xiv]  In becoming a sacred, consecrated man, he accepts his disorders as mystical transfiguration; his crisis is resolved and his sickness cured, resulting in a new personality.   

In his shamanic journey and initiations to a higher spirituality, he has undergone several rites that define him as a person different from the rest of his people, including torture and violent dismemberment of his body -- or rather, in his mind he has. His or her flesh (a shaman may be male or female) is scraped away until his or her body is reduced to a skeleton. He spends a period in “hell” during which the future shaman is taught by spirits and souls of dead shamans and demons before he finally ascends to a Higher Level.[xv] He thus dies to the everyday human condition and is resuscitated to a new transhuman or ecstatic existence.[xvi]

The shaman is thus a specialist who participates in the sacred more than others, who experiences mystical trance and undertakes wanderings to the subterranean realm on earth or in the soul’s flight to the heavens. The shaman undertakes such ecstatic journeys for several reasons: to meet God and bring an offering; to seek the soul of a sick man that has been carried off by demons or wandered away from his body; to guide the soul of a dead man to a new place; and to add to his own knowledge by frequenting higher beings. Thus the shaman can die and return to life many times as he learns the technique in shamanic initiation of -- the secular West would say “symbolic” -- temporary death. In exploring unknown regions entered during ecstasy, he must constantly reorient himself and explore the planes of existence newly opened to him.  Because he has the ability to leave his body, he acts in the manner of a spirit, flying through the air, becoming invisible, and culturally redoing his consciousness.[xvii]

The emergence of Pollock’s “primitivism” points the way toward shamanism, not to the mere drawing from the personal unconscious of someone who is psychologically disturbed and then renders his subjective fantasies and personal melodramas. The emergence in1938, which Lee Krasner, his wife and fellow Abstract Expressionist, said defined Pollock’s way for the remainder of his career,[xviii] is evident  immediately in a drawing of 1939-40, sheet # 555* (fig. 2) where  Pollock depicts what seems to be an act of copulation with the earth. 

Fig. 2

This drawing has been a popular favorite for critics seeking to attribute a troubled psyche to Pollock, and thus a source for considerable speculation about Freudian fears of sexuality and alleged trouble with women.  I believe, on the contrary, that it has a predicable source and a characteristically predictable meaning in symbol and myth from the larger context of the era.

Sheet 555 is a drawing that shows the penetration of the earth, and penetration, of course, suggests sex. But this drawing is really much more than that.  Copulation was a frequent topic and image for one of Pollock’s sources– the Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera. Rivera depicted it several times in the form of joint tubing in his mural series, Detroit Industry, of 1932-3.  And from the images of industrial “penetration” at Detroit, Rivera moved in 1933 to a briefly extant mural at Rockefeller Center (fig. 3).

Fig.3

Pollock knew of these images and their meaning. He visited Detroit to see his brother Charles and he is known to have watched Rivera work at Rockefeller Center before the murals were destroyed. Most importantly, he adopted the form and the image for himself.  Sheet 555 repeats Rivera’s theme of the fecund copulation of the earth as symbolic of the germination of life. Indeed, Pollock has drawn his image of the central penetrating column from the same form in the Rivera mural, at the center of which the earth is shown being penetrated by an irrigation pipe. Surrounding the industrial pipe in the Rivera are its immediate results -- new rows of fertile fruit and grains. To Rivera’s imagery, Pollock added his own symbols of the nurturing, if not ritually sacred in the Native American sense, soil and fecund new life that were necessary for fructification (thereby suggesting the similarities and differences between the America of the 1930s and the America of the 1940s). While Pollock’s columnar penis repeats Rivera’s pipe, Pollock has enwrapped it with a snake, a frequent and common symbol in his art of the unconscious, the “dark god,” for the snake sheds its skin regularly and thus renews itself.

*Drawing sheets are from volume three of the Francis V. O’Connor and Eugene Thaw’s Jackson Pollock Catalogue Raisonne: Paintings, Drawings and Other Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) unless otherwise noted.

The top of the column grows into branches, Pollock’s concision of Rivera’s fruitfulness and an echo of the branches seen in earlier Pollock drawings including sheet # 461r and others. We shall see these branches in Pollock’s paintings, too.  Surrounding the column is a mandala, a prominent Jungian, medieval, and India Indian mythic symbol of the goal of wholeness. It is usually in the form of a magic circle, square, or quadernity. In Jungian theory, it similarly represents the psychic process of organizing a centrally new order of being. The mandala is also the birthplace of the gods and is placed over chaos to enwrap and transform it. The column penis is further surrounded by crisscrossing legs and arms, suggesting the coordination and unity of different parts, a Pollock motif. Further, the crossing hands are surrounded by bright aureoles suggesting a radiant event taking place. The crisscrossing arms also suggest a crucified figure (a fragment of the bars of a cross is barely visible in the reproduction), which, like the mandala, is again a frequent Pollock symbol (see below). Around this complex is a cape with radiating, curving lines that suggest “ribs,” a symbol of the shamanic process of“x-ray” or penetration to the bones. Lastly, on the sides are Pollock’s common dualist symbols for the unconscious processes of sacrifice or destruction, the horse and bull, which we shall also discuss below.

There are many symbols here -- too many, in fact, for an introductory discussion of Pollock’s forms and symbols. Suffice it to say that sheet 555 indicates that rather than a sexually disturbed individual with a troubled unconscious, the drawing reveals that Pollock is the master of symbolism that transforms thirties socio-economic concepts into an expression of his concern for ritual transformation and growth, a forties subject.

A second drawing has also been used typically to justify describing Pollock as troubled and violent.  Sheet # 508 (fig. 4) seems at first to depict be the striking of a child by a woman.

Fig.4

Such a view, of course, feeds the generally Freudian view of Pollock as a man with troubles with his mother.  However, it is more likely that the work is shamanic and not Freudian, for the child has a strange, almost death-like visage. That visage seems to echo similar faces of figures in trance, as in fig. 5.

Fig.5

Pollock’s child has the same wide, oval eyes (although vertical and not horizontal), two-dot nose, and simple, oval mouth.  The drawing represents an entire community in an altered state of dream trance -- rapture affected by shaman ceremony.[xix] Further, the hand is not shown in a slapping motion and not violent, as often is argued but rather it represents openness to shamanic transfigurative ceremony. The face of the woman herself is a mask-like, Kwakiutl Indian form from the MoMA’s “Indian Art of the United States” exhibition. The transformative power of masks will be discussed below. And finally, why did Pollock choose a full woman and child? Because women are fertile, giving new life and new life is here in this drawing in the form of a child. Pollock is thus suggesting the regenerating power of shamanic ritual. What has been considered evidence of Pollock’s troubled sexuality and “violence” – although he was not violent in reality, i.e., he never struck his wife, Krasner, or anyone else -- in sheets 508 and 555 are actually evidence of his search for transformative or shamanic powers and being.

What these two works also indicate is Pollock’s approach to shamanistic “primitivism.” I put “primitivism” in quotes because, of course, the West, and Pollock’s, idea of primitivism is artificial, or in today’s jargon, “constructed” and not only in the drawings but in Pollock’s major works. And even if we get ahead of ourselves in our discussion, we can see this underlying issue in his paintings.

The emergence of Pollock’s full-blown shamanic primitivism, with the faults as well as the strengths of his dialogue, can be seen in the key painting, Birth,* of the 1938-41 period, probably 1941 (fig. 6).

*For the titles of Pollock’s work, I will follow the procedures laid down in O’Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne . Those titles that are Pollock’s own appear without brackets. Bracketed titles were assigned by O’Connor and Thaw. Titles in parenthesis are not Pollock’s but have become standard by usage.

Fig.6

In Birth, Pollock creates one of the central illusions of his primitivism, with a fictitious form suggesting an “Indian totem pole,” a montage of forms, functions and expressions to make an “Indian” expression that does not exist. His image is an eclectic conflation of different artifacts of Native Americans, some within and some out of context. Birth is constructed through signs, markers and fragments that Pollock intended as harbingers of the “spirit” of the primitive. Indeed, not only is Birth an eclectic composite of the forms of Native American peoples, it is a powerful and totally original fusion ofthose forms with those of the West with which Pollock was familiar, in the service of a theme that establishes the goal of renewal or (re)birth for him and his art. (He had begun to develop this theme earlier in his work, inspired by that of the Mexican muralists.) In this painting, Pollock attempted to fuse form and image to evoke his subject. Pollock’s primitivism is a siting of himself as in touch with ideas “outside” of mass urban civilization while continuing a dialogue with it. Thus, his personal idiom of magical flowing or curving new life and lines of power, expressed mostly through the symbols, forms, and ideas of Native American cultures, was further developed when these sources were expanded, and when Picasso's influence was added to them.

Birth consists of a tall, narrow "figure" with a dark, round head or mask on top, swirling masks -- some circular, some angular -- for the body, and claw legs spread at the bottom. The figure displays a vertical dynamism rooted in, on the one hand, Benton's theories of curvilinear forces circling around an imaginary axis, and on the other, the stacked, interlocking mythic forms and animals of the totem poles of the Northwest that he had seen in the American Museum of Natural History.

In addition to winding snakes, symbols of rebirth, one of which makes up the figure’s mouth (drawn from a Pre-Contact monumental head to the right in Siqueiros’s Los Angeles mural Tropical America in Los Angeles),[xx] the head consists of glowering Northwest Coast-styled angular eye sockets or ovoids. Immediately, below and to the right is a head quoted from Picasso's Girl with a Cock of 1938, at that time in the Peggy Guggenheim collection in New York. It is Pollock’s aggressive bird form, the “eagle.” To its left, upside down, is another curvilinear head, this one derived from similarly compressed, "bug-eyed" rattlesnake shell ornaments. These ornaments were to be seen in the American Museum of Natural History, the Heye Foundation, the BAE Annual Reports of the Smithsonian (Second, pl. LXV; Twelfth, fig 213), the catalogue of “The Indian Art of the United States” (p. 71), and the pages of Franz Boaz’s Primitive Art (fig. 131)[xxi] (fig. 7) with which, as noted, Pollock was acquainted.

Fig.7

Next to the shell form is a swirling, upside down-mask, an echo of masks from Inuit cultures, as is well-known.[xxii] One cheek also twists into a snake-like shape as above. There are two narrow, triangular toothy heads from Picasso, reminiscent of the drawings for Guernica. (The top one completes the surrealist vagina dentata form.)  A full, frontal claw lies at the left (drawn from a stone totem pole in the exhibition of the "Indian Art of the United States" -- see figure 13 in the catalogue), with Northwest Coast claw head joints below. Significantly, a triangle and right angle form also at the left clinch the composition. These may be images borrowed from the Mexican muralist Orozco. Such forms representing human fecundity, creativity and constructive potential as measuring instruments are to be found in his New School for Social Research murals and the Epic of Civilization at Dartmouth College.

The ability to combine disparate elements is one of Pollock’s distinctive gifts. Indeed, he made his life-long theme, unifying what seem to be polar opposites was both his creative method and one of his most important subjects. As with Cubism and Surrealism, and even the works of writers such as Virginia Wolfe, Abstract Expressionist art testifies to the early modern preoccupation with fragmentation. The Abstract Expressionist body is not a continuous whole, but a set of symbols and concepts that ultimately attempt to revitalize through an imaginative restructuring of fragments. Unlike Surrealism, however, Pollock and his Abstract Expressionist colleagues emphasized conjunction and not disunity for its own sake. In other words, they sought an integral and not disparate, reality, and they rendered it in the tension of a constant state merging opposites.             

Pollock’s style and form give coherence to symbols interpreted as magical, totemistic, shamanist, and fecund or sexual.  These images become a story of birth, spring or “coming into life” again,  a major theme in the work of other Abstract Expressionists, as for example, in Hans Hofmann’s Coming Into Life,  1946; Gottlieb’s Omens of Spring of 1950; and Rothko and Still’s mythic, unusually naked breasted pietas. It can even be found in the 1930s, for example, in the popular novels of Thomas Wolfe.  Sharingthese artists’ knowledge of one of the distinguishing accomplishments of the twentieth century – an increased understanding of  prehistoric, archaic, and non-Western cultures, Pollock’s primitivism, exemplified in Birth, may even have considered the archaic past as more alive than his own time. He and his colleagues may have understood man as not evolving, but instead as adding one discrete layer of experience upon another, like the rings of a tree.

