Jackson Pollock

Art of This Century, New York
Victor Wolfeson (acquired from the above)
French & Co., New York
Mr. and Mrs. Milton Sperling, Beverly Hills
Mr. and Mrs. Stanley K. Sheinbaum (formerly Mrs. Milton Sperling), Los Angeles
Acquired by the present owners in 1999 

Henry J. Seldis, ``Jackson Pollock's Influence upon American Painting'', Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1967
Jonathan L. Welch, ``Jackson Pollock's The White Angel''', M. A. thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1977, pl. 1, illustrated
Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works, Volume One, New Haven & London, 1978, cat. no. 146, p. 139, illustrated

The mid-1940s were a catalytic time of creative ferment in post-war New York, with cross-currents of European and native influences among American artists each vying to achieve a new type of painting that would reflect the complex character of the times. Artists and thinkers from avant-garde Paris, such as Max Ernst and Andre Breton, arrived in New York during the early 1940s to escape the horrors of World War II, and their presence gave considerable impetus to artists such as Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Whilst each sought to break free from any dominating influences, they nevertheless absorbed ideas from European modernism, Cubism and Surrealism. Together with prevalent theories on political movements such as Marxism and the evolution of new psychological schools of thought by figures such as Carl Jung, New York was in the vanguard of Modernist thought and creativity. In this environment, Jackson Pollock embarked on a journey to discover within these influences any inspiration to his own mature style of abstract painting.  Pollock's all-over drip paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s are monumental achievements that helped catapult New York and the burgeoning school of Abstract Expressionism to the forefront of the art world.

Prior to this, in 1942-1946, Pollock produced an innovative and challenging body of work, reflective of engagements with the art of Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro as well as Native American Indian art, all to the purpose of exploring the boundaries of Modern painting. The White Angel, exhibited in Pollock's third one-man exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century, demonstrates the artist's search for a new means to express his inner aesthetic impulse and psychological state by means of ``veiling'' the image. Pollock grappled with imagery, experimenting as his contemporaries did with the tension between figuration and abstraction as well as Cubism and Surrealism.  In paintings such as The White Angel, Pollock's images and figures are mined from his subconscious in the manner of Surrealist automatism but presented in the shallow, tilted and unspecific space of the Cubist picture plane.  And, while figures are recognizable in this painting in the form of a female and male  - one of Pollock's most powerful motifs at this time - their shapes are so abstracted as to be almost as mysterious as the symbols surrounding them.

Along with other artists influenced by Surrealism, Pollock sought to express the turmoil of modern times through symbols of the most eternal and universal nature. Many of his paintings from 1942 to 1946 have a particularly mythological and ritualistic character as evidenced by many titles from this period such as The Moon Woman (1942, Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice), The She-Wolf (1943, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Pasiphaë (c. 1943, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) .  In The White Angel, the forms, black contours and broad color fields display a greater simplicity and clarity of design than paintings of the same period such as Troubled Queen (c. 1945, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) with its jagged shards and agitated surface or Guardian of the Secret (1943, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) with its calligraphic tracery and scumbled paint surface. Yet the meaning of its components is equally mysterious and enigmatic. The elongated figures, similar in their whimsical and flattened form within a simplified geometric ground to Picasso's Three Dancers (1925), can be identified as male and female, a motif prevalent in Pollock's work of this time, perhaps a reference to the importance of his relationship with Lee Krasner which began in 1942. In his Master's thesis on The White Angel, Jonathan Welch identifies the male figure on the left as the white angel based on the brown, wing-like triangle surrounding the shoulders and torso of the figure. Welch also notes the plant-like features to the female's face in the red leaf-like lobes on the right which he connects to a similar biomorphic motif in the work of Max Ernst, which he characterizes as a connection with Jungian ideas on the collective unconscious and the commonality of all forms of life.

The figures' lack of features lends them a pictographic quality similar to primitive art, which is even more evident in the totemic configuration of linear symbols in the tilted green square. Pollock was generally familiar with American Indian art from his childhood in the West, but the use of sand mixed with the green pigment at the center of The White Angel can also be related to Pollock's attendance at an exhibition of Indian Art of the United States at the Museum of Modern Art in January 1941 during which Navajo artists executed their ritualistic sand paintings on the gallery floor. Pollock also came into contact with theories on Primitive Art and its access to the universal and primordial subconscious through his relationship with John Graham who included Pollock in his influential 1942 exhibition American and French Painting which first brought Pollock to the attention of Lee Krasner. Graham was a central figure in the dissemination of European modernist thought in New York in the 1930s and early 1940s, and was an early champion of Pollock's paintings as well as a mentor for Gorky, de Kooning and many other young New York artists.

In readings from ancient Chinese texts and Latin translations, Carl Jung discovered an historical precedence and context for his theories on the psychology of the unconscious in references to alchemy which also accessed the universal unconscious. Jungian thought was widely influential in the work of Pollock and many of his contemporaries, and as Jonathan Welch noted, the concept of alchemy also had its appeal.  ``Just as the process of the transmutation of metals was considered to be a projection of the unconscious of the alchemist so the `word'  for the Surrealists was considered to be a projection of the unconscious of the poet. ­``Breton emphasized that the phrase should be considered literally and that the `surrealist research presents a remarkable similarity of aim with alchemic research'. '' (Welch, ``Jackson Pollock's The White Angel'', M.A. thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1977, p. 34). Elements of alchemy can be found in Pollock's works such as The White Angel with its pictographic and archetypal figures, and in its polarities. One of the functions of alchemy is to reconcile or unify opposites of duality such as good and evil, male and female, or light and dark. In the constructs of alchemy, the male is an active element while the female is passive and this theory can illuminate Welch's identification of the male figure as the ``angel'' of the painting ¨ - the active figure ¨ - while the female who is signaled by the leaf-like facial motif is the passive component. As Pollock was resistant to any verbal explanations of the symbolism or meaning of his paintings, this interpretation is only speculative but the fact that another work of Pollock's of this time was titled Alchemy (1947) by Pollock, Krasner and other associates for his 1948 show at Betty Parsons Gallery demonstrates the prevalence of the theories of alchemy among Pollock's circle.