The Magus and the Alchemist: John Graham and Jackson Pollock

The Smithsonian Institution

The Magus and the Alchemist: John Graham and Jackson PollockAuthor(s): Elizabeth LanghorneReviewed work(s):Source: American Art, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 46-67Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3109316 .

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The Magus and the Alchemist

John Graham and Jackson Pollock

Elizabeth Langhorne

1 Jackson Pollock, Masqued Image, ca. 1938-41. Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 61 cm (40 x 24 1/8 in.). Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase made possible by a grant from the Burnett Foundation

In a dinner conversation with his close friend Nicholas Carone, in his last years, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) acknowl-

edged John Graham's (1881-1961) importance for him. Carone was pressing Pollock, "People understand the painting-talk about the technique, the

dripping, the splattering, the automatism and all that, but who really knows the

picture, the content?... Well, who?

Greenberg?" Pollock replied, "No. He doesn't know what it is about. There's

only one man who really knows what it's

about-John Graham."' In recent years Clement Greenberg's formalist account of abstract art has come under heavy fire, but no new, equally comprehensive theory has taken its place that would account for the formation and importance of abstract art during and after World War II. The encounter of Pollock and Graham points toward just such a theory.

In "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" and "Towards a Newer Laocoon," Greenberg asserted that in a decaying modern culture that is no longer able to justify the

inevitability of its particular forms and where kitsch is rampant, the best contem-

porary, plastic art is abstract: "The history of avant-garde painting is that of a

progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resistance consists

chiefly in the flat picture plane's denial of efforts to 'hole through' it for realistic

perspectival space." Thus Greenberg came to appreciate Pollock's role in tackling the problem faced by the young American painters-how "to loosen up the rather strictly demarcated illusion of shallow depth" in late synthetic cubism and recapture the tensions between flatness and illusionism so fundamental to the best of modernist painting.2 And yet, even as artist and critic had a lot to offer one another-Greenberg lending Pollock a knowing eye, encouragement, and critical acclaim; Pollock offering Greenberg confirmation and advance- ment of his aesthetic theories-their basic concerns were very different. An artist for whom the evolution of form was inti- mately bound up with the evolution of symbols in the service of life was being used by a critic to advance a master narrative of art for art's sake.

This difference in sensibility was already clear in Greenberg's February 1947 review of exhibitions by Pollock and Jean Dubuffet. Asserting that Pollock, as a master of "recreated flatness," was the equal of the great Euro- pean painter Dubuffet, Greenberg referred to what various artists made of Paul Klee's all-over scratchings into the material surface of a painting:

Where the Americans mean mysticism, Dubuffet means matter, material, sensation,

47 American Art



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the all too empirical and immediate world- and the refusal to be taken in by anything coming from outside it. Dubuffet's mono- chrome means a state ofmind, not a secret

insight into the absolute; his positivism accounts for the superior largeness of his art.

Greenberg was right about American

painters' interest in the spiritual dimension of art. Even in the late 1930s and

early 1940s they were practicing what

Stephen Polcari has called their versions of T. S. Eliot's "mythic method," fusing aspects of anthropology, comparative mythology, and depth psychology in an

attempt to discover meaning in the face of war and to express such meaning in an abstract and automatist art.3

Pollock, too, shared such concerns, but not the positivism Greenberg ad- mired. The very forms that so fascinated

Greenberg in Pollock's work were in fact the products of a spiritual quest of just the sort Greenberg dismissed. In a December 1947 review of the work of

Adolph Gottlieb, whom Greenberg saw as "the leading exponent of a new indig- enous school of symbolism" that included Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman, he wrote: "I myself would

question the importance this school attributes to the symbolical or 'meta-

physical' content of its art; there is

something half-baked and revivalist, in a familiar American way, about it." Given such sentiments, it is not surprising that Pollock warned Fritz Bultman, with whom he loved to discuss just such issues: "It's not something you can discuss with

Greenberg."4 He was well aware his

understanding of the task of art was not that of his most supportive critic. Through- out his life, Pollock believed the one

person who understood what he was up to was Graham.

The two men met no later than the late fall of 1940, when Graham was fifty- three and Pollock twenty-eight. By November 1941, when Graham invited

Pollock to exhibit at the McMillen

Gallery, Pollock was a frequent visitor to Graham's studio at 54 Greenwich Avenue, which was filled with his collection of African, Oceanic, and Melanesian

objects, Renaissance bronzes, Greek and

Egyptian statuettes, and an extensive collection of mirrors and crystal balls. To his old friend Reuben Kadish, Pollock

compared the act of crossing Graham's studio threshold to entering a temple or sanctuary. Kadish likened Pollock's reverence for Graham to that of a cult follower for his guru.5 What was it about Graham that so attracted Pollock? Given his recent encounter with the art of Picasso, his growing fascination with

primitive art, and his Jungian psycho- therapy, it is hardly surprising that he should have found in Graham, who shared these interests, a kindred spirit. Even before he met him, Pollock had come to appreciate Graham's System and Dialectics ofArt (1937) and even more his article "Picasso and Primitive Art." The latter so impressed Pollock that he quite uncharacteristically wrote Graham a

letter.6 As Pollock told Carone, he also went to see Graham, because "he knew

something about art and I had to know him. I knocked on his door, told him I had read his article and that he knew. He looked at me a long time, then just said, 'Come in."7

Graham saw primitive artists as the

precursors of modern abstraction. Never seduced by the desire to imitate or

compete with nature, they always re-

sponded to the "possibilities of the plain operating space," or the two-dimensional format in painting. The primitive artist thus understood what the modern

painter, coming from and reacting to a tradition informed by five hundred years of working with the rules of perspective that evolved during the Renaissance, had come to understand anew. This under-

standing permitted "a persistent and

spontaneous exercise of design and compo-

48 Fall 1998



sition." The primitive artist, Graham maintained, worked "freely within the

pure form, shifting at will, assembling and dissembling the character-feature of form."

Graham tied the freedom of handling and the ambiguity of feature found in

primitive art to free access to the unconscious, couching his discussion not in the

To his oldfriend Reuben Kadish, Pollock compared the act of crossing Graham's studio threshold to entering a temple or sanc-

tuary. Kadish likenedJackson's reverence for Graham to that of a cult follower for his guru.

ethnographic terms of how the art related to its creators' beliefs in the spirit world, but in the psychological terms of the

Jungian collective unconscious, "the creative factor and the source and the storehouse of power and of all knowledge, past and future." Through the forms used in their art, primitive people "satisfied their particular totemism and exteriorized their prohibitions (taboos) in order to understand them better, consequently to deal with them successfully." The

drawings Pollock gave to his therapist Dr.

