JACKSON POLLOCK AND THE NATIVE-AMERICAN SHAMAN

____________

A Thesis

Presented

To the Faculty of

California State University Dominguez Hills

____________

In Partial Fulfillment

Of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

in

Humanities

____________

By

Marilou Staker

Summer 2019
THESIS: JACKSON POLLOCK AND THE NATIVE-AMERICAN SHAMAN

AUTHOR: MARILOU STAKER

APPROVAL

APPROVED:

Patricia Gamon Ph.D.

Thesis Committee Chair

Matthew Luckett Ph.D.

Committee Member

Kirstin Ellsworth Ph.D.

Committee Member
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

APPROVAL ................................................................................................................................... ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................... iii
LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... iv
ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... v

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 1

Central Topic and Focus ..................................................................................................... 1

Literature Review................................................................................................................ 3

2. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND................................................................................................ 6

Early Years and Influences ................................................................................................. 6

Primitivism........................................................................................................................ 10

3. INFLUENTIAL EVENTS ........................................................................................................ 13

John Graham ..................................................................................................................... 13

Carl Jung and Pollock’s Jung-Based Therapy .................................................................. 17
Museum of Modern Art’s Exhibit Indian Art of the United States, 1941 ........................ 20

4. SHAMANISTIC INFLUENCES IN POLLOCK’S ART ........................................................ 26

Shaman as Artist and Healer ............................................................................................. 26

Examples of Pollock’s Representation of Shamanistic Ideas ........................................... 30
Naked Man (1938-41) ....................................................................................................... 30
Guardians of the Secret (1943) ......................................................................................... 34
All-Over Drip Paintings (1946-50)................................................................................... 39

5. CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................... 45

WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................................... 48

iii
 LIST OF FIGURES

1. Kiva Mural ................................................................................................................................ 21

2. Bird. .......................................................................................................................................... 22

3. Sky Father and Earth Mother .................................................................................................. 23

4. Four goddesses Surrounded by Rainbow. ............................................................................... 23

5. Haida Shaman Grave Box ........................................................................................................ 24

6. Navajo sand-painters at the Museum of Modern Art, 1941..................................................... 28

7. Naked Man ................................................................................................................................ 31

8. Mask ......................................................................................................................................... 33

9. Guardians of the Secret ............................................................................................................ 34

10. Wooden mask .......................................................................................................................... 36

11. Pottery bowl ............................................................................................................................ 37

12. Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 ................................................................................................... 39

13. Jackson Pollock at Work......................................................................................................... 42

iv
 ABSTRACT

Abstract Expressionism has generally been studied as the formal confluence of

abstraction, surrealism and expressionism transposed onto America’s shores during the psycho-

traumatic existentialist World War II period and atomic aftermath. An underlying theme of many

modernist studies is primitivism. This study varies in that it specifically looks at the art of

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) as a member of the New York School in the 1940s and early 50s

when under the influence of Native-American art and culture, as well as the writings of John

Graham, and Jungian psycho-therapy, as he struggled with alcoholism and personal demons.

During the period Pollock integrated Native-American shamanism and Navajo sandpainting

healing ceremonies and techniques while his art evolved from figurative abstraction into all-over

nonobjective drip painting as a means to express his unconscious and to heal himself.
 1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Central Topic and Focus

My thesis examines the incorporation of the shaman spirit of Native-American culture in

the art of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). The role of the shaman as healer and artist resonated

with Pollock and provided a structure for him to explore his own psyche. Although Pollock was

influenced by many other factors, this paper will focus on the influence of Western Native-

American art, especially Navajo sandpaintings, in the development of his artistic design,

technique, symbolic motifs and the underlying shamanistic meaning of his Abstract

Expressionist works.

I was immediately drawn to Pollock’s drip paintings when I saw them in art museums,

specifically the Peggy Guggenheim in Venice. I enjoyed learning more about his art while

studying art of the twentieth century and wanted to discover even more about this “great

American artist.” Many have theorized what ideas and events influenced Jackson Pollock.

Discussions include the impact of Surrealists and automatism, primitivism, Picasso and Carl

Jung’s ideas of the importance of the unconscious. Through my personal collection of Hopi,

Navajo and Acoma pottery, and Navajo and Pueblo weavings, I became interested in Native-

American symbols and references in Pollock’s paintings. It was my personal interest in Hopi and

Navajo art that instilled in me a desire to learn more about Pollock’s interest in the Navajo

shaman and their role artists and healers. Pollock wanted his work to speak for him and not his

words. However, when he did make a comment his tendency was to refer to Native Americans

and sandpaintings over any other specific influences. These comments along with his use of
 2

Native-American references in his art piqued my interest in pursuing a greater understanding of

his use of shamanistic ideas in his paintings. With this in mind, I have argued that specific

overlapping events in Pollock’s life influenced his willingness to accept shamanistic ideas as he

integrated them into his art.

Born in Cody, Wyoming, Pollock’s early life and his exposure to Native-American

culture planted the seed for his embracing of these ideas. A biographical approach examines

these early experiences. I have defined what primitivism meant in the early twentieth century,

outlined the renewed interest in primitivism in the US art community in the 1930s and 40s and

noted its contribution to the resurgence and popularity of Native-American art. I have used the

psychoanalytic approach to analyze the influence of John Graham’s article Primitive Art and

Picasso (1937) and his System and Dialectics of Art, which focused on primitivism, the

unconscious and referenced the Native-American culture. This approach included Pollock’s

exposure to Carl Jung’s ideas, which include his Jung-based psychotherapy which began in 1939

and continued until 1942. His visit(s) to the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit, Indian Art of the

United States (1941) as well as other Native-American exhibits in other museums are examined.

I examined how these events in Pollock’s life afforded him answers to finding ways to explore

his own self-expression through Native-American influences and specifically that of the Native-

American shaman. I have analyzed specific works, Naked Man (1938-41) and Guardians of the

Secret (1943), to show shamanistic influences and how Pollock’s all-over drip paintings reflect

his integration of the Native-American shaman as healer and artist. The outcome of this

examination is to gain another perspective of Pollock’s art as he expresses ideas of the Native-

American shaman.
 3

Through analyzing the events that influenced Pollock we can gain an understanding of

Pollock’s openness and readiness to embrace the Native-American shaman. I have shown how he

used the idea of the shaman in his art and how his all-over drip paintings represent Pollock as the

shaman trying to heal himself. This insight may offer us another perspective and understanding

of Pollock’s art.

Literature Review

The literature is rich with the influence of Native-American art and suggestions of the

shaman in Pollock’s art. Mike King in his article, “Art and the Post Secular,” suggests that

Pollock’s art shows shamanistic influences. He also points out that Pollock’s Jungian therapy in

the late 1930s persuaded Pollock to search his unconscious and understand that Native-American

ideas already existed there. King explains how this helped Pollock understand ideas he already

knew but that Pollock was subsequently able to express shamanistic ideas in his art. In 1986 The

Los Angeles County Museum of Art produced the exhibit and catalog, The Spiritual in Art:

Abstract Painting 1890-1985, edited by Tuchman and Freeman, which included an essay by

Jackson Rushing, “Ritual and Myth: Native-American Culture and Abstract Expressionism.”

Rushing examined the confluence of two specific influences on artists in the 1930s and early

1940s, the popularity of Native-American art and the belief that primitive art existed in the

unconscious mind. The author reviewed Pollock’s exposure to exhibits of Native-American art

and the influence of John Graham’s writings in the late 1930s. He explained Graham’s writings

and how his message affected Pollock’s search for his artistic expression. Rushing outlined

Pollock’s exposure to Native-American art through his life and specifically through exhibitions.

He demonstrated Pollock’s incorporation of American indigenous art, including that of the

shaman. He analyzed specific works by Pollock, such as Guardians of the Secret (1943) and the
 4

shamanistic references found in these works. Pollock’s use of the techniques and relationship to

the Navajo shaman and their sand-paintings is outlined.

