stmichaeladelphi.org

By JULIE V. IOVINE

Jeff Goldberg/Esto for Ennead Architects

The Natural History Museum of Utah, perched on the foothills of the Rockies.

Salt Lake City

There’s nothing like a natural-history museum to give one a little perspective. Compared with the more than 160 million years that dinosaurs stomped the earth, mankind’s roughly 20,000-year history is barely a sliver of time. In the past, the grandiose subject of where we came from and what we are made of called for appropriately solemn and magisterial architecture: sweeping stairs, baronial halls, relentless symmetries and axial certainty. In other words, something in the Beaux Arts style.

The Natural History Museum of Utah, at its 200,000-square-foot home on the campus of the University of Utah here, has gone for a different feeling—that of a trailhead. Instead of ascending a grand staircase, you enter as through the faceted, sheer walls of a canyon, rendered in beige plaster and board-formed concrete. Instead of a procession of galleries with symmetrical predictability, the organizational logic is that of switchback paths traversing ramps, bridges and underpasses.

Designed by the New York-based Ennead Architects, with exhibition design by the ubiquitous Ralph Appelbaum Associates, and in collaboration with GSBS Architects, the museum makes an assertive break with formality. It plays up today’s educational mantra of experience, discovery and interconnectedness over yesteryear’s emphasis on order, direction and significance.

If the interior is conspicuously nontraditional, the exterior of the $102.5 million building, which opened in November, seems barely there at all. In a controversial move, it isn’t located near such other downtown cultural venues as the Church History Museum and the Leonardo, the new science, technology and art museum. Instead it straddles a popular hiking trail perched halfway up the slopes of the Wasatch Range, foothills to the Rockies at the edge of both the campus and the town. Had it not been for the spring panoply of bright green grasses visible on a recent visit, the museum, clad in a burnished copper mottled by streaks of zinc and tin, might have disappeared completely amid the reddish-brown rock against which it is set.

According to Todd Schliemann, a partner of Ennead Architects, camouflage was much to the point in the interest of spreading the natural-history message. To that end—unusual for climate-control-conscious museums—multiple terraces open directly off exhibits. Thus, in one display you can observe a model of Lake Bonneville, which filled the Great Basin during the Pleistocene era some 15,000 years ago before it drained out through Red Rock Pass, leaving nothing but the puddle that is Salt Lake (energetic crankers can even spin a big spigot to fill the display with water and pull the plug on it themselves); then you can step out onto the adjacent terrace to view the actual lake in the distance and check the current level, which apparently varies slightly all the time.

Reminders of the natural world just beyond the walls abound, introducing a redeeming note of seriousness and wonder to the blatant infotainment of the exhibits inside, an Appelbaum trademark. The main lobby is called “The Canyon.” It’s the kind of sappy naming game that many institutions go for today. But it works, partly because the focal point of the space is an enormous panoramic window that, with breathtaking sweep, delivers natural history live: a view of the entire Salt Lake Valley and snow-capped Oquirrh Mountains. The lobby space is open and expansive, with café tables and cherry-wood benches meant to suggest fallen logs. There’s also a 40-foot-tall display wall that serves as a kind of amuse-bouche of collection highlights. It includes dinosaur fossils, conch shells, iridescent butterflies, ancient moccasins and woven baskets. The laudable intention was to provide a public place where people can range widely and even see a little something for free before buying a ticket. Two bridges cross overhead and a third seemingly carved from rock scales the back wall to underscore the adventure theme.

The NHMU may not go in for the old-fashioned coherence of symmetry, but it is organized in a left brain, right brain sort of way, with experiential galleries to the right of the Canyon and active research labs, special exhibits, vitrines for exotic rocks, and artifact storage (viewable through glass doors) to the left. But with wilding toddlers to wrangle (Utah has one of the nation’s youngest populations), odds are that it will be to the state-of-the-art interactive right side of the museum that people will head first for a full day of exploration.

You only have to see Allie, the Allosaurus, to realize just how far pedagogical entertainment in the natural sciences has come. This rubbery, stubby-armed flesh-eater was a favorite at the old natural-history museum. Slide a quarter down its craw and it would sing “Do-Re-Mi.” Now Allie has been relegated to an out-of-the-way spot by some elevators on the lowest entry level and supplanted by far more sophisticated educational tools. These include five learning labs for school groups and a showcase lab where working scientists pursue their research and bone dusting in full sight of visitors, a reality-show-era diorama.