In Birth Pollock thus has assembled a swirling, curvilinear totem of forms from several cultures, held together by heavy outlines of Northwest Coast artifacts. Towering up before the observer is a compressed vortex of flowing masks and other shapes signaling in their dynamism the symbolic act of new birth, creativity, and renewal, common themes in Pollock’s work and of the era. For Pollock, the expressive movement counts as much, if not more, than the symbolic allusion. The composite of forms from several different cultures is fused to represent the “human” in expressive lines of transformative force, motion, and power.  In short, this is the experience of “ecstasy,” an essential feature of shamanism, Pollock’s key mode, for the neophyte shaman awakens himself to other orders of reality by opening up a visionary realm and by drawing on powers greater than himself.  In a parallel idea, Jung remarked that “there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.[xxiii]

It is useful to point out that just as the “Indian” was an illusion of the “primitivism” that Pollock believed, “shamanism,” too, is an illusion. It is a period concept between the wars of unified religion (ritual) beliefs allegedly shared by many peoples but there was no such unity. As with primitivism, ritual beliefs were different. For example Navaho medicine men are not shamans.  Nevertheless if the beginnings of anthropology overemphasized similarity of times and places, it did take note of the beliefs and traditions and try to give them respect and Pollock was interested in and devoted to using those ideas rather than others.

It is useful to point out that although particular peoples or traditions are distinctive, with fundamental events, “shamanic knowledge is remarkably consistent across the planet. In spite of cultural diversity . . . the basic themes related to the art and practice of shamanism form a coherent complex . . . superficial feature as well as deeper structures which appear to be constant.” [xxiv] These include shamanic rapture or ecstasy, of great significance to Pollock.

Another early shamanic symbol of a state-altering form is fire. Fire appears throughout Pollock’s early work, yet it has hardly been accorded significance or even discussed in the literature on Pollock, except perhaps as more evidence of Pollock’s personal tendency toward “violence.” Sometime around 1938, Pollock painted The Flame (fig. 8).

Fig.8

Again, it was probably visually inspired by a Mexican muralist, in this instance, by Orozco, his favorite of “Los Tres Grandes” as Orozco, Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros were known.  Fire symbolism was prominent in the work of Orozco, and most probably his Man of Fire at Guadalajara (fig. 9) was the immediate influence here,

Fig.9

Orozco used fire in many paintings, from the Dartmouth murals, the Epic of Civilization, of 1932-4 to Catharsis of 1934.  Orozco used fire as a common motif that changed in meaning from creative to destructive force depending on the context.  While Pollock’s paintings of fire are more abstract than Orozco’s circular image in Man of Fire, it is no less dualistic in meaning. (Although Orozco painted Man of Fire in 1940, it is probable that Pollock saw sketches for it earlier because Orozco’s drawings were frequently on display at Alma Reed’s gallery in New York.)

In Orozco’s Man of Fire, a single figure representing humanity is engulfed in flames, surrounded by several figures representing the elements. In contrast, Pollock’s figures are less specific; The Flame is abstract except for what may be an embracing couple at the left. The “couple” (we can see several white fingers belonging one of the participants) is penetrated by flame and its immediate source may be a similar couple in his [Composition with Figures and Banners] of 1938-4.  Ultimately, however, the original source may be an embracing couple next to the main figure of Orozco’s Prometheus, a favorite painting of Pollock, and his gift of fire/knowledge. In The Flame, Pollock evokes a near total cataclysmic upheaval and conflagration that the fire of the new engenders. A world of fire and flame is thus a dualistic symbol of destruction and creation that he knew and could easily adopt. In his era, the cleansing nature of upheaval was often conceived as purification through destruction.  Both world wars were often described in their early years as such necessary cleansers of the corrupt worlds that led to them.  Fire is thus one of Pollock’s symbols that generates and defeats “stultification.”

Another unevaluated image of Pollock’s that is nevertheless important is that of the cosmos. We will see a hint of it in the discussion below of Mask, a painting that contains a star below a head. More significant is (Circle) of 1938-41 (fig. 10).

Fig.10

This is a circular composition filled with what seems to be marine and other life -- eels, shellfish, octopus, and again, snakes, those symbols of rebirth. Pollock obviously wanted to identify his image with a theme of life forming new power and vitality than anything to be found in the empty “Wasteland” of the “mass” society of the West, which was galloping toward a war against which his work was posed.

In (Circle), Pollock has further evoked the dynamic flow of fertility by imitating the compositions and forms of Southwest Indian sand or “ground” painting and shamanic ceremony, as this illustration indicates (fig. 11).

Fig.11

a condensed pictographic swirl of new life forms, a sort of procreative, curvilinear flow. For Pollock, to delve into the unconscious was to seek and revive symbols and ideas of new life and vitality, which he needed to revivify his personal life, and the West needed to revive a dying and destructive civilization. The fructive earth of Pollock’s sand painting suggests his chthonic view of nature.(Circle) thus becomes a cosmic map of the world with the creatures from the earth and the sea that are revealed in the process of shamanic trances and their characteristic soul journeys over the earth.[xxv]

The cosmic journey in (Circle) is an indication of spiritual flight.  Journey is evident, too, in There Were Seven in Eight of 1945 (fig. 12)

Fig.12

Fig.12 Detail

Here Pollock has repeated rows of figures and Inuit, Northwest Coast and Picassoesque masked heads in an elongated echo of similar arrangements in North West Coast carved and painted boxes (fig. 13) as well as Guernica, another Pollock favorite.

Fig.13

The painting further contains a squared, scroll-like labyrinth as a mask head at the upper left, which Pollock will later use in his drawings with a spiral.  The scroll labyrinth is a “Path to the Underworld.” In some shamanic cultures, the path of initiation is an invisible one. Scrolls, labyrinths, and trails of varying meaning denote the ‘orientation’ of the neophyte’s direction. Certain forms, such as the labyrinth, represent explicitly the experience of initiation – entry into the abyss of the protected sanctuary of the mysteries, a pilgrimage of the spirit. Shamanic journey is in fact an expression of the evolution of the human spirit out of worldly time and space [xxvi] Pollock’s most accomplished statement of the protected sanctuary or mystery is The Guardians of the Secret of 1943. Journeys suggest the transcendence of the shallowness of mass man.

 Cosmic qualities are further evident in Mask of 1938-4 (fig. 14), where we can see, as noted earlier, a star at the bottom of the head. Here Pollock joins the cosmos to his act of transformation for a mask represents such a change.

Fig.14

Masked spirits are an important symbol to the peoples of Native America, indeed, to all peoples everywhere.  The wearing of masks creates another gateway to the underworld, to the spirits, to another identity, to one’s totem animal, or to the supernatural power of the animal the masks symbolize. Indeed, masks manifest supernatural power and beings. In their catalogue to the “Indian Art of the United States” exhibition,  Frederich Douglas and Rene D’Haroncourt wrote that the term kachina  refer to transformations of the wearers, Pueblo Indians, into supernatural beings such as a spirits of the dead, clouds and rain. Elsewhere in the catalogue they write in the catalogue that masks are useful in myth-making, rituals, and ceremonies to prepare for a successful hunt and to drive away evil spirits that may be preying on an individual or a people, in other words, they are useful for beneficial actions. Masks also heal the sick by evoking the masked spirit who will bring health and maybe new harmony. Additionally, some masks of the Northwest Coast were carved in the likenesses of spirits or mythical beings that were believed to be the ancestors of families. Their masks in particular exaggerate human features in a grotesque manner. In the Northwest Coast, “masks are metaphors of altered self . . . objects of immense power . . . . To the Kwakiutl masks are living beings whose powers are literally those of life and death, for masks take people from one world and move them to another and, in so doing, bring about death and rebirth . . . . The human dons the mask of a spirit because he wants to seek the powers of eternal life the spirits possess.[xxvii] 

Masks are thus tools of transformation into an animal sprit and supernatural being of greater power than mass man.  Masked figures, then, as well as others in Pollock’s early work if 1938-41 are thus not simply, if at all, surrealist hybrids from the personal unconscious as they have traditionally been described in the Pollock literature, but specific beings – spirit deities. They are figural representations of the shamanic magical forces of the world. With them Pollock seeks to alter his and his culture’s identity and to redo the modern world as more spiritual and less scientifically rational than it is.

Between 1938 and 1941, Pollock painted several paintings specifically devoted to the sacred powers of masks and masked figures including [Composition with Masked Forms] and Masked Image, which use Northwest Coast and Picassoesque forms, but perhaps the most compelling is Mask. In it, a female head resides in a bull/horse composite, which is typical of Pollock.  Horns anchor both ends, with the one at the left rich enough to suggest a horse’s ears, too, facing out of the canvas. Horses and bulls are typical Pollock protagonists. Visually derived from Picasso, particularly the drawings for Guernica, they together represent aggression and suffering, as they were ultimately taken from the drama of bullfighting. For Pollock, the horse, usually combined with its alter ego, the bull, suggests a creature of sacrificial injury.  The Spaniards Goya and Picasso made the conflict in bullfighting into human metaphors.

 For all three artists and for the bullfight, the bull may be victim as well as aggressor, but the horse never inflicts pain. He only undergoes it.  Pollock frequently represents the horse and bull tied together (fig. 15) and often locked in mortal combat; as the psyche, they represent the battles within with their capacities for transfigurative suffering and aggression.

Fig.15

The horse and bull are Pollock’s own personal “ying and yang” symbol. (He had drawn the traditional “ying and yang” symbol, too.) The animal as protagonist and victim is a common theme of Surrealism, too.[xxviii]

To reinforce the shamanic purpose of the masked head, Pollock includes a wedge-like form in the “horse” head at the left. It is white and ends in a red circle. This form was inspired by a drawing that he did most probably at Bloomingdale Hospital in 1938, where he went to confront his newly recognized alcoholism. Pollock drew from photographs in Life Magazine while a patient.  One of them, sheet # 387 (fig. 16) from the May 9, 1938 issue, has been described as that of a “deep-sea diver” helmet, but Nan Rosenthal has recognized it as goggled hood worn by a blaster of abrasives to protect him from inhaling particles as he worked.[xxix]photograph illustrated

Fig.16

a story in Life about the prevention of industrial diseases. While its industrial source and theme is realist, we recognize it as something more. This modern mask prophetically indicates Pollock’s awareness of the use and purpose of what in his work will most often be a shamanic mask, which he will use to express the ritual task of protection against harm. Indeed, in Mask, he employed the wedge form and circular eye of figure 16 to generate the mouth and tooth of the animal at the left. The entire composition thus takes on the role of confronting disease as the masked shaman does. It has more significance than an odd, simple copy of a photographed object.

The concept in Jungian psychology that the mind is “primitive” in its fundamental layers and that renewal will come through that mind and those layers suggests that a society’s cultural mind can be psychologized into a  new ritualized psyche and thus new life. We saw Pollock emphasize the head as the site of power in the works mentioned above. With his turn toward the “primitive” in 1938 to 1941, he adopted Native American form and concept further, translating that early theme into the masked being.  (Orange Head) of ca. 1941 (fig. 17), for example, consists of head decorated with most probably Native American markings on its face.

Fig.17

Most significantly, however, its back side is a Vancouver Island Kwakiutl mask from the Museum of Natural History in New York that was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 1941 (fig. 18). 

Fig.18

In (Orange Head), to Pollock, the Kwakiutl “past” lies in the “back” of the mind/head. Further, the mask is in profile and thus not presented as it was seen at the museum, but rather in reproduction in the catalogue. It is as if Pollock were relying on this reproduction rather than his own encounter in the museum.

As we noted, the catalogue for the exhibition declared that masks transforms their wearers.[xxx] The Surrealists masked many figures, taking advantage of the idea that masks in all cultures involve a magical thinking enabling the wearer to become something other (fig. 19).

Fig.19

For all three cultures -- (Kwakiutl, Surrealist, and Pollock) -- the mask can thus transform man and make him anew.[xxxi] Pollock’s emphasis on the masked head, that is, the psyche, as the site of change is a constant throughout his work.  He joins this emphasis with a large variety of his symbols in ritual paintings of his era.