Joseph Henderson showed him similarly struggling with his inhibitions, fears, and hopes, while engaged in formal

experimentation.8

Kindred Spirits

In the abstract work of primitive artists Graham was thus discovering both a

therapeutic function and an extraordinary wealth of two-dimensional forms.

Certainly Graham's evocative, aphoristic

formulations would never have found their way into a scholarly anthropological volume on primitive art; even in the New York art world of the 1930s his pro- nouncements, heavily laced with mysticism, were considered extreme. Neverthe- less, his intuitions about the spontaneous, metamorphic, expressive properties of

primitive art signaled a new approach to abstraction and to the art of Picasso, whom Graham thought the paradigmatic modern artist: "No artist ever had greater vision or insight into the origin of plastic forms and their logical destination than Picasso

.... Picasso's painting has the

same ease of access to the unconscious as have primitive artists-plus a conscious

intelligence." Graham pointed not to Les Demoiselles dAvignon (1907), where the influence of African sculpture is obvious, but rather to works from 1927 or later, most particularly those from 1930 to 1933. Characteristic of these primitive art forms is the interchangeability and conflation of different members of the human body, and it is this physical fluidity that Graham dramatized in his

caption describing an Eskimo mask he had chosen as the frontispiece for his article: "There is typical primitive insis- tence that nostril and eye are of the same

origin and purpose. Two similar orifices seem to say: two eyes and two nostrils." About Picasso's work he was less specific. Phrases such as "[Picasso is] painting women in interlocking figures of eight," evoke the artist's use of a free metamor-

phic line to depict different anatomical

parts. More suggestive was Graham's choice of illustrations, among them that masterpiece of Picasso's transformative

imagination, Girl before a Mirror (fig. 2). This image probably provoked an immediate and visceral response in Pollock-the first explicit evidence of that connection was Masqued Image (fig. 1).9 Pollock's instinctive grasp of Picasso's mastery was certainly supported by the conviction with which Graham

49 American Art



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2 Pablo Picasso, Girl before a Mirror, 1932. Oil on canvas, 162.3 x 130.2 cm (64 x 51 ? in.). Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim

spoke up for Picasso and abstract art in the 1930s. Graham's words inspired many of the artists who would later become abstract expressionists, including Pollock.

But what attracted Pollock to Graham more than the latter's proselytizing for modernist art and Picasso was their mutual understanding of the significance of an art that, while articulated in terms of modern psychoanalysis, owed more to the sort of esoteric ideas Greenberg so disliked. Pollock had first been introduced to such ideas in high school by his art teacher, Frederic John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, who not only instilled

in his students an appreciation for

Matisse, but also introduced them to Rosicrucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism,

yoga, reincarnation, and karma-all in order to teach them "how to expand their consciousnesses," to meet them-

selves.10 It was a lesson not lost on Pollock and one significantly reinforced

by his therapist, who shared the Jungian conviction in the healing power of

images. To Graham, too, the quest for self

mattered more than the abstract play of forms. But this did not mean that he had abandoned the attempt to make painting serve his quest. By 1943, Graham had, in his own painting and in his pronounce- ments, denied Picasso (he erased his name from System and Dialectics ofArt) and turned back to the Renaissance. He still believed in the artist as visionary and

diviner; but no longer convinced that wisdom could be brought forth from the immemorial past through the evolution of form, he turned to symbolic images as a "secret, sacred language. . . in adora- tion, evocation, conjuration of this world's forces or spirits." The psychological and the formal gave way to the overtly mystical and the symbolic. While in 1937 Graham could claim that "culture as a

process is the evolution of form," he would later state that the "true attraction of any art is its symbolical language.... The successive evolution of symbols constitutes the culture of a nation.'11

Such Hermetism made its appearance in Graham's work well before 1943, in such a fashion in Sun and Bird (fig. 3) as to suggest, if not an influence on Pollock's growing symbolic awareness in Bird (fig. 4) and Magic Mirror (see fig. 10), at least shared interests. Constance Graham remembers that the two went

together to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Indian Art of the United

States.12 Pollock's Bird and Graham's Sun and Bird not only date from that time, but also are strikingly similar in their

50 Fall 1998



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3 John Graham, Sun and Bird, ca. 1941-42. Oil on canvas, 53.3 x 45.7 cm (21 x 18 in.). Private collection

4 Jackson Pollock, Bird, 1941. Oil and sand on canvas, 70.5 x 61.6 cm (27 3 x 24 1 in.). Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Lee Krasner in memory of Jackson Pollock

overall hieratic, symmetrical composition, their differentiation between darkness and light, and the presence of a bird with outstretched wings. In the Graham, the more immediately evident bird is flanked by a sun disk on the left and a crescent moon on the right. These forms reflect Graham's increasingly esoteric interests- theosophy, hatha yoga, tantric yoga, numerology, systems of proportion derived from Pythagorean and Platonic sources, alchemy, and astrology.13

Sun and Bird especially conveys Graham's preoccupation with the last two. The likely source for its imagery was an illustration in Pierre Mabille's article "Notes sur le symbolisme" in the 1936 issue of Minotaure. A bird with outspread wings is enclosed in a triangle, which hangs on a central axis, a crescent moon and a blazing sun appear beneath the lower points of the triangle (fig. 5). 14 Mabille's article pointed out the magical efficacy of the symbolic image, both for

the ancients, who used them in their Hermetic texts and in religious and initiatory ceremonies, and for the modern painter. His illustrations, though unidentified and unexplained, derive from Hermetic texts on alchemy.

The Hermetic Tradition

The Hermetic tradition, which traced its origin back to the mythical Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus and couched its teachings under the veil of enigma, allegory and symbols, had declined with the rise of science and the triumph of the Enlightenment. Partly due to the work of Eliphas Levi, it revived in intellectual and artistic circles in late-nineteenth-century France and especially influenced symbol- ist and then surrealist art. Holding to a universe in which every being possessed a spirit and the macrocosm corresponded to the microcosm, Hermetic thought

51 American Art



5 Unidentified artist, alchemical image, published in Minotaure vol. 2, no. 8 (1936): 2

. . . . . ....

attempted to discover the hidden laws that ruled the universe and thereby to accomplish what is called the Great Work-the realization of spirit in matter.15