Keyboards, screens, Post-it notes and good old chalk-and-blackboard beckon for interaction at every possible level. There are rubber bones to fit into the puzzle of a fossil imprint and fake pottery shards to arrange into an ancient painted vase just as archaeologists might. Cleverly, the museum shows off its exceedingly rare collection of competing types of horned triceratops, arranging them just the way local hunters might display their own bagged prey, as heads mounted on the wall.

The Beaux Arts museum of yore presented artifacts—whether rocks, fossils or human tools—in a fashion that made them seem to belong to a more primitive, less complicated time. Today’s approach generally makes past and present, nature and human all part of one ingeniously complex continuum. In its new digs, the NHMU captures that spirit at its most awe-inspiring.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared May 9, 2012, on page D6 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Natural History, Modern Setting.

By LEE ROSENBAUM

University of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim

“Mural” (1943) by Jackson Pollock

Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock

Hood Museum of Art

Through Jun 17

Then travels to the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.

Hanover, N.H.

The late Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was a tough act to follow. Probably because no one can top his definitive 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective, we have no major show in the U.S. this year to commemorate the centenary of that towering Abstract Expressionist’s birth.

But there are aspects of Pollock’s work from the years preceding the famous “drip” paintings that remain underexplored. Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, under its new director, Michael Taylor (former curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), has seized the moment by hastily assembling an absorbing dossier exhibition focusing on a crucial period in Pollock’s trajectory from representational landscapes, heavily influenced by his teacher Thomas Hart Benton, to his signature abstract masterpieces that, according to popular and Hollywood legend, seemed to spring out of nowhere.

The Hood’s “Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock,” organized by Sarah Powers of the Hood with Pollock expert Helen Harrison, reveals that many of the pictorial strategies employed by Pollock in his celebrated monumental canvases of the late 1940s to early 1950s can be traced to his intensely charged easel-size paintings from the brief period, 1938-41, when this quintessentially American artist was haunted by Orozco’s macabre visions of skeletons and ritual sacrifice. Pollock had seen the Mexican’s murals in 1930 at Pomona College in California and, six years later, at Dartmouth. While there are plenty of pyrotechnics in the works of both artists, “Men of Fire” might have been more aptly (if less appealingly) titled “Men of Skulls and Bones.”

Pollock owed his enthusiasm for the visceral impact of monumentality to Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and, above all, Orozco. In his first oversize horizontal canvas, a 20-foot-wide 1943 composition, “Mural,” commissioned by his patron Peggy Guggenheim (on view at the Des Moines Art Center through July 15), Pollock was influenced not only by Orozco’s larger-than-life scale but also by the swirling energy of his brushstrokes and dramatic use of black to define curving contours. Orozco’s archetypal images of snakes, skulls and flames, which must have resonated with the American’s Jungian sensibility, are abundantly present in Pollock’s works at the Hood.

To appreciate “Men of Fire,” you need to start not in Dartmouth’s art museum but in its Baker Library. That’s where the 24-year-old Pollock made pilgrimage in 1936 to see Orozco’s 24-panel mural “The Epic of American Civilization” (1932-34), a sweeping history of the Mexican people. Its darkly symbolic and ritualistic content made a strong impression on the younger artist. Dartmouth also owns Orozco’s studies for the mural, included in the Hood’s show.

Nowhere is the connection between Dartmouth’s mural and Pollock’s work clearer than in his “Untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton)” (c. 1938-41), acquired by the Hood six years ago. With a lumpish, crouched female at its center, it quotes the image of a skeletal ribcage and extended limb from Orozco’s fiercely satiric panel “Gods of the Modern World.” That work had stirred an uproar at Dartmouth over its depiction of a ghoulish cadre of skeletal professors in caps and gowns, overseeing a female skeleton as she gives birth to a skeletal baby with a mortarboard on its head (representing “stillborn knowledge”).

Like many of the Pollocks in the show, “Bald Woman” is densely composed and difficult to read. Only close scrutiny can unpack the contorted anatomy of the drooping woman and the many images derived from Orozco’s mural—winding serpents, orange flames and the jumble of tiny, sickly green skulls surrounding the central figure. Pollock had transmuted Orozco’s politically charged imagery into psychological totems. The morbid scene is redolent with death and despair.

Pollock’s use of semiabstraction and his partial concealment of representational images point ahead to the layered complexities of the drip paintings, where representation seems to disappear. The Museum of Modern Art’s “Flame” (c. 1934-38), for example, is a precursor to all-over abstraction, with its jagged orange, black and white slashes that represent a raging fire. Without help from the label text, you might miss the ribcage—parallel light and dark lines. Lying near the bottom of the canvas, amid the conflagration, the bones suggest that this is a sacrificial pyre.