In the shaman dreamer’s journey through the world, his soul traverses rivers and mountains, sacred centers and portals in the web of the Other World.[xxxii] A nimbus of power lines (like the halo in the Western Christian tradition) is a visual expression of the mind’s energy in its mystic aspects and of its sacred powers. The sun itself is such a shamanic symbol, representing the heroic principle of all-seeing and all-knowing, and the indwelling fire of life. Such “solarization” “represents the highest spiritual manifestation of totality.”

Pollock pictured an emerging solarized figure in a formerly puzzling drawing, number 549 (fig. 20),

Fig.20

where a branching, winged half-figure with what appear to be claw hands emerges to take flight from another figure before two celebrating pictographic male and female souls developed from BAE images of the sun and dawn (figs 21-22).

Fig.21 Details Fig. 20

The solarized figure is embraced by a half moon and a rimmed sun, the latter typical of Southwestern sand painting, where a thin lip around a circle signals the emergence of dawn. Pollock’s fellow Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman may have expressed this concept in his magnificent Day One, which consists of a large, rectangular, red plane emerging from a thin, orange edge suggesting the dawn of a new time, most probably, the postwar era. A bony horse head, echoing the sacrificed animal of [Composition with Ritual Scene], appears as a cast shadow on the ground in the Pollock. In Pollock’s drawing, then, and in shamanic solarization, the “physical” head of the figure seems to be disappearing as a great sun-like disc manifesting energy takes its place fig. 23).

Fig.23

This “Dreamtime” figure represents the often-seen magical relationship between the primitive and the solar complex,[xxxiv] for the solarized shaman with a nimbus manifests the cosmic center.[xxxv]

In primitivist identification with this idea, natural symbols can represent the liberating flight of authentic inwardness that Pollock and many of his generation sought to break free of mass man. Bird of 1938-41 (fig. 24) consists of a feathered creature whose head is the all seeing eye of a shamanic being bestriding two head masks.

Fig. 24, 25 & 27

Bird follows Northwest Coast Haida works of shaman ceremony in which a bird bestrides a man in a box, a kind of casket, open at the side, with two guardian figures (fig. 25). The guardian figures resemble a wooden carving in the Museum of Natural History (fig. 26).

Fig.26

It also echoes a Nootka Painting on wood from the American Museum of Natural History which was shown at the MoMA exhibition.

Further, a swirling concentric circle in the center perhaps represents the shamanic entry to the “Other World” either above or below.

 It resembles such a form in a Salish (Cowichan) spindle whorl (fig. 27), a similarly splayed, if skeletal, figure in the American Museum of Natural History. The larger whorl suggests the shamanic middle world.  In an earlier work, [Composition with Woman], Pollock had also placed a blank hole at the center of a mythic creature. It is similar to the “Emergence Centers” in southwest sand painting and the shamanic tradition where an opening or hole is the location where the gods descend down to earth or to death in the subterranean regions and a shaman’s soul flies up or down on his journeys to heaven or hell.  In many myths, this hole is thought to be the axis mundi, the center of the world.  It is the threshold or door or passageway to other realities, a subject Rothko addressed in his early work, too.  Pollock’s later drip painting, Vortex of 1947, reworks this idea as “abstraction.”

In the Haida work, which is also in the American Museum of Natural History, the figure below is a commemorative effigy, the “dead” shaman, whose soul is in the form of a crane, lifts off to celestial realms.[xxxvi]  The upper panel of the Pollock echoes that form while it also consists of sand, echoing the very sand of sand painting, which reinforces yet again the transformative quality of Indian ritual art work, for sand painting in the Southwest suggests a gateway to the Other World of spirits. In contemporary drawings, Pollock had laid a pregnant woman on the earth or penetrated her, symbolizing the earth’s feminine fertile, quality from which deities spring. Importantly, in Bird the center of the avian marks the appearance of a roughly humped-back fetus, which was originally a still born child in Orozco’s Epic of Civilization at Dartmouth College. Orozco used the child as a symbol of death. Pollock uses it as a symbol of life, for now it is an upside down spiral with which the bird is pregnant. Pollock took this spiral form from a Southwest Mimbres pot on exhibit at the “Indian Art of the United States” at the Museum of Modern Art (fig. 28).

Fig.28

He would use this image often, most obviously in Night Sounds of 1944, where it was joined by a gesticulating rectilinear, stick or pictographic figure to its left and a circular, pictographic figure to its right.[xxxvii]

Throughout his work, Pollock paints and draws pregnant women with their final resulting issue – babies -- in symbolic and pictographic terms. Let us look at the simplest and most direct example. [Bald Woman with Skeleton] of 1938-41 (fig. 29) presents a scene of a public ritual birth that draws upon the work of the Mexicans muralists.

Fig.29

 Rising above a horse-skeleton is a fully fleshed woman with a Siqueiros-like “bald” head -- misnamed -- for it is the site of change as we have seen.  Its intense white is drawn from Siqueiros’ paintings such as Rotation of 1934-47 (fig. 30)

Fig.30

and probably preliminary drawings for The Face of Treason of 1947.[xxxviii]  (Pollock attended Siqueiros’s Workshop in New York in 1936 and became intimately acquainted with his work. As is well known, it is Siqueiros who introduced Pollock to dripping paint on the floor.) For Siqueiros, and probably for Pollock, such heads refer to the seat of vital energy. Pollock’s horse skeleton also resembles a skeletal figure in an Orozco crayon drawing for as well as the actual panel of Gods of the Modern World, one of the Dartmouth College murals. Together the skeleton and the curvilinear woman form a hump-like shape, which ultimately suggests pregnancy for Pollock.

            These forms are surrounded by many gesticulating figures which are reminiscent the “crowd” or “public” that Pollock knew from Orozco’s Prometheus and other works, such as El Greco’s The Dream of Philip II (plate 92) (fig. 31)

Fig.31

 or the detail of the Burial of the Conde de Orgaz (plate 86) in M. Legendre and A. Hartmann’s El Greco (Paris Hyperion, 1937), a book Pollock was known to have studied. [xxxix] They celebrate what is taking place. In shamanist terms, they can be considered to be in trance-rapture.  Behind the crowd in [Bald Woman with Skeleton] is a wall of flame, that familiar symbol of creation or destruction, or both. Two guardian ribbed, i.e. x-rayed, animals and sword-like creatures (see sheet III: 470r) surmount the composition.

For Pollock here, the flames seem to represent creation because of two remaining symbols. One is a serpent that crawls below the horse skeleton and seems to also “guard” the dark ceremony. Clearly drawn from Orozco’s similar form at Dartmouth, [xl] it is a pre-Contact symbol that has continued in use in Native American cultures of the Southwest to this day. In those cultures, the serpent denotes the presence of a primitive deity and its powers. It sheds its skin periodically and thus is continually reborn like the pre-Contact plumed serpent.[xli]  For Jung, the snake is a symbol of the dark god, the unconscious, functioning, as does the plumed serpent, for the development of a new, true selfhood, since it requires the shedding of the old, that is, destruction, and the emergence of the new, that is, reconstruction. And, the snake is the subject of Hopi ritual in the Snake ceremony that Pollock had read about in the Smithsonian Institution’s BAE Nineteenth Annual Report. There the primary purpose of the ceremony was considered to “bring rain and thus to promote growth . . . . this desire . . . dominates all the rites of the Hopi ritual.”[xlii] The presence of the serpent in the painting thus signifies that change needs to takes place in psychological as well as real space and that change requires darkness as well as light.

[Bald Woman with a Skeleton] is thus what Pollock’s work has always been considered to be in modernist criticism – a psychological fantasy. But what a psychological fantasy! Such modernist descriptions do not begin to do justice to paintings such as these. Pollock’s work suggests again that he sees the primordial impulse as one of fructive creativity, human development and commitment to others, not sexuality for its own sake or for Freudian neurosis, not for drunken excess, not for autobiography, and not for the personal unconscious alone.

In a second symbol Pollock clarifies this scene further, for it confirms the process of rebirth or resurrection that the horse sacrifice and dark god requires. That symbol is an upside-down baby emerging from between the legs of the horse skeleton. Though hard to see, it is clearly there and it has been used before. Pollock cast this image of a human form with arms up and legs truncated as the centerpiece of the chinaware bowl that he gave to Dr. Wall, his doctor at Bloomingdale, in 1938 (fig. 32).

Fig.32

The figures thrusting in all directions across the surface of the bowl in a palette of flame Dr. Wall described in his words as representing the “Flight of Man” after Pollock explained it to him.[xliii] The thrusting form in the bowl and the painting has a source that further explicates this flight, journey or life process. The baby is possibly taken from a Michelangelo drawing of 1532-33 (fig. 33) revealingly entitled “Resurrection.”

Fig.33

Recall that Pollock had drawn from the Old Masters before, not only from El Greco and Signorelli, his favorites, but Michelangelo as well. The form of the baby was obviously chosen for its meaning and for its representation of rising and resurrection, with its up-thrust arms, since it does not really look much like a baby. A more accurately rendered baby form will be chosen shortly.  [Bald Woman with Skeleton] is thus a ritual scene of rebirth from bones and resurrection. Every element of the painting functions to represent a ritual rebirth from darkness and sacrifice. And because of the “people” or the masses that surround, witness, and validate the event, Pollock seems to be addressing his deed to the public. As in Mexican painting, Pollock’s presents a birth or ritual act for the good of the public, some of whom are pleased and some of whom are fearful. (See below.)

[Bald Woman with Skeleton] introduces further panoply of shamanic symbols for us. Let us explore them further. It is unusual to represent a sacrifice in art with an already defleshed figure. That the figure is a skeleton leads to a realization of another key shamanic idea. A representation of shamanic “death” is what is intended by the skeletons in Pollock’s drawings such as number 527 (fig. 34).

Fig.34

 “Death and dismemberment” is called “chaos” in shamanic terms. The skeletal shaman figure lying beneath a pre-Columbian head is a personification of death, while at the same time, “like the seed of the fruit after the flesh has rotted away, his or her bones represent the potential for rebirth. The shaman-neophyte must die to finitude in order to attain knowledge of the immortal.”[xliv] To represent death is to represent the beginnings of new life, for all shamans know that death, e.g. animal food, furnishes all with life. Figure 35 is a shamanic image of a skeleton holding the sacrificial knife in its hand

Fig.35

Skeletal forms also appear in a drawing in what I call Pollock’s “Mexican” notebook of 1938-41, that is, what seems to be his last notebook of drawings based on the Mexican muralists. He had filled two previous ones with copies and variations on Old Master works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Signorelli, and especially El Greco. In the Mexican notebook, Pollock’s imagination takes flight as he is no longer working through older art but creating his own new forms. Sheet 470r (fig. 36) is dominated by another large female figure, this one with a machine arm, drawn from Orozco's frescoes at Guadalajara.

Fig.36

The figure has a particularly rhythmical and monumental curving female body. At the top of her neck is the junction of two tiny heads, one oval and one a skull. The oval head, drawn from an Orozco crowd figure, actually branches to the right as though it were the head of quadruped animal with a long back. It rests on the female figure's neck. The skull opposite belongs to a long, bone figure that is bent at a joint at its middle. Slightly below that joint is a horizontal protrusion, probably intended to suggest a penis. The bone figure descends to an elongated, skeletal hand much like that of the dreaming figure at the bottom of 463r (see below). The extension may, however, be a foot. The hand or foot holds another, smaller bony creature that rises straight up. The mechanical arm seems to hold it up, too, as a mother would her child. Significantly, its head lies at the center of Pollock's image of a womb that he had used before. The womb is aptly placed in the abdomen of the female; the penis of the larger bone figure stands just above of it. The whole configuration rests within a larger, standard (for Pollock) cloak/womb frame. This drawing seems to represent the embracing couple that, as with The Flame, as noted above, actually originated from Orozco’s crowd in his Prometheus, now with a child, and the embrace of mechanized, skeletal “death” and fleshy, fecund life. All of this is condensed into an irregular, emblem filling up nine-tenths of the paper. Thus, it symbolizes what other Pollock drawings in the Mexican notebook symbolized: the struggle and conflict between the forces of life – the joining couple and the mother and child -- and of darkness – skeletal “death” and mechanization.  Much like the Mexicans and the Surrealists, Pollock's art fully centered itself in an imagery of symbolic strife. Although dramatized and often consisting of rhythmic and dynamic sections (curving bodies, radiating lines), he seems to have to become a symbolic artist whose work, he imagines, expresses his psyche and that of his cultural need for new life or rebirth. Although a diversion from the notebook, another drawing reinforces the idea of symbolic death.