The alchemist's Great Work thus focused on matter, specifically base metals. The usual goal was to transform lead into gold. On one level this effort was a protochemistry; on another, in accord with old belief in the spiritual significance of matter, the effort at transformation was directed not just toward the material without, but toward the soul, within. As lead is transmuted into gold, so the soul can be purified, dissolved, and crystallized anew, to reveal spirit. Alchemy thus offered the modern painter a metaphor illuminating his or her own work. Alchemy's symbols provided the artist with a new subject matter-i.e., allegorical signs referring to self transformation. Taken as a magical operation, the manipulation of symbols

might not simply refer to but actually constitute such a spiritual process. The

manipulation of pigment in the act of

painting might be understood, like the alchemist's transformation of base lead into gold, as a process of meaningful self- transformation. For artists who took the

premises of alchemy seriously, it could become a vehicle for investing spiritual and emotional meaning in the act of

painting-whether painting symbols or

manipulating raw pigment. Graham's understanding of the

magical powers of art was bound up with his involvement with alchemy. In Sun and Bird, a bird hovers over an oval egg shape. In alchemy the egg stands for

prima materia containing the captive soul, the chaos apprehended inside the alchemist's retort."6 Sun and moon signify the underlying division of all existence into opposite principles-whether day- night, male-female, spirit-matter, active- passive, fixed-changing-that stimulate the eternal vital current. In astrology, a sister science of alchemy, the zodiacal

sign Capricorn marks the beginning of the process of dissolution, here associated with the changing moon, while Pisces, placed on the face of the sun, denotes a final moment, an end that simultaneously contains the beginning of the new cycle. Thus Graham's placement of zodiacal

signs reiterates the dynamic between opposites-solve et coagula, dissolve and reconstitute. The eagle or phoenix also speaks of periodic death and rebirth; in alchemy it symbolizes the liberated soul. Here the bird is shown rising from the

egg, the prima materia. Traditionally consecrated to the sun, the phoenix speaks of eternal life within continual death. Perhaps to emphasize this connection, Graham titled his painting Sun and Bird.

Astrological signs frequently comple- ment alchemical images, following a law of Hermetic wisdom that "whatever is below is like that which is above." Saturn

corresponds to lead, the materia that is

52 Fall 1998



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6 John Graham, Untitled ("Litera- ture of the Future"), ca. 1940. Drawing, 29.2 x 20.3 (11 1/2 x 8 in.). Private collection

the basis of the alchemist's art; Jupiter corresponds to tin, a light metal, the first manifestation of spirit in the alchemical work.17 In Sun and Bird, the astrological signs for the planets on either side of the bird's head-Saturn on the left and

Jupiter on the right-reiterate the nature of the alchemical work, and represent the "rulers" of the zodiacal signs below. Thus Graham reiterates the central alchemical

theme of the painting-the play of

opposites and the transformation of matter to a higher, more spiritual level.

Self-Transformation

Biographical details confirm that the alchemical-astrological symbolism in Sun and Bird does indeed refer to and delin- eate Graham's process of personal self- transformation. Graham was born in Kiev on 8 or 9 January 1887 (by the Gregorian calendar) under the sign of Capricorn. He describes his mother as "a sorceress, or a

witch.., immersed in occult knowledge," who retrieved Graham as an infant from a rock where an eagle had left him during a "night of apocalypse" and "deluvian outpour.... The eagle, after a few circles, went straight up.... My mother, when I

grew up ... explained that I was the son of Jupiter and a mortal woman and that is why He had to send me to live with the human beings, though I was not alto- gether human.'8 Graham thought of himself "more like a sacred androgyne, the missing link between the swine nature and the human nature."'19 With such tales Graham elaborated a personal myth, and used elements of that myth in Sun and Bird to record and continue his own work of self-transformation.

The theme of birth refers not just to Graham's rebirth as an adept in the Hermetic tradition, but very probably to his reentry into art as well. Although Graham had developed his reputation as a painter both in Paris and New York in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he had stopped painting in 1933, though he continued his activities as collector, connoisseur, and vocal advocate of modernist painting. Only around 1939 did he start to paint again. In an untitled

drawing (fig. 6), he diagrams his under-

standing of art using the "philosophical geometry" of alchemy, the circle, the

triangle, and the square.20 The circle that

53 American Art



7 John Graham, Bird Watcher, 1941. Oil on canvas, 64.2 x 51.4 cm

(25 ? x 20 ? in.). Indiana University Art Museum

dominates the composition corresponds to prima materia, primordial matter, but the additional sunrays make this circle a

symbol of the creative light, the spiritual agent. The circle is penetrated by a downward pointing triangle,with ART written large at its top and horizontal lines crossing its bottom tip. In different

positions the triangle symbolizes the four elements of material existence: downward

pointing and crossed by a horizontal axis, as shown here, it signifies earth-that is, matter in its solid form. The square in the bottom tip of the triangle is a further

signification of matter, experienced by the five senses, as indicated by the number five. Art for Graham would

appear to be the concretization of the

interpenetration of spirit and matter. In

alchemy primordial light or spirit, when

54 Fall 1998



:

8 John Graham, Untitled (From White to Red), n.d. Colored pencil, ballpoint pen, felt-tipped pen, crayon, and pencil on manila folder, 29.8 x 22.5 cm (11 3?x 8 7/8in.). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Patricia F. Graham in

memory of her husband, John David Graham and his brother, Nicholas G. W. Thorne

intercepted by a material surface that then reflects and individualizes it, is referred to as a "ray." Probably Graham referred to this materialized spirit when he said there is "no new way to paint..,. except with some kind of ray."21 Sun and Bird elaborates Graham's concern with the

interception of spirit by matter. It is not

surprising, therefore, that as Pollock

struggled to find himself through art, he should have recognized Graham as an artist who "knew."

John Graham was by no means the

only one to propose a spiritual dimension for art and artist. An undercurrent in surrealist circles, this view received one of its most explicit expressions in Transition, a review published in Paris between 1932 and 1938 that Graham regularly brought back to show his artist friends.22 In 1935 the editor Eugene Jolas had called for a new kind of creator who

redevelops in himself ancient and mutilated sensibilities that have an analogy with those used in the mythological-magical inside of thought in the primitive man, with pro- phetic revelations, with orphic mysteries, with mystic theology, . .. with the attitudes

of the early romantics, with the mental habits still extant in folklore and fairy tales, with clairvoyances, day and night dream- ing, even with subhuman or psychotic thinking.23

In Vertical, published in the United States in 1941 as a sequel to Transition, Jolas called for a reconstitution of "the myth of continuous ascent as being the myth underlying man's ceaseless aspirations towards the liberation of the soul." He cites the myths of Icarus and Daedalus, Pegasus, Nike, Christ, and the winged horse of the Norsemen as versions of this

myth. Sun and Bird could be viewed as Graham's variation on this theme, cast

by him in distinctly alchemical and

astrological terms. Other such variations

by Pollock include Bird, Naked Man, and Birth, which owe more to his longstanding interest in the spiritual significance of American Indian art and are responses to the challenges posed by the Mexican muralists and by Picasso. Graham chose to include Birth in the exhibition Ameri- can and French Painting that was held at the McMillen Gallery from January to

February of 1942.24 In these works Pollock, no doubt indebted to Graham, began to work out a mystic spiritual identity for himself. Whether Pollock's

55 American Art



Bird or Graham's Sun and Birdwas executed first is unknown; nor is it relevant. What does matter are the shared interests of the two artists, which find striking expression in two other canvases by Graham, Bird Watcher (fig. 7) and Untitled (1942).

