Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Two years later, in a picture taken on an outing with the Minsches near Phoenix, Jackson sits impromptu on the edge of a rock, leaning forward, as if squatting in midstride, ready to spring up and out of the picture. His body is loose and angular, all joints and limbs, one elbow resting on his knee, the other braced to keep his relaxed frame from falling over. His clothes are loose and comfortable, sleeves rolled up, shirt billowing out over his belt in empty folds, hat cocked at a rakish angle. He tosses a roguish smile at the camera, almost a smirk, which betrays not even a trace of self-doubt.

  Walnut Grove School, Orland, 1922: Jackson, second row, far left; Sande, third row, far left; Frank, back row, second from right.

  With only slight revisions, this is the Jackson Pollock who will eventually intrigue, frustrate, and win the art world, the Jackson Pollock whom Thomas Hart Benton will take in and love as a son; the Jackson Pollock whom Lee Krasner will call “the sexiest thing on two legs.” Even at this age, there were other, less flattering sides not caught by the camera: a dark streak of self-abuse that will turn ugly as he grows older and discovers alcohol. But here, even at age twelve, crystallized in adolescence, is the legendary Pollock charm. In the last picture of Jackson, taken on the day he died, he sits precariously on a boulder with his mistress on his lap, his legs apart, clothes loose, leaning forward, tossing the remnants of a roguish smile.

  The first signs of transformation appeared soon after the family moved to Orland. The frightened little boy who had always cautioned his adventurous brother, “Mother wouldn’t like it,” was replaced by an enthusiastic accomplice. “They had a mischief streak in them,” recalls Stuart Cleek, who accompanied the “fun-lovin’” Pollock brothers on many of their adventures. “They was always getting something wrong with somebody,” Cleek says enigmatically. “Never mean or anything. They just had a lot of high life.” It was the kind of high life, apparently, that caught the attention of Bessie Trowbridge and Helen Sabelman, their teachers at the nearby one-room Walnut Grove School. Cleek recalls that he and the Pollock boys were kept after class on numerous occasions. “We’d just sit there and look at the clock and laugh and wink at each other.” On the playground, both Sande and Jackson were known for their prowess at “hand-e-over,” a fast-moving game of elimination much like blind man’s bluff, which often ended with the two of them in play and the rest of their schoolmates in “jail.” After school, they often lit out for the vast stretches of sagebrush and wild grass that surrounded Orland to hunt brush rabbits, gophers, ground squirrels, and any bird they could hit. Hunting was one of the few memories they had of their father.

  Jackson and Stella, Phoenix, about 1924

  Jackson’s brief exposure to Roy’s ingratiating machismo on the return to Phoenix only accelerated the transformation. Egged on by the Minsch boys, he began to range farther over the same landscape that six years earlier had held all kinds of unnamed terrors. With Sande, he hunted and hiked along the Salt River and its crazy grid of tributary canals, swimming in the pooled water and digging caves in the steep embankments. To the astonishment of the Minsch children, whose father frequently “whacked” them with a green peach branch, Jackson operated free of constraints. Roy, Charles, and Jay had all left, Frank was seldom home for long, and Stella seemed wholly indifferent. “Have all the fun you can,” Frank remembers her saying, “because one day it will all be a memory.” Among the neighborhood boys, Jackson earned a reputation as a daredevil and provocateur. On January 28, 1924, he and Orville Minsch took a frigid midnight swim in the canal to celebrate his twelfth birthday in Huck Finn style.

  But the transformation from Mama’s boy to Peck’s bad boy was never complete. When he accidentally killed the eccentric Mrs. MacDonald’s cat while showing off his deadeye aim with a .22, he pleaded with his friends not to tell on him. “He was afraid of what she might do to him,” says Dolly Minsch. When Sande invited him to skip classes at the Monroe School, he refused, afraid that his absence might be discovered. The new image might allay and even beguile the outside world, but it could never touch Jackson’s troubled, irresolute inner world.

  Fortunately, during this same three-year period, he discovered something that could.

  For the first seven or eight years of Jackson Pollock’s life, art existed solely as an activity—something that people, notably his brother Charles, did; a skill no different from blowing bubbles, shooting marbles, or whistling—all of which Charles also did; no different from his mother’s crocheting or his father’s reading. Until Chico, when Stella began to display some of Charles’s watercolors, he had little if any sense of the permanence of art. Charles’s brothers marveled at the act of making a drawing; but once the act was finished, the drawing had no more independent significance than a bag of marbles. Despite occasional encounters with bands of Indians and visits to Indian ruins, Jackson never experienced Indian art firsthand and therefore never had an opportunity to see the seemingly isolated act of creation as part of a larger and, in some cases, coherent culture.

  In Janesville, he had marveled at the artistic skills of his schoolmates Orlo Shinn and Cecil Williams. “They were darn good drawers,” Gordon McMurphy remembers. “Whatever would come into their minds, that’s what they could draw. They were freehand drawers, either with chalk on a blackboard or on paper. I don’t think they learned it; it was just a natural gift. And they could spin a rope, you know, and do rope tricks, and they could draw a horse bucking in any position.” In Jackson’s childhood world, spinning a rope and drawing a horse were commensurate skills.