An independent gouache, sheet # 4: 940 (fig. 37), adds to this conception. It consists of Orozco-originated stacked bodies before a crucified figure on the cross.

Fig.37

Significantly, all the figures are only partially rendered so that they not only physically overlap but they make an only partially differentiated emblematic whole. The downward facing bodies in blue and red have extended limbs that are countered by the rising arms of the crucified figure. The red figure has claws and overlays a similarly clawed animal whose own mostly gray limbs form the bottom of the plane.  To this unit is distantly added, perhaps, the red “head” of a horse at the very bottom left where it often is in Pollock drawings. Another head seems to complete the human blue body and reside next to yet another white head. In between the blue and red figures is the sharp, angular, yellow head that Pollock used to suggest the sacrificial horse of our solarized drawing.   In sheet # 4: 940, then, Pollock has superimposed contrasting beings and contrasting states of being to form complex possibilities; the living and the dead, the dying and rising and the animal and the human. They all form an interlocking unit. That is, Pollock has rendered “death” with the standard Western icon of resurrection by means of interlocking, linear form planes that make a loose but unified unit.  And, overall, he has easily flowed from Picasso to Pre-Contact Mexico to Native America to the Christian icon of death and resurrection for his ritual themes.

For Pollock, Native American peoples lived more closely and more harmoniously with the land than urban man.  He believed in a nature that man did not dominate, a decentered man, as we saw with his decentered man’s identification with women.  This nature decentering led to identification with animals which supported Pollock’s Jungian interest in increasing the “natural” or “animal” element in himself. We have seen that in sheet # 4: 940. The fusion with the animal can be seen more clearly in works such as [Man, Bull, Bird] of 1938-41 (fig.38)

Fig.38

which they join together lying on top of and interspersed within one another, somewhat like an Inuit ivorycaring of man and bear (fig. 39). [xlv]

Fig.39

And Northwest Coast rattles:

The lost [Reclining Figure], known only through a photograph given to Lehman, and Reclining Woman separate the forms more. These works may also herald a shamanic theme of incorporation by chthonic deity, part of the process of the suffering ordeal of the shamanic initiation journey.[xlvi] To the man, bull and bird may be added a spiraling, birthing bird and horse’s head on opposite sides of the bull head, a top register of red flame and an x-ray of ribs once again. Ultimately, this overall, horizontal overlapping emblem derives from the compositional schemes of Pollock’s teacher and mentor, Thomas Hart Benton.

Fig.40 LEFT   Fig.41 RIGHT

Wounded Animal of 1943 (fig. 40), however, locates nature within the style of Northwest Coast such as a Haida slate carving of a sea monster, an example of which can be found in Boas’ Primitive Art of 1928 (fig. 41).[xlvii]  While Pollock’s colleagues owned and knew it, Pollock must have known it too, although it was not found in his library, for there are several other forms found in it that related to Pollock’s work, as we have seen.  Denied realization in the mass wasteland of the time, the wounded “animal” or natural side of “man,” was also recognized by the Surrealists, who may have been a further inspiration for Pollock’s version of the theme. For them, denying the rational mind necessitates releasing “the wounded animal within” so that a “sensitivity to the unknown and the unknowable” could be retrieved.[xlviii] For the Surrealists, and for Pollock, too, such a view aligns them with mythic and so-called primitive thinking where animals are not brutal but “noble ancestors of the human species who hold special powers.” [xlix] The need to recognize the animal side of man leads to man’s rebirth as we seen in # 4: 940 and other drawings. The animal form clarifies what had “died” in mass man and what needs resurrection.         

Thus, to reform man, to counter the machine, to undermine strictly rationalizing, scientific life, to oppose bureaucratic and state regimentation, in other words, to destroy mass man and mass society, new combinations and the integration of previously downplayed elements of the personality/culture/society/nature and history had to be revived.  In his work of 1938 and beyond such as sheet # 4: 940, Pollock asserts his allegiance to this cultural critique.

Returning to the Mexican notebook, we see symbolic expressions of new life. We have seen something of this before, in the phallic images of his earlier work.  Female imagery of the most inventive, concentrated fecundity takes over the role in number 469r (fig. 42).

Fig.42

Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Lisa Messinger has described this strange representation as a "surreal composite of both and male and female body parts--beasts, uterus, testicles, penis, hair, intestines, and a six-fingered hand."[l]  The brilliant combination of fecund images of sheet 469r is illuminated if we compare the drawing to a Picasso painting of Maria-Therese Walter, The Dreamer of 1932 (fig. 43), formerly in the dealer Klaus Perls’s Collection and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fig.43

This is a painting that Pollock must have known, because the telling branching forms at the upper right of his composition are taken from the Picasso as a direct quotation (although Pollock has used branches before).  With its oval forms around the fecund, front and back Maria-Therese, Picasso’s lover at the time, The Dreamer symbolizes fertile life -- as does the Pollock. The oval forms also recall the pregnant female in Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror of 1932 (fig. 44), a painting in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which Pollock was well known to have admired.

Fig.44

 Pollock's drawing 469r furthers his dialogue. It presents two stages of pregnancy as an amorphous form in profile, with a separated breast below with eye-breasts overlapping it.  At the very top of it is a penis with a convex head, the reverse of the concave penis form at the right.  The penis at the top of the central image stands above an open depression that could be a negative penis shaft and testicles or perhaps a uterus. From the left wall of the amorphous form a protoplasmic shape breaks through into space.  A double circle occupies the right interior of the form, perhaps an image of breasts again, or Pollock's use, from Siqueiros’s Rotation, of white or “bald” (sic) heads seen directly from above. Flowing from this double circle at the center are radiating lines derived from Western Native American artifacts. These radiating lines will often be repeated in Pollock's work. They are, for example, at the left center of the figures (?) in 468r, beside the nipple breast. Next to the radiating lines in 469r is a faintly visible set of fingers (or another emblem of radiating lines) which are repeated in full at the lower right of the form. This image thus seems to be one of concentrated fertility, male and female reproduction, pregnancy, and protoplasmic life[li] and thus, again, the new of life and possibility.  Further, shamans are reputed to have six fingers as does the drawing and thus # 469r may be another hint of Pollock’s identification with shamanism. [lii]

Fig.45

Further fertile female imagery can be found in 463r (fig. 45).  A Siqueiros bird presides over a whirlwind set of forms that at first seem to be capes but whose identity gradually becomes clear. Messinger has pointed to Andre Masson's In the Tower of Sleep of 1938 as a work that was reproduced in Cahiers d' Art in 1939 and that Pollock may have seen and drawn from.[liii] He seems to have done that here in the whirlwind effect, and the sense of overlapping and unfolding forms, which are also found at the lower center of the Masson. But Pollock has transformed that sense of unfolding into a field of vaginal forms reflecting the same thought that inspired his own drawing 464r particularly at the right, where labial lips emerge, and also in the center where other forms echo the shape of fallopian tubes. Messinger has noticed that a vaginal image seems to form the head of a shape attached to a cross in 473r.[liv]  (Vulval symbolism is common in shamanic ritual art.) [lv]At the center below the pointed wing of the bird is an oval form with a white, curving shape. This shape can be found at the top of sheet 462r and is probably a baby-in-womb form that Pollock used repeatedly in his work. The bird, then, presides over this field of dreams from the fecund unconscious, for most of the imagery of the drawing is a dream emanating from the barely visible, brown central lower section. There a man, drawn from the Masson, lies hugging the ground with his fingers extended. He seems to be imagining this dream of the new.

The act of penetration is the next step in the birth process.  (Shaman ritual emphasized the dynamic, fertilizing nature of male –female interactions and thus not the modernist, urbanist, Freudian view of sex.[lvi].) A subtle and now more pictographic representation of the sex act is evident in Totem Lesson One of 1944 (fig. 46), one of many Pollock paintings with a singular personage or giant, an idea perhaps from Orozco, although a standard totemic representation of several Indian peoples in the MoMA catalogue consists of a large figure and an animal in several media including basketry.

Fig.46

The animal at the bottom right in black is drawn from Boas and reproduced in several BAE Annual Reports (fig. 47).

Fig.47

In the center of this painting, Pollock conflates several emblems of fecundity around the key image of a linear phallus-like form penetrating a triangular pink pubis. Thus, the instruments of his earlier Male and Female are now engaged in that for which they are made: intercourse. Pollock further underlines this concept with additional symbols, for the linear phallus combines two artifacts of Native American peoples found on the pages of the publications of the Bureau of Ethnology.

Fig.48

One is a "Mother Corn" image of the Pawnee(fig. 48), which was explained in the BAE Twenty-Second Annual Report (pp. 44) as representing "supernatural power that dwells in H'Uraru, the earth which brings forth the food that sustains life; . . . we speak of the ear of corn as h'Atira, mother breathing forth life." (Rivera, too, had depicted a pre-Columbian corn god, Xochipilli, among his symbols of its fertility.) This image is fused with another from the BAE Eleventh Annual Report of 1889-90 (fig. 49), consisting of parallel sticks and looping cornstalks from the (Z)Sia culture of the Southwest.

Fig.49

According to Matilda Coxe Stevenson, the author of the article for which the image is reproduced, ritual notched prayer sticks are used in theurgist rites to exhort anthropomorphic and zoomorphic beings to intervene with the cloud people to water the earth. The cloud people use mystic powers to water "mother earth so that she may become pregnant and bear to the people . . . the fruits of her being."[lvii] These forms suggest the cooperation of all forces, natural and supernatural, in religious ceremonies to cultivate and propagate corn, the life-sustaining staple of the American Southwest.  In response to their union in Pollock’s painting, a familiar small branch emerges from the bottom of the pubis.

Matching the black-outlined, pink tone of the triangle in Totem Lesson One is a semicircular head above and to the right. In shamanic ritual terms, it is being “held” in the arm of the totemic spirit, demonstrating the shamanist principle of a “covenant” between spirit and man to grow to a higher order. This image is typical in shamanist cultures from Late Classic Maya to the Northwest Coast Tlingit. The mayan shamanic spirit in clay in figure 50 most legibly illustrates this concept for us. 

Fig.50

Significantly from this embraced head emerges a right angle line, which would suggest a straight-line pipe, another form and symbol of the union of nature and culture. In the words of a Lakota medicine-man Lame Deer: “For us Indians there is just the pipe, the earth we sit on and the open sky . . . That smoke from the peace pipe . .  . It goes straight up to the spirit world. But this is a two-way thing. Power flows down to us through that smoke, through the pipe stem. You feel that power as you hold your pipe: it moves from the pipe right into your body. . . . It is alive.”[lviii]

The pipe is the “tool of tools,” the most sacred and cherished gift of Plains Indians, used as both a ceremonial object of spiritual communion and a tool of self-realization in a Vision Quest. It makes breath visible and shares it with all, although Pollock does that elsewhere and not in Totem Lesson One. And it fuses male and female in the symbolism of the straight pipe stem and round bowl.[lix]

Elaborating further from Totem Lesson One, Pollock may have developed another very stripped-down pictographic symbol for penetration – simply a line through a triangle. An example of this copulation triangle signifying fecundity includes the yellow second eye of the totemic figure of Birth. It is joined by symbols of other procreative acts in Night Mist of 1944-45, where a long, linear triangle aims at a stout triangle; Troubled Queen of 1945, where a brown phallus penetrates a yellow-green pubis in the center, below a zigzag lightning fertility symbol; and Two of 1943-45 where the act of copulation from the rear centers the canvas. Yellow Triangle of 1946 (fig. 51) accentuates the pubis which is penetrated by a star-like phallus from below, and seems to become a protagonist in itself because of an eye at its top. 

Fig.51

Finally, The Child Proceeds of 1946 (fig. 52) reiterates the fertilizing act of sex with two figures, one of which is in the process of developing a large mass of protoplasm signifying the emergence of life, while the other carries a pictographic version of a baby on its back. 