While in Sun and Bird Graham had

depicted the adept's Great Work, these

paintings speak to its central and final achievement: the union of a heightened masculine spirituality with a purified feminine matter, the masculine-feminine

androgyne, symbolized by the "conjunction" of sun and moon, Sulphur and

Quicksilver, or King and Queen. To

express this union Graham paints the female principle in Bird Watcher with a central diamond eye, the diamond a traditional alchemical image signifying the philosopher's stone, or the union of matter and spirit: spiritualized matter. Graham's involvement with the mystical diamond can be traced back to the sole remnant of his autobiography, From W to R (From White to Red) (ca. 1936). The frontispiece shows, in addition to the central sun marked by a large number four, a prominent diamond motif (fig. 8). Marked by the letter G, it echoes Graham's name lettered next to it and associates the diamond with Graham's own person. The diamond's horizontal axis extends to the left, toward the head of the man, and to the right, toward another man's lower back, pointing at the two polar principles of mind and body that Graham wished to reunite.25

To return to Graham's Bird Watcher: as striking as her diamond eye is the fact that she is a Picassoid woman, done in a late synthetic cubist style and kin to Picasso's 1937 and 1938 female images as represented here by Seated Woman

(fig. 9). Graham applies his understand-

ing of pictorial alchemy to Picasso's

imagery of the 1930s. It seems likely that it was Graham, who, as early as 1941, helped shape Pollock's response to Girl

before a Mirror in terms of spirit-matter, evident in Magic Mirror, and who in 1942 was to stimulate Pollock's increasingly mystical and alchemical approach to Picasso's muse, evident in Moon Woman (1942) and Male and Female (1942).26

Magic Mirror (fig. 10) is also a response and a challenge to Picasso even as it begins to illuminate a path beyond him. On first view Magic Mirror offers an all-over field of shimmering, opales- cent, white paint in which scattered lines, red, black, and yellow are placed on the surface or buried in the white; variously straight or curved, their placement creates a gentle balance between stasis and movement. The only image that stands out is the winged phallus at the top of the central vertical axis. Pollock addresses this potent symbol to a Picassoid woman (the title suggests Girl before a Mirror) whose outlines shimmer just behind or beneath the field of animated paint.27

The juxtaposition, so striking once observed, of phallus and female image beneath, echoes Untitled (CR 555) (fig. 11), the drawing in which Pollock first clearly proposed the union of male and female opposites as the way to articulate the dimensions of a fuller self. In that work a strong, three-dimensionally modeled phallic entity extends a pair of hands, piteously, toward a skeletal, weakly defined female torso, flanked by a bull and a horse. In Magic Mirror the skeletal female is replaced by the image of Picasso's fertile muse, whom the winged phallus addresses not directly, but through the veil of the white paint that covers her. This constitutes Pollock's first full-scale projection of this theme onto the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. New is the assertion of the third dimension, a literalized concrete third dimension created by the layering of female image, white paint, and topmost linear definition of the winged phallus.28 Pollock would seem to equate Picasso's muse with the thick, crusty surface

56 Fall 1998



1

9 Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman

(Dora), 1938. Pen and ink, gouache, and colored chalk on paper, 76.5 x 56 cm (30 '/8 x 22 in.). Foundation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

that characterizes Girl before a Mirror and many of Picasso's late synthetic cubist paintings.

Picasso's perceptual probing of external concrete reality in analytic cubism

ultimately had led to an acute awareness of the abstract nature of lines, planes, tonal values, and finally colors, textures, and other literal material elements that go into the making of an artistic image. The Renaissance-based, still illusionistic three- dimensional pictorial space of analytic cubism, which had become increasingly

shallow during the course of early cubist

experimentation, gave way around 1912 to a radically new kind of pictorial space: an emphatically material and two- dimensional surface. On this surface Picasso chose not to push on to nonob-

jective abstraction, but instead to synthe- size abstract pictorial elements with renewed references to external reality: synthetic cubism. And after 1925 he allowed his references to external reality to be suffused with a new, surrealist-

inspired release of feelings, imagination, and eroticism. In many ways Pollock's art of the early 1940s presupposes this

heightened awareness of the abstract, material means of art, so evident in a work such as Girl before a Mirror.

Pollock proposed to animate the thick

paint of late synthetic cubism, or, in terms of his personal and artistic quest, to bring to bear his new male potency on the material aspect of Picasso's muse, by threading the movement of linear impulse through the field of thick paint. Pollock here reclaims the masculinity that at age twenty he had associated with sculpture.29 Now, almost a decade later, he asserted command of the three-dimensional materiality of paint with an explicitly male confidence. In a transposed medium, he was beginning to make good on the artistic ambitions stated earlier to his father: that he needed not merely to subdue matter "with the aid of a jack hammer," but to engage it in a kind of dialogue.

The thoughts and feelings symbolized by the winged phallus find expression in a linear impulse, those symbolized by the female muse in the material field of thick paint. To support this more abstract play of line and paint, Pollock relies on his new command of the vertical and literally three-dimensional axial structure of a canvas. In the lower half of Magic Mirror,

echoing the alignment of the phallus, thick black lines on the painting's topmost layer establish a predominant

57 American Art



10 Jackson Pollock, Magic Mirror, 1941. Oil, granular filler, and glass on canvas, 116.8 x 81.3 cm (46 x 32 in.). Menil Collection, Houston

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downward thrust on a diagonal from left to right. These lines suggest an arm and hand that grasp the grainy, sandy paint. Around a striking red dot of paint,

three-quarters the way up the central axis, a rotating pattern of red and black lines swings first down, then around, up, and to the right, where a fetal configuration

58 Fall 1998



11 Jackson Pollock, Untitled (CR 555), ca. 1939-40. Crayon and colored pencil on gray paper, 31 x 47.6 cm (12 ? x 18 3 in.). Collection of Phyllis and David Adelson, Brookline, Massachusetts

I

floats, sketched in largely yellow lines.30 In future works Pollock would be able to project his schematic orchestration of movement, not just into lines animating varying densities of paint, but into the linear pulses of poured paint. Magic Mirror is the seed of the animated

materiality and underlying structure of the poured paintings of 1947-50. While in Masqued Image and Magic Mirror Pollock offers sketchy representations of a yellow fetus, in the latter he offers far more: the fetus of his future art. "Foetus, ancestor of all forms and beasts at one and the same time, like a rosebud holds in itself threat of all potentialities dor- mant but potent."31

