It All Began with Jackson Pollock’s Mural for Peggy Guggenheim’s Townhouse

If you’re a patron of my website, you probably know something about me, and you might know that I was an English professor in a past life. One of the classes I taught was an introduction to the Beat Generation literature class. Throughout my research and studies, I began to see Jack Kerouac’s (author of On the Road) name linked together with Cedar Bar encounters (in Greenwich Village) with the name of Jackson Pollock – at times friendly…at other times not so friendly – and always with alcohol involved! Both men, sadly, worked for years in obscurity, and, when fame finally arrived on their doorstep, they were inadequately prepared to deal with it…to put it mildly.

But, let’s go back to Jackson Pollock. When I began to see his name cropping up more and more in association with the authors I already respected, I decided I needed to learn more about this artist that seemed to turn the art world on its tail beginning in the late 1940s. I began with the Oscar-winning movie Pollock starring Ed Harris as the titular character and director and Marcia Gay-Harden as the Best Supporting Actress winner as his wife, Lee Krassner. You can go to Wikipedia to see the basics about Jackson Pollock and Peggy Guggenheim, but when Peggy Guggenheim offered Jackson Pollock a monthly stipend, part of that stipend included painting an 8’ x 19’ 10” mural for Peggy Guggenheim’s townhouse in New York City. This work was before the drip paintings that would put him on the art world map – basically no drips to be found in Mural. The portrayal in the movie of how the actual work was completed isn’t entirely accurate (oil paint doesn’t dry overnight), but it makes for a good scene, and you can see the finished product. It astounded me. I had never seen painting like that; it was painting that seemed to break all the rules like the Beats seemed to break all the rules in literature.

Through further research, I learned that this work was proverbially in my neighborhood – at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, IA! When Peggy Guggenheim decided to return to Europe, she gifted Mural to the University of Iowa’s Art Department; at the time, they were at the vanguard for appreciating so-called modern art. Again, Google and/or Wikipedia can fill in the details of the association and how the Figge ended up with Mural. So, I made the road trip west on I-74 across half of Indiana, all of Illinois, and to the banks of the Mississippi River in the Quad Cities to see it. Seeing Mural in person absolutely took my breath away – not only for its immense size but for the colors, the patterns, the seemingly never-ending flow of it.

Mural was recently restored by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and I cannot recommend more this documentary on YouTube about how the work was created, the restoration process, and its recent world tour.

Mural is now back home in Iowa City. The University of Iowa’s museum will re-open in September 2022, and you can absolutely guarantee that I WILL be making another road trip across the Mississippi to see this great work of art that is now the blueprint for Abstract Expressionism. I CAN’T WAIT!!!