The Flame

Fire gives Jackson Pollock's The Flame both its subject and its unsettled structure. MoMA describes flames partly obscuring what appears to be a skeleton: a figure remains within reach, while the brushwork keeps drawing attention across the surface. Dated approximately 1934–38, this is a small painting in oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard. The museum records dimensions of 51.1 × 76.2 cm and credits the Enid A. Haupt Fund. Its compact size makes the vigour of its painted forms especially striking. ^[1]

A body caught in the brushwork

MoMA's 2015 gallery label connects the painting's force to vigorous brushstrokes and interlocking, rhythmic forms. These organise a surface that the museum calls “quasi-abstract.” The term is useful because the skeleton and the surrounding fire remain imaginable even as their boundaries become uncertain. Flames provide an unusually mobile subject: their shapes can suggest an object while also carrying the eye from one painted passage to another. Here the difficulty of separating a body from its surroundings becomes part of the experience of the painting. ^[1]

Sarah G. Powers makes the skeletal image more specific in her essay for the Hood Museum's 2012 exhibition Men of Fire. She describes a white skeletal figure amid orange, yellow and red flames, comparing it with the burning setting of José Clemente Orozco's Gods of the Modern World at Dartmouth. Pollock visited the Dartmouth murals in 1936. His interest had earlier points of contact: he saw Prometheus at Pomona College in 1930, while Powers identifies Orozco's New School mural as another likely encounter in 1931, when Pollock's teacher Thomas Hart Benton was working there too. ^[2]

The Hood exhibition brought early Pollock works together with Orozco's preparatory studies, allowing their imagery to be considered alongside the Dartmouth cycle. Powers places fire within an exchange involving destruction, creation and renewal. That curatorial reading gives the subject a wider resonance while leaving its particular human figure unsettled. The skeleton supplies a bodily presence; fire makes that presence difficult to hold apart from its setting. ^[2]

Light, weight and movement

Carolyn Lanchner's account of The Flame draws attention to two American painters behind its handling: Benton and Albert Pinkham Ryder. She connects its curved movement and emphatic contrasts between light and dark with Benton's example and Ryder's atmospheric effects. This helps explain why the painting can feel weighty and restless at once. Light does more than illuminate an identifiable scene. Its contrast with darkness helps the composition turn, swell and gather force. ^[3]

Lanchner also describes thick, muscular marks merging figure and ground in a composition whose movement spreads outward. Figure and ground usually distinguish an object from the space behind it. In her reading, that distinction becomes difficult to sustain here, because the painted activity passes between both. The brushstroke can carry meaning through its direction and weight as well as through what it depicts. This gives the painting an interest of its own: its dense handling makes movement tangible, with each mark contributing to an active field. ^[3]

Pollock's own 1944 questionnaire offers a useful companion to these comparisons. He described his work with Benton as something against which he later reacted strongly, but also credited Benton with introducing him to Renaissance art. Resistance and instruction belonged to the same relationship. Discussing American painting, Pollock singled out Ryder as the master who interested him; among contemporary artists, he especially admired Picasso and Miró. He also rejected the idea of a nationally isolated American art, arguing that contemporary painting's basic problems crossed national boundaries. ^[4]

Those answers suggest a relationship with other artists based on active choices. Pollock could value a teacher's instruction while resisting his example, and admire Ryder while looking closely at European modernists. His description of contemporary painting as a shared undertaking also helps explain his impatience with national categories. The questionnaire belongs to a later moment in Pollock's biography, but its combination of resistance and admiration gives a useful language for thinking about artistic inheritance. ^[4]

Robert Storr, writing in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, identifies The Flame as an early manifestation of Orozco's effect on Pollock. He compares it with Orozco's Man of Fire, dated 1938–39, using the striking idea that Pollock's painting anticipates the later fresco. The approximate 1934–38 date matters here: resemblance cannot establish a straightforward sequence of copying. Storr's comparison concerns an affinity of imagery and style; it supplies no evidence that Pollock travelled to Guadalajara to see that mural. Orozco's influence is most useful as a relationship to investigate through particular works, with their different dates kept in view. ^[5]

A small painting with mural ambitions nearby

Charles Stuckey sets The Flame within Pollock's longstanding interest in mural painting. His account connects that interest with Mexican muralists, Benton's teaching, Federal Art Project employment and the experimental workshop of David Alfaro Siqueiros. Siqueiros encouraged unconventional paints and methods of application. Across these different encounters, questions about materials and scale could develop alongside one another, with mural painting offering both examples to study and practical opportunities to work. ^[6]

Stuckey sees an early form of allover organisation in The Flame, but explicitly notes the absence of evidence that Pollock considered these easel paintings studies for murals. The distinction preserves the achievement at its actual scale. A small support can sustain movement throughout its surface, while a mural asks how such movement holds together across a much larger expanse. The comparison gives the little painting a place in a continuing compositional inquiry without assigning it an undocumented preparatory function. ^[6]

The later Mural, commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim in 1943, offers a concrete comparison in working conditions. Getty's research found strong documentary evidence that Pollock worked with its stretched canvas leaning against a wall, and that most paint was applied upright. Researchers also tested whether a stringy pink paint required horizontal application. Their experiments showed that paint of a suitable consistency, flicked at an upright test surface, could produce comparable effects. ^[7]

That account makes the later painting's energy easier to understand as something achieved through materials and working decisions. Even a seemingly free, flowing mark has a physical history. Getty's findings concern Mural, so they leave The Flame's precise studio arrangement open. They also make a useful companion to its documented brushwork: Pollock's developing technique involved questions about the behaviour of paint, the position of a support and the movement a painted surface could convey. ^[7]

Exhibition and collection

Francis V. O'Connor's 1967 chronology records The Flame in Artists for Victory at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from 7 December 1942 to 22 February 1943. This exhibition date belongs to the painting's public history, several years after the latest year in its approximate making date. The distinction helps place an early canvas within Pollock's developing career: a work could continue to circulate after the immediate circumstances of its creation had passed. The chronology establishes this particular appearance, without supplying an individual review or a record of viewers' responses to the painting. ^[8]

MoMA purchased The Flame from Pollock's estate in 1980, as part of a group of acquisitions intended to represent his career more fully. The museum's account distinguishes purchases from Lee Krasner's gifts; The Flame belonged to the purchases. Its later collection history gave this small early work a place beside paintings from widely separated moments in Pollock's development. ^[5]