Because paint mattered more to Pollock than mere words or explicit symbolism, he was able to incarnate spirit in matter in a way that eluded his intellectual guru. What prevented Graham from mastering the kind of pictorial alchemy he gestured toward is shown

by his Untitled (fig. 12), an explicitly Hermetic and symbolic version of Girl

before a Mirror, radically different from

the terms of appreciation put forward in the 1937 article "Primitive Art and Picasso." If he had spoken there of the

spontaneous play of metamorphic form on the two-dimensional surface, Graham now gives the contemplating woman an

eye surrounded by a downward pointing triangle, reminiscent of the alchemical

geometry that symbolized his understand-

ing of art as an interpenetration of matter and spirit in the untitled drawing discussed above. Graham reiterates this understand-

ing in the mirror-canvas at which the woman gazes: a phallus hovers over the feminine vase. Picasso also implies such sexual association in his canvases of the 1930s. By making the androgynous puns within Picasso's images explicit, Graham once again defines art as the interpenetration of opposites projected in sexual terms, a definition that would also seem to have influenced Pollock's Magic Mirror. Pollock's winged phallus hovering at the top of the painting over the female

body is in tune with the sexual terms of Graham's Hermetic version of the Picasso canvas. And the proposal in Magic Mirror

59 American Art



12 John Graham, Untitled (Artist Sweating Blood), ca. 1942-43. Oil on canvas, 76.8 x 61 cm (29 ? x 23 1/2 in.). Private collection

to enliven a female material surface with a male linear impulse, so central to Pollock's art, is in tune with Graham's understanding of art as an interpenetration of spirit and matter.32

Graham had long-standing ideas about how this might be accomplished at an abstract level. In Untitled, we find him poised at the threshold that separates his newer convictions about the importance of symbols and his older convictions about the spiritual potential of the abstract material of paint, which linked him to the tradition in modern art of content in abstraction. Like Malevich

in his 1916 and 1919 manifestoes on

"Suprematism," in System and Dialectics

ofArt Graham had equated supreme feeling in art with abstraction. Like Kandinsky, he had believed in the soul's quest for formal embodiment in a work of art. Not only did he talk of the power of abstract art, but throughout the 1920s and 1930s attempted to practice it in his own mode of abstract painting, which he called minimalism: "Minimalism is the reducing of painting to the minimum ingredients for the sake of discovering the ultimate, logical destination of painting in the process of abstracting. Painting starts with a virgin, uniform canvas and if one works ad infinitum it reverts again to a plain uniform surface (dark in color), but enriched by process and by experiences lived through. Founder: Graham." Given his commitment to abstraction, Graham could call painting "essentially a modern art because its basic element-SPACE-was first consciously used only in the most recent times, since the Impressionists."33 He specifies, "Space has these aspects: a) extension or continu-

ity; b) plane as a specific extension, i.e., a two-dimensional extension; c) matter or a multiplied plane; d) form or matter precipitated and specified; e) volume or an optical delusion based on the phenomenon of binocularity or a sight from two

points with an arbitrary difference; f) energy or matter in discharge or liquidation." He dismisses the illusion of space, emphasizing instead the role of the subject. "Subjectively considered, form is an ability to mould space in definite and final shapes that function together in concert. Subjectively form is an ability to command, to imprison space in signifi- cant units, it is an ability to control the stream of energy in regard to

space .... Pure form in space speaks of great psychological dramas more

poignantly than psychological art can ever do." Here Graham presents an

energy-based metaphor for the role of

60 Fall 1998



13 John Graham, Studio, 1941. Oil on canvas, 61 x 76.2 cm (24 x 30 in.). Private collection oil$

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the psyche in art that Pollock by 1941 was

already beginning to realize in his increas-

ingly abstract art.34 Graham credits Picasso with such a

mastery of pictorial space, but not with a final push into the realm of pure form. In his private Journal of 1944-46, Graham wrote: "The painting-a fin- ished one-presupposes two stages: 1) first you try to brake [sic] the whole space into drastic shapes, design it evocatively, organically and this is a hard, long and strainuous [sic] process in itself (Picasso does not go beyond this stage) and 2) second, the hardest task is to forget about all you have accomplished. . . reform like a general after a battle your regiments, your forces and attack over from an

entirely different point of view or angle." The second stage would seem to be the more thoroughly abstract, the effort to

go for something more supreme, more

nonobjective. "A painting is a self- sufficient phenomenon and does not

have to rely upon nature. Artist [sic] uses nature in much the same way as aviator does-he uses flying field to start the

flight but once started he dismisses the field and can fly endlessly as long as motor holds."35

That in 1941 Graham was still pushing himself in the direction of abstraction is evident in his "Studio"series (fig. 13), which Sidney Janis illustrated in his 1944 book Abstract and Surrealist Art in America. In the accompanying statement made in 1942 Graham explains that the series "started with a realistic interior

consisting of an old armchair with a little lamb's hide thrown over its back, a green plant, a square antique mirror above the chair and secretaire to the right. Every subsequent painting of this subject became a further abstraction or summa- tion of the phenomena observed." Even as Graham writes of pure form, his forms remain, as is clear in Studio, surprisingly rooted in the external subject matter.

61 American Art



14 John Graham, Omphale, 1943. Oil and pencil on canvas 47.63 x

30.48 cm (18 3 x 12 in.). Collection of Allan Stone Gallery, New York

He is like an aviator having difficulty taking off.

By 1943 he despaired of the further evolution of form. Since Picasso "had done it all," he turned with a vengeance to symbolic Renaissance figuration. The

wounded Omphale (fig. 14) is quite characteristic. In Apotheosis (fig. 15), a late self-portrait, the heroic figure carries on his shoulders emblems of the sun and

moon; the achieved state of spiritual illumination is symbolized by the third inner eye of yoga enlightenment and shafts of light emanating from the fierce head.

Whereas Graham beat a retreat from his long standing convictions about the

power of abstraction to the domain of

symbols, Pollock maintains an allegiance to both. His embrace of the spiritual potential of paint in 1941 would seem to owe much to Graham: Graham's description of pure form as matter and space, "matter as a multiplied plane," suggests Pollock's sense of thick matter and of three-dimensional space as literally three- dimensional layers in Magic Mirror. Space as "energy or matter in discharge or

liquidation" suggests Pollock's ambition to drive linear impulse through matter- this last definition even seems to describe Pollock's future poured paintings. In

Magic Mirror, Pollock simultaneously embraces both symbolic imagery, echoing Graham's reading of Girl before a Mirror in Untitled, and expression with the purer means of line and paint.

