I first encountered this work last November at The Anderson Collection, among several abstract expressionist works from Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and Sam Francis.
I immediately felt that this work from Pollock was the most important among all, in terms of richness of meaning. Though I wasn't able to decipher it the first time, except the general feelings of the unity of subject and object in the painting, as a defining character of Abstract Expressionism perceived by many.
But what is the story told by this work? When you look at it, you could pick up any given area on the canvas, small or large, and you will find seemingly infinite little things - stories, processes, brushes, colors, structures. Yet Lucifer is obviously telling a bigger story.
Soon I realized that the true way to look at this painting is through its layers. In fact, to my eye, Lucifer (1947) has exactly three layers.
The first layer is the background of heavenly sky, the pearly, blue-gray firmament suffused with earthly warmth, the brown of creation's dawn—similar expression found at the Sistine Chapel in Michelangelo's Creation paintings. This is the background of the world in this painting.
The second layer is the theme of this painting, where evil is in black. It adheres to the background, spreading across the whole of it. Unlike the passive, stable, tranquil background, the black drips are dynamic. It is one, and it is vast. When you look into it, you see chaos. When you look at it as a whole, it's one, and consistent. It is in constant presence. Evil, as the privation of light, is shapeless, is everywhere. It is perfectly pervasive, covering and almost obscuring the heavenly sky and the Earth, yet seemingly weaving a net of reality, where beauty and vividness emerge from. This is something not to be easily expressed by anything prior to abstract expressionist paintings.
The third layer is the scattered liveliness - the bright accents which are on the very top of the painting. This is the top layer, the purple, the green, the yellow, the crimson, the blue. A diversity of stories in colors emerges. These precious, bright stories are not pervasive like the black drips and brushstrokes. The background's everlasting tranquility and Lucifer's deterministic chaos give rise to the creativity of the third layer. It is unclear from this canvas whether this vividness could emerge without that layer of chaos. Or, even if they can, they would become much less exciting. It is the double contrast which gives life its heterodox resilience. This is what gives this painting its pictorial profoundness. The ontological truth that is dynamically described in this work is outside time and space, presented to the viewer and gives him a perspective from outside this universe.
Or, if there exists an ontology of the world at all? One thing we are sure of is that if there's ever an ontology to this world in the picture, it would not be a static one. For the world as it happens always, and the objects of the world exist through the ongoing experience, where the subjective and the objective converge into experiences. It is the short-lived experience that matters to the world, and what matters to the world matters to God.
What distinguishes the third layer from the black that represents Lucifer is its creativeness. If the heavenly omnibenevolence and the evil's permanent chaos are antithetical, the mortal, ephemeral, actual world is unique in its creativity.
The ephemerality of the third layer is in contrast with the steadiness of the heavenly background. Yet the mutual immediacy of these three layers is the ontological truth of the world. The heavenly background requires the bright, vivid colors of the world to actualize, yet the two are intermediated by evil which is present everywhere. Only God can experience the full totality through his Everlastingness; however ephemeral the world's events are, they are unified and omnipresent in His experience.
Lastly, sharing the fun—a detail pointed out by a security personnel at the Anderson Collection was that somewhere around the bottom of the painting, a small embedded object (perhaps a cigarette paper) was incorporated in the painting. So we know that Pollock was smoking while he painted part of this work.