Arrival and Afterlife: Jackson Pollock’s Mural and the University of Iowa

Abstract

This essay focuses on the arrival and afterlife of Jackson Pollock’s Mural (1943) at the University of Iowa. Assumptions that Iowa was devoid of modern art prior to Mural’s arrival in 1951 are countered with a discussion of the university’s innovative approach to art education during the 1930s, which was widely copied throughout the nation, and its impressive collection of contemporary art, which it began building in the mid-1940s. Mural’s precarious afterlife is discussed as both a proudly displayed trophy of American modernism and a pawn in various academic and economic takeover bids. Mural, Doss suggests, arrived at Iowa as the spoil of victory in a war between two styles of modern American art: regionalism and abstract expressionism. Over the past six decades, Mural’s afterlife at the University of Iowa has wavered between anxieties about appropriate directions in cultural pedagogy, worries about aesthetic legacy, and wild-eyed schemes of monetization.