Other resources supply additional details and explanations. Michael Tucker explains in

his book Dreaming with Open Eyes, the ideas Carl Jung developed along with Pollock’s Jung-

based therapy. Tucker expresses the impact of Graham’s writings on Pollock. He points out the

Native-American meanings in Pollock’s Guardians of the Secret and clarifies understanding

about the shaman that Pollock expressed in his drip paintings. Another discussion of John

Graham’s writings, including Graham’s background, can be found in Evan Firestone’s book,

Animism and Shamanism in 20th Century Art. He looks at Pollock’s Naked Man (1938-41)

representing a shaman as a self-portrait. In addition to Tucker, Firestone looks at Guardians of

the Secret, and its references to Native-American art and culture.

An understanding of primitivism and its role in the acceptance of Native-American art in

the 1930s and 1940s is important. Claude Cernuschi in his book, Jackson Pollock--Meaning and

Significance, discusses primitivism in conjunction with Abstract Expressionism. He also explains

and references the shaman and its relationship with Pollock’s drip paintings. The two-volume

book, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, compiled by William Rubin gives a good explanation

of the history, meaning and influence of primitivism at this time. It includes an article, “Abstract

Expressionism,” by Kirk Varnedoe that adds additional information on influences of primitivism,

Jungian ideas and Native-American interest at this time. Janet Berlo, in “Navajo Sandpainting in

the Age of Cross-Cultural Replication,” describes the role and actions of the shaman as healer

and artist. In the writings of Jackson Rushing, Claude Cernuschi, as mentioned above, they detail

how Pollock interpreted shamanistic ideas in creating his drip paintings.

 5

Several articles discuss the unconscious in conjunction with its influence on Pollock. In

Michael Leja’s article, “Jackson Pollock: Representing the Unconscious” and Elizabeth

Langhorne’s article, “Pollock, Picasso and the Primitive,” each discuss the influences of Native-

American art, the theories of Carl Jung, and Pollock’s therapy. Langhorne includes Pollock’s

interest in shamans and shamanism and its incorporation in his art. Other authors that made

similar references have been cited in the text. All of these have provided biographical

information on Jackson Pollock as well as having uses a psychoanalytic approach to look at how

Pollock incorporated these ideas into his art.

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CHAPTER 2

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Early Years and Influences

Paul Jackson Pollock, born in 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, was the youngest of five boys.

Raised in the Western states, his interaction with Native-American art and culture began early in

life. In 1923, as an eleven-year-old, he along with his brothers and friends, explored the Pueblo

Indian cliff dwellings near his home in Phoenix. One summer in the 1920s, Jackson and his

brother Sande accompanied their father on a surveying job along the north rim of the Grand

Canyon, an area filled with Hopi, Navajo and Zuni tribal influences. Pollock took pride in being

from the West and having first-hand knowledge of the West. He was not just an American artist

but one that was born and raised in the West. He expressed his appreciation and understanding of

the Native-American aspect of this heritage in an interview in 1944. “I have always been

impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art,” Pollock stated, adding, “The Indians

have the true painter’s approach in their capacity to get hold of appropriate images, and in their

understanding of what constitutes painterly subject matter.” “Their color,” he said, “is essentially

Western, their vision has the basic universality of all real art.” Jackson went on to comment, that

he wasn’t sure that references to Indian art in his own current work were intentional; they were

probably more “the result of early memories and enthusiasms” (qtd. in Landau 56). He may have

downplayed the influence in his art but his own references and acknowledgements indicates he

obviously paid attention to Native-American influences.

Pollock was a troubled youth and struggled in school. He wasn’t particularly social and

was known for not having much to say. He knew however, at the age of seventeen that he wanted
 7

to be an artist (Cernuschi 13). In 1930, after a visit in Los Angeles from his brother Charles,

Jackson moved east to join his brothers in New York and pursue his desire to become an artist.

Upon arriving there he enrolled in a class taught by Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students

League. Benton taught a style of art known as Regionalism and Benton defined it as “an

indigenous art with its own aesthetic as a growing reality in America” (qtd. in Cernuschi 14).

Pollock absorbed many of Benton’s teachings, specifically those of rhythm and dynamic

movement even though he went on to develop his own style. Benton’s focus on rural America

may have reinforced Pollock’s love of the West and encouraged his continued interest in Native-

Americans.

Pollock’s knowledge of Native-American art continued to grow when sometime between

1930 and 1935 he and his brother Charles purchased the twelve volumes of the Annual Report of

the Bureau of American Ethnology. These volumes featured detailed reports on a variety of

topics related to the ethnology and archaeology of Native-Americans. They were illustrated with

hundreds of reproductions, including color photographs, of ancient and historic Native-American

art objects. They included photographs of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Native-

American objects and rituals. According to Jackson Rushing in his article, “Ritual and Myth:

Native American Culture and Abstract Expressionism,” “Pollock used these reports as a rich and

authentic source of Indian imagery” (Rushing 282).

In 1935 Pollock was hired by the Federal Art Project of the Works in Progress

Administration (WPA) started by President Roosevelt to employ artists during difficult financial

times. This job gave Pollock along with many other future Abstract Expressionists steady work

and income. It also provided exposure to the Mexican Muralists as the program was inspired by a

similar one in Mexico. In addition, several of those artists, such as, Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente
 8

Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, visited and painted in the United States. Their style of

artistic expression and freedom from political meaning appealed to Pollock. In 1939 Pollock

joined Siqueiros’ workshop, “A Laboratory of Modern Techniques in Art.” Pollock related to

Siqueiros’ belief that art should be dynamic and passionate and have an emotional impact on the

viewer.

The works of Picasso and the Surrealists, along with that the concept of the unconscious

in art, also influenced Pollock. The idea of the unconscious and primitive art was promoted in

John Graham’s “Primitive Art and Picasso” where he says, “Picasso’s painting has the same

access to the unconscious as have primitive artists” (qtd. in Cernuschi 46).

Pollock struggled with acute depression and alcoholism and he pursued treatment for

alcoholism. He entered treatment programs in hospitals, was treated by therapists and turned to

Jungian-based therapy. Along with the writings of Graham, the teachings of Carl Jung affected

his art by encouraging his search for primitive images with universal, unconscious meaning.

Jungian therapy coincided with Native-American popularity which resulted in

influencing Pollock’s artistic direction. His interest in Native-American culture was furthered by

his frequent visits to various museums while living in New York. Rushing reports that Pollock

and his artist friend, Fritz Bultman “went everywhere looking at Indian art and that their outings

took them more than once to the Museum of American Indian and the American Museum of

Natural History” (Rushing 282). These visits continued to broaden his exposure and knowledge

of Native-American art and prepared him in part for the inspiration offered by the exhibition

from New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1941, Indian Art of the United States which

allowed him to observe Navajo medicine men creating sandpaintings.

 9

Pollock’s interest in Native-American subject matter included his affinity with the

shaman whose duties included tribal healer and artist. “That Pollock was quite taken with the

notion of a combination artist/healer has been confirmed by several friends with whom he

discussed the ability of these magic men to ‘travel through spirit worlds’” (Landau 58). As his

friend Bultman attests, “Pollock was aware of the whole shamanistic dream culture of the

Indians” (qtd. in Rushing 282). Pollock gained an understanding of how the shaman, as the tribal

artist medicine man, used sandpaintings for healing. The shamanic themes reflected his struggle

to overcome his depression and alcoholism and to become well.

In 1945, Jackson and his artist wife, Lee Krasner moved to Long Island, New York where

Pollock turned his barn into an art studio. This quiet location, surrounded by nature, had a

dramatic effect on his work. This was a period of sobriety in his life where he found not only

peace but which provided him with a large, quiet place where he would eventually create his

“drip paintings.” (Unfortunately, after completing a series of photographs and films taken by

Hans Namuth in 1950, Pollock turned again to excessive drinking. “In 1954 and 1955 Pollock’s

painting nearly ground to a halt as his drinking got heavier and his depression deeper” [Fineberg

98]. The result was a violent end when in 1956, his car crashed into a tree killing himself and one

other.)