Pollock’s use of disguised and obscured representation, although later difficult to detect, persisted into his abstract masterpieces of the late ’40s and early ’50s. As noted in the catalog for MoMA’s show, close analysis of Pollock’s signature “drip” paintings (informed by Hans Namuth’s famous images of Pollock at work) reveals their structural underpinnings of veiled and hidden figures.

The link between the proto-Pollocks seen at Dartmouth and the mature abstract masterpieces is the groundbreaking, ex-Peggy Guggenheim “Mural” of 1943. Designed for her apartment’s entrance hall, that dazzling achievement, said to have been largely executed in one day, is not only the first but also the biggest of the mural-size Pollocks.

A frenzy of black verticals and whorls, enlivened with touches of pink, yellow and turquoise, “Mural,” under sustained scrutiny, comes into focus as a cross-canvas parade of upright, abstracted figures, with outlines strongly reminiscent of the black-defined curves of the marching Aztecs’ muscled flesh in the “Migration” panel that begins Dartmouth’s Orozco mural. Tightly focused on the brief period when Pollock was most strongly influenced by Orozco, the show doesn’t include (or illustrate) works like “Mural” that marked the next step toward Pollocks signature style. But the black swirls that animate Orozco’s and Pollock’s murals also figure prominently in a painting displayed at the entrance to the Hood’s show, the Tate Gallery’s powerful “Naked Man with Knife” (c. 1938-1940), a chaotic jumble of three fiercely grappling nudes.

Comparing the little-known Pollocks at the Hood with the paintings that later became touchstones of international veneration reveals that we might not have had the latter without the foundation laid by the former. Contradicting the myth of the sudden epiphany, Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, once noted that there were “no sharp breaks” from the works of the pre-”drip” period to the mature masterpieces, “but rather a continuing development of the same themes and obsessions.”

You can see the truth of that in Hanover.

Ms. Rosenbaum writes for the Journal on art and museums and blogs as CultureGrrl at www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl.

A version of this article appeared May 2, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Becoming Jackson Pollock.

Type the words “empty wine bottles” into eBay’s search engine and you will soon be presented with a number of options to purchase all manner of empties from the world’s greatest wine estates. Within seconds, I found examples of magnums and bottles of distinguished vintages from Bordeaux and California. I can understand keeping a bottle as a trophy from a particularly special vintage or grower, but I have no inclination to start a collection of empties. So why would somebody want to buy an empty bottle, in some cases for hundreds of pounds?

As eBay says, there are myriad reasons for buying old bottles, from decorating a restaurant to storing homemade wine. But let’s speculate for a moment. How probable is it that one might be tempted to purchase an empty bottle from a particularly valuable and sought-after domaine, refill it with a similarly aged wine of above-average quality (but by no means as valuable) and try to pass it off as the original? It would be a fun trick to play at a dinner party. But could it actually fool an expert?

“There have been fakes for hundreds of years, certainly in France,” says wine authenticator Maureen Downey, owner of Chai Consulting in San Francisco. “As somebody who is experienced at looking at these things, you can tell when the capsule isn’t right. It is believed that one of the methods of making a fake wine is by refilling an empty bottle. We often find it is a very old bottle with a brand new cork but no indication of recorking.”

As the prices for fine wine have increased, so have fears about counterfeits. One Hong Kong merchant told me that restaurants there are now more diligent about smashing the empties of particularly prestigious wines. Although not an exact science, the authenticity of a product—which can be verified by the glass, label, weight and color of the liquid—remains a very real concern.

Take, for example, the European debut of California-based Spectrum Wine Auctions, which last week came to London for its much-billed “Evening Sale.” Hours before Spectrum and its local partner, Vanquish wine merchants, were due to accept bids at a sale room in the Mandarin Oriental hotel, they released a statement saying they were withdrawing 13 lots from the auction, including a number of bottles with the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti label, due to “apparent label discrepancies.” The domaine, through its U.K. agent Corney & Barrow, confirmed it couldn’t verify the wines’ authenticity. Eight lots from Burgundy’s Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé were also withdrawn. Richard Brierley, head of fine wine at Vanquish, says those lots were withdrawn “as a matter of precaution” after a specific request from the domaine. Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé declined to comment.

