The Myth of the Mural

Jackson Pollock’s Mural has been mythicized in the art world. Two legends stand out.
The first is how the painting was created in a way echoing Handel’s writing of Messiah: Pollock
locked himself in his apartment for a week. His wife “recalled” Pollock struggling to find ideas
until inspiration struck him the night before the due date. He then painted Mural in a mere fifteen
hours. The second myth was that Mural was too large to fit onto the apartment wall of Peggy
Guggenheim, his patron who commissioned the painting. Eight inches from the sides of the work
were “removed” to make it fit (Menand).
Why do such legends exist? At least in part, it is because the piece also has a
near-legendary status in Pollock’s career as well as in art history.
Created in 1943, Mural features a colorful array of curves and spirals. Each color seems
to come alive in different ways. Narrow, thin smears of red pepper the surface of the painting. A
tangy orange is subtly laid in a wider assortment of shapes. It is most prominently seen in one of
the painting’s knobbed clusters in the upper left. Bright yellow splashes onto the canvas, with its
pools becoming increasingly vast as one moves their eyes to the top of the mural. Extremely
minute hints of azure pop out from different parts of the canvas.
Moving on from the warmly colored spots interspersed in the painting, one discovers that
its grander curves and strokes are reserved for generally cooler colors. From top to bottom, one
sees streaks of teal crawling like vines on one hand and slightly curled lines of navy blue gently
traveling like a calm breeze on the other. Most importantly, Menand notes that black, thick
streaks serve as scaffolds for its other lines and swirls. Critics also highlight how massive it is:
20 feet long and 8 feet wide (Brothers). All this is on a seemingly blank canvas. But looking
closely, one observes that white paint saturates the gaps left in the work, fusing with the colors
underneath and around it. The final effect is a towering, energized behemoth. Onlookers may
find aesthetic appeal in the work, stemming from its free yet almost regular use of undulating
lines, parallel to patterns in older carpets and tapestries.
This is not to say the designs of ancient textiles influenced Pollock. Surveying Mural’s
context reveals other influences. In his formative years as an artist, Pollock was trained to create
landscapes of the American West under Thomas Hart Benton (Brothers). Such scenes would
have been familiar due to his upbringing in Wyoming. These helped shape the creation of Mural
with its origins found in the image of a stampede of animals in the Wild West (Naifeh and Smith
468-472). Surrealism also shaped Pollock’s style, also marked by a fascination with mental
realities. Other influences include Pablo Picasso, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente
Orozco. The latter two’s works were characterized by “violent expressionism” (Hunter 218),
which may explain Mural’s intensity. As for Picasso’s impact, one can trace it in Pollock’s use of
abstracted real-life figures and bleaker tones in Mural and some of his earlier works like Mask
(The Museum of Modern Art).
The context of Mural also points to Pollock’s other works. Some trends emerge. Firstly,
titles were unimportant to Pollock. Before he used numbers to title his later works, he would ask
friends or relatives to propose titles for him (Naifeh and Smith 454). Thus, one should not search
for deeper meaning in the title “Mural.”
Another trend in Pollock’s work is that as his career progressed, the forms in his works
became less and less distinct from each other. He later settled on a style without a trace of
composition or distinct form. (Kaprow 3-5). Observers should therefore not overexert themselves
in trying to distinguish animals and other objects in Mural.
There is a significant consequence of this aspect of Mural. Finding separate figures that
function as symbolic icons in the final painting is impossible. Rather, one must look at the piece
as a whole and how it was made.
The painting itself symbolizes his transition from cubist-surrealism to abstract
expressionism. And if the embellished story is true, he started painting Mural with outlines of
animals in the previously mentioned stampede. As he continued painting, new images came to
mind and superimposed on the original one. The result was a heavily abstract depiction of that
image in his mind. In this story, the outlines of animals represent the style he left behind. He
began to display a unique brand of abstract figuration, representing in its own right his intense
emotions, unfortunately only quenched by an alcohol addiction (Naifeh and Smith 468-470).
Reconciling these emotions to his interest in pure abstraction is said to be among this
work’s core values. Previously, only representations of real objects could elicit such fervor
(Naifeh and Smith 458). Bridging such a gap makes Mural sit on the edge between external
realities and internal worlds. This contributes to one of the painting’s greatest strengths: its
appeal to a larger audience. Even some who personally do not find 20th-century art attractive can
be struck by the work’s tasteful patterning and eerie resemblance to something possibly real.
 Perhaps Mural also sprung from gratitude towards his patron. After all, she
commissioned the painting for display in her own apartment (Brothers). One could imagine a
grateful Pollock investing in this artwork an extra dose of effort or creativity, which would result
in Mural being one of the notable artworks of the Western tradition.
It is important at this point to note that she was unusually generous to Pollock. Almost no
one at the time provided an artist a monthly stipend and access to an art show (Naifeh and Smith
451). Such support was the launching pad for Pollock’s eventual rise to fame.
To this day, he remains an important figure in art history. This year, international police
forces uncovered a smuggled, unknown Pollock valued at up to $54,000,000 (Charlish and
Wlodarczak-Semczuk). In just the past decade, Mural itself underwent careful restoration (Getty
Conservation Institute). Such shows that it and other works of Jackson Pollock will continue to
stand as preserved, vital pieces of art history for years to come.
 Works Cited
Brothers, Cammy. “On The Road to Abstraction.” The Wall Street Journal, 20 Nov. 2020,
www.wsj.com/articles/on-the-road-to-abstraction-11605892888.
Charlish, Alan, and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk. “Unknown Pollock Painting Found in Bulgaria
Police Raid.” Reuters, edited by Andrew Heavens, 22 Mar. 2023,
www.reuters.com/lifestyle/unknown-pollock-painting-found-bulgaria-police-raid-2023-0
3-22.
Getty Conservation Institute. “Exploring and Conserving Jackson Pollock’s ‘Mural.’” YouTube, 9
Dec. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWAbVpkV0jQ.
Hunter, Sam. “Pollock, Jackson.” Collier’s Encyclopedia, 17th ed., vol. 19, Macmillan
Educational Company, 1985.
Kaprow, Allan. “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958).” Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life,
University of California Press, 2003, pp. 1–9.
https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520930841-005.
Menand, Louis. “A Clear Look at Jackson Pollock’s Breakthrough Painting, ‘Mural.’” The New
Yorker, 29 July 2019,
www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-clear-look-at-jackson-pollocks-breakthr
ough-painting-mural.
Naifeh, Steven, and Gregory White Smith. Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. Clarkson N.
Potter, Inc., 1989.
The Museum of Modern Art. “Jackson Pollock. Mask. 1941.” The Museum of Modern Art,
www.moma.org/collection/works/79683. Accessed 21 Apr. 2023.