His exposure to Native-American culture and art started at an early age and continued

throughout his life. This afforded Pollock experiences which laid the groundwork for his interest

in Native-American culture and in particular his affinity for the shaman as healer and artist.
 10

Primitivism

As part of the New York School of artists, Pollock accepted new artistic ideas of the time.

In the 1930s and 40s this group of artists in America, in response to the political tension of war,

shifted their artistic ideas. The “New York School” consisted of a loosely affiliated group of

artists that introduced radical new directions in art and shifted the art world’s focus. These artists

were also referred to as “Abstract Expressionists” and in addition to Pollock, included artists

such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko,

Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottleib and Clifford Still, among others. These artists faced issues

that were cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic. Some of the issues they faced included “social

relevance, existentialism, the surrealist’s interest in the unconscious mind, the Mexican influence

and the formality of European modernism” (Fineberg 32). They broke away from convention and

created large-scaled works that reflected their individual psyches. They all believed in the

absolute individuality of the artist and within that context valued spontaneity, improvisation and

the process which resulted in abstract imagery.

The crisis of war and its aftermath were key in the response of artists during this time.

Kirk Varnedoe explains that American artists of the forties were responding to the pressures of a

decade of debate between nationalism and internationalism and the sociopolitical responsibilities

of art (Rubin 618). Michael Leja, in his article, “Jackson Pollock: Representing the

Unconscious,” explains that the art world believed that if “Modern Man’s faith in reason, science

and technology had failed him, it was probably because their opposites--emotion, instinct,

unreason, that part of his nature that had been strictly repressed--had begun to intrude in his

affairs. This other side of human nature had to be attended to, had to be recognized, imaged and
 11

released” (Leja 561). These artists felt the need for an approach that would transcend regionalist,

political and other boundaries of art. They turned to primitive myth and art for inspiration.

The term “Primitivism” in its relation to the art world, according to William Rubin in

Primitivism in 20th Century Art, refers to “the interest of modern artists in tribal art and culture,

as revealed in their thought and work” (Rubin 1). In the nineteenth century this referred to non-

European art and included styles of Egypt, Aztec, Asian, African, and Middle-Eastern art.

However, it might also refer to art from the European past, such as Medieval art or very early

Renaissance art, or to contemporary European folk art. Late nineteenth-century

Postimpressionists like Gauguin and Cezanne began painting something different in art that was

not merely a reflection of reality. Gauguin is considered the starting point for primitivism in

modern art. With his Polynesian works he took the first step toward conceptual and stylized art.

He was able to “meld the realism of Impressionism with flat decorative effects and stylized

forms whose antecedents were not in Western realism” (Rubin 7). In the early twentieth-century,

artists such as Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, and Picasso became focused on African and Oceanic

masks. Picasso’s use of tribal art in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907 was no less shocking to

his peers than his complete abandonment of European space, proportion and propriety. The

infamy of this picture, which depicts four nude prostitutes and a madam inside a brothel

confronting the viewer, spread quickly through the artistic world; subsequently tribal art became

an urgent issue (Rubin 13). In the early twentieth century this led to freedom from European

academic art that had adhered to naturalism. It was through Picasso’s Demoiselles that freedom

from the older conventions was established and modernist’s primitivism was solidly identified

with tribal art.

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American artists associated the teachings of Carl Jung and the writings of John Graham

with their exploration of the unconscious and its connection with the primitive past and spiritual

expression. The emphasis on collective truths of the primitive past that were timeless and

psychic supported artist’s belief of artistic individuality. Rushing observes that artists Wolfgang

Paalen, Richard Pousette-Dart, Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb were interested in Native-

American art, and more specifically Northwest Coast art and its totemic aspects. References to

totemic symbols and rock art can be seen in their art.

The Abstract Expressionist artists were looking for definitive departures from figuration.

“The emblematic simplicity of Native American designs appealed to their concern for isolated,

archetypal images” (Rubin 625). These artists looked to new possibilities in the format and

surface of a painting which led them to an all over two-dimensional pictorial field. The artists

may have at the outset incorporated formal devises or signs from tribal arts, but ultimately their

primitivism was an elimination of all references. This removal of iconographic reference to

primitive lore and signs gave way to the stronger concern with artistic process.

Pollock was undoubtedly influenced by the intellectual climate that stressed the

psychological connection between the primitive and the modern. For Pollock it was the primitive

that provided the ability to connect with the unconscious; the use of non-Western art was the

perfect way to gain this personal approach. “For Pollock the primitive may not have been so

much an ‘other’ as a kin, a fellow participant in a more global less circumcised artistic venture”

(Cernuschi 214).
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CHAPTER 3

INFLUENTIAL EVENTS

John Graham

In the 1930s, New York Artists were actively interested in the spirituality found in

Native-American art and the positive contribution it could make. During this time the increase in

interest of Native-American art coincided with a growing interest in Carl Jung’s ideas of

primitive collective unconscious and primitive art. Along with this increased interest in the ideas

of Carl Jung came the writings of John D. Graham. John Graham incorporated the ideas of Carl

Jung and primitivism and promoted the importance of the masks and art of primitive cultures.

The ideas generated by these two people had a profound influence on Jackson Pollock and his

art.

John Graham was born in 1881 as Ivan Dabrowsky in the Ukraine and left there after the

revolution. He spent the 1920s in Baltimore and Paris as an artist and began associating with

Gertrude Stein and those around her. Along with his credentials as a painter in the United States,

John Graham became well-known as a connoisseur and dealer in African and Oceanic sculpture

(Landau 79). Rushing speculates that, “possibly due to Graham’s growing up in the Ukraine and

his exposure to the tribes of Siberia, he was well acquainted with literature on shamanism in the

Russian empire….Graham’s knowledge of the literature on Russian shamanism paralleled

Pollock’s awareness of Native-American shamanic art” (Rushing 282).

Graham’s book, System of Dialectics of Art, published in 1937, was filled with ideas not

unlike Jungian psychology. It also “reflects the tenor of the times in its revelation of a

connoisseur’s aesthetic and psychological, not purely ethnological, appreciation of primitive art”
 14

(Rushing 274). Michael Tucker in his book, Dreaming with Open Eyes, explains that Graham

had argued that “the purpose of art in particular is to reestablish lost contact with the unconscious

(actively by producing works of art), with the primordial racial past and to keep and develop this

contact in order to bring to the conscious mind the throbbing events of the unconscious mind”

(Tucker 318). According to Rushing, this combining of the conscious with the unconscious is

related to Jung’s belief that the emergence of the basic elements of the unconscious, the primitive

stages of civilization, into waking consciousness could help modern man meet his need for

spiritual transformation (Rushing 274).

Preceding the preface to System of Dialectics of Art, Graham set out his beliefs in Jungian

terms that there is a distinct difference between the rational discipline of science and the more

intuitive activity in making art. “Art,” he wrote, “opens access to the unconscious mind, science

opens access to the conscious mind” (Landau 80). His definition of art meant “a creative process

of abstracting.” He believed that artistic creation came from two sources, one being thought

(conscious and unconscious) and the other emotion. He felt the goal of all great art was for an

artist to reestablish lost contact with the submerged levels of his mind. As an artist departed from

the reality of nature these abstract paintings could embody meanings as significant as any

representational style. Great art, Graham wrote, should never be explicit. Ellen Landau, in her

book, Jackson Pollock, points out that according to Graham,

a great painting or sculpture results from the immediate unadorned record of an

authentic intellect-emotional reaction of the artist set in space. This reaction could

be recorded in terms of brush pressure, saturation, velocity, caress or repulsion,

anger or desire; it might change and vary “in unison with the flow of feeling at the

moment.” (80)
 15

Graham purported that every artist must develop his own personal technique, a

combination of training and improvisation. He believed that gesture is the most important

personal tool an artist can employ to reflect his emotion. He felt that every artistic situation

should be spontaneous, and that artists should be willing to go out on a limb and to court, not

deny, accident. In general, a true artist should be willing to take as many risks as possible in the

generation of a work. “This quality of “creative daring” was for Graham, the most important

virtue for an artist in a conventional world” (Landau 80).

