It is futile to try to reckon with art entirely by pondering why an artist has created a specific image; art is ambiguous and its creators’ minds are too complex for us to draw comprehensive relationships between them. When we try, we might find some connections, but they can only partially inform our experience of what is in front of us. The rest is up to us. Such is the case with Jackson Pollock, a man of great emotion and intellect who absorbed theosophy, Wassily Kandinsky’s spiritual writings and Jungian theory. In interviews he frequently discussed North American indigenous shamanism and the belief of Pacific Northwest Indians that spirits animate everything in nature. Pollock, who maintained that he would enter trance states while painting, considered the physical world a veil that concealed an enduring, force – or set of forces – permeating everything. He could not fully represent this invisible realm, but he was a master of orienting us toward it. His paintings from the mid-1940s onward are open-ended invitations for us to reconsider what is real. That journey remains our own.
Mural lifted Pollock out of obscurity because it was commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim, who was a well-known art collector and insatiable socialite. Looking at the painting, we should bear in mind that it originally hung only a few inches off the floor and that Pollock had intended it to be seen up close, for Guggenheim’s entry hall was only 13' wide. Serving as a vertical framework is a procession of stick figures that would have stood on about the same plane as visitors to Guggenheim’s apartment. The procession anchors Mural in the genre of landscape painting; and the land they inhabit is one of emergence and disappearance. Here thickets, eddies and ribbons of paint briefly settle into letters, biomorphic forms and disembodied faces that rise and fade as we walk the painting’s length. These combined details suggest a space in which time, generation and spirits are perpetual and entwined. In that respect Mural befit the nature of Peggy Guggenheim’s home where, through circumstances of wealth and war, expatriates, artists and intellectuals converged to drink, commingle thoughts and then disburse – one day after the next.
Today the artist, his patron and members of her circle are gone. Mural, however, has outlived the specifics of its origin and placement. From the confines of museum walls, it still points in the direction of something essential.