The red flag was originally raised by Los Angeles-based collector Don Cornwell. Mr. Cornwell, who also happens to be a lawyer, completed his own detective work when he viewed Spectrum’s wine catalog and noticed several incongruities in the labels of some of the rarest and most sought-after Burgundy wines. He posted his concerns, in forensic detail, on the forum of Internet wine site wineberserkers.com. This alerted Corney & Barrow, who then raised the issue with Spectrum. Among these concerns was the observation that on a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 1978, which had an estimate of £6,000, a label on the shoulder of the shipper, Percy Fox, misspelled the address as “Sackvilee Street” rather than Sackville Street.

“It is concerning to see a label on which the then-London address of Percy Fox & Co. is misspelled,” says Simon Lawson, general manager of Diageo-owned Percy Fox, which was the official U.K. agent for Domaine de la Romanée-Conti until 1993. “Our suggestion would be that any wine which displays labeling errors like this are referred to the domaine for verification before being offered for sale.”

In the auction catalog, Spectrum and Vanquish say all of their wines were carefully inspected and vetted by their team of international experts, who spent long hours meticulously scrutinizing each detail of every consignment. They also added, in a statement, that the wines were withdrawn “through an abundance of caution and in line with our commitment to excellence in due-diligence and verification,” so that the issues could be properly investigated. At the time of writing, Spectrum President Jason Boland says the investigation is ongoing. Mr. Brierley adds: “We are committed to resolving the matters raised and having the relevant producers involved in that process.”

But the incident does raise questions as to the provenance of old and rare fine-wine bottles coming onto the market, especially viewed in the present context of fine-wine prices. “Clearly there is a problem,” says Corney & Barrow Managing Director Adam Brett-Smith, and “clearly it needs addressing.” The withdrawn lots didn’t stop staggering sums being paid for rare wines at the Spectrum and Vanquish wine auction. A three-liter Jeroboam of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 1990 sold for £40,250, while a single bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti from 1945 fetched £28,750. These are sums that could only be dreamed of two decades ago. I wonder how much the empties would sell for.

Write to Will Lyons at william.lyons@wsj.com

Nobody remembers Joseph Alsop now, but in his day he was as famous as a journalist could be. A white-shoe-leather political columnist who went from Groton to Harvard to the New York Herald Tribune in three easy steps, he spent the whole of his life rubbing elbows with powerful pols whom he flattered assiduously, then wrote about in his widely read newspaper column. He was also a closeted homosexual who mistakenly supposed that no one knew of his after-hours inclinations. In fact, Mr. Alsop’s friends were well aware that he was gay—and so were his enemies.

David Auburn’s “The Columnist,” which opened on Broadway this week, hinges on something that happened to Mr. Alsop when he visited Moscow in 1957, at the height of the Cold War. It seems that he picked up a young man at a party and spent the night with him, not knowing that the fellow in question was a KGB operative and that he had inadvertently stumbled into what is known to intelligence agents as a “honey trap.” Mr. Alsop and his companion were secretly photographed having sex, and the next day the columnist was informed that if he didn’t agree to serve as an “agent of influence” for the Soviet Union after returning to America, he would be exposed as a homosexual, thrown in jail and left to rot.

Instead of cooperating, Mr. Alsop went to the U.S. Embassy, came clean about what he’d done, and was hustled back to Washington on the next plane. The KGB promptly sent incriminating photographs of Mr. Alsop to a long list of colleagues and government officials—none of whom blew the whistle on him in public.

That is, needless to say, quite a tale, and it’s easy to see why Mr. Auburn thought that it would make a rattling good play. But unless you know the history of American political journalism, certain parts of “The Columnist” may be a bit confusing, especially since it’s likely to leave uninformed viewers with the impression that Mr. Alsop, who was a staunch supporter of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, was a conservative. He was, in fact, a liberal anti-Communist, an FDR-loving New Deal Democrat who was violently opposed to both Joe McCarthy and the Soviet Union. That particular political pigeonhole may not make much sense to under-50 playgoers who grew up in our postmodern age of left-right polarization, but in the 1950s there was nothing at all unusual about the way that Mr. Alsop split the difference between domestic liberalism and foreign-policy conservatism.