Fig.52

Pollock’s imagery of copulation, suggests, then, the interaction of male and female principles that create and govern the dynamism and shamanic order of the world. In shamanic binaries, “male forms of energy invest, impregnate, extend, and move outward.  Female forces receive and transform male energies, converting them into new forms.”[lx] And in the shaman world, shamans may cross the gender divide, oscillating between male and female as he or she did with animals.[lxi]

In these images, Pollock has countered all his “death” imagery, or rather, the popular conception of him as merely an alcoholic depressive violently lashing out and “gesturing” in existential despair. Instead, his work is full of imagery of new life or ritual rebirth. It is at this time, ca 1941, that Pollock painted Birth with all its symbolism and vitality. Birth is a key early painting culminating much of his pre-abstraction and an early climax of his full-blown primitivism. However, it simply reaffirms and reinforces Pollock’s important emphasis on the new life or renewal that shamanic ceremony brings about.

It should be realized, if it has not been already, that shamanic ceremony has a public function. By definition, the shaman brings forth new knowledge and wisdom for his or her people. In Pollock’s case and that of his Abstract Expressionist colleagues, the public need was to repudiate the personality/psyche of mass man, the results of which, as we noted, were seen at Nuremberg. They were seen elsewhere, too, as their art and Pollock’s famous drawing, War of 1944-47, indicated. To further define the public need of his concept, in a few works Pollock alludes to the most acute representation of public crisis in his time, World War II.

Pollock had worked for the war effort in 1942 when he had designed window-displays with Krasner for the WPA War Services. That year too, he included his The Flame in the first exhibition of many devoted to war art, the exhibition of the newly formed Artists for Victory group that took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1943. Neither The Flame nor his Burning Landscape, in which splatter and spread accompany a pictographic figure, contains much that is directly illustrative of the war except in a general sense.  (Harold Lehman relates that Pollock happened to have that painting The Flame; flames projected war . . . So he threw it in the exhibit.)[lxii] On the other hand, pen and ink drawings such as numbers 724, 726 (fig. 53) of 1945,

Fig.53

War of 1944/1947, and prints such as 1080 (P18) do evoke it. They represent a new image of World War II, that of stacks of bodies and heads arranged as on a funeral pyre arrangement. If were done in 1944, it would be prescient of the images of the stacks of corpses that flooded the West after the Nazi extermination camps were discovered and revealed. If the date is later, as it is inscribed, War forms an emblematic image of the Second War II, both as a whole as well as the camps. (In American intellectual life, allusions to war as the Holocaust as it became known were not as prevalent as they were to become later, i.e., ca. 1960 and beyond.) Whatever the date, Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists addressed the war as a comment on human need and not on “winning” the war which was the common social and historical demand. As Lehman said “there was a whole national epic in the arts that essentially replaced the thirties’ social change and because of the depression. Now it’s ‘win the war!’”[lxiii] In their way, Pollock’s and Abstract Expressionist art in general was about winning the peace.

 In Birth, movement had coursed through and swallowed up Pollock's forms. He then followed up that imagery formally, we saw, with works such as the double curved side of Totem Lesson One.  Gradually, throughout the forties, while a formal and thematic device, the multiple curve became even more evident. His work employed such circular form and flow as an image and a symbol itself, mixed in with other symbols.  For example, in Untitled of 1945 (fig. 54), amidst integrated combinations of bird and human figures, lies an explosive “bang” at the right.

Fig.54

 It is an expression of shamanic ecstasy. Pollock had used such a symbol for this end since at least Male and Female of 1942, where explosive forms seem to parallel the union of a male and female. Gradually it separated from them and stood alone. The simple, Miro-inspired figurative gouache, Painting, consists of perhaps a pregnant female with breasts and branches at her chest (fig. 55).

Fig.55

A protoplasmic, narrow, linear “child” extends to the right and an angular pictograph figure to the left. Most importantly, a simple, scumbled white form/symbol/image of explosive or shamanic rapture dominates the lower left side of the painting. A further and later expanded example of this new symbol can be found in another Untitled of 1945 (fig. 56), a work on paper.

Here grew the burst of ecstatic rapture that has been enlarged to take over the entire space as a multiple linear and figurative form. This unrecognized work anticipates Pollock’s “abstractions,” but before we get to them we must take one more step.

Fig.56

Pollock’s “abstract” paintings elaborated the intensified the explosive and expressive areas of Male and Female and many other works into a power web, one of the most basic beliefs of shamanism.  Besides specifically the edges of Male and Female and other examples noted above, emblems or “webs’ have been a frequent if not a prevalent shape concept throughout Pollock’s work.  Explosive piles characterize not only the above works but drawings such as # 542, # 724, #765, War, and so many other earlier compositions. Indeed, these compositions are so full of energy that without even an emblematic shape within the sheet, explosiveness is implicitly if not explicitly realized in the figures and around the edges of most of his canvas. Pollock’s dynamism is a constant throughout his work, but it was amplified in 1947.

It was at this moment in the mid-1940s that an event took place that altered Pollock's work and, eventually, the history of art. After some transitional works -- Eyes in the Heat (fig. 57),

Fig.57

Fig.58

Shimmering Substance (fig.58) and others of 1946 -- Pollock developed his overall poured and dripped paintings. Their contrast to his past of alternating between static and dynamic compositions seems decisive. What led to this change? Some thing or event both reaffirmed for Pollock the appropriateness of an image of dynamic flow as a formal and expressive means to render his themes of magical ecstasy, fecundity, chaos and new birth. Something also perhaps inspired the further development of that image.

Fig.59

In 1946 The Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition, "The Art of the South Seas" (fig. 59). It was one of the first major shows of Oceanic material in America, and it is still admired today as a fine combination of anthropological information and ritual objects that the West considers to be art as well as artifacts. As the first major postwar exhibit of non-Western art, it attracted a great deal of attention. Most Abstract Expressionists saw it. Barnett Newman wrote a review of it, and the Abstract Expressionists Adolph Gottlieb, Seymour Lipton, Herbert Ferber, and Richard Pousette-Dart incorporated references to the objects in their work.[lxiv]         

As noted above, Pollock had drawn considerable inspiration from the Indian Art show of 1941. He had attended it with his friends Fritz Bultman and John Graham and his Jungian analyst Violet de Laszlo, and had watched sand painters create and destroy paintings in one day at its entrance.[lxv] That show had been crucial to the development of his goal of an art of ritual, generative force, and altered consciousness, and significantly, as a result of seeing it, he adopted forms from several different Native American cultures, some of which we have seen.

By the time the Oceanic show arrived, Pollock’s direction toward the expression of dynamic, magic, shamanic power had grown, even if he could not settle on one imagistic means. Pollock had earlier visited the Oceanic room of the American Museum of Natural History with his friend Kadish, and Brooklyn and the Museum of Natural History with his friend Lehman, with whom he also visited MoMA’s Indian show,[lxvi] but he had developed a new admiration for Oceanic material. He testified to this new interest in writing in a letter discovered by Paul Karlstrom in his work as Director of the West Coast Regional Center of the Archives of American Art. In it, Pollock wrote to his friend Louis Bunce that "The Pacific Islands show at the Museum of Modern Art . . . tops everything that has come this way in the past four years (my italics)," that is, since "Indian Art of the United States" of 1941-42.[lxvii] Pollock thus regarded the Oceanic show as superior to the modernist exhibits of the intervening years. (He is also known to have owned the catalogue.)

Despite his admiration, Pollock seems to have borrowed from only one work; but that work may have been the proverbial "straw that broke the back," codifying the direction that he was now willing to take.  On a wall in a central gallery was a carved board of tropical hardwood, 167 cm. long, that had been acquired by Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History during the Joseph N. Field Expedition in 1913 to

Fig.60

what was then German New Guinea (fig.60). It was from the Kaiserin Augusta River, in Simar. The relief carving consists of tall, vertical open fretwork with a frontal head and an elongated, projecting beak on top. The head oversees crisscrossing, chalky white and burnt sienna (iron oxide), earth toned, slightly charred curves, extended to the edges of the plank. In other words, beneath the head there are all-over curves and counter curves of earth tones with open intervals – seemingly air itself -- in between. A face-like decorative arabesque, hard to see in reproduction, sits at the bottom. The body of the carving consists of mostly abstract curves, except for two pairs of bird forms, one symmetrical, set next to the beak of the head and the other below the beak in a top\bottom oval swirl. The birds, especially the central pair, have distinctive, button eyes that differ from the curvilinear lines and planes (fig. 61)  Aside from the beak, the carving is in very low relief.

Fig.61

The curves are both long and short, and thin and swelling and the relief spaces are in a number of shapes, including comma-shaped spaces and leaf-like forms.  The back is not painted. This board from the Sepik River people thus seems to consist entirely of swelling, all-over, light and dark, tendril-like curves. Below the head, it is virtually a linear web. The plank clearly resembles Pollock's emerging new style much more than that of his works immediately before it such as The Child Proceeds and Yellow Triangle.

 The question has to be raised whether this Sepik River carved board may have inspired or played at least some part in Pollock's radical stylistic shift in 1946. The plank matches his emerging style of pouring in every significant way. The timing of its impact is important. So, too, is the relationship of the carving to Pollock's transitional works of 1946, the year he absorbed and worked through the ideas and possibilities seemingly suggested by it. No other previously noted influences match the carving in range and closeness to Pollock's drippings. They are all missing something in our terms of comparison.

These noted influences have included dripping by Hans Hofmann in a work such as Spring of the early 1940s, which is just that – dripping. It may have helped Pollock crystallize his thinking, for his first major use of the drip appears in 1943 in Water Bird (for the Inuit, water birds were analogous with shamans lxviii ) and the [Compositions with Pourings I & II] of 1943, too, but that is the extent of the possible impact. Spring does not include the images and figures that appear in Pollock’s new work of 1946. The Brooklyn Janet Sobel’s delightful curlicue webs evocative of the cosmos (fig. 62)

Fig.62

were known to have been admired by Pollock. However, the curls turn in on one another and do not extend as Pollock’s lines do. Despite years of denial by modernists, Pollock noted in the letter that he did admire Mark Tobey’s “white writing” paintings, which made him a significant artist at the time. They are also suggestive and extend to the edges of his painting, but they are finer and more delicate than Pollock’s vigorous markings.  The surrealist Masson has Pollock’s vigor in works of the early 1940s such as Labyrinth and they may also have provided exemplars, but none of these figures combines movement and subject matter directly in a way similar to Pollock’s. Perhaps Miro’s new paintings, the Constellation series, shown in New York at Pierre Matisse’s Gallery in 1945 were the closest to Pollock’s. These works consist of a wiry line connecting figures and cosmic elements, making a field with figures imbedded in it. But again, the line is mostly unmodulated and lacks a life of its own. Pollock’s line varies from wide to narrow and overlies other lines, which Miro’s does not do.

In 1945 Pollock had moved to Springs, Long Island, from New York City after he wed Krasner. Before the near-maturity of his abstractions such as Full Fathom Five or Cathedral of 1947 (fig. 63),

Fig.63

Pollock completed two series of works called the Accabonac Creek and Sounds in the Grass. These series consisted of small canvases, the most famous of which were Eyes in the Heat and Shimmering Substance. Eyes in the Heat contains innumerable small, thick strokes in concentric whirlwinds stretched to the edges of the canvas, echoing the basic form of the Sepik River carving. It obviously indicates a sharp break with Pollock's immediate past and a great intensification of his earlier curvilinear and most expressive designs. What is most striking, however, is the use of the imagery of eyes absorbed into the field. Eyes in the Heat matches the carving, in this detail, for the carving also consists of eyes amidst an all-over field, representing the eyes of the birds.

It is significant that “heat” joins fire in Pollock’s work. Eyes in the Heat reflects shamanic ritual and ecstasy, for the relationship among friction, fire, heat, and light is an analogue to the sacred initiation process and its outcome. Copulation is a process of heating and releasing energy by means of the friction of intercourse. (See Male and Female.) Further, the shaman “Vedic term sram means ‘to heat oneself.’”[lxix] The shaman is the supreme master of fire and embodies a heat so fierce that its spiritual luminescence represents both purity and knowledge. The rousing of mystical heat in order to achieve fire-mastery is common to mystics all over the world.[lxx] It is an agency of transmutation. As an Inuit shaman explained, “Every real shaman has to feel an illumination in his body, in the inside of this head or in his brain, something that gleams like fire, that gives him the power to see with closed eyes into the darkness, into hidden things or into the future, or into the secrets of another man.”[lxxi] Perhaps one of the better known features of Indian life in America is the “sweat” lodge where the shaman prays and purifies himself for the greater community of life.

