Guardians of the Secret

Guardians of the Secret is a large early painting by Jackson Pollock, made in New York in 1943, four years before his first drip paintings. It appeared in his first solo exhibition, at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery Art of This Century in November 1943, and was bought by the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) in 1945, making it one of the first Pollocks to enter a museum.

What you are looking at

The canvas, 122.9 by 191.5 centimeters, is organized around a pale rectangle in the center, filled with a dense scribble of black, yellow, red and blue marks, some like letters or numbers, some like stick figures, fish or arrows. It looks like a tablet, a table top or a chest whose contents we cannot read.

On either side stand two tall, vertical figures painted in dark blues, blacks, yellows and white. They are the "guardians" of the title: stiff, totem-like presences with mask-like heads, set like sentinels at the edges of the secret. Along the bottom, below the central panel, lies an animal, usually read as a dog or wolf, its head turned toward the right, its body made of white and black slashes. The top band is crowded with smaller signs: masks, an eye, a fish shape and a flaring red form.

The paint is thick and urgent, with drips and spatters already appearing among the brushstrokes.

Sources and meaning

Pollock never explained the painting, but historians point to several sources. Between 1939 and 1941 he was in Jungian psychoanalysis, and his drawings from those sessions are full of archetypal figures; the idea of guardians protecting a hidden content echoes Jung's ideas about the unconscious. He also admired Picasso and the Surrealists, whose automatic drawing he adapted.

Native American art was another source. Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, and grew up in Arizona and California, and in 1941 he visited the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of Native American art, where Navajo artists demonstrated sand painting. The historian W. Jackson Rushing has argued that this ritual practice, in which an image is made on the ground as part of a healing ceremony, shaped Pollock's later decision to paint on canvas laid on the floor. Such readings are interpretations, not statements by the artist.

Why it matters

The painting sits at the hinge of Pollock's career: still built around figures and symbols, but already moving toward the all-over field of marks that fills the central panel. A few years later, that field would take over the whole canvas, as in Number 1 (Lavender Mist).

Where to see it

Guardians of the Secret is in the collection of SFMOMA, San Francisco. See also Pollock's The Deep and his page as Jackson Pollock.