In addition, I suspect that many of those who see Mr. Auburn’s play will find it understandably hard to believe that a mere newspaper columnist could possibly have wielded the power that Mr. Alsop is portrayed as having in “The Columnist.” Today’s columnists derive such influence as they may have not from their writing but from their television appearances, which are the real source of their fame. A columnist who isn’t seen regularly on TV might as well be talking to himself. But in Joe Alsop’s day, it was perfectly possible for an op-ed columnist to win fame solely on the strength of what he wrote. At its peak, “Matter of Fact,” Mr. Alsop’s thrice-weekly column, appeared in nearly 200 papers from coast to coast, and it was closely read not just by politicians in Washington but by ordinary Americans as well. It may sound like a joke when the fictional Alsop of “The Columnist” haughtily proclaims that he tells his readers “what they need to know,” but back in 1957, more than a few of those readers would unhesitatingly have agreed with him.

Why, then, is he forgotten? On top of his steadfast support of the Vietnam War, which made him an nonperson in his later years, Alsop was done in by the ephemeral nature of newspaper journalism. Like TV, it can make you famous, but it can’t keep you famous after the presses stop rolling. H.L. Mencken, himself a columnist of renown, nailed it when he admitted that of the five million published words he claimed to have written in his lifetime, most were nothing more than “journalism pure and simple—dead almost before the ink which printed it was dry.”

The one sure way for a newspaperman to commend himself to posterity is to write an important book. Alas, none of Mr. Alsop’s books pass muster (though “The Rare Art Traditions,” the history of art collecting that he published in 1982 after shutting down his column, is a highly readable study that deserves to be better remembered). Look him up in the Yale Book of Quotations and you’ll find just one sentence to remember him by: It was Joe Alsop who said of the Vietnam War in 1965 that “there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

As legacies go, that beats having been photographed in bed with a KGB agent—but not by much.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes “Sightings” every other Friday. He is the author of “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

A version of this article appeared April 27, 2012, on page D8 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A News Columnist With His Own Secret.

By BEN PAYNTER

Ryan C. Henriksen for The Wall Street Journal

Mike Adair, left, and Bob Holt, right, at Briarcliff Elementary School, Kansas City, Mo. The school has served as the background for many of the duo’s e-cards.

When brainstorming, Bob Holt and Mike Adair ditch their pens and sketchbooks, grab coffee and retreat to a small, foam-lined recording booth inside Hallmark’s headquarters in Kansas City, Mo., to crack jokes into a microphone.

Rather than prescript greeting cards, the duo do improv comedy, riffing off each other to figure out what quips or scenarios might ultimately drive better overall content. “When we start laughing, that is when we know we’ve hit on something and that we should keep drilling,” Mr. Adair said.

Sound is important because the men make e-cards, email greetings in the form of short animations. Their core franchise stars an excitable pink cat named Hoops and his little green rabbit sidekick, YoYo, their voices high-pitched to an almost chipmunk-like shrillness. Hallmark said Hoops & YoYo, which have almost 200 cards online, account for about one-third of its total e-cards sent. The cartoon duo now have their own line of paper cards, coffee mugs, plush dolls, bumper stickers and a holiday TV special.

In a best-selling paper card for Easter, Hoops & YoYo gorge on chocolate bunnies and scream: “Ch-ch-ch-chocolate bunnies! Chocolate bunnies! Chocolate bunnies for all!” Many cards are meant to celebrate just about anything, boosting chances to send cards—especially online. In a card marking “Donkey Laugh Day,” Hoops and YoYo compete to make the more obnoxious “Hee-Haw” sound. As YoYo puts it: “It’s always the season to laugh—like a donkey.”

Another online card honors Sarcastic Wednesday, with Hoops saying, “Boy, I’d rather be in my cubicle than almost anywhere else in the whole world.” YoYo chimes in, “Oh, it’s already five o’clock? I wish we could start the day over! Don’t you?”

On a recent day, Mr. Holt and Mr. Adair sat in rolling chairs opposite a lone mike wired into a computer. To control volume, they simply roll toward or away from the microphone. A few years ago, Mr. Holt and Mr. Adair tried using individual microphones, but they found it stifling. Being funny is all about timing, and they weren’t close enough to be able to cue off each other’s expressions. The only other accessory in the booth was a fan that had to be turned on between takes because there was no air-conditioning.

On this day the topic was Mother’s Day, one of the biggest card-giving days of the year. To get into a funny frame of mind, they began chuckling over the uninspired gifts they’ve given to their moms—like potholders—which led to a more bizarre list of even worse gifts they could have given, like a potholder dispenser. Then Mr. Holt suggested that they act like extroverted moms, sharing exactly the sort of sarcastic things that a real mom might think (but perhaps not say). “Gee, I wonder if I’ll get some gardening tools,” he said. “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like ‘Get out there and work in the dirt.’ “

When Mr. Holt mentioned another classic tradition—serving mom breakfast in bed—Mr. Adair jumped in. “First I gotta get up, make it and then clean it up.” This kicked off more jokes that ultimately led the duo to a wish list for gifts that would actually cause moms more work or cost more money. Mr. Adair mentioned a do-it-yourself spa kit. “I can’t wait to open the gift card I helped pay for,” he added, as Mr. Holt burst out laughing.