Pollock used many means to suggest fructifying heat. He had represented fire before, of course, in his fire imagery, the greatest concentration of which was The Flame. He had represented intercourse. He had even used a swastika form commonly found on Southwest Anasazi painted ceramics and associated with fire and the movement of the sun.[lxxii] And he had also used color symbolism to represent the fertilizing energy of the sun and elements of the male principle in the unusual monochromatic painting, the yellow (Sun- Scape) (fig. 64).[lxxiii]

Fig.64

(Yellow Triangle takes on new meaning in this light.) In (Sun-Scape), a central stick figure is matched by circular forms that seem to have developed from the first stage of Pollock’s allusive, explosive circles. In this work, a circle of dots has meaning, too:

Over much of pre-Columbian America, dots are used to represent seeds, potential points of emergence for new life. They are also used to represent raindrops, which are viewed as seeds falling from the sky, fertilizing the earth beneath. Dots therefore connote fertility, which in the indigenous mind always results from the union of male and female principles.[lxxiv] 

In short, Pollock had long indicated mystical heat at least in some representational figurative form.

Shimmering Substance takes nature and Pollock into abstraction. The eyes in Eyes in the Heat were mostly elliptical orbs, seemingly with eyelids closed or open, and thus did not resemble the eyes in the Sepik River carving. In Shimmering Substance, however, Pollock has eliminated the eye images in his new, small, intensely swirling field of mostly comma-like strokes, and substituted flat, button-like orbs of red, yellow, and blue, which undoubtedly resemble the flat, button-like eyes of the Sepik River piece more strongly. The brushstrokes in Shimmering Substance are more distinct and larger than those in Eyes in the Heat and closer in their crispness to the carving. There is a greater sense of crisscrossing and less of coagulation.

In Shimmering Substance, Pollock has rid his canvas of any natural reference, and ventured the pure, expressive movement of rounded planes in a circular maelstrom. (A yellow substratum oval like a mandala, familiar from previous work, has often been noted in the painting). Intense and often curvilinear mythic animals and human animal-totem spirit beings, the established staples of Pollock's work, have yielded to linear webs. In Pollock's other work in these series, he revived and suddenly concentrated on his pouring and dripping, techniques that were absent from these two canvases, as well as from The Child Proceeds and other works of 1946.

Besides the resemblance of the all-over curvilinear compositions of his transitional paintings to the Sepik River carving, Pollock's first poured paintings recall its elongated format. He had worked in a tall, vertical format before, but so rarely that a recent study noted that Full Fathom Five was an "uncharacteristically vertical canvas."[lxxv]

A movement from squarish canvases to pronouncedly vertical and horizontal shapes may be a direct reflection of the carving as comparisons to Enchanted Forest (fig.65)

Fig.65

Number 13A: Arabesque and Summertime (fig.66) indicate.

Fig.66

Fig.66 Detail

At first, with the former work, but even more clearly with the latter two, Pollock understood and developed the idea of a narrow, extended tensile field of curves as a rich format. The drip and pouring technique now came to the fore as a means to cover surface in large sweeps and swathes. To imitate the carving's vitality and breadth, the small impasto brushstroke would simply not do.

The continuous swirling webs and skeins of the Sepik River carving and the drippings also share another key element -- interstitial space or "air." Throughout his earlier work, Pollock had often covered the surface of his canvases with marks and then imposed forms and planes on them. The surfaces of these paintings were choked with imagery. Even such dynamic works as Gothic and Full Fathom Five had such overlays; they were totally covered. So were many later drips, such as Number 27, 1950, One: Number 31, 1950 and Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950, all of 1950, and Ocean Greyness, Greyed Rainbow of 1953, and Scent of 1955. The dense, coagulated, curvilinear field was an alternative for Pollock, one that he never entirely abandoned. It is a constant in Pollock’s development and owes nothing to the carving.

Yet Pollock worked in an equally frequent mode in which the webs seemingly float on air and in empty space.  This manner does seem to echo the Sepik River board. The carving consisted of tensile arching and curving with space in between, a veritable lattice. Pollock quickly adopted this idea not only in Cathedral of 1947, with its silvery, thinner, and even more vertical armatures, but also throughout his classic period of 1947 to 1950. From Enchanted Forest of 1947 and Number 13A, 1948: Arabesque to the great Number 32, 1950 and Autumn Rhythm of 1950, Pollock flooded canvases with brilliant linear webs that were airy and almost gossamer. They seem held up by their own strength and flow, much like the field of the wooden carving. The former button-like orbs have been deliberately integrated as spots and rough spatters: rounded, more concentrated planes in a whorl of larger curves.

Finally, one can find a later reference to the general shape and composition of the Sepik River board - Pollock's Easter and the Totem of 1935 (fig.67).

Fig.67

The totem at the left echoes the board in that it is a tall, thin form with a head filling the top with a long line for a nose. Its shape and proportion, thus, recall his earlier interest even without the drip webs.

In 1946 Pollock absorbed and worked through the ideas and stylistic alternatives suggested by the Sepik River painted wood carving. In 1947 he developed full control of this new mode and as his skill and understanding of the potential of movement itself as the image grew, his famous style emerged. That meant, seemingly, that he eliminated the transitional animal imagery and any suggestion of human form and figure.[lxxvi] With works such as and The Enchanted Forest, Lucifer (fig.68),

Fig.68

and Reflection of the Big Dipper of 1947, Pollock established confidence and command. He had incorporated the carving's idiom into his style, thickening or thinning the paint, changing color combinations and sizes, expanding, contracting, or combining different curves in the same composition. The button shapes became one with the curvilinear, and both shared the same forcefulness, the same power. Thus, the spots and the carving's lines were woven into a new tapestry.

Yet Pollock's pourings and drippings were never simply formal, despite the popularity of formalist explanations of them for a time. Pollock had an end in mind with his drippings, something to express. He had a theme. The catalogue discussion of the Sepik River carving tells us what that probably was (in early anthropological language with its limited assumptions):

There are certain tendencies such as . . . the frequent use of organically curved surfaces, that appear in almost all Sepik carvings, but these are shared by other Melanesian styles. Sepik River art derives its unique character from its remarkable ability to make plastic forms the carrier of strong emotions. It lacks to a great extent the traditional, formal restraints that give uniformity to other regional styles. Based on human and animal shapes that are often distorted or combined to produce grotesque and fantastic effects, this intense, sensual, magic art depends for its plastic impact almost entirely on the bold integration of its design elements. Imagination ordered but not restricted by feeling for form makes the art of the Sepik River an ideal instrument for its main purpose--the release of magic power.[lxxvii]

“Magic power.” Thematically as well as stylistically, then, the carving confirms and completes Pollock's development. Its swirling curves literally embody the familiar subject of Pollock's work -- emotional force, magic flow, and explosive, transformative, ritual emanation or ecstasy -- fused together now in the drippings for the ultimate "integration": his all-over style. Pollock's classic poured paintings are emblems of lines of force expressing a moment of magic power, that is, shamanic ecstatic transformation and spirituality, as had his earlier, more obviously figurative, work. One could say that the drippings ultimately enlarge and enrich the idea and form of those flowing power lines into the shaman power web. One could also say that movement and flow make a new form of divine power of the Lord of the Wind – the Breath of Life – the undifferentiated energy hidden in all things according to shaman lore.[lxxviii]

Pollock's abstractions thus fully develop his search for the apt means to express the immaterial and intangible that he had only partly succeeded in evoking with symbols, totemic compositions, repetitions of designs from his schooling with Benton, the Mexicans and others, and with partially dynamic forms.  When in an exhibition of non-Western artifacts, Pollock came across a carving of a figure whose body consisted of dynamic, curvilinear movement representing the transformative and creative force of magic power, he must have felt that the struggles, hesitations, and cul-de-sacs of his search were not in vain. At the very least, the carving confirmed and concentrated Pollock's direction. From the first time he saw it, he must have recognized that he could fully represent the process and the power by themselves, and that his earlier figures, combining symbols and rhythmic emanations of magical force, were too much of a compromise. He could, in a sense, go all the way.  Sepik River artists already had.

Interestingly, the carving must have also ratified for Pollock the idea that the unconscious was the expression of other cultures not found in Western ego consciousness. What he had seen in the Oceanic show was simply another version of what he had learned, imagined, and conjured “authentically” from the “unconscious,” where lay the non-Western or its analogues he thought. Thus, although his classic paintings may have partly developed without the Sepik River source, at least in the time and in the form they did, the source was only the final straw.

Pollock's drippings are thus not “abstractions,” as they have been long described but imaginative images of what cannot be seen: sacred, intangible shamanic webs of powers and ecstatic lines of force. We have seen him arrive at the threshold of this idea earlier. Now he seems to have crossed it.  In this, in his own way, he thus was further in accord with innumerable artists and styles of his time. Diego Rivera, for example, in a work that Pollock admired as a youth, filled the pictorial space of Dia de Flores of 1925 with a panorama of lush, fertile flowers representing the intangible richness of the Mexican folk. On the ceiling above Prometheus, Orozco had painted expanding rectangles representing growing force and power itself.

Fig.69

As examples, we could cite Masson's Portrait of Goethe and his Landscape of Wonders of 1935 (fig. 69). There is also a painting by a friend of Pollock's, Wolfgang Paalen's Space Unbound of 1941, as well as works by the surrealists Gordon Onslow-Ford and Matta.  Other Abstract Expressionists also conveyed the veritable rhythmic and “magical” emanations of the internal and external universe, indicating how much this idea was in the air. For example, Pousette-Dart emulated the magic efflorescence of  ceremonial objects of non-Western peoples in his Symphony # 1, The Transcendental of 1942 as well as spiritual golden light in his Within the Temple of 1945 and Presence, Cathedral Window of 1955. He also referred to magic emanation and flow in the mid1940s in his Undulation works, while Theodore Stamos conjured the energies of the past in his Ancestral Flow, also of 1945.  The "color" painters Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko self-consciously used the expansive flow of the sacred and ritual tradition of light (in its modern form, color) as the basis of their work. And other American artists, too, such as the Indian Space painter Steve Wheeler, painted magical eyes and transformative metamorphosis in such works as Behind the Cellar Door of 1943.

Pollock thus painted the manifestation and materialization of magical, ancient force as conceived by his generation. In this regard, it is important to note that Kadish, Pollock's close friend, has said that he had received letters in the postwar period from Pollock, indicating that his poured and dripped paintings were a kind of image.[lxxix] Regrettably, those letters are lost, but that comment seems to confirm that Pollock's drippings represent not simply naturalistic mimesis, but an idea, possibly from his traditional subject matter. In other words, the drippings, as we have seen in all of his work, are pictographs or hieroglyphs of force. One could name the “abstractions” “Pictographic Expressionism” to replace “Abstract Expressionism.”

The evocation of a magical power web of fecund flow and transformation, of ritual fulfillment in new being evoked from within, is the magic of the world Pollock and his time sought. In the midst of personal and historical devastation and destruction, inner renewal, the search for what Kandinsky earlier called the "Great Spiritual," as understood in his era, was the subject and source of Pollock’s energy, and his art. Pollock's drippings gave a visual shape to shamanic psychic transformation, the sacred myth and rite of his generation that would remake Western man.