That same year, 1937, Graham wrote an article title “Primitive Art and Picasso” for an

issue of Magazine in Art. Graham continued to emphasize the conscious and unconscious mind

and modern versus primitive cultures. Rushing explains that Graham:

explicitly stated the therapeutic importance of probing the unconscious: The

Eskimos and the North American Indian masks with features shifted around or

multiplied, and the Tlingit, Kwakiult and Haida carvings in ivory and wood of

human beings and animals, these also satisfied their particular totemism and

exteriorized their prohibitions (taboos) in order to understand them better and

consequently to deal with them more successfully. After examining the

relationship of primitive art to evolution, psychology, and plastic form, Graham

concluded: The art of the primitive races has a highly evocative quality which

allows it to bring to our consciousness the clarities of the unconscious mind,

stored with all the individual and collective wisdom of past generations and

forms…An evocative art is the means and result of getting in touch with the

powers of our unconscious. (274)

 16

The importance of Graham’s beliefs in primitive art and the unconscious are expressed

when Pollock says, “the source of my painting is the unconscious” (qtd. in Rushing 283).

Pollock’s deep in interest in Native-American art coincided with Graham’s discussion of Eskimo

masks and Northwest Coast carvings. These references of primitive art to the unconscious and to

expressing art abstractly especially validated, encouraged and inspired Pollock as he developed

his creative expressions through art.

In “Primitive Art and Picasso,” Graham observed that most civilized people lose their

access to their unconscious. But he explained that this blockage could be temporarily relaxed by

certain “expedients.” Danger or nervous strain, alcohol, insanity and inspiration could stimulate

an opening to the source of unconscious power, but that only among primitive people, very

young children and geniuses is the free access easily obtained. In Systems of Dialectics in Art

Graham defined a genius as a person who has an explosive mixture of boundless self-indulgence,

vision, the capacity for making stupendous efforts, as well as a propensity for sorrow-worship,

self-sacrifice and destiny (Landau 81).

Pollock was so impressed with Graham’s writings that he wrote to him and proceeded to

take up a close friendship with Graham. According to Landau, “Pollock’s unlikely friendship

with the cosmopolitan and intellectual Graham at a sensitive stage in his career served a very

important purpose, helping him not only to appreciate Picasso, but legitimating his mystical

proclivities” (81). Graham’s ideas effectively granted Pollock a license to follow his own natural,

subjective view, giving him permission to experiment and encouraging him to reach further

thereby attempting to redefine the bases of artistic achievement. Graham saw the genius in

Pollock so much so that he would introduce Pollock to his friends as “the greatest painter

America had ever produced” (81).

 17

Graham’s writings coincided with Pollock’s search for greater understanding of himself

through his Jungian-based therapy. The ideas promoted by Graham and Jung overlapped with the

popularity of Primitive art and for Pollock, specifically Native-American art.

Carl Jung and Pollock’s Jung-Based Therapy

Pollock had been initially introduced to Carl Jung’s ideas in the early 1930s by Helen

Marot, a teacher at the City and Country School in New York City where he worked as a janitor.

He struggled with depression and alcoholism and Jung’s notions of the unconscious offered

Pollock explanations for his problems. Carl Jung believed that the disturbed mind can be

attributed to the splitting of the conscious mind from the unconscious; they needed to be

integrated to achieve psychological wholeness. According to Jung, beneath consciousness and

the individual unconsciousness lies the buried archetypes of the collective unconscious, the

oldest and most primitive layer of the human mind, which modern man can access in certain

circumstances.

In June 1938 Pollock voluntarily entered the Westchester Division of New York Hospital

for alcoholism. After his release he continued to seek out further help and worked with Dr.

Joseph Henderson in Jungian analysis. Joseph Henderson was just starting out as a therapist. He

had been raised by a Navajo nanny and by his own admission was also interested in Native-

American culture (Firestone 86). Dr. Henderson persuaded Pollock to search into his

unconscious, and to learn from Native-American art. His did this using two of Jung’s theories.

One, that all genuine art originates in the unconscious. And second, that colonizing people

inherit the racial memory of those natives that they displace (King 13). According to Elizabeth

Langhorne in her article, “Pollock, Picasso and the Primitive,” Henderson noted that Pollock

used archetypes in his drawings.

 18

Jungians believed these archetypes are universal, timeless and structural

characteristics of the human psyche. These archetypes reside in a collective

unconscious but are manifest in symbols found throughout cultures and in

individual dreams and fantasies. The recognition of archetypal symbols is seen as

the path to harmony between unconscious and conscious psychic energies in the

individuated Self. (70)

Pollock’s Jungian analysts certainly prepared him to make cross references between cultures and

seek out their shared archetypal features. They viewed his archetypal images as coming from the

unconscious. Jung’s theory claimed that an individual was not normally aware of the archetypes

embedded in his or her unconscious. However, they could come up to the surface of

consciousness in dreams, drawings and fantasies. Pollock himself internalized this conception in

describing the source of his artistic images. Pollock said, “when you’re painting out of your

unconscious, figures are bound to emerge” (qtd. in Langhorne 75).

Pollock continued Jungian analysis with Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlo who took over

Pollock’s treatment in 1941 after Dr. Henderson left New York. She noted that Pollock exhibited

a fascination with ritualized behavior and the intuitive approach to the creativity of the shaman.

These ideas were reinforced by Jung’s ideas of the shared racial unconscious along with

Pollock’s visits to the Museum of Modern Art. Dr. De Laszlo noted that Pollock showed a

shamanistic primitive attitude toward the making of his images. “His expressed desire was to

discover for himself the sources of the power a shaman’s work released” (Landau 60). These

visits to the museum (along with his earlier exposure to Native-American art) created in Pollock

a strong identification with primitive art.

 19

Langhorne expands on Pollock’s interactions with Dr. De Laszlo in relation to Jungian

ideas. She notes that the therapist and Pollock spoke about the Navajo sandpaintings and that Dr.

De Laszlo “was struck by Pollock’s own kind of shamanistic, primitive, attitude towards his

images” (Langhorne 77). Pollock was interested in the ritual of the Navajo sandpaintings. He

painted images that symbolized creative, spiritual aspirations and harmonious balance as if the

act of painting the images could help him attain the goals symbolized (77).

In the book Dreaming with Open Eyes, Tucker succinctly says this: “Jung followed the

ancients in holding to the deceptively simple command: know thyself” (Tucker 59). He goes on

to explain that Jungian thinking suggests that we need to penetrate the surface of things and

make far-ranging and imaginative spatial and symbolic connections thereby making a connection

with deeper aspects of ourselves. This suggests that, behind the persona which each of us adopts

to meet society’s demands, we need to seek to develop our true self. This true self can become

exposed through an exploration of the dark side of the psyche which we usually keep repressed.

In her article, “Jackson Pollock’s The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle” Langhorne notes

that Jung also presents a sense of opposites, a union of conscious and unconscious psychological

forces. The process of bringing these opposites into harmonious balance Jung calls individuation.

The goal is realization of the archetypal self, meaning a fully balanced and integrated psyche

(Karmel 206). Langhorne believes that Pollock’s symbol making in his art, such as in the

painting The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, is related to his psychic life and his attempt to

achieve a union of psychological opposites, thereby gaining a harmony of self.

Pollock experimented with ancient motifs of Native-Americans as a way of penetrating

the unconscious mind. Pollock’s incorporation and transfigurations of Native-American art were

reflective of shamanic ideas. Pollock was fascinated with the ritualized and intuitive behavior of
 20

the shaman and its use in their creative work. This was reinforced by what Pollock had learned of

Jung’s ideas about the shared racial unconscious.