Why does Pollock begin to succeed in enlivening the material plane on a

relatively abstract level, even as Graham found himself at an impasse? Already in

Magic Mirror Pollock had found a way of meaningfully linking the evolution of

symbols and the evolution of form by finding abstract pictorial equivalents for his symbolic images. Crucial here is the axial structure that supports both. It is

possible that it was Graham who first directed Pollock's attention to the

planimetric structure of Mondrian's works, which Graham read, not as "mere

geometrical simplifications but as ana-

logues of profound, if esoteric, emotional states." If so, there was still a decisive difference: unlike Graham, Pollock did not start his painting in response to

62 Fall 1998



15 John Graham, Apotheosis, 1955- 57. Oil, pencil, and stumping on

ivory paper, 124.7 x 90.2 cm (49 x 35 V1/2 in.). Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection

external nature; rather he was responding to his inner thoughts and feelings. For these he finds first symbolic images, then abstract equivalents, expressed in the

language of line, paint, and axial structure.36

Just because in his own art Graham finds himself stymied at the intersection

of the evolution of symbol and that of form, even as Pollock readies himself for a future dialectic of symbol and form, the former was able to recognize and respect Pollock's ambitions, to rescue him from that debilitating "crucifying sense of isolation" to which his analyst Henderson

63 American Art



referred.37 Willem de Kooning, a friend of Graham in the late 1930s, claims that Graham discovered Pollock: "Of course he did. Who the hell picked him out? The other critics came later, much later. Graham was a painter as well as a critic. It was hard for other artists to see what Pollock was doing-their work was so different from his. It's hard to see some-

thing that's different from your work. But Graham could see it."38

He would have recognized not only Pollock's symbolic mode, but also specific imagery: sun and moon, bird, woman, and phallus. And while Graham had little

respect for the psychological art of the surrealists, fulminating in his private notebooks that "Surrealism is the bank-

ruptcy of the imagination because the source of Surrealists' inspiration is not the unconscious but the conscious as intellectual deliberate mind," he honored those with a true access to the creative powers of the unconscious. Enough in Pollock's confidence in 1941 to accompany him to one of his therapy sessions with Dr.Violet de Laszlo, Graham-"the lay analyst"- later bragged to Hedda Sterne that he was more effective in helping Pollock than Pollock's professional analyst.39

But more important to Graham than the psychological and specifically psycho- therapeutic context of Pollock's quest would have been its spiritual dimension. In his notebook he wrote down this advice to young painters and poets: "Do not try to understand anything literally. Try to understand the Hermetic mean-

ings of the sayings of the great men."

Certainly Graham would not have introduced Pollock to the notions of

alchemy in 1941, but rather would have reinforced Pollock's awareness of alchemy as a figure of an artistic and spiritual quest. That such awareness must have

preceded Pollock's encounter with Graham is suggested by a WPA mural

painted by his close friend Kadish in December 1936-August 1937, with the

self-explanatory title A Dissertation on

Alchemy. The overtly alchemical symbolism of such surrealists as Masson, Ernst, and Matta cannot have come as a surprise when their work was beginning to have an impact on the New York art scene in 1942. Alchemical symbols began to

appear in Pollock's own work at this time.40 What mattered most, however, was

Graham's ability to recognize Pollock's qualities as an artist. What Graham so evocatively wrote about, Pollock was on his way to actually achieving. Thus while both created symbolic canvases such as Bird and Sun and Bird, only Pollock would translate his symbolic awareness and personal growth into an avant-garde formal expression, which emerged in

Magic Mirror as a conscious challenge to Picasso. Graham articulated, and probably abetted, the intensity of this challenge: "The desire to create is a demoniac desire to rival the first creator, the primeval father, the Sun, to challenge him desperately and in love as Satan and Prometheus did."

Graham's great respect for Pollock is indicated in a touching story related by Lee Krasner. On a windy winter's night in 1942, she and Pollock were walking Graham home to his studio. They were practically blown into a short figure in an overcoat down to his ankles whom Graham embraced and introduced as Frederick Kiesler. In turn Pollock was introduced as "the greatest painter in America." Kiesler in mock obeisance made a slow, elaborate bow to the ground, rose, and asked, "In North or South America?"'41 And another story speaks to the respect Pollock maintained for Graham, even years after their rela-

tionship had cooled in 1943: One day, sometime after Pollock's poured paintings had gained acceptance in the art world, Graham was seated outside the house of his father-in-law, Leo Castelli, when Pollock walked by. Graham assailed him

bitterly with, "I guess you're the one now,

64 Fall 1998



aren't you!" Pollock's gentle response was, "Oh, no John, you're the one."42

What then did Graham know that

Greenberg didn't? He knew that painting should be more than just an evolution of form, that content mattered, that the

painter's task was to fuse the two; but even such fusion was not enough: a modern alchemist, the painter should so unite spirit and matter that the birth of the work of art would deserve to figure the birth of a human being.

Notes

Nicholas Carone, quoted in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography ofJackson Pollock (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), p. 183.

2 For Greenberg's views on abstract art, see Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940)," The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brian, vol. 1 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 34. For Greenberg on Pollock, see Greenberg, "'American-Type' Painting (1955)," The Collected Essays, vol. 3, p. 219.

3 For Greenberg on Dubuffet, see Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock," The Collected Essays, vol. 2, p. 125. For more interdisciplinary efforts, see Stephen Polcari, "Richard Pousette- Dart: Toward the Historical Sacred," in Lowery Stokes Sims and Stephen Polcari, Richard Pousette-Dart (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), p. 61. For Polcari on the "mythic method," see Polcari, Abstract Expres- sionism and the Modern Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

4 Clement Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb," The Collected Essays, vol. 2, p. 187. In two interviews with the author, Fritz Bultman recalled a number of conversations on Pollock's view of Greenberg's position, one on "Pico della Mirandola's very elegant speech on the dignity of man," shortly after it was published in the View (December 1944). Pollock said that the ideas contained in this impressed him very much; interview with Bultman, 4 February 1982. Bultman also recalled that one of the most striking aspects of a conversation that they had about Freemasonry while at Springs-Pollock was impressed that the grocer there was

a Freemason-was the warning not to raise such matters with Greenberg; interview with Bultman, 1 February 1980. See Naifeh and Smith, p. 551, for the similar reference by Bultman.

5 On the first encounter between Graham and Pollock, see interview by Deborah Solomon in which Constance Graham recollects that Graham and Pollock met in fall 1940, in Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 264. In October 1939, Graham and his fourth wife; Constance, rented an apartment at 54 Greenwich Avenue. Nene Schardt, a next door neighbor, recalls that Pollock and Graham met soon afterward. See Naifeh and Smith, p. 346.

The contents of Graham's studio are described in Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 81. For the characterization of Graham as guru, see Kadish, interview by Ellen Landau, New York, 2 May 1979; Landau, p. 81. Robert Motherwell, too, observed that Graham was something of a guru to Pollock (author's interview, 17 January 1984) and Fritz Bultman, who met Graham in 1938, stated that he "would use the word either shaman or guru" to describe Graham's relationship to Pollock. Author's interviews, 1 February 1980 and 4 February 1982.

