In 1941, Jackson Pollock visited a MOMA show on Indian Art of the United States. Curated by Rene d’Harnoncourt, this show employed a full-scale re-creation of a wall of Southwestern pictographs, shop window-type arrangements of contemporary fashion designs featuring Indian handiwork, and live demonstrations by Native American sand painters, dancers and silversmiths. The sand painters created an image on the ground by ‘painting’ with colored sands dropped from their fists.
Certainly the forms of Native American art and visual culture were brought into New York school paintings – the nested symbols, zoomorphic (animal-inspired) forms-within-forms, the bold earth colors. But possibly even more important to these painters seeking an authentic American art was the position of the shaman as a healer in society.
Lee Krasner (above: sun woman II, 1957), a painter and Pollock’s wife, been a student of Hans Hofmann. She poured her energy and intelligence into furthering Pollock’s efforts.
Hofmann’s experiments remained merely exercises in abstracting form from motif (Hans Hofmann, Spring, 1940), always subscript to a system he called “push & pull” (Hans Hofmann, Push and Pull, 1950), his “signature style.” (Hans Hofmann, Cathedral, 1959 )
When I paint, I paint under the dictate of feeling or sensing, and the outcome all the time is supposed to say something. And that is most often my sense of nature. . . it might suggest landscape and might only suggest certain moods, and so on but this must be expressed in pictorial means, according to the inner laws of these means. Only this is acceptable as art.
–hans hoffman
In reply to a query from Hofmann as to why he did not work more from nature, Pollock is said to have replied, “I am nature.”
