Yellow and white contours quiver in the gaps between the brown-black armature. (The adviser who gave Guggenheim that shrewd idea was one Marcel Duchamp.) She instructed Pollock to paint the mural on a canvas, rather than directly on the wall, so that she could show it at the gallery as well as at home. She showed his smaller paintings at her gallery, Art of This Century, and thought a large-scale work in her home could occasion not only an artistic breakthrough, but a commercial one. He found work as a preparator at the still new Museum of Non-Objective Painting (the forerunner of the Guggenheim Museum), but quit when Peggy Guggenheim offered the emerging artist a monthly stipend: first $150, later $300. Violently alcoholic, clinically depressed, Pollock received in 1940 a 4F deferment from the draft, which kept him in New York during the war.
Benton’s brawny figures would be a formative influence for Pollock, though he had already fallen hard for José Clemente Orozco’s murals in California, and later would attend a workshop with David Alfaro Siqueiros, the most Marxist of the muralists who anchor “Vida Americana.” At the Whitney, Orozco’s thickly outlined figures inform Pollock’s “ Untitled (Naked Man With Knife),” completed around 1940 - whose torqued and tightly locked nudes, in turn, foreshadow the interlocking curves of “Mural.” There’s more action in an untitled, wide-format painting of a tumbling bullfight, which evidently channels Siqueiros’s vigor and violence. This young painter from Wyoming followed his brother to New York in 1930, and enrolled in Thomas Hart Benton’s courses at the Art Students League. The ponderous symbolism and overcalculated squiggles of Pollock’s first years got channeled to something rhythmic, automatic, almost dancing, and almost drippy.
But in “Mural,” Pollock opened up into canvas-covering gestural abstraction, with raw, sweeping lines applied with the action of the full body. He’d already won some acclaim for early, Surrealist-inflected paintings, heavily influenced by his teacher Thomas Hart Benton and by the Mexican muralists he revered. Everything before them looks like a warm-up, everything after like a natural outcome, though at the moment of their creation, who could tell?įor Jackson Pollock the hinge was soldered in 1943, when Peggy Guggenheim commissioned him to execute his first monumentally scaled painting: a 20-by-8-foot mural for the narrow vestibule of her Upper East Side townhouse. For Jacques-Louis David it was “The Oath of the Horatii,” for Kazimir Malevich it was “Black Square,” for Virginia Woolf it was “Jacob’s Room,” for Amy Winehouse it was “Rehab.” These are the breakthrough works - the hinges between the early career and the mature one.