                 Drip painting was a unity of dynamic elements parts and the foundation of Pollock’s all-over style. What thus became evident in his abstractions from 1947 and beyond was that Pollock never changed his symbols, never changed figures, never changed his subjects, but rather found a more formal means to bring them all together. The great claim that Pollock dropped his earlier, often called “surrealist,” subjects for abstraction is false. So is the fundamental claim of the fifties that Pollock and de Kooning led a charge to an abstraction that had little to do with their previous figurative work and that it was totally new. On the contrary, it was the same expression, now in a different inventive form -- a variant, not a rejection.  Critics of the fifties made a fundamental error in their understanding of Pollock’s work, and the subsequent interpretations, such as the most recent critiques based on the new topics of existentialism, modern man literature, and individualism have simply repeated this error. But more on that another time.{lxxx]

Pollock’s shamanism believed in a dynamic web of power shared by everyone and everything in their world and that informed the universe. Shamans believe that everything is alive and connected and that this web of connection organizes the world.  Everything is integrated into and interactive.  The connective web represents the unlimited amount of potential and power of the spirit world that can be transmitted to the natural world. All in the world has a living force within and this power infuses all things.  Because “the net of power animates the cosmos,”[lxxxi] the shaman or “Blessed One” taps into it. For the shaman’s cosmic power web, everything has an endless potential for transformation. Pollock’s Comet and Reflections on the Big Dipper of 1947 manifest these webs of power; nature, the earth and the sky are not dead substance, but animate organisms, as even the alchemists of Jungian psychology insisted.

We can conclude our discussion with a look not only at Easter and the Totem of the 1950s with its repeat of Pollock’s idea of ritual resurrection but at some figurative paintings that partake of the web during Pollock’s classic period of 1947 to 1950.  We will see the continuation of Pollock’s themes in those years and in distinctive works in the late 1940s painted at the same time as his classic drippings.  

Number 14, 1948 (fig. 70) is an elegant dripping, but not abstract.

Fig.70

We immediately see several figures in the work at the left: a strongly outlined man and at the right a woman with dainty, two dot-eyes and a “Betty Boop” mouth. To the sides of both figures, and maybe in between, are other figures. Amidst Pollock’s whirling web of interlocking power lines are a couple, and the essential shamanic principles of male and female in act of intercourse for a long horizontal “penis” extends from the male across the paper to the female. Again, through the pro(creative) act with which we began our examination, in the drippings the possibility of new life or “renewal” appears. Perhaps the curvilinear forms between the two adults make up a child, the essential issue of the new world to come.

We have seen Pollock rethink the human psyche and its possibilities. In keeping with his time and the Surrealists, he has employed a wide variety of symbols and forms but when he reached his so-called abstractions, he simplified. He simplified, he pictorialized, but he did not fundamentally change. His style may have in retrospect matured, but his thought remained the same.

We can see that phenomenon in what are called the “cutouts,” which reprise many of Pollock’s distinctive repertoire of figurative motifs and which are much more than simple negative envelopments or labyrinths.[lxxxii]  In these, we can see Pollock celebrate new life, not only with webs of power, but through standard imagery once again.   In Untitled (Cut-Out Figure) of 1948 (fig. 71), two tall, linearly dripped figures “guard” or celebrate a cutout figure whose body plane is a dripped field taken from another painting and glued to this canvas

Fig.71

between the guardians is all shamanic, ecstatic vitality, while the painting from which it cut reverses the idea. There the “empty” figure is imbedded in the dynamic field and web. Both images mean the same thing: celebrating or guarding a vital figure or space is an act, as expressed in Pollock’s earlier version of the guardian idea, The Guardians of the Secret, of positive joy, not weak, victimized, alcoholic despair. Indeed, in the sand paintings from the American Southwest that Pollock loved, guardian figures stand at the opening to the ritualized figures within.  This work, as in all of Pollock’s work, recall the fact that the shaman in Central America is often called “the guardian of the stream of life,” a designation that perhaps sums up Pollock.

What emerges from our examination is an artist and individual bent on spiritual growth that he considered psycho-cultural. That is, it was for both himself and for his world. In his way, Pollock did express the negativity that the art world loves to see in his work, but he also worked his way out of it, which the art world mostly ignores. [lxxxiii] The shaman, for example, is a seer and visionary who, through the process of self-wounding, death and rebirth, remakes himself and his world. “By dying in life, the shaman passes through the gates of fire to the realm of eternally awakened consciousness.”[lxxxiv]  Through altering consciousness, he thus seeks to accumulate inner power to communicate with the forces of nature and the universe for the benefit of society. Thus, the shaman has a social as much as a personal reason for this suffering. His work is directed toward the benefit both of himself and society in relation to the greater cosmos. It is about positive growth more than the romantic despair of an individual and an alcoholic.

 For decades, we have heard that Pollock was a neurotic and his work that of a disturbed individual, but the “normal/abnormal” psychologizing bipolarity so common in our society’s Freudian discourse, whether that of cocktail romantics or the more clinical variety, pathologized Pollock. To label him as simply a neurotic is to misrepresent him. Shamanism has long been dismissed as a fraud, and even in the twentieth century, as mental illness. The bizarre experiences that shamans reported and the images that they recalled seeing were once viewed as nothing more than the ravings of schizopherenia, unrecognized in “primitive societies.” Such a view is now considered unfounded, for it views human experience narrowly through the “abnormal /normal dichotomy” into which all peoples must fit. Even studies with the diagnostic tools of psychoanalysis such as the Rorschach test show that the shamans are mentally healthy.[lxxxv] They simply live on two planes, everyday reality and the world of the spirits. Shamans voluntarily seek out imaginings, while schizophrenics do not (not to mention that much schizophrenia is often simply treated by drugs today and not psychoanalysis).[lxxxvi] The shaman today is considered a therapist within the socio-historical context of his society, not a psychopath. He mediates between the forces of the universe and develops inner power to overcome chaos, not to indulge in it .[lxxxvii] Ironically, it is Freudian psychoanalysis and not shamanism that is considered suspect today.

We also have heard for decades that Pollock’s work is negative, that is, that it describes Pollock’s troubled mind; but we see that it is actually ultimately positive, for the shamanic is about overcoming difficulty or illness with growth and healing. Shamans, dreamers, and visionaries return again and again, extending consciousnesses and reality at the source level of gnosis and creative process.[lxxxviii] “Magic and the supernatural are the means that the shaman uses to gain control over a cosmos of uncertainty. Natural and supernatural events commingle in the person of the shaman.”[lxxxiv]  In this as in so many other things, shamanism is close to the visionary world of the collective archetypes or pathways of Jung, which are used to do the same – overcome difficulty and redirect the darker elements of the psyche to light

We have also heard that Pollock’s work is, in the typical fifties mantra, individual and subjective, but shamanism is a public system for the public good, its values and its communitas. The shaman brings back knowledge from other realities to heal the body and mind and to regenerate the public order. With its essential program of guarding and changing the group’s mythology, it contains a decisively positive program for life. Health in shamanic societies means being in harmony with the whole of things and healing results from establishing this harmony. For shamanic cultures, health is spiritual development and reestablishes connectedness to all. It overcomes war and depression in every sense of the word.

Pollock’s art, then, is a form of resistance to contemporary history and culture, to the “wasteland” of early modernity.  It articulates an attack on mass psychology and its traits by founding a memory of the past with which the artist could identify and it attempts an authenticity not based on subservience to industrial order. Pollock sought a renewed, living inner self, and a capacity for feeling and intimacy. He sought a connectedness not only to the past, not only to a new kind of tradition (the “primitive”), but to animal life, to nature, and to that new place, the unconscious, that is, to all that is larger than himself. And he desired to produce as nature does, as Jean Arp suggested of the artist, hence the origin of his famous remark that “I am nature” rather than representing nature, as Hans Hofmann wanted him to do.  Pollock and his generation sought an authentic creativity to end the mediocrity, conformity and vulgarity of mass man that was their world. Using the artistic process as the ideal model to epitomize creativity, Pollock privileged himself as the exemplar of creative culture, and he restored and rooted individual authenticity and feeling found in youth but lost in the modern age. In his view, his new spirituality would transform the irrationally rational of modernity and heal himself and his world. Changing corrupt inner culture would renew and find the newly culture appropriate to the day.                    

Pollock’s art, then, is about fortitude and resourcefulness, expressed in a vocabulary of drama, struggle and heroic endeavor. It also masked his own anxieties, uncertainties and conflicts. With the world around him also engaged in heroic endeavor, Pollock sought to empower himself, to resolve his and other’s difficulties and to create new possibilities denied by Western history.  Thus with his troubled biography, Pollock aligned himself with the tropes of cultural struggle and renewal of his time.

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Illustrations

Fig. 1. Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1941-42. Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, Gift of Roy Neuberger.

Fig. 2. Jackson Pollock, # 555, 1938-41, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.                    

Fig. 3. Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads, 1934, later version of work from Rockefeller Center, National Museum of Fine Arts, Mexico City.

Fig. 4. Jackson Pollock, # 508, 1938-41, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.        

Fig. 5. Luke Anguhadluq, People Stunned by Drum, drawing, Baker Lake, Inuit, 1972.

Fig. 6. Birth, 1938-41. Oil on canvas mounted on plywood, 46 x 21 3/4 in. The Tate Gallery, London.

Fig. 7. Shell with representation of rattle snake, Tennesse shell gorgets from FranzBoas, Primitive Art, p. 142.

Fig. 8.  Jackson Pollock, The Flame, 1938-41, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fig. 9. Jose Clemente Orozco, Man of Fire, Guadalajara, 1940.

Fig. 10. Jackson Pollock, (Circle), 1938-41. Oil on composition board, 11 3/4 x 11 in. diameter. Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Lee Krasner in memory of Jackson Pollock.

Fig. 11. Drawing after ground painting, Diegueno, Southern California. See alsoShamanist cosmic map or sand painting, from Waterman, 1910, reprinted in Ruth Underhill, Red Man's Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 278.

Fig. 12. Jackson Pollock, There Were Seven in Eight, 1945, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fig. 13.  Northwest Coast Carved Box, American Museum of Natural History, New York.

Fig. 14. Jackson Pollock, Mask, 1938-41, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fig. 15. Jackson Pollock, Sheet # 511, 1938-41, The Art Museum, Princeton University,   Museum Purchase, Caroline G. Mather Fund.

Fig. 16. Jackson Pollock, Sheet # 387, 1938, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 

Fig. 17. Jackson Pollock, [Orange Head], 1941, Private Collection.

Fig. 18. Vancouver Island Mask, Kwatkiutl, American Museum of Natural History.

Fig. 19. Man Ray, Untitled, 1930, Gelatin Silver Print, 9 5/16 x 7 11/12 in, Getty Museum, California.

Fig. 20. Sheet# 549, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  

Fig. 21. Lightning, Clouds and Rain, from fig. 187-88, “Mallery Cloud –Rain—Speech,” Annual Report, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology, 373. 

Fig. 22. Morning and Sunrise, from figs. 170 to 172, ibid.,  page 371.

Fig. 23.  Solarized Figure, Detail from Painted Buffalo Hide, Sioux, Musee de l”Home, Paris.

Fig. 24. Jackson Pollock, Bird, 1938-4, oil and sand on canvas, 27 ¾ x 24 ¼ in., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Lee Krasner.

Fig. 25. Shaman Headrest, Tlingit, American Museum of Natural History.

Fig. 26. Carved wood figure, Haida, American Museum of Natural History.

Fig. 27. Spindle Whorl, Carved painted wooden disc, Salish (Cowichan), American Museum of Natural History.

Fig. 28. Mimbres Bowl, Mimbres Culture New Mexico, ca. 100 – 1150, Diameter, 10 5/8 in., Taylor Museum of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

Fig. 29. Jackson Pollock, [Bald Woman with Skeleton], 1938-41, Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Dartmouth, New Hampshire.

Fig. 30. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rotation, 1934-47, Museum of Modern Art, INBA, Mexico, D.F.

Fig. 31. El Greco, Dream of Philip II, 1579, Real Monasterio, Escorial, Spain.

Fig. 32. Jackson Pollock, enamel chinaware bowl, 1938, location unknown.

Fig. 33. Michelangelo, Resurrection, 1532-33, Windsor Castle, Royal Library.

Fig. 34. Jackson Pollock, Sheet # 527, 1938-41, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Fig. 35.  Effigy Vessel, Mixtec, Zaachila, Oaxaca, Mexico, ca. 1400.

Fig. 36. Jackson Pollock, Sheet # 470r, 1938-4, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Fig. 37. Jackson Pollock, Sheet # 4: 940, 1938-4, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Fig. 38. Jackson Pollock, Man, Bull Bird, 1938-41, Private Collection, Paris.

Fig. 39. Ivory image of man and bear, Eighteenth Annual Report, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology, (1896-97).
Fig. 40. Jackson Pollock, Wounded Animal, 1943 Location unknown.