6 Graham's publications on the subject are System and Dialectics ofArt, ed. Marcia E. Allentuck (1937; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971); and "Primitive Art and Picasso," Magazine of Art (April 1937): 236-39, 260. On Pollock's letter to Graham, see Ellen G. Landau, "Lee Krasner's Early Career: Part One: Pushing in Different Directions," Arts Magazine (October 1981), p. 119. The issue of Magazine of Art containing the article was in Pollock's library at his death; see Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw,

eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne ofPaintings, Drawings, and Other Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) [henceforth CR], vol. 4, p. 197.

7 Pollock's quotes to Carone, all from Potter, p. 56.

8 Graham, System and Dialectics, pp. 237, 238, 273. See also Eleanor Green, John Graham: Artist andAvatar (Washington: Phillips Collection, exhibition catalogue), p. 141.

9 Graham, System and Dialectics, pp. 237, 260. See also Jonathan Weinberg, "Pollock and Picasso: The Rivalry and The 'Escape,'" Arts Magazine (June 1987): 46.

10 Francis V. O'Connor, "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock: 1912 to 1943," (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins, 1965), p. 17. See also Manuel Tolegian, quoted in Potter, p. 29.

11 For Graham on symbolic images, see System and Dialectics ofArt, p. 141. For Graham's overt mysticism, see ibid., pp. 109, 61.

12 Dating of Sun and Bird by Allan Stone of Allan Stone Gallery, New York. For shift in Graham's style ca.1939-40, exemplified by two of his paintings, Zeus (1941) and Interior (ca.1939-40), Green notes Graham's tendency to adapt his style to explore particular problems of painting with some other artist, this time Pollock; Green, pp. 52-53. Constance Graham remembers how her husband raved about Pollock's work. Bultman also stated that "Graham turned Pollock to his [Graham's] own sources"; author's interview, 1 February 1980. For Constance Graham Garner on MoMA exhibition, see interview with

65 American Art



Solomon, July 1984; Solomon, p. 102. Indian Art of the United States was exhibited at MoMA from 22 January to 27 April 1941.

13 On Graham and theosophy, see Landau, Pollock, p. 81; also Green, pp. 56-57, and Elia Kokkinen, "Ivannus Magus Domini," Art News (September 1968): 52. Graham is known to have become, by the fall of 1942, a devout practitioner of hatha yoga and of tantric yoga; see Green, pp. 54, 57 n. 2; and Landau, p. 81. Naifeh and Smith place the emergence of these esoteric interests in 1939. Naifeh and Smith, pp. 343, 346. They are present already in the frontispiece to his autobiography of ca. 1936 (see fig. 8).

14 Pierre Mabille, "Notes sur le symbolisme," Minotaure, vol. 2, no. 8 (1936): 2.

15 For Levi's influence, see Maurice Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in conjunction with Abbeville Press, New York, 1987). For more on the Great Work, see Titus Buckhardt, Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971), pp. 35, 37; Oswald Wirth, Le Symbolisme Hermetique dans ses rapports avec lAlchemie et la Franc-Maconnerie (Paris: Edition le Symbolisme, 1931), p. 85.

16 Compare dream fifty-eight in Carl Gustav Jung, The Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1939), p. 189, and Jung, Psychology andAlchemy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 201-2. This dream is one likely source for Graham's painting. For this and the following alchemical interpretation of Sun and Bird, I also draw on Wirth, pp. 11, 16; and Buckhardt, p. 88.

17 Buckhardt, pp. 76, 78. See also Wirth, p. 26.

18 For Graham's birth date, see Green, p. 133. Graham's description of his

origins is from Hayden Herrara, "John Graham: Modernist Turns Magus," Arts (October 1976): 103.

19 John D. Graham, Journal (1944-46), Archives of American Art, microfilm roll 96, p. 2.

20 On Graham's developing reputation, see Irving Sandler, "John D. Graham: The

Painter As Esthetician and Connois- seur," Artforum (October 1968): 50. For the hiatus in his painting, see Kokkinen, p. 99. I date the untitled drawing ca. 1939 because Graham writes his Brooklyn address on the drawing. By October 1939 he had moved to 54 Greenwich Avenue. See Green, p. 142; and Naifeh and Smith, p. 346. For the alchemical interpretation of the drawing, I draw on Wirth, pp. 9-11, 31, 36, 64.

21 Buckhardt, p. 70; also Dorothy Dehner, quoted in Herrera, p. 104.

22 Krasner stated that Pollock also read Transition in the late 1930s; author interview with Krasner, 2 May 1975.

23 Eugene Jolas, "Workshop," Transition: An Intercontinental Workshop for Verticalist Transmutation 23 (July 1935): 98.

24 Eugene Jolas, Vertical: A Yearbook for Romantic-Mystic Ascensions (New York: Gotham Bookmart Press, 1941), p. 13.

25 For further discussion of Bird, Naked Man, and Birth, see "Pollock, Picasso, and the Primitive," Art History (March 1989): 66-92. I focus here on Magic Mirror (1941) because it bears more directly on the topic of alchemy. See Jung, Psychology andAlchemy, pp. 329- 330, for more on the Great Work.

Graham's appreciation of the diamond as the symbol for the union of opposites, especially body-mind, is clear in his notebooks, where he describes himself in terms of the diamond: "This life on the sharp facet (of the diamond) is result of a dislocation, discrepancy between the body too young for my years and the mind (soul and intellect) too old for my age" (Journal, frame 213). See Landau, Pollock, p. 8.1; and Kurt Seligmann, Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, Universal Library, 1968), pp. 472-74. Since Graham was reading Jung in 1936, one likely source for the diamond imagery is Jung's "Commentary" in The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book ofLife, ed. Richard Wilhelm (London: 1931; reprinted New York: Causeway Books, 1975); see especially pp. 95, 123, 131. This book, which Pollock also encountered in his Jungian analysis (as reported by Henderson, in Naifeh and Smith, p. 333), is an ancient treatise on Chinese mystical alchemy and Taoist yoga. The diamond symbol is also pervasive in tantric yoga. See Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series LVI, 1958), pp. 204, 206, 227. For more of Graham's diamond imagery, especially as con- nected to tantric yoga, see To Pay (ca. 1944) in the Graham papers in the Archives of American Art, illustrated in Green, p. 61.

26 Picasso's Seated Woman (27 April 1938; see fig. 9) and his untitled drawing (Mougins, 5 August 1938) were illustrated in Cahiers dArt, vol. 13, nos. 3-10 (1938); the former was also exhibited in Alfred H. Barr, ed., Picasso: Forty Years of His Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939), listed as entry no. 350, and owned by Mrs. Meric Callery of New York City. Birdwatcher also bears comparison with Weeping Woman (26 October 1937).

