JACKSON POLLOCK'S 'MURAL' OF 1943

Jackson Pollock’s ‘Mural’ of 1943

This is a brief summary of the article that was published in the Guardian newspaper on 25 April 2015: ‘The painting that heralded a new era in art: Jackson Pollock’s Mural is reborn in Venice’, by Jonathan Jones.

Jackson Pollock’s ‘Mural’ of 1943

A photograph taken in about 1946 shows Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock standing in front of Pollock’s ‘vast swirling abstract painting’.  The meeting of these two people ‘changed art forever’: the painting is Pollock’s ‘Mural’.

In the late 1940s Peggy Guggenheim settled in Venice at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni: this is now a museum of her art collection.  In mid-April 2015 the painting ‘Mural’, by Pollock was taken to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where it will be on show until 16 November 2015 in an exhibition entitled ‘Jackson Pollock’s Mural: Energy Made Visible’.

‘Mural’ is over 6 metres wide and almost 2.5 metres high: it ‘made Pollock into Pollock and gave birth to the art of our time’.

Peggy Guggenheim came from one of New York’s wealthiest families.  In the early 1940s she bought many works from artists who were fleeing the Nazis.  She was married, briefly, to Max Ernst – until 1943.  

Pollock was a struggling young American artist who had grown up in rural poverty.  His early works, shown in the show in Venice, resemble illustrations to country tales.  Peggy Guggenheim’s first response to a Pollock work in the early 1940s was disdain, but her advisor – Piet Mondrian – urged her to reconsider.  Consequently, Guggenheim gave Pollock a show in her gallery and commissioned him to paint a mural for her New York townhouse.  The works by Pollock in that show were ‘predominately mythic women which he was painting in imitation of his heroes Picasso and Miro’. 

‘Mural’ is regarded by many art historians as a turning point.  Until now it has rarely been seen outside the University of Iowa, which Peggy Guggenheim donated it to in 1951.  The painting has been cleaned and restored for the show in Venice.

‘Mural’ is a ‘wild release’: it is the beginning of Pollock’s ‘idea of throwing or pouring paint’ and of his ‘mind-expanding sense of scale’.  Pollock was a poor communicator.  He had been excused military service because of alcohol dependency and depression.  He died in a car crash in 1956.  ‘Mural’ shows Pollock emerging from his solitude and celebrating life in a way that embraces the viewer.  

Jones concludes by describing Pollock as ‘America’s noblest savage’.