SFMOMA, Part 6: Guardians of the Secret.
In SFMOMA's collection — not on view at the moment — is a wide, dark canvas, four feet high and more than six feet across. At its center sits a pale rectangular slab, covered edge to edge in looping black marks like writing in a language no one speaks. It is flanked at the far left and far right by two tall standing figures: one white, skull-headed and skeletal, built out of bone-colored strokes; the other robed in dark blue and black, masked, as solid as a column. Along the bottom lies a prone animal with pointed ears and a single visible eye, its body stretched toward the dark figure. Above the slab, a row of symbols floats on deep blue — a white shield, a black curve like a scarab, a burst of red like a rooster, a pale sun ringed in yellow. The surface everywhere is worked and reworked, scraped down and built back up. In the lower right corner, in dark red paint: Jackson Pollock.
This is Guardians of the Secret, painted in oil on canvas in the summer of 1943. It measures 48 3/8 × 75 3/8 inches. SFMOMA acquired it in 1945 and owns it outright. It is the Pollock before the Pollock — four years before the drip paintings that made him the most famous American artist of the century, and the reason San Francisco saw him before almost anyone else did.
The easy reading is code-breaking: match each symbol to a myth, decode the slab, solve the painting. The wall text all but invites it — Jung, the unconscious, archetypes, totems. But the subject is not the code. The subject is the guarding itself: two figures posted at the edges of something that cannot be said, only circled. Pollock did not paint the contents of the unconscious. He painted the feeling of standing outside it, asking to be let in. He never explained what the secret was. Nobody else has, either.
1939: The analyst
A few years before he painted it, Pollock started seeing a psychoanalyst — a Jungian, Dr. Joseph Henderson. He was drawn to Jung's map of the mind: beneath the personal unconscious sits a deeper stratum, the collective unconscious, stocked with images every human carries. Jung called them archetypes — the mother, the shadow, the wise old man, the animal guide. Pollock believed his dreams were dispatches from that layer, and that a painting made honestly could be one too. He brought dream drawings to his sessions. Henderson kept some of them.
This was not eccentric in 1940s New York; it was the weather. Psychoanalysis had quietly replaced Marxism as the intelligentsia's master theory — the painters of the New York School and the poets around them all talked about the unconscious the way a previous generation had talked about the working class. What was unusual was how literally Pollock took the prescription. He did not illustrate Jung's ideas. He tried to paint the way Jung said the mind actually works: in symbols that arrive uninvited, before the censor wakes up.
The Surrealists had a name for the technique — automatism — and a whole doctrine to go with it. Pollock took the technique and left most of the doctrine behind. His unconscious was not Parisian and literary. It was American and mythic: totem poles, sandpaintings, cave walls. The guardians in this painting have documented ancestors — the frontal, staring figures of Northwest Coast totem poles, which stand as intermediaries to ward off strangers, and the guardian figures of Navajo sandpaintings, which do the same work in a healing ritual. Pollock had studied both. He was not borrowing decoration. He was borrowing their job description.
1943: The year
1943 was the hinge of Pollock's life. That year, Peggy Guggenheim — the collector who had already decided he was her great discovery — gave the thirty-one-year-old his first solo show at her New York gallery, Art of This Century. Piet Mondrian, the old master of the grid, walked in and was stopped cold by a painting called Stenographic Figure. Nothing in American painting had prepared anyone for what was coming, least of all Pollock's own earlier work: regionalist scenes learned at Thomas Hart Benton's knee at the Art Students League, WPA murals painted for the Federal Art Project, careful student Picassos.
Guardians of the Secret was painted that summer, in the white heat of this turn. Read it as a ledger of debts being settled. The two flanking sentinels come from the totem poles and the sandpaintings. The slab's unreadable script comes from no alphabet at all; it is writing as pure gesture, meaning as pure rhythm. And everywhere, the things he was finished with: a curve out of Miró here, a mask out of Picasso there, a hunk of Orozco's monumentality, a lick of El Greco's flame, the earth tones of the Native American art he had been studying for a decade. The paintings of 1942 and 1943 read like chapters of an exorcism — Moon Woman, Male and Female, The She-Wolf — and Guardians of the Secret is the most architectural of them, the one where the symbols hold still long enough to need guarding.
1943–1945: Two women
The painting's second history belongs to two women who had barely met the painter. In 1943, the year of Pollock's first New York show, Peggy Guggenheim began an extraordinary correspondence with Grace McCann Morley — the founding director of the San Francisco Museum of Art, as SFMOMA was then called. Morley had the same hunter's instinct Guggenheim had. In September 1943 Guggenheim wrote to her about the new painter she had discovered. A month later Morley wrote back: she was glad to know of him, and "perhaps something can be done about having an exhibition here next summer."
