The She-Wolf

Painted in 1943, this canvas comes from a turning point in Jackson Pollock's career, just before he became famous for his radical drip paintings. Here you can still see recognizable forms emerging from the chaos. The central figure is a she-wolf, her body outlined in bold white strokes against a tangle of reds, yellows, and dark blues. Pollock drew inspiration from the ancient Roman legend of the wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus, the twins who would go on to found Rome. The animal feels both powerful and mysterious, half hidden in a storm of color and line.

Pollock was deeply interested in myth, the unconscious mind, and the ideas of psychologist Carl Jung at this time. Rather than planning the image carefully, he let instinct guide his brush, which gives the work a raw and restless energy. When asked about its meaning, Pollock once said the painting "came into existence because I had to paint it," and that any attempt to explain it could only destroy it. This was the first of his paintings to enter a museum collection, purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it still hangs today. It marks the moment Pollock began letting go of clear subjects and moving toward the wild abstraction that would make him a legend.