Museum of Modern Art’s Exhibit Indian Art of the United States, 1941

Beginning with the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts at the Grand Central Galleries in

New York in 1931, the awareness of Native-American culture as a spiritual and aesthetic

resource grew exponentially through the decade, and there was a significant rise in the

production of books, articles and exhibits that focused on Native-American art and artifacts

(Rushing 273). The ideas had attracted so much interest that in 1941 the Museum of Modern Art

in New York put together the exhibition, Indian Art of the United States. According to Rushing,

“This exhibition, along with other permanent collections provided New York painters with

sources of imagery and ethnographic information that shaped their perceptions of the vitality and

spiritual potential in Native American art” (Rushing 273-4).

Pollock’s therapist, Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlo, noted that Pollock was fascinated with

the Indian Art exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. According to Elizabeth Langhorne, Pollock

was influenced by many of the works displayed in the exhibit, the Hopi mural from Awatovi,

Arizona in particular (Figure 1). This mural was reproduced for display at the exhibit. The

exhibit included many other Hopi designs that Pollock incorporated into his art including

spiraling circular designs, the eye motif, and motifs with birds and feathers.
 21

Fig. 1. Kiva Mural. Awatovi Arizona 120" long, 50" high. Collection of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, United
States Department of the Interior, from Museum of Modern Art, Indian Arts of the United States (New York, 1941;
19).

Langhorne explains that Pollock’s Bird (1941) includes many aspects seen in the Hopi

mural including its bird imagery and symmetrical tiered design (Figure 2). Also, “in Indian lore

birds and feathers are the ubiquitous means by which man can communicate with the spirit

world” (Langhorne 74).

 22

Fig. 2. Bird (1941). Oil and sand on canvas 27 ½” x 24”. New York Museum of Modern Art, from Ellen G. Landau,
Jackson Pollock (Abrams, 1989; 64).

Sandpaintings were also reproduced and displayed at the exhibit. One was of Sky Father

and Earth Mother (Figure 3) from the Navajo tribe’s Shooting Chant. The original of this

sandpainting was actually 8’x 10’. Traditionally, this would have been created by a shaman

during a healing ceremony. Another sandpainting at the exhibit also represented the Shooting

Chant and depicted four goddesses surrounded by a rainbow (Figure 4). At the opening of the

rainbow are two guardians protecting the sandpainting.

 23

Fig. 3. Sky Father and Earth Mother. Navajo Sandpainting. Arizona. Collection of the Museum of Navajo
Ceremonial Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, from Museum of Modern Art, Indian Arts of the United States (New York,
1941; 17).

Fig. 4. Four Goddesses Surrounded by Rainbow. Navajo Sandpainting from the Shooting Chant. Collection of the
Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, from Museum of Modern Art, Indian Arts of the United
States (New York, 1941; 118).
 24

Pollock witnessed Navajo sandpainters giving demonstrations at the exhibition. Navajo

sandpainters, or shamans, created sandpaintings there on the spot at the museum throughout the

run of the exhibition. Navajo sandpaintings are part of Pueblo Indian ritual practices. The

shaman, as the tribal medicine man and healer, also acts as the tribal artist and is the only one

that creates the sandpaintings which are used for healing ceremonies.

Pollock’s friends recalled that he was interested in other Native-American exhibits along

with the 1941 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. In addition to the Museum of Modern Art

exhibit there were several permanent collections in New York of Native-American art. There

were permanent displays at the Museum of the American Indian, The American Museum of

Natural History and The Brooklyn Museum. Langhorne identifies specific exhibits that appealed

to Pollock, such as the diorama of a Navajo Medicine Lodge where a medicine man is in the

midst of creating a sandpainting in the Southwest Hall at the American Museum of Natural

History. Another, in the North Pacific Coast Hall depicted the model of a Haida shaman’s grave

box complete with a bird with outstretched wings (Figure 5).

Fig. 5. Haida Shaman Grave Box, from Elizabeth L. Langhorne, “Pollock, Picasso and the Primitive,” Art History
(vol 12, no. 1, March, 1989; 77).
 25

And the Hall of the Plain Indians included an installation explaining shamanism where a

Blackfoot shaman mannequin shows the symbolic importance of the sun and moon (Langhorne

78). These exhibits provided artists, and specifically Pollock, with sources of imagery and

information that increased their knowledge of Native-American art and culture. As previously

noted in Chapter 2, Pollock himself stated his interest in Native-American art in one of his rare

interviews. He elaborated on his respect and appreciation of Native-American art, and in

particular their capacity to get hold of appropriate images and their understanding of subject

matter and their vision.

Native-American art was important to Pollock not just for its images and psychological,

metaphysical attitudes but also for its formal qualities (Langhorne 82). The spatial organization

of Native-American art is radically different from that of Western art. Primitive art, which

includes Native-American art, works with the two-dimensional plane. It does not attempt or even

want to give the illusion of a three-dimensional world. Their world is transposed symbolically to

the flat surface, whether a vertical or horizontal plane. This flattened perspective of Native-

American art as well as primitive art is radically different from Western art. Rather than imitate

their world, Native-American art was a form of abstract expression. “Northwest Coast Indian

artists expressed their mythology by means of abstract symbols rather than figurative

representation” (Cernuschi 214). The inclusion of sand and other items from nature was also

unique and appealed to Pollock. Pollock’s works reflect these Native-American influences, from

the symbolic use of symbols, the flattening of the space and the dance of the shaman in creating

sandpaintings.
 26

CHAPTER 4

SHAMANISTIC INFLUENCES IN POLLOCK’S ART

Shaman as Artist and Healer

In the American Southwest groups such as the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande valley of

New Mexico, the Hopi of northern Arizona, the Tohono O’odham of the Sonoran Desert, and the

Navajo of the Four Corners produced sandpaintings. It is the Navajo people who are the most

renowned for their sandpaintings and who have made them, with alterations, available to the

public. Janet Berlo, in her article, “Navajo Sandpainting in the Age of Cross Cultural

Replication,” described Navajo sandpainting as one of the great arts of the indigenous Americas.

She goes on to point out that sandpainting arts have been included in every major exhibit and

book surveying Native North American art; its influence on abstract expressionist Jackson

Pollock is legendary (Berlo 689). She explains sandpainting thus:

ceremonial practitioners called medicine men, singers, chanters, or in Navajo,

hataali, draw upon expertise resulting from years of apprenticeship and study. On

a bed of packed earth, the hataali and his assistants, almost always male, carefully

drop from their fingertips ground minerals and plant pollens of different colors,

drawing anthropomorphic images of supernatural figures and their activities that

occurred within specific sacred locales in the mythic past. Sandpaintings illustrate

and actualize harmonious relationships among the Diyin Dine’e (the

Supernaturals, or Holy People), Dinetah (the Navajo land), and the Dine’e (the

Navajo themselves, literally ‘Earth Surface People’). The making of such images

is part of a multi-night ritual involving singing, praying, and the use of herbal
 27

medicine, in which a person who seeks physical and/or psychological healing sits

within this image. To be sung over by the hataali while sitting within the healing

force field of such a cosmogram is to embody the central ideal of Navajo culture:

hozho, rendered in English as a combination of harmony, goodness, wellness and

beauty. (689-90)

When the ceremony has been completed (before sunset), the sandpainting is carefully erased

with a wooden stick with prayer feathers attached. The sand is cast away, the sickness along with

it, and the patient now healed rises to walk in beauty once again (Bahti 14-15).

Sandpainting is done in a careful sacred manner, according to the ancient knowledge of

the art, with each figure and design produced in proper order and done with the five sacred

colors; white, blue, yellow black and red. According to Navajo history, sandpainting was taught

to them by the Holy Ones (divine beings). When a sandpainting is created the opening faces

East with the other three sides protected. Guardians often appear in pairs for added protection.

Other figures representing the Navajo Way and Navajo mythology are portrayed along with

other important symbols in the Navajo culture such as plants, animals, rainbows, constellations,

as well as the sun and the moon.