Morley then did something no one else in American museum life was doing. She wrote to the directors of every major West Coast museum — Seattle, Portland, Santa Barbara, Pasadena, Los Angeles — urging them to take a solo exhibition of this unknown abstract painter. She told them Pollock was "an important new personality whose work deserves to be better known," and that she had seen a considerable group of the work in the East and found the quality fine. Not one of them said yes. In January 1945 she reported back to Guggenheim: "I suspect we shall not find many takers for it out here. It is a little beyond most of the museums." San Francisco would have to go it alone.
1945: San Francisco
The show opened at the Arts Club of Chicago in March 1945 and came to San Francisco that August — the first museum exhibition of Jackson Pollock's work ever held, anywhere. It was essentially the company Guggenheim had shown in 1943: Stenographic Figure, the painting that had stopped Mondrian; two untitled abstractions from 1943, already sloshing paint around with a freedom that reads now as prophecy; Pasiphaë, where the old internal geometries are visibly coming apart; and the two paintings closest to Guardians of the Secret in gesture and color, The Magic Mirror (1941) and Male and Female (1942–43), with its own central white plane ringed by gestural brushwork.
And San Francisco — which had wanted none of it at the institutional level — understood it at once. The Chronicle's critic Alfred Frankenstein wrote the single best review of Pollock's young career: "The flare and spatter and fury of [Pollock's] paintings are emotional rather than formal, and like the best jazz one feels it is the result of inspired improvisation rather than careful planning." Morley forwarded it to Guggenheim, who answered that the Chicago notices had been "so notably stupid" she was doubly pleased — as was Pollock himself, who called it "an intelligent and sensitive appraisal of the paintings he had sent."
Then Morley closed the deal she had been working toward for two years. Early in the correspondence she had confessed which painting she wanted: Guardians of the Secret. "It is a powerful and fine painting. However, our funds are very small.... Unhappily the price of a Pollock painting" — Guggenheim was asking $750 — "is already considerably out of our reach." What followed was what Morley later called a "considerable struggle" with her own acquisitions committee, and a negotiation that brought Guggenheim down to $500, paid out of the Albert M. Bender Bequest Fund. The fund's namesake was the same Albert Bender who had spent four years maneuvering Diego Rivera's visa through Washington, asked him for The Flower Carrier in 1935 — and, that same year, donated a set of David Park's biblical prints to the brand-new museum. In 1935 Bender had given the young museum its Rivera. Ten years later, his money gave it its Pollock.
Guggenheim's handwritten reply to the news: "I am so happy you bought the Pollock. He will be delighted too. It is a great joy to me to have him recognized as you can imagine. I feel he is my one great discovery. My baby—..."
1947–1950: After
What happened next is the famous part, and it makes Guardians of the Secret look like a message in a bottle from a man about to disappear into his own method. Beginning in 1947, Pollock laid his canvases on the studio floor and stopped painting figures entirely — no guardians, no dogs, no slabs, no symbols with names. He poured and dripped liquid house paint straight from the can, with sticks and hardened brushes, walking around all four sides of the canvas, his whole body in the work, in what one critic called a frenetic dancing style. He could see the painting from every angle because he was inside it. The symbols did not vanish; they dissolved into the field. Everything the two guardians had been standing around became the entire painting.
The anni mirabiles, the wonderful years: Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950, Blue Poles. The most famous American paintings of the century, and not one readable image in any of them. It is tempting to see the drip paintings as the opposite of Guardians of the Secret. They are its completion — the secret finally unguarded, because there is nothing left to guard but the act itself.
He died in 1956, at forty-four, in a car crash on Long Island.
Guardians of the Secret is the last Pollock that still believes a painting can keep one. Two figures, posted at the edges of the unsayable, doing their job. The secret stayed secret. San Francisco kept the painting. 🌁
Timeline — Pollock and Guardians of the Secret
1912 — Paul Jackson Pollock born in Cody, Wyoming, January 28
1930 — moves to New York; studies under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League
1938–1942 — paints for the WPA Federal Art Project
1939 — begins Jungian analysis with Dr. Joseph Henderson
1942 — meets Lee Krasner
1943 — first solo show at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century, New York; paints Guardians of the Secret in the summer; correspondence between Guggenheim and Grace McCann Morley begins
1945 — marries Lee Krasner; "Jackson Pollock" at the Arts Club of Chicago (March), then the San Francisco Museum of Art (August) — the first museum exhibition of his work; Alfred Frankenstein's review in the San Francisco Chronicle; Morley buys Guardians of the Secret for $500, paid from the Albert M. Bender Bequest Fund
1947–1950 — the drip years: Lavender Mist, Autumn Rhythm, Blue Poles
1956 — dies August 11 in a car crash on Long Island, age 44