Flight of Man

This rare ceramic bowl painted by Jackson Pollock is one of about ten known examples surviving from a turbulent stage in the artist’s life.  Pollock was suffering intensely from depression and alcoholism in the late 1930s, and found it difficult to work.  Rita Benton, wife of Pollock’s mentor, the painter Thomas Hart Benton, suggested ceramic-painting to Pollock as a therapeutic method to help him focus on his art. In 1938 Pollock, hospitalized for alcoholism, began a course of Jungian psychoanalysis; painting and drawing were incorporated into his treatment and Jungian archetypes began to appear in his work. Carl Jung had described these archetypes as archaic figures that collectively derive from the unconscious mind.

Pollock painted this bowl’s interior with a dark scene of abstracted human figures that seem to strive and grasp at unknown forms. One, at the center of the bowl, is surrounded by a halo of light and seems to be in flight. While derived from Pollock’s unconscious, the intense colors and intertwined figures also reflect Pollock’s response to the expressionist paintings of Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, whom he knew and admired. Orozco frequently employed images of figures in flames, forms that may be reflected in Pollock’s central figure who leaps into a brilliantly lit abyss.  The figures in rapture also suggest Pollock’s interest in El Greco’s scenes of the resurrection of Christ, which appeared in his sketchbooks of the period.

Pollock presented this bowl as a gift to one of his analysts, Dr. James H. Wall, who later explained that the title “Flight of Man” was his interpretation of how Pollock had described the meaning of the work.  The MFA owns a related work from this period, a psychoanalytic drawing that shares with this bowl the red, blue, and yellow color palette and the motif of entwined human figures (2003.807).