Museum and art exhibits have demonstrated sandpainting art. Artists deliberately make

changes to avoid creating an exact copy of a ritual sandpainting. Changes can be slight such as

changing the prescribed color, leaving out or changing one of the four sacred plants or altering

the number of feathers on a figure’s head. The alteration had to be significant enough to avoid

empowering the image and calling the gods (Bahti 18).

 28

During the months of 1941, at the Indian Arts of the United States exhibit at the Museum

of Modern Art in New York, Navajo sandpainters repeatedly performed their ritual work in the

gallery, as can be seen in the often-reproduced publicity photo (Figure 6).

Fig. 6. Navajo sand-painters at the Museum of Modern Art, 1941, from Elizabeth L. Langhorne, “Pollock, Picasso
and the Primitive,” Art History (vol 12, no.1, March, 1989; 74).

For the Navajo, these sandpaintings are an integral part of elaborate ceremonies designed

to cure illnesses by restoring the patient to wholeness and harmony with nature. Both physical

and psychological ailments are cured by the pictures created by the shaman. The shaman creates

a flat, linear image by sprinkling colored sand or pulverized minerals in a freehand manner

directly onto the ground. The shaman, or artist, pinches the colored sand tightly between thumb

and forefinger and releases them in a controlled stream, resulting in a drawn painting. Rushing

observed that “just as the sandpainter works strictly from memory, Pollock also worked without

preliminary drawings, characterizing his paintings as ‘more immediate--more direct’” (Rushing

 29

284). Pollock described the increased scale of his own painting coming from the Navajo

sandpaintings which were large in scale, often measuring eight by ten feet (Rushing 291).

The shaman with his healing qualities along with his artistic role appealed to Pollock.

Shamanic themes appealed to him because they reflected his struggle to become well. Firestone

comments that

in addition to the shaman’s ability to cure illnesses, the initiatory process of death and

rebirth, battling evil spirits, and ascension to a higher plane served as important

metaphors of recovery. When Pollock shifted to overall compositions and the dripping

techniques that concealed his figuration he experienced an ecstatic submersion

comparable to the “great communion” of indigenous dance rituals. (121)

Pollock spoke of how he left the canvas on the floor rather than using an easel as was

traditional in European art. By placing the canvas on the floor, Pollock could work from all four

sides and literally be “in the painting.” He then observed; “This is akin to the method of the

Indian sandpainters of the West” (Craven 53). “The aim of a Navajo sandpainting was, upon its

completion, to place the ill-person back in harmony with Nature. Thus, it was crucial for the

person to be literally in the painting for it to work properly” (53). By being in the painting

Pollock became like the Navajo patient, the one being healed, who is being sung over as he sits

inside the sandpainting. The Navajo believe that contact with the image unified the patient with

nature by putting him in touch with the mythic progenitors. The Navajo sandpainter does not lose

contact with the painting and demonstrates intense concentration. Although, he is free to correct

and adjust the composition so that, according to the Navajo, “all is in accord again” (Rushing

291). Here in creating the sandpainting the process and the experience have as much importance

as the image that is created. This is true for both the shaman as well as for Pollock.
 30

According to Rushing, all of Pollock’s varied incorporation and transfigurations of

Native-American art were informed and sustained by a shamanic intent. In the first period of

Pollock’s artistic dialogue with Native-American art, from 1938-47, he experimented with their

ancient motifs. In the second part of Pollock’s pictorial dialogue with Native-American art, from

1947-50, his art reflected a shamanic process for healing (Rushing 292). In his drip paintings,

Pollock developed a personal art-as-healing process derived in part from the concepts of Navajo

sandpainting, which he had witnessed at the Museum of Modern Art.

Examples of Pollock’s Representation of Shamanistic Ideas

Naked Man (1938-41)

Pollock’s affinity with the Native-American shaman can be seen in his painting, Naked

Man (1938-41) (Figure 7). Landau described this painting where Pollock has created “his most

visually intelligible presentation of a tribal artist/healer whose godlike presence is a large part of

his magic (58).

 31

Fig. 7. Naked Man (1938-41). Jackson Pollock. Oil on Plywood, 50" x 24". Private Collection, from Ellen G.
Landau, Jackson Pollock (Abrams, 1989; 60).

Naked Man shows Pollock’s quest to express the healing transformative power of the

shaman. Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife, recalled that he spoke of the image as “a witch-doctor-like

figure, a male nude with a bird’s head (or bird mask)” (qtd. in Firestone 95). A witch doctor is

another term for a medicine man, or shaman, who is often associated with a bird and/or mask. In

Naked Man, a bold black line loops off the shoulder of the standing body of a muscular man and

winds into the coils of a circular, facial mask. The unusual mask projects the image of one eye

locked into a yellow crescent shape and suggests the presence of a bird’s head and beck facing

left. The bird’s head faces left, forming the single eye of the round mask that is also its beak.

Surrounding the mask is a fiery orange aureole that visualizes the light experienced by shamans.

With his right hand the shaman reaches for another mask that will enable him to summon a

second spirit. In the lower right corner are prickly, organic forms, one of which the shaman has
 32

just dropped. “As John Wesley Powell observed in the inaugural volume of the BAE Report that

Pollock owned, every tribe has its potion or vegetable drug by which the ecstatic state is

produced and their venerable medicine-men seek visions and dream dreams” (Firestone 97).

Langhorne suggests that Naked Man is a self-portrait that declares Pollock’s

identification with the artist-shaman. The shamanistic figure has the body of a man and is human

in the details of its anatomy. The male genitalia is clearly represented and “reinforces the phallic

power implied in the figure’s erectile stance” (Landau 58). This idea of a self-portrait also gains

value when one sees that the “figure appears to be situated in an apartment-like interior in front

of a fireplace (fire being essential to most shamanic ceremonies) whose one visible andiron

echoes the shaman’s posture” (Firestone 99). The fiery aureole around his mask is in effect the

sun, and the yellow crescent in its center signifies the moon. The sun and crescent moon are

among Pollock’s most prevalent symbols in this period, which, according to Jung, represent

respectively the dualities between male and female and the conscious and the unconscious mind

(99).
 33

Fig. 8. Mask. Eskimo. Hooper Bay, Alaska. Painted wood and feathers. 21.5 cm high. Philadelphia, University of
Pennsylvania, the University Museum, from William Rubin, Primitivism in 20th Century Art (The Museum of
Modern Art, 1984; 642).

Among Pollock’s papers were pictures of masks from the Indian of the United States

exhibit. In the American Museum of Natural History’s handbook Indians of the Northwest Coast,

the section on shamanism states a shaman “has the extraordinary power of being able to

communicate with the spirit world and has a number of spirit helpers for each of which there is a

special mask (Figure 8). When this mask is worn, the shaman speaks the language of that spirit”

(Langhorne 78). Shamans were known to wear masks to induce personality transformations in

their communion with the supernatural (Landau 60). In Naked Man Pollock shows the shaman

wearing the mask of the bird spirit and that of the sun and the moon.

Langhorne proposes that Naked Man represents Pollock’s statement of identity which is

“rooted in a changing sense of self as themes of death and prostration give way to those of life

and vision” (Langhorne 80). Pollock uses ideas of the shaman as healer for his own self-

transformation. “By virtue of his own temperament, deeply emphatic to nature and to

mythologies, by virtue of his own suffering and search for healing in psychotherapy, and by
 34

virtue of his extended search for a sympathetic identity, Pollock’s presentation of a personal

identity as a shaman-artist in Naked Man seems most natural” (81). This painting allowed

Pollock to integrate aspects of his life and psychological needs as the persona of the shaman-

artist.

In Naked Man, Pollock created a self-portrait of himself, as a shaman, the one who heals

those that have a need to be healed. He uses symbols that reflect those of a shaman; the mask, the

bird, the herbs and the fire. He attempted to find a platform, a way to heal himself, and found it

in the shaman.

Guardians of the Secret (1943)

In the somewhat mysterious painting, Guardians of the Secret (1943), Pollock uses a

variety of Native-American symbols and references (Figure 9).