It would seem probable that Picasso himself was referring to these traditions when he painted women with three eyes or diamond eyes or hats under diamond suns. For Pollock's approach to Picasso, see my "Jackson Pollock's Moon Woman Cuts the Circle," Arts (March 1979): 131-34; and "More on Rubin on Pollock," Art in America (October 1980): 62-63.

27 Walter Hopps, in "The Magic Mirror by Jackson Pollock," The Menil Collection: A Selection from the Paleolithic to the Modern Era (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987), sees what I have called a flying phallus as a "putative head form" (pp. 260-61). In support of my interpretation, I call attention to the flying phallus in CR 537r (ca. 1939-40) and to CR 956 (ca. 1942). This symbol of spiritualized instinct is the culmina- tion of the evolution of the snake-bird imagery in Bird, Birth, and Naked Man. See also the discussion below of Graham's use of this motif.

The reference to Girl before a Mirror is noted by Hopps; ibid. Landau resists the importance of Girl before a Mirror, pointing instead to the possible influence of Picasso's Woman in an Armchair (1929); Landau, Pollock, p. 69. I grant this possibility. What matters to my argument is the presence of a Picassoid woman in the canvas.

28 For a discussion of CR 555 by Pollock's

Jungian analyst, see Joseph L. Henderson, Thresholds of Initiation (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan Univer- sity Press, 1967), pp. 110-11. The anonymous patient of the text, as

66 Fall 1998



Henderson has acknowledged to the author, is Pollock.

The conservation of Magic Mirror revealed information about its dimen- sionality; Hopps notes that the canvas was cut from a prior painting, then remounted on another stretched and painted canvas of slightly larger dimensions. It is covered with a skin of variously thick and crusty paint mixed with a granular filler, possibly fine gravel. There are three distinct strata of painting activity effectively masking the original composition. "The Magic Mirror, "p. 259. Hopps sees the work as a self-portrait undergoing "subjective, psychic transformation." Ibid., p. 261.

29 In February 1932, Jackson wrote his father, "Sculptoring I think tho is my medium. I'll never be satisfied until I'm able to mould a mountain of stone, with the aid of a jack hammer, to fit my will"; CR, vol. 4, doc. 12, p. 212. In the fall of 1930 and in the spring and summer of 1933, Pollock studied sculpture. See CR, vol. 4, pp. 209, 214, 217.

30 This fetal configuration echoes the volute shape, also with yellow colora- tion, found in the upper right hand corner of Masqued Image, similar to the fetus illustrated in Pollock's library copy of Charles Darwin's The Descent ofMan; it also recalls the girl's reflected face in Girl before a Mirror. Pollock's long fascination with fetal imagery is evident in the skeletal fetus in CR 477r (ca. 1938-39), the flaming fetus in CR 925 (ca. 1939), the central fetus in CR 595 (ca. 1939-42), and the fetal plumed serpent imagery of Bird and Birth.

31 Thus Graham appreciates the fetal forms found in the art of primitive man and of Picasso; Graham, System and Dialectics, p. 130.

32 Similar concerns, though with sugges- tively different gendered associations, are expressed by Lee Krasner, whom Pollock met in late 1941 and married in 1945, in describing her "Little Image" paintings of the late 1940s: "I merge what I call the organic with what I call the abstract, which is what you are

calling the geometric. As I see both

scales, I need to merge these two into the ever-present.... You might want to read it as matter and spirit and the need to merge as against the need to separate. Or it can be read as male and female." Interview by Cindy Nemser, in Nemser, Art Talk (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1975), p. 90.

33 See Graham, System and Dialectics, pp. 5-6, 115-16, 161, 179, 132.

34 To elucidate Pollock's attraction to an energic model of the unconscious, Leja discusses a book found in Pollock's library, Harvey Fergusson, Modemrn Man: His Beliefand Behaviour (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), comparing Ferguson's model with energic meta- phors in both Freudian and Jungian depth psychologies, Bergson's vitalism, and Eastern mysticisms; pp. 185-91. Graham, System and Dialectics, p. 116. However, Graham is perhaps the most important source for Pollock's growing pictorial exploration of the flow of energy in space.

35 Graham described the stages of painting in his Journal, frame 183. For the artist's use of nature, see Graham, System and Dialectics, p. 119.

36 In an interview with the author, Bultman distinguished between artists working from the external motif and inner images, noting that "Pollock was coming... only from inside." He was not the only one, "Some of the Surrealists had it, Miro, Paalen, .. Dali.... All of that was in the air. Graham sorted it out for people." He also referred to Pollock's explicit challenge to Mondrian. "With the balance [of polarities], he was not challenging Picasso so much as Mondrian-because it's a plastic challenge," using automatism to break the static surface and its rectangles. "He felt that through the image we could break through to something new

.... The image is the place to start and then you go on from there and you break with representation, because even

though Mondrian was totally abstract, he had come from the representational world." Pollock wanted to come from "the world of the shaman, the dream

image." Bultman was aware of this at least by 1943. Graham would have interested Pollock "in magic, and he [Pollock] would naturally have associated it with the magic that he knew." Referring to Pollock's use of imagery, he stated that "There's a story. It's totally integrated pictorially, however, in Pollock." Interview with Bultman, 1 February 1980.

37 Henderson, "A Psychological Commen- tary," in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 43.

38 James T. Valliere, "De Kooning on Pollock," Partisan Review 34 (fall 1967): 603.

39 Graham, Journal, frame 190. To further explore Pollock's work in analysis, see Gordon, p. 51 n. 14; and Green, pp. 47, 52. Bultman recalled that Pollock was aware not only of the magic implications of alchemy, but also of "the psychological implication of alchemy as growth"; author, interview with Bultman, 1 February 1980. Alchemy is the central metaphor used by Jung for the psychological process of individuation in The Integration of the Personality. This was the topic of M. Esther Harding's "Redemption Ideas in Alchemy," one of ten titles appearing on a list in Pollock's own handwriting dating from ca. 1940- 41 found among his papers. See Leja, p. 151.

40 For Graham's advice, see Journal, frame 202. Bultman, who remembers meeting Pollock in late 1941 around the time of Pearl Harbor, recalls a long discussion with Pollock about alchemy and magic in reference to a particular painting, the image of a woman, the title of which he recalled as being either The Queen ofHearts or The Queen ofDiamonds, a painting hanging on the wall of Pollock's Eighth Street studio and which he said had since disappeared. Author interview with Bultman, 1 February 1980; see also Graham, System and Dialectics, p. 98.

41 Barbara Rose, "Arshile Gorky and John Graham: Eastern Exiles in a Western World," Arts (March 1976): 70 n. 3.

42 Ibid.

67 American Art



The Magus and the Alchemist: John Graham and Jackson Pollock

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