Though the two men are good friends, they rarely have time to hang out after work. They see this as a benefit; it allows them to ignore in-jokes and focus on broader themes like strange work or dating rituals.

Then it’s Mr. Holt’s job to create something coherent. When he first developed the characters in 2001, he would come home, put on background music to drown out any distracting noises and sketch on his computer. Each character and new pose was usually inked once without going back for corrections. “It’s sort of the same way we do audio with Hoops & YoYo,” Mr. Holt said. “A lot of times the first take is the best because it’s the most genuine.” Today, Mr. Holt uses previously saved copies as a starting point, then manipulates their actions and the backgrounds accordingly.

After reviewing the audio of their Mother’s Day card, Mr. Holt and Mr. Adair assigned it the working title “These Are Mom’s Inner Thoughts,” and decided to break the rant into subcategories that could be activated by clicking buttons. If they ever worry about offending anyone, they don’t show it. Both like to think of themselves as modern ventriloquists. As Mr. Adair put it: “You can always point and say, ‘It’s not me! Hoops said it.’ ”

A version of this article appeared May 12, 2012, on page C11 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Two Guys, a Cat and a Funny Green Bunny.

By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN

Getty Images

Jessica Hardy swims in the women’s 100-meter butterfly during the Long Beach Grand Prix in Long Beach, Calif., in 2010.

Jessica Hardy is still fuming.

Four years after her energy-drink sponsor allegedly spiked Hardy with a banned substance, disqualifying her from the 2008 Olympics, Hardy is still swimming angry. When others reminisce about medals they won in Beijing, her fury grows.

“I hear about (those medals) all the time,” says Hardy, enraged at the thought of someone else wearing the gold and silver medals she believes she would have won in Beijing.

Is angry any way to swim?

Jim Wood thinks so. If an athlete can maintain control of form, argues Wood, the former president of USA Swimming, then anger can be converted into high-speed fuel.

But Hardy herself is convinced that anger will hurt her cause. To free herself of negative thoughts and emotions that she says create debilitating toxins, she has hired psychologists to put her through drills. “When my muscles get that toxin it is harder to swim,” she says.

In her effort to redeem herself, Hardy—the 25-year-old world record holder in the 100-meter breast stroke—will take a significant step this weekend at the Charlotte UltraSwim, the last major competition ahead of the U.S. trials next month. Swimmers from around the world will be competing for jockeying rights in Charlotte ahead of the Olympic Games.

For her part, Hardy will be seeking to reestablish her dominance in the 100 breaststroke—possibly amid whispers of “cheater.”

“I’ve done everything I can to clear my name,” says Hardy, a 25-year-old Southern California native. “I can’t control other people’s opinions of me.”

The impossibility of proving a negative means that a cloud of suspicion may hang forever over Hardy, who was found to bear trace amounts of a stimulant called clenbuterol. But few if any experts who have studied Hardy’s case believe she intentionally ingested a performance-enhancing drug.

Like nearly everyone in amateur sports, Hardy consumed a so-called recovery product after workouts; Michael Phelps, for instance, drinks a post-swim concoction called Pure Sport. In Hardy’s case, the drink of choice was called Arginine Extreme, made by a Texas company called AdvoCare. In exchange for making testimonials about it, Hardy received Arginine and other considerations for free.

After flunking the dope test, Hardy examined the source of everything she ate and drank and concluded that the least-policed item was Arginine Extreme. Sure, she had passed previous drug tests while consuming the product. But was every batch the same?

To find out, Hardy hired Don Catlin, former director of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Lab and a foremost authority on drug testing. Catlin said he found “trace amounts” of the substance in the batch of Argenine Extreme that Hardy had been using. In an interview, Dr. Catlin says he believes the stimulant’s presence in the product is accidental. He said, “Supplements have a supply line of materials and that supply line can get contaminated.”

After Hardy blamed Argenine Extreme, AdvoCare sued her claiming defamation. She countersued charging the company with supplying her with the contaminated product. Allison Levy, general counsel for AdvoCare, said the company conducted its own tests on the batch of supplements Hardy claimed was contaminated, and those tests came up clear of any banned substances. “We are confident there is nothing wrong with our products, with this batch or with any other batch,” Levy said.

