Guardians of the Secret

Guardians of the Secret

V. Arkalovich, A. TarasovaMFL-41

Author: Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)

Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter, and the leading force behind the abstract expressionist movement in the art world. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. Jackson Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.

Guardians of the Secret (1943)

As a child in America's west, Wyoming, he had watched Indian rituals and this seemed to play a role in his artistic development. He had been inspired spiritually as well as artistically and it is thought that he turned to drip painting as Indians do sand paintings in a customary healing procedure in an effort to right his ways. Although Pollock was not known for cubism, ‘Guardians of The Secret’ has elements that suggest the symmetrical styling of that genre, combined with the imagery resembling that of prehistoric, African and Native American female and male figures that are barely recognisable due to the highly abstracted artwork, the painting has a sense of majesty. The carefree qualities, striking symbolic occurrences, violent curlicues twirling brightly above the central rectangle give Guardians of The Secret its unique qualities.

Oil Paint

Abstract expressionism

is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the Western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.

Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches—and in doing so, attempted to tap into universal inner sources. These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process. Their work resists stylistic categorization, but it can be clustered around two basic inclinations: an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture, in contrast to a reflective, cerebral focus on more open fields of color. In either case, the imagery was primarily abstract. Even when depicting images based on visual realities, the Abstract Expressionists favored a highly abstracted mode.

Acrobat with a Paint Brush by Willem de Kooning

Black and White (Number 6), 1951

Number 34, 1949

Number 3, 1952

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