What's In A Name?

Catching up on magazine reading this weekend I came across an excellent little piece on Jackson Pollack and a potential new discovery in Smithsonian Magazine. It argues that in one very special piece of art commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim herself, Jackson Pollack decided to sign his name in large letters throughout the canvas. The author of the article, Henry Adams, admits that it was his wife who first saw it over breakfast one day. Adams describes their “aha” moment below:

“I was researching a book about Pollock's lifelong relationship with his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, the famed regionalist and muralist, when I sat puzzling over a reproduction of Mural after breakfast one morning with Marianne, herself an art historian. She suddenly said she could make out the letters S-O-N in blackish paint in the upper right area of the mural. Then she realized JACKSON ran across the entire top. And finally she saw POLLOCK below that.”

He goes on to write an explanation of why this could be the case and I’ve pasted in their justification for this hidden signature below the original mural. (See the full article http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Decoding-Jackson-Pollock.html). This has created quite a stir in the Smithsonian readership community, both online and now in the December issue of the magazine with most readers asking why Pollack would do such a thing. I’m not sure I have an opinion, but I love this little piece of artistic mystery.

Guggenheim, by then a huge Pollack supporter, commissioned this piece for her own home, not a museum or an art show, thus the artist in question was never “in question” necessitating such a cheeky move. However, maybe that’s what this was, embedding something hidden so all of the guests at her many parties would study it and perhaps “see” it one day. I have no idea, but there are some times I think I see it—it’s in black in his painting after all—and there are other times I need the de-coder to see it properly.  Given his technique, part of me wants to believe that maybe he had to sign a bunch of checks that day or the bottom of many pieces of art and his wrist bone just sort of continued that general motion and he started making shapes of his name without knowing it...What do you see?

Here is a small poem for today inspired by this new development.

Random Concrete
Dripping syllables, spattering punctuations of love
from one intense canvas to another
in states both calm and manic,
You gave life to new shapes, forms
Like a god, you dabbled your drizzle from above.
With fame, wide spread notoriety
Did you pull one last act
A hidden gesture of ego’s the variety?

Somewhere on earth or in ether, methinks
The spirit of Pollack smiles, silently winks.