In early 2009, an American Arbitration Association panel heard her case, including Dr. Catlin’s evidence of allegedly contaminated sport drink. Ultimately, in what many regard as an exoneration, the panel halved Hardy’s ban to the sport to one year from two.

“The impossibility of proving a negative means that a cloud of suspicion may hang over Hardy.”

For her part, Hardy partly blames herself for having taken a supplement composed of unknown ingredients. Now, she is rare among Olympic athletes for taking no supplements at all. “If you are a competing athlete facing the possibility of being tested, you should understand that most of these supplements do nothing,” said Gary Wadler, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Prohibited List and Methods Sub-Committee. “It’s just not worth the risk to take them.”

In Charlotte this weekend, the Olympic events that Hardy will swim are the 100-meter breaststroke, and maybe the 100-freestyle. If these trials follow the results of the 2008 U.S. trials and recent world competitions—Hardy will finish first in the 100-meter breast, while placing high enough in the 50- and 100-meter freestyle to vie for a place on relay teams. Conceivably, she could win three medals in London.

But she must overcome any thought that her best shot might have been lost, as happened to Zach Lund in recent years. The world’s top-ranked skeleton racer heading onto the 2006 Winter Games, Lund was disqualified at the start of those competitions for having used a hair-restoration product that only recently had entered the list of forbidden products, and that stayed on that list only long enough to keep Lund from competing in the Torino Games.

Four years later, in the 2010 Vancouver Games, Lund finished fifth.

As before Beijing, Hardy approaches the U.S. trials as a world favorite in the 100-meter breaststroke. But this time, the wild card for her is whether she can control the anger she harbors about having been disqualified.

A born sprinter, Hardy is prone to fading after 50-meters when her legs begin to feel heavy. She says she knows can’t finish strong while wasting energy on rage.

Hardy never used to be an angry person. But after the disqualification fiasco, her coach, Dave Salo of the Trojan Swim Club in Los Angeles, says she became prone to “act out and storm off” after occasional bad swims. Sometimes she lashed out at him when he demanded a particularly torturous workout, such as a 14 100-meter sprints with three seconds between.

Studies show anger produces the hormone norepinephrine, which increases blood pressure, heart rate and the flow of blood to the large muscles in the arms and legs. That sounds beneficial for exercise. However, that same process pulls blood from the brain, and science increasingly has shown that smart swimming outperforms strong swimming, that technique matters more than brute strength.

Determined to manage her anger, Hardy sought individual therapy as well as consulted sports psychologists to find techniques to help clear her brain of any negative thoughts that might creep in during competition. She learned to perform exercises that include quick, deep cleansing breaths and brief conversations with herself.

Hardy also spent the past year “brain training” at a Southern California research center, where she plays videogames with sensors attached to her head that map her tension level as she completes a series of agility and focus exercises. After studying the map of her brain waves, she says she has mastered anger-control techniques amid the most challenging parts of the videogames. Coach Salo says, “She is ready.”

Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com

By LEE ROSENBAUM

University of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim

“Mural” (1943) by Jackson Pollock

Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock

Hood Museum of Art

Through Jun 17

Then travels to the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.

Hanover, N.H.

The late Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was a tough act to follow. Probably because no one can top his definitive 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective, we have no major show in the U.S. this year to commemorate the centenary of that towering Abstract Expressionist’s birth.

But there are aspects of Pollock’s work from the years preceding the famous “drip” paintings that remain underexplored. Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, under its new director, Michael Taylor (former curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), has seized the moment by hastily assembling an absorbing dossier exhibition focusing on a crucial period in Pollock’s trajectory from representational landscapes, heavily influenced by his teacher Thomas Hart Benton, to his signature abstract masterpieces that, according to popular and Hollywood legend, seemed to spring out of nowhere.

The Hood’s “Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock,” organized by Sarah Powers of the Hood with Pollock expert Helen Harrison, reveals that many of the pictorial strategies employed by Pollock in his celebrated monumental canvases of the late 1940s to early 1950s can be traced to his intensely charged easel-size paintings from the brief period, 1938-41, when this quintessentially American artist was haunted by Orozco’s macabre visions of skeletons and ritual sacrifice. Pollock had seen the Mexican’s murals in 1930 at Pomona College in California and, six years later, at Dartmouth. While there are plenty of pyrotechnics in the works of both artists, “Men of Fire” might have been more aptly (if less appealingly) titled “Men of Skulls and Bones.”