Fig. 41. Boas, Primitive Art, fig 238.

Fig. 42.  Jackson Pollock, Sheet # 469r, 1938-41, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 Fig. 43. Pablo Picasso, The Dreamer, 1932, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Fig. 44. Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fig. 45. Jackson Pollock, Sheet # 463r, 1938-41, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Fig. 46. Jackson Pollock, Totem Lesson I, 1944, 70 x 44 in. Mr. and Mrs. Harry W. Anderson Collection, California.

Fig. 47. Reels of Alaskan Eskimo, Inuit caribou antler carvings of animals, fig. 120, reproduced in Boas's Primitive Art  (p. 126).

Fig. 48. “Mother Corn" from "Hako, Pawnee Ceremony," plate LXXXVIII, drawn by A. C. Fletcher. Twenty-Second Annual Report , Pt 2, (1900-01), Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology.

Fig. 49. Ha’Cha-Mo –Ni Before Plum offerings are attached, plate XI, drawn by Mary Irvin Wright,  from the (Z)Sia culture of the Southwest, Eleventh Annual Report, (1889-90), Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology.

Fig. 50. Late Mayan Clay Figure.

Fig. 51.  Jackson Pollock, Yellow Triangle, 1946, Private Collection, Los Angeles.

Fig. 52. Jackson Pollock, The Child Proceeds, 1946. 43 x 22 in. Courtesy Jason McCoy Gallery.

Fig. 53. Jackson Pollock, Untitled, ca. 1945. Black and color ink, gouache, pastel, and wash on on paper, 18 3/8 X 24 ¾ in., Private Collection.

Fig. 54. Jackson Pollock, Untitled, 1947, pen and ink and colored pencils on paper, 20 5/8 x 26 ½ in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Lee Krasner, 1982.

Fig. 55. Jackson Pollock, Painting, gouache on plywood, ca. 1944, 23 x 18 7/8, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Monroe Wheeler.

Fig. 56. Jackson Pollock, Untitled, 1945, Pastel and enamel on paper, 25 9/16 x 20 ½ in., Thyssen-Bornemisza, Collection, Lugano.

Fig. 57. Jackson Pollock, Eyes in the Heat, 1946. 54 x 43 in. The Peggy Guggenheim  Collection.  The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Fig. 58. Shimmering Substance, 1946. From the Sounds in the Grass series.  30 1/8 x 24 1/4 in. Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mr. and Mrs. Albert Lewin and Mrs. Sam. A. Lewisohn Funds.

Fig. 59.  "Art of the South Seas" Installation view from Arts of the South Seas, January 29 through May 19, 1946. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fig. 60. Sepik River carving, wood.  Field Museum of Natural History, Neg. # 111 718, cat. # 141 179, Chicago.

Fig. 61. Sepik River Carving, New Guinea, [detail],

Fig. 62. Janet Sobel, 1940s, Gary Synder Gallery, New York.

Fig. 63. Jackson Pollock, Cathedral, 1947, Enamel and Aluminum paint on canvas, 71 ½  x 35 1/16in.,  Dallas Museum of Art.

Fig. 64. Jackson Pollock, (Sun- Scape) Location unknown.

Fig. 65. Jackson Pollock, The Enchanted Forest, 1947. 45 1/8 x 87 1/8 in. Peggy      Guggenheim Collection. Photo: Robert E. Mates.

Fig. 66. Jackson Pollock, Summertime: Number 9A, 1948. Oil and enamel on canvas, 33 1/4 x 18' x 2 in. The Tate Gallery, London.

Fig. 67. Jackson Pollock, Easter and the Totem, 1953, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fig. 68. Jackson Pollock, Lucifer, 1947, Mr. and Mrs. Harry W. Anderson Collection, California.

Fig. 69. Andre Masson, Landscape of Wonders, 1935. Oil on canvas, Guggenheim Museum.

Fig. 70. Jackson Pollock, Number 14, 1948, enamel on paper, 22 ¾ in x 31 in. Yale University Art Gallery, The Katherine Ordway Collection.

Fig. 71. Jackson Pollock, 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 in. Private collection, Canada.

Endnotes

[i]. See Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (New York Cambridge University Press, 1991), 233-62.

[ii]. Still condemned “Bauhaus stability.” See ibid., 114, and note 77, while Pollock, in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961, 84) said “I was in a house designed by Mies once: I felt so taut that I couldn’t say anything,.” Rothko, quoted in “Notes from an Interview by William Seitz, January 22, 1952,” in Miguel Lopez-Remiro, Mark Rothko Writings on Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 75,  objected to “the Bauhaus idea, . . . because it imposes a false unity on the artists . . . All things done with straight lines are not dead . . . .”

[iii]. See Sidra Stich, Joan Miro: The Development of a Sign Language (St. Louis: Washington University, 1980).

[iv]. Barnett Newman, “The Ideographic Picture” January 20-February 8, 1947 Betty Parsons Gallery, cited in Mollie McNickle, Barnett Newman Selected Writings and Interviews, introd. by Richard Shiff (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990), 107.  It is McNickle who compiled this study and who should be given credit as author.

[v]. For example,  the Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnology on Native Americans defined pictographs as symbolic.

[vi]. Quoted in Stephen Polcari, “Reuben Kadish Oral History Interview,” April 15, 1992, Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art, transcript, 11. 

[vii]. See Stephen Polcari, “Interviews with Harold Lehman,” 1996-7.  Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art, transcript, 21.

[viii]. Ibid., 13.

[ix]. Ibid., 14.

[x]. See Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, 239 and note 12.

[xi]. See Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.)

[xii].  Kadish, in Jeffrey Potter, To A Violent Grave (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), 88.

[xiii]. Fritz Bultman, quoted in W. Jackson Rushing, “Ritual and Myth: Native American Culture and Abstract Expressionism,”  in Maurice Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: Abbeville, 1986), 263.

[xiv]. Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958),  87 -89.

[xv]. Ibid., 96.

[xvi]. Ibid., 87.

[xvii]. Ibid., 95.

[xviii]. Lee Krasner, interview with B.H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Black and White (New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, 1967), 6.

[xix]. Joan Halifax, Shaman The Wounded Healer (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 35.

[xx]. See also the Inuit ivory carving of a composite animal in Edward. W. Nelson, “The Eskimo About Bering Strait.,” Eighteenth Annual Report, pt 1, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnology, (1896-97), fig. 157, 446.

[xxi]. Franz Boas, Primitive Art ((New York: Dover reprint 1955), 142.

[xxii]. Irving Sandler first suggestedPollock’s acquaintance with Inuit masks was derived from an illustration in John Graham’s  “Picasso andthe Unconscious” Magazine of Art 30 (April 1937). However, the masks were on display at the American Museum of Natural History and discussed and illustrated in depth in the BAE Eighteenth Annual Report, 1896-97, pt 1, as well as in other Annual Reports.

[xxiii]. Jung, cited in Shirley Nicholson, Shamanism An Expanded View of Reality (Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books, 1987), 2.

[xiv].  Halifax, Shaman, 5

[xxv]. See Mary Schmidt, “Crazy Wisdom: The Shaman as Mediator of Realities,” in Nicholson, Shamanism, 66.  Circular diagrams suggesting the disk of the earth with the encircling sea and overarching sky in ground paintings were used in puberty ceremonies of Mission Indians. See Ruth Underhill, Red Man’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 276.

[xxvi]. Halifax, Shaman, 68.

[xxvii]. Stanley Walens, Feasting with Cannibals: An Essay on Kwakiutl Cosmology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 59

[xxviii]. See Sidra Stich, “Anxious Visions,” in Stich et al, Anxious Visions (Berkeley: University of California, 1990), 140 and in passim.

[xxix]. Nan Rosenthal, “The Pollock Sketchbooks: An Introduction,”  in Rosenthal, Katherine Baetjer, and Lisa Mintz Messinger, The Jackson Pollock Sketchbooks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997) 23

[li].Colleague Barnett Newman also painted fecund protoplasm in his Pagan Void of 1944-45. See also Pollock’s The Child Proceeds of 1946 discussed below.

[lii]. Pollock lost the tip of a finger as a boy. In the drawing, the lower hand has six fingers. Perhaps Pollock sees this image of concentrated fecundity as symbolically leading to the renewal of his hand.

[liii]. Messinger, “Pollock Studies the Mexican Muralists and the Surrealists: Sketchbook III,” 67, refers to Cahiers d'Art vol. 14: 68.

[liv]. Ibid, 71.

[lv]. Armand Labbe, Guardians of the Stream (Santa Ana, California, Bowers Museum of Culture Art: Cultural Arts Press, 1995), 112.

[lvi].  Ibid., 115.

[lvii]. Matilda Coxe Stevenson, "The Sia," Eleventh Annual Report, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnology (1889-90), 73-74.

[lviii]. Lame Deer and Erdoes, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, quoted in Halifax, Shaman, 89. A “sacred pipe” in the initiation of a chief is discussed in the Smithsonian Institution Eleventh Annual Report, 359.

lix.. Joan Halifax, “Shamanism, Mind, and No-Self,” in Nicholson, Shamanism, 207.

[lx]. Labbe, Guardians of the Life Stream, 92.

[lxi]. Miranda and Stephen Aldhouse-Green, The Quest for the Shaman, (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 12.

[lxii]. Polcari, Interviews with Harold Lehman, transcript, 104.

 [lxiii]. Ibid., 86.

[lxiv]. For Barnett Newman, see "Los Formas artisticas del Pacifico," Ambos Mundos 1 (June 1946), 51-55, reprinted in English as "Art of the South Seas," Studio International 179 (February 1970): 70-71; republished in McNickle, Barnett Newman, 98-103.

[lxv].  See Ellen G. Landau,  Jackson Pollock,  (New York Harry Abrams, 1989), 58 & note 23, and Donald Gordon, "Jackson Pollock's ‘Bird’ or How Jung Did Not Offer Much Help in Myth-Making," Art in America,  68 # 8 (October 1980) 48, 50, and note 50.

[lxvi]. Polcari, Interviews with Harold Lehman, transcript, 117.

[lxvii]. Pollock, letter to Louis Bunce, cited in Paul J. Karlstrom, "Jackson Pollock and Louis Bunce," Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art Journal  vol. 24 # 2 (1984): 26.

[lxviii]. Halifax, Shaman, 86.

[lxix]. Ibid., 25

[lxx]. Ibid. 88

[lxxi]. Ibid., 26.

[lxxii]. Ibid., 117.

[lxxiii]. Ibid., 92.

[lxxiv]. Ibid., 108.

[lxxv]. Landau, Jackson Pollock, 72.

[lxxvi]. We now know this to be false. There are figures. See Pepe Karmel, “The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” 87-137, in Kirk Varnedoe with Karmel, Jackson Pollock (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998).  However, they are not part of the discussion of this essay.

[lxxvii]. Ralph Linton and Paul S. Wingert, with Rene D'Haroncourt, Art of the South Seas (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 111.

[lxxviii]. Labbe, Guardians of the Life Stream, 90-91 and in passim.

[lxxix]. Personal communication, December, 1991.

[lxxx]. See the forthcoming study, Stephen Polcari, Jackson Pollock/ Mass Man AGONISTE.

[lxxxi]. Halifax, Shaman, 9.

[lxxxii]. Michael Leja likens the cut outs to a film noir labyrinth, ideologically and methodically bringing the work down to a pop level. SeeLeja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism.

[lxxxiii]. When I first presented the positive qualities of Abstract Expressionist art in my book, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, a senior art critic from the 1950s questioned me about them, so shocked was he by the idea.

[lxxxiv]. Halifax, Shaman, 92.

[lxxxv]. Stanley Krippner, “Dreams and Shamanism,” in Nicholson, Shamanism, 130.

[lxxxvi]. Richard Noll, “The Presence of Spirits in Magic and Madness,” in Nicholson, Shamanism, 52-56.

[lxxxvii].  Mihaly Hoppal, “Shamanism: An Archaic and/or Recent Belief System,” in Nicholson, Shamanism, 82-85.

[lxxxviii]. Jean Houston, “The Mind and Soul of the Shaman,” in Nicholson, Shamanism,  xiii.

[lxxxix]. Gary Doore, interview with Michael Harner, “The Ancient Wisdom in Shamanic Cultures” in  Nicholson, Shamanism, 12.