Fig. 9. Guardians of the Secret (1943). Jackson Pollock. Oil on canvas, 48 1/4" x 75 1/8". San Francisco Museum of
Art, Albert M. Bender Collection, from William Rubin, Primitivism in 20th Century Art (The Museum of Modern
Art, 1984; 617).
 35

Two figures or guardians stand at each side of the painting. These figures may reflect the totem

poles of the Northwest Indians where these poles act as intermediaries to ward off strangers

(Landau 126). They could also represent guardians that are depicted in Navajo sandpaintings.

According to Bahti, in Navajo Sandpaintings, guardians “generally appear in pairs at the

entrance or eastern edge of a sandpainting. Their function is to give added protection to the

sandpainting by guarding the opening” (Bahti 28). The figure on the right is bearded and appears

to be in the process of ejaculation, indicating this as a male. The figure on the left appears to be

female, dressed in a flowing gown. At the top of the painting there is an outline of mask and next

to that is an embryonic shaped symbol. Rushing describes this painting as “Pollock’s most

dramatic and successful visual statement about the shamanic potential of Indian art and the

unconscious mind” (Rushing 285). At the center of the image is a rectangular space filled with

pictographic secrets. Flanking and guarding the secrets are those two guardian figures. At the top

left of the canvas is a more overt reference to Northwest Coast art. Outlined in white is the mask

of the mythical Tsonoqua, which Pollock knew from visits to the Museum of the American

Indian and Indian Arts of the United States (Figure 10).

 36

Fig. 10. Wooden mask. Kwakiutl or Tsonoqua. Vancouver Island. 12” high. Collection of the Museum of Natural
History, New York (16/962), from Museum of Modern Art, Indian Arts of the United States (New York, 1941;156).

These symbolic references indicate that Guardians of the Secret represents a ritual scene.

In its formal arrangement Guardians of the Secret refers to Southwest, not Northwest Coast,

rituals. Immediately to the right of the mask Pollock placed a black insect. This curious creature

curled up in a fetal position is derived from the painted decoration on a Mimbres pottery bowl

(Figure 11). Rushing beliefs that the painting’s three flat, horizontal registers of activity, framed

by totemic figures, suggest that it is a “picture within a picture” (Rushing 285-7). The guardians

may be protecting a ritual painting made for healing purposes.

 37

Fig. 11. Pottery bowl. Mimbres culture. New Mexico. 10 5/8” in diameter. Collection of the Taylor Museum,
Colorado Springs (10/59), from Museum of Modern Art, Indian Arts of the United States (New York, 1941; 88).

These guardians are painted on a large canvas stands at 4’ x 7’. At the bottom of the

image, a large dog or wolf joins the guardians in protecting the entrance to an inner realm of

mysteries. Tucker suggests that “its gestural power, ritualistic organization of space and

hallucinatory mixture of high-keyed and meditative color combine to make Guardians of the

Secret a powerful, strangely disturbing manifestation of shamanic energy in painting” (Tucker

316).

Some scholars believe that the rectangle is a metaphor for the unconscious mind, and the

figures stand for the repressive mechanisms that make its contents difficult and painful to access.

Above and below the slab are tribal images and creatures that assist the guardian figures

(Firestone 109). Within the white rectangle, amongst numerous illegible marks, are a few

decipherable signs. At the top, just left of center, is a dark blue fish symbolizing the deep and

unknown. Below it, to the right, is another fish form, yellow, with a large eye, and perhaps

another near the lower right corner. On the left side of the rectangle, an ecstatic, dancing figure

raises its arms to the top edge. When the slab is viewed upside down, two more stick figures can

be detected on the left that resemble Native-American petroglyphs. There is agreement that the
 38

white rectangle is a metaphor for the unconscious. Landau interprets it as the front or top of an

alter or coffin tipped forward. Rushing also suggests some type of alter. Firestone suggests that it

could be the reflective surface of a mirror. Either way, the guardians protect us from seeing

everything that lies within ourselves because to see everything would be almost unbearable

(Firestone 110).

Michael Leja feels this painting can be read as a metaphorical representation of the

problem posed by the unconscious and its guarded, inaccessible, secret meanings. He

acknowledges that Pollock inscribed the secret tablet, which is a metaphor for the unconscious,

with indecipherable markings. He claims that by using marks that are illegible Pollock is saying

that they indicate difficulty and struggle and that the thick, labored and overwrought surface

functions as guarantee of this. He notes that Pollock has painted over figurative passages that had

been visible in earlier stages of the work but are now blocked. Pollock has conveyed “many of

the characteristics features of the unconscious--illegibility, inaccessibility, struggle--through

Modernist pictorial dynamics” (Leja 556).

Guardians guard the secrets held deep inside the unconscious. The secrets kept inside an

altar or box in addition to the guards, are also being guarded by a wolf. Rushing suggests that

this “image may now be seen to indicate a pair of secret society guardians who protect a ritual

painting made for healing purposes” (Rushing 287). However, one sees this white rectangle--as

an altar or ritual painting--and with it, its guardians, what it holds is not to be accessed. The

unconscious feelings and struggles being protected are not to be released until they can be healed

through shamanistic rituals.

 39

All-Over Drip Paintings (1946-50)

Fig. 12. Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 (1950). Jackson Pollock, Oil on Canvas, 8' 10 1/2" x 17' 8". Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. George A. Hearn Fund, from Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (Abrams, 1989; 201-2).

In Pollock’s drip paintings (1947-50), Pollock evolved to combine and incorporate

shamanistic ideas in a drastically new style. In the drip paintings Pollock is much like the

shaman creating a sandpainting--making a visual representation on the floor without touching the

surface. Yet he also becomes the patient--the one the shaman uses his healing powers to aid. As

Rushing notes, “because of Pollock’s own search for wholeness and his obvious interest in

sandpaintings, his drip paintings may be interpreted as ritual acts in which Pollock stands for the

shaman who is his own patient” (Rushing 291). Pollock knew and valued the Navajo concept of

discovering one’s self through shamanic experience.

What appealed to Pollock was that part of tribal life where the “people living close to

nature found nature in themselves rather than nature as a motif” (292). He commented that “I

work from the inside out, like nature” (292). And it is within this context that he made his

famous retort to the painter Hans Hoffman, “I am nature,” Pollock believed in expressing nature
 40

not in depicting nature. This move from objective representation to subjective signified Pollock’s

feelings about Native-American culture. He felt that nature itself was spiritual and that one could

approach nature through dreams and visions. This approach could then be used in his imagery.

Like the Navajo sandpainters, Pollock moved his canvas to the floor rather than use an

easel as was traditional in European art. Pollock made the following statement about his work:

My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before

painting. I prefer to tack the un-stretched canvas to the hard wall or floor. I need

the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I feel nearer, more a part of the

painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and

literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sandpainters of

the West. (qtd. in Rushing 291)

Like the shaman, by placing the canvas on the floor, Pollock could work from all four

sides and literally be in the painting.

Pollock controlled paint and dripped it across the canvas to create his images. He created

his paintings spontaneously without a sketch or preconceived idea. He went from the usual

painters’ tools, such as a palette and brushes, to using sticks, trowels, knives and dripping paint.

All of this recalls the procedure used by the Navajo shaman, who collects sand, herbs and other

ready-made natural materials before creating the sandpainting. Although still invoking

immediacy he did control the technique of dripping paint onto the canvas to create his painting.

Not having physical contact with the canvas was novel for the modern artist and yet it mimicked

the shaman as he made a sandpainting.

Pollock noted, “when I am in my painting….I have no fears about making changes,

destroying the image, etc… because the painting has a life of its own…When I lose contact with
 41

the painting the result is a mess. Otherwise there is a pure harmony, an easy give and take, and

the painting comes out well” (qtd. in Rushing 291). The Navajo sandpainter must not lose

contact with the painting either and must demonstrate great concentration. He can correct and

adjust the composition so that, according to the Navajo, “all is in accord again” (Rushing 291).

