The painting is by Jackson Pollock. Its title is the she-wolf. 1943.
If you lay your eyes on the painting just for a glimpse, it is highly improbable that you ignore it. This is a fact. Regardless of whether you like this painting style (I don’t like this painting style) or the art of painting at all. This is bizarre because a glimpse does not give you enough time for hardly conceptualising the animal’s figure. Still. There is something that will make you take another look at the painting, something that simply attracts you.
The she-wolf is involved in the myth of Romulus and Remus, Rome’s twin founders. When they were exposed to die, a she-wolf found them and suckled them. There are many variations to the story of course. But this is the exact reason that it is a myth. The similarity of the figure embodied in the painting with one of the two bronze she wolves is apparent [see here]; thus Pollock’s source of inspiration and driving force without a doubt.
If it is true that every artist struggles in order to find his/her own style, mode of expression, signature or inspiration, then Jackson Pollock tortured himself. Fighting like a wolf in captivity (a ‘he-wolf’?). His main concern though was not what to represent but the means to do it. The period of which he became well-known is the later one, with his pour paintings, when he was painting without touching the canvas. He dribbled the paint on the canvas with a brush or even poured it straight out of the can. He painted in the air, in a three-dimensional space. Although his painting styles differ significantly, they form a continuum. On this continuum, however, the she-wolf is a breaking point laying the ground for his subsequent well-known period.
What I find fascinating in this painting is the fact that (one of) Pollock’s strongest struggle(s) about how to convey his meanings was driven by the myth of the she-wolf. The myth itself as a notion concerns our ways of conveying meanings, stories and narratives. It is the vehicle for carrying along through time and transforming in space stories. It’s like a spaceship, a social constructions’ spaceship. Truth and lie inseparable in the form of siamese twins; travelling from mouth to mouth, evolving from generation to generation; found since ancient times to nowadays. This is also the myth in Herman Hesse's work. The notion of transformation in Klein and Wagner, the struggle in Narcissus and Goldmund and the symbolic figure of the wolf (again) in the Steppenwolf. The myth as embodied in the prehistoric cave’s paintings representing the bison (if you read Pollock’s painting from your right to the left, you will see a bison sharing the same body with the she-wolf). Primitive imageries made by our wild prototype way back in time. The wild prototype of Darwin which continuously evolves in time and space through the varying patterns, agencies and features. Pollock unfolded his evolution same way. His search for the means to express himself found its way on the surface of his canvas through the medium of the archetypical means in human history to convey meanings, through the myth. There you go: the absolute indivisibility of technique and statement, of method and message. The she-wolf as the symbolic prototype of the notion of myth acting both as a driving, seducing force for Pollock and at the same time as a signifier of his own struggle to express himself.
When he was asked to explain his painting he replied:
She-wolf came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt an explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.
Other people have described the she-wolf as ‘raw, uncivilised intensity’. This is what the painting captures in a unique way. This is why it attracts you (and maybe scares you at the same time). And this is the closest we can get to the fundamental structure of the myth: by qualifying it as uncivilised. But fear not. Someone will read you a bed time story by the Just So Stories that Kipling wrote for his children. Maybe the one about ‘How the Leopard got his spots’?
PS Although symbolic representation through animals (bison, bull, horse) is a recurrent pattern in his paintings, Pollock did not engage ever again with the (she-)wolf. He died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related accident. He never stopped struggling for the means to express himself. Somehow though the paints and the (so diverse) painting styles always fell short of what he wanted to paint.
PPS The she-wolf is kept imprisoned till nowadays at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
