Portrait of H.M.

Portrait of H.M. is a 1945 oil painting on canvas in the University of Iowa’s Stanley Museum of Art. The Spanish government’s 2025 loan documentation records its dimensions as 92.71 × 110.49 centimetres. A little wider than it is high, it offers a scale suited to sustained, relatively intimate attention. Those measurements provide a useful starting point: before considering the possibilities suggested by its title, we can imagine the physical canvas and our own relationship to it. ^[1]

A portrait enters the gallery

The title was already public in 1945. Portrait of H.M. appeared in Pollock’s second solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century, New York, from 19 March to 14 April. The thirteen paintings included the two Totem Lessons, The Night Dancer and There Were Seven in Eight. Its first audience therefore encountered it among evocatively named works, alongside drawings and gouaches. ^[2]

Reviews of the exhibition reveal sharply different expectations. Howard Devree, writing on 25 March, found emotion insufficiently clarified into communication. On 7 April, Clement Greenberg called Pollock the strongest painter of his generation, while discussing densely packed oils and sometimes abrupt colour and value contrasts. Parker Tyler’s May review was sceptical about talent but recognised calligraphic activity and a feeling for paint’s material character. These were judgments on the exhibition; none supplies an individual verdict on Portrait of H.M. ^[2]

What might the initials mean?

William Rubin offered an associative reading in his 1979 essay on psychological interpretations of Pollock. He proposed Helen Marot or Herbert Matter, both friends, as possible connections, and argued against treating the work as a literal portrait. For Rubin, a title could arise from a recollection or conversation surrounding the making of an image. His own earlier overreading of Pasiphaë helped shape that caution: he had developed an interpretation around its mythological name before learning that the same painting had previously been called Moby Dick. His argument allows a name to matter without making it a complete explanation of the painted forms. It remains a critical position, rather than a demonstrated identification of H.M. ^[3]

A different emphasis appeared when the painting travelled to Honolulu in 2017. Interviewed by James Charisma, museum director Sean O’Harrow identified it as a portrait of the photographer Herbert Matter and stressed Matter’s importance to Pollock. That reading restores the possibility of friendship to the title. O’Harrow’s words preserve a particular interpretation of the subject, with friendship at its centre. ^[4]

In 2022, Josh O’Leary’s Iowa Magazine introduction to the Stanley’s opening exhibition, Homecoming, described the work as a likely tribute to Herman Melville and his novel Moby Dick. The word “likely” matters. This literary possibility joins the personal associations already proposed, leaving the initials unresolved. O’Leary also reminded readers that Iowa’s Pollock collection extends beyond its celebrated Mural: Portrait of H.M. was another gift from Guggenheim. Seen in that collection, the smaller painting widens the encounter with the artist. A visitor can follow a second work and a second kind of title, instead of allowing the monumental commission to stand for everything Pollock was doing. ^[5]

Reading beyond a likeness

The question of identity is only one way into the painting. Bernice Rose’s account of Pollock’s development offers another: the relationship between drawing and painting. She describes the earlier work as a contest between linear forms, expansive space and the weight of painted surface. In her reading, figure and surrounding area could exchange roles, making the image unstable; drawing helped bind these competing effects together. This general framework for Pollock’s work shifts attention from finding a face to following how a painted image becomes legible. Where might a line seem to describe something, and where might it draw attention to its own movement? How much does the title influence the decision to recognise a figure? Such questions keep the experience open while giving the eye something definite to pursue. ^[6]

The Museo Picasso Málaga’s 2016 exhibition, Mural. Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, placed Portrait of H.M. in a history of formal experiment. Its checklist included the painting with Mural, Direction and Bird Effort. The guide situated Pollock’s development in relation to artists including Picasso and Miró, and described increasing movement in his line before the later poured paintings. It then explained pouring as a way of extending drawing through paint. This sequence gives the 1945 canvas a place in a developing set of problems: how a line describes, how it moves, and how it occupies a painted surface. It also keeps the date meaningful. The guide’s discussion of later dripping and splashing does not establish that Portrait of H.M. was made with the floor working and pouring familiar from Pollock’s subsequent career. The wider history of his technique requires attention to those differences between individual works. ^[7]

New settings, new conversations

The painting’s later travels have changed its company. The Honolulu exhibition, Abstract Expressionism: Looking East From the Far West, opened in September 2017 and considered the movement through Asian American and Hawai‘i artists as well as the New York School. In that setting, the Iowa loan entered a broader account of artistic relationships and exchange. Its scope gave the familiar movement a wider group of participants and places. ^[4]

A reciprocal loan brought Portrait of H.M. to Madrid for the Thyssen-Bornemisza’s 2025–26 exhibition Warhol, Pollock and Other American Spaces. The Stanley’s announcement explains the practical exchange: after the Spanish museum requested the Pollock, visiting senior curator Diana Tuite asked to borrow Georgia O’Keeffe’s New York Street with Moon. The request for the Pollock had come two years earlier. O’Keeffe’s painting subsequently travelled to Iowa, bringing a cityscape by an artist absent from the Stanley’s collection into its galleries. These were temporary loans between collections. Their reciprocity opened two different opportunities for audiences: Iowa could expand its presentation of American modernism, while Madrid could bring the Pollock into a new exhibition argument. The arrangement shows how a painting’s public life can generate possibilities far beyond the individual object that crosses the Atlantic. ^[8]

Curated by Estrella de Diego, the Thyssen exhibition explored spatial strategies shared across apparently different artists. Its museum statement placed Pollock and Warhol between abstraction and figuration, stressing concealment, layering and changing relations between figure and background. That framework gives Portrait of H.M. a particularly suggestive setting. That emphasis on pictorial space makes uncertainty an active subject for looking: how can a painting carry associations without surrendering all of its visual life to a name? ^[9]