In creating their image, for both Pollock and the shaman, the process and the experience have as

much importance at the image created.

The shamanic nature of Pollock’s quest was captured in the series of photographs which

Hans Namuth took of the artist in 1950 and 1951 (Figure 13). Namuth photographed Pollock

while at work on the sort of “drip” or “poured” paintings which had recently brought him to the

attention of Life and Time magazine reporters, who were anxious to establish if “Jack the

Dripper” really was “America’s greatest living artist” (Chernuschi 318). A young photography

student in 1950, Namuth was intrigued by what he called the “difficulty” of Pollock’s all over

abstractions. He eventually sought out the artist and asked if he could photograph him while

painting. Pollock was at first reluctant but eventually agreed.

 42

Fig. 13. Jackson Pollock at Work. 1951. Photograph by Hans Namuth. Courtesy of Center for Creative Photography,
University of Arizona, from Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940 Strategies of Being (Prentice Hall, 2000; 95).

What Namuth’s photographs showed was a man oblivious to the outside world, utterly,

and completely absorbed in the act of creation. With the canvas on the floor, painting now

required unprecedented physical participation on the part of the artist. Before Pollock, painters--

however spontaneously they worked--traditionally placed canvases on easels or fixed them

vertically; the pigment was applied directly by means of brushes. By placing the canvas on the

floor, Pollock not only reversed the orientation of painting but increased the amount of physical

space where creation takes place. Unrestricted by format--by a working situation dictating up and

down position--Pollock could attack the canvas from all directions, occasionally even stepping

inside the painting (Cernuschi 109).

Pollock could be physically freer and more impulsive. His technique and ritual can be

seen through the films and still photographs of Hans Namuth. The obvious result of this
 43

unprecedented spontaneity was the freedom the artist gained. A significant change is that Pollock

not only used his arm and wrist but painting now included his entire body. By eliminating

physical contact with the canvas and using force of gravity, Pollock needed to learn a way to

control the quality of his drip painting. Chernuschi observed that Pollock’s technique required a

certain apprenticeship with the way paint is affected by its own viscosity, by the speed of the

gesture, by the height of the fall, and so on. It also required a certain dexterity, a capacity to

associate a gesture with its effect and to reproduce the effect at will. By manipulating these

variables, Pollock could produce a great variety of effects with a seemingly limited highly

restricted technique. As the critic Frank O’Hara perceptively noted: “There has never been

enough said about Pollock’s draftsmanship, that amazing ability to quicken a line by thinning it,

to slow it down by flooding, to elaborate that simplest of elements, the line--to change, to

reinvigorate, to extend, to build up an embarrassment of riches in the mass of drawing alone”

(qtd. in Chernuschi 109).

It is in the method--on the technical rather than on the visual level--that the kinship exists

with sandpainters. Like his Native-American predecessors, Pollock worked on the floor and

dropped pigment, sand and other foreign matter onto the canvas surface, thus incorporating both

the force of gravity and the element of air in the process. “Body and soul now have no need to be

pictured separately, at the threshold of shamanic transformation” (Chernuschi 318). They are one

as they drip and dance across the canvas. Like a great shaman, Pollock swept far down into

himself in these paintings to heal himself through a mystical act of participation.

Pollock’s famous drip technique, which has so often been hailed as a signal moment in

the triumph of high art from white North America, represented a critical assimilation of Native-

American methods. With his rightly acclaimed all-over paintings from the late 1940s and early
 44

1950s, Pollock “advanced from a mere inter-image dialogue with Native American objects to a

direct linkage with the artisanal process whereby Native art was made” (Craven 53).

The drip paintings speak of a oneness, for Pollock must have felt they were the visual

realization of his transformed consciousness. Elements of his unconscious mind had merged with

his waking conscious. A lengthy period of abstinence from drinking (1947-1950) along with a

sense of wholeness resulted in a marked transformation of his painting style. In these paintings,

Pollock sought unity between conscious decision and primitive instinct, and with the inspiration

of Native-American art he found it.

Pollock incorporated in the drip paintings many shamanic influences. The paintings were

created using the style much like the shaman creating a sandpainting. They are painted with the

canvas on the floor and without making physical contact with the surface. Their increased

physical size forced the artist to “dance” and move around all sides of the canvas, even, if

necessary, to be in the painting. Without any preconceived ideas, the artist, like the shaman,

controlled the material they used to create the image. Much like the shaman the creation of the

drip paintings essentially became a ritual process. Pollock became the patient and the shaman in

his attempt to seek to heal himself. Through the unity between conscious decision and primitive

instinct, and with the impetus of Native-American art, in his drip paintings he found a way.
 45

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

While visiting Rome recently, I noticed a sign on the street announcing an ongoing

exhibit, entitled, “Pollock and the New York School.” I took advantage of this serendipitous

opportunity to attend the exhibit at the Complesso del Vittoriano. Exhibited there was Pollock’s

Number 27 (1950), on loan from the Whitney Museum in New York along with other Pollock

pieces and other works from Abstract Expressionists. As I wandered through the exhibit, I

encountered a quote on the wall from the critic, Harold Rosenberg, (although written in Italian, it

was thankfully, also written in English), “A painting that is an act is inseparable from the

biography of the artist. The painting itself is a “moment” in the adulterated mixture of his life.”

This quote, taken from an article Rosenberg wrote for the Art News in December 1952 entitled,

“The American Action Painters” captures not only the creation of Pollock’s drip paintings, but

also the notion that the life experiences, “biography” of an artist, are reflected in his art. Even

Pollock himself made it sound as if his works were an extension of himself when he described

his technique: “Every good artist paints what he is” (qtd. in Cernuschi 140).

Rosenberg describes Pollock as an artist with a secret. One who knew how to make

magic--a peer of the Navajo sandpainters. In his drip paintings, Pollock removed the easel and

laid his canvas on the floor. He poured paint from a can or dribbled it or threw it off the end of a

stick it because that was his way of getting closer in touch with the act of painting. He refused to

work from preliminary drawings as it was his desire to have an immediate and direct contact

with the composition. From that desire to be totally encompassed, like the shaman with their

sandpaintings, came the large wall-sized drip canvases. Rosenberg concludes, “what proves most
 46

remarkable is Pollock’s range, an effect of temperament, physical ebullience, and integrity of

purpose. For this ‘sandpainter,’ the painting was the medicine for the artist himself. Its goal of

‘harmony’ induced a settling down of psychic method into aesthetic process” (qtd. in Shapiro

380).

Throughout his life Pollock was in contact with Native-American culture and art. It began

in his early years, growing up in the West and continued with his exposure to Native Americans

when he purchased the twelve volumes of Bureau of American Ethnology. These experiences

encouraged Pollock to continue his interest in Native-American art. The increase and popularity

of Native-American culture at the time made access to their art readily available. Pollock, as a

way of dealing with his own personal demons, embraced the ideas of primitivism in conjunction

with the unifying of the conscious with the unconscious as a way of healing oneself. Along with

the writings of John Graham and the teachings of Carl Jung he internalized their teachings which

aligned with his interest in primitivism and Native-American art. Their emphasis on the primitive

mind and culture deepened Pollok’s interest in Native-American art which gained a greater

exposure and popularity during the same time. The Indian Arts in the United States exhibit in

1941, along with other permanent Native-American exhibits in New York inspired Pollock’s art

as he included symbols reflective of their culture. He specifically took interest in the medicine

man, or shaman, who acted as the tribal artist and healer. He incorporated the actions and styles

of the shaman when creating a sandpainting in his drip paintings. Pollock used this action of

creating his large drip paintings as a way of healing himself, by acting not only as the shaman

but as the one being healed.

Although therapy and the healing rituals of the shaman could not rescue him from his

own demons he broke the boundaries of art. Pollock’s method of painting, the poured technique,
 47

was inspired by the Native-American shaman. It is through this radical technique that Pollock’s

contribution to art and the future of art is made manifest.

 48

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