Enigmatic Combat and Guardians of the Secret

Among the permanent collection of artwork at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hang two beautiful paintings. Arshile Gorky’s “Enigmatic Combat” and Jackson Pollock’s “Guardians of the Secret” are similar in only a few ways, yet the ways each artist decided to portray their scene through abstraction is worthy of comparison.

“Enigmatic Combat” was created by Arshile Gorky between 1936 and 1937. The media used for this piece is oil on canvas. Her piece is presented on a yellow wall along with a Picasso and Braque. Gorky uses very rough brush stokes and mostly solid colors without values or shading. Where she did decide to mix the colors they are only partially mixed. She used very earthy tones for the pallet of this piece. Most regions are filled with a brown, yellow, orange, or green color. Mostly all of the colored regions of this painting are outlined in a dominating thick black outline. Most of the earthy toned regions are crowded and centralized and surrounded by regions of white with hints of blue, grey, or purple. All the regions are organically shaped with rounded and pointed sides that share an

Arshile Gorky’s “Enigmatic Combat” and Jackson Pollock’s “Guardians of the Secret” are similar in only a few ways. They are both centrally focused and weighted towards the bottom. Their canvases are both wider than they are tall. The oil paint is laid on very thick and the rough and broken brushwork is easily and intentionally left visible. And the most notable similarity is that the artists both created extremely expressive and abstract pieces that the viewer must try to decipher and make connections of what is actually happening on the canvas through subtle hints.

These figures guard and hold up the center rectangle, with a secret undecipherable alphabet. The blank lines seem to be intended as a secret text that only Pollock could understand the meaning behind it.

On the left there appears to be a green profile of a human head (this head looks surprisingly similar to the way Picasso was portraying his lover Dora Maar around this time period). The head faces the ground and it appears to be attached to nothing that could be viewed as a neck or torso (perhaps decapitated in combat?). The only other figures I could make out are perhaps two birds, one on the bottom left facing left and just the head of another in the upper right facing right. With the recent wars at the time perhaps Arshile Gorky’s “Enigmatic Combat” was attempting to show a fallen victim as birds scrutinize the body as the entire scene is shattered through the c

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