Pollock owed his enthusiasm for the visceral impact of monumentality to Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and, above all, Orozco. In his first oversize horizontal canvas, a 20-foot-wide 1943 composition, “Mural,” commissioned by his patron Peggy Guggenheim (on view at the Des Moines Art Center through July 15), Pollock was influenced not only by Orozco’s larger-than-life scale but also by the swirling energy of his brushstrokes and dramatic use of black to define curving contours. Orozco’s archetypal images of snakes, skulls and flames, which must have resonated with the American’s Jungian sensibility, are abundantly present in Pollock’s works at the Hood.

To appreciate “Men of Fire,” you need to start not in Dartmouth’s art museum but in its Baker Library. That’s where the 24-year-old Pollock made pilgrimage in 1936 to see Orozco’s 24-panel mural “The Epic of American Civilization” (1932-34), a sweeping history of the Mexican people. Its darkly symbolic and ritualistic content made a strong impression on the younger artist. Dartmouth also owns Orozco’s studies for the mural, included in the Hood’s show.

Nowhere is the connection between Dartmouth’s mural and Pollock’s work clearer than in his “Untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton)” (c. 1938-41), acquired by the Hood six years ago. With a lumpish, crouched female at its center, it quotes the image of a skeletal ribcage and extended limb from Orozco’s fiercely satiric panel “Gods of the Modern World.” That work had stirred an uproar at Dartmouth over its depiction of a ghoulish cadre of skeletal professors in caps and gowns, overseeing a female skeleton as she gives birth to a skeletal baby with a mortarboard on its head (representing “stillborn knowledge”).

Like many of the Pollocks in the show, “Bald Woman” is densely composed and difficult to read. Only close scrutiny can unpack the contorted anatomy of the drooping woman and the many images derived from Orozco’s mural—winding serpents, orange flames and the jumble of tiny, sickly green skulls surrounding the central figure. Pollock had transmuted Orozco’s politically charged imagery into psychological totems. The morbid scene is redolent with death and despair.

Pollock’s use of semiabstraction and his partial concealment of representational images point ahead to the layered complexities of the drip paintings, where representation seems to disappear. The Museum of Modern Art’s “Flame” (c. 1934-38), for example, is a precursor to all-over abstraction, with its jagged orange, black and white slashes that represent a raging fire. Without help from the label text, you might miss the ribcage—parallel light and dark lines. Lying near the bottom of the canvas, amid the conflagration, the bones suggest that this is a sacrificial pyre.

Pollock’s use of disguised and obscured representation, although later difficult to detect, persisted into his abstract masterpieces of the late ’40s and early ’50s. As noted in the catalog for MoMA’s show, close analysis of Pollock’s signature “drip” paintings (informed by Hans Namuth’s famous images of Pollock at work) reveals their structural underpinnings of veiled and hidden figures.

The link between the proto-Pollocks seen at Dartmouth and the mature abstract masterpieces is the groundbreaking, ex-Peggy Guggenheim “Mural” of 1943. Designed for her apartment’s entrance hall, that dazzling achievement, said to have been largely executed in one day, is not only the first but also the biggest of the mural-size Pollocks.

A frenzy of black verticals and whorls, enlivened with touches of pink, yellow and turquoise, “Mural,” under sustained scrutiny, comes into focus as a cross-canvas parade of upright, abstracted figures, with outlines strongly reminiscent of the black-defined curves of the marching Aztecs’ muscled flesh in the “Migration” panel that begins Dartmouth’s Orozco mural. Tightly focused on the brief period when Pollock was most strongly influenced by Orozco, the show doesn’t include (or illustrate) works like “Mural” that marked the next step toward Pollocks signature style. But the black swirls that animate Orozco’s and Pollock’s murals also figure prominently in a painting displayed at the entrance to the Hood’s show, the Tate Gallery’s powerful “Naked Man with Knife” (c. 1938-1940), a chaotic jumble of three fiercely grappling nudes.

Comparing the little-known Pollocks at the Hood with the paintings that later became touchstones of international veneration reveals that we might not have had the latter without the foundation laid by the former. Contradicting the myth of the sudden epiphany, Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, once noted that there were “no sharp breaks” from the works of the pre-”drip” period to the mature masterpieces, “but rather a continuing development of the same themes and obsessions.”

You can see the truth of that in Hanover.

Ms. Rosenbaum writes for the Journal on art and museums and blogs as CultureGrrl at www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl.

A version of this article appeared May 2, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Becoming Jackson Pollock.