  From these same experiences, Jackson had begun to learn something else: not about art, but about artists. Orlo Shinn and Cecil Williams were both Indian boys, the only two who dared to cross the strict racial line that divided whites from “diggers” in towns throughout the West. Their unique position made them outcasts on both sides of the line. (Both also died young under unusual circumstances: Shinn was kicked to death by loggers in a whorehouse in Westwood; Williams died in an unexplained fight in army boot camp.) Although he never knew of their fates, Jackson must have sensed their alienation and sympathized with it, even as he envied their remarkable skill and the attention it attracted.

  If Shinn and Williams were only a fleeting, subliminal glimpse into the link between art and psyche, Monteze LeMaster was a long unblinking look. She was the oldest of Jackson’s schoolmates at the Walnut Grove School: a tall, dark-haired girl with large features and a wounded look. At fifteen, she was two years behind in her schooling, perhaps because of family duties, perhaps because Orland High was too far away for a poor family without a car. Her story was the story of many farm girls in the area—except that Monteze LeMaster could draw. “That girl was sure handy with a pencil,” one of her classmates recalls. Handy but not happy. “Monteze was older and bigger and knew everything already,” says Helen Finch, another classmate. “She was miserable ‘cause she was different.” On Friday afternoons at 1:50, when the school had its weekly art lesson, Mrs. Trowbridge would usher her to the front of the class, where, pencil in hand, she would glumly draw a picture for her admiring classmates. “She always did it reluctantly,” recalls Finch, “like she wanted to be someplace, anyplace else.”

  Other people may have helped shape Jackson’s early attitude toward art, but no one had the impact Charles did. After the family moved away from Chico in February 1920, the two saw each other only on the rare occasions when Jackson accompanied Frank into Chico to see Jay play football or box, or to visit Uncle Frank and Aunt Rose. Even then, Charles gave Jackson only passing attention. It was primarily through Stella and Frank that news of Charles’s exploits filtered back to Jackson. He saw, for example, that in 1920 and 1921, Charles was drawing cartoons and illustrations for the Chico High School paper and yearbook: drawings in the rakish Art Nouveau style of Aubrey Beardsley, which Charles later dismissed as “awful” and “filthy.” On one of his trips, Jackson undoubtedly saw the collection of color reproductions that Charles began to clip on the sl
y from copies of the Studio in Orland’s Carnegie Library. “I couldn’t resist stealing them,” Charles explains. “I had never seen a museum or gallery.” It was a tame assortment of landscapes, still lifes, and mythological scenes, primarily English, in cool, restrained contrast to the wildfire burning in the salons of Paris.

  The most important influence on Charles’s art during these years was an attractive, aristocratic spinster art teacher named Angeline Hardcastle Stansbury. “She would always encourage him to keep up and do whatever he could with his talent,” recalls a girlfriend of Charles’s who often accompanied him to the big Victorian house in Chico where Miss Stansbury would greet them in high lace collar and black crepe skirt and offer them wine and fruitcake. Teacher and student continued to correspond after Charles arrived in Los Angeles in the summer of 1922 and enrolled—at her urging, with her recommendation, and with a $175 loan she had arranged—at the Otis Art Institute.

  Among Charles’s many discoveries at Otis was a magazine called the Dial, a monthly collection of serious fiction, poetry, commentary, and book reviews sprinkled with black-and-white reproductions. Charles called it “a revelation,” and in his enthusiasm, began to mail copies home to Orland. If his intention was to encourage his younger brothers’ interest in intellectual pursuits, rather than just to display his budding erudition, the Dial was wildly off-target. The issues he sent included short fiction by D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann; commentary by Bertrand Russell and Ezra Pound; and poetry by William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot, including the first appearance in America of “The Waste Land”—hardly the kind of introduction to literature likely to lure two farmboys, eleven and thirteen, back from a hunting expedition or in from a game of “hand-e-over.”

  Charles in Los Angeles: the big-city artist

  But if Charles’s aim was off, his timing was impeccable. Estranged from their father and ignored by Stella, Sande and Jackson were thrilled by their oldest brother’s attentions, however distant and misdirected. They may have taken only an occasional bite from the Dial’s cornucopia of articles, but they devoured the pictures. Though small, the illustrations amounted to a comprehensive catalogue of avant-garde art. The line drawings of nude women by Pablo Picasso and photographs of nude sculptures by Ernesto de Fiori must have riveted Jackson and Sande’s adolescent attention. Some pictures, like the one of Constantin Brancusi’s bronze Bird, undoubtedly puzzled them, while others, like the German Expressionist Franz Marc’s painting of a horse or Gino Severini’s neo-Romantic fresco of three harlequins may have struck a sympathetic chord, however brief and inarticulate its vibrations. Of the art criticism—Roger Fry on Jean Marchand and Hans Purrmann on Matisse—Jackson couldn’t have made any sense. But his sensitive eye would have lingered on the illustration of Matisse’s Les Capucines, with its everyday objects and dancing figures.

  The loose collection of thoughts and images that had been accumulating in Jackson’s mind since Phoenix—from memories of Charles’s painting lessons to his admiration of Monteze LeMaster—coalesced around these issues of the Dial. Over the next few years, he and Sande would begin to sketch and talk with increasing conviction of becoming artists when they grew up. Forty years later, lying in the hospital on the night before he died, Sande would talk of the spell the Dial articles had cast, recalling to a surprised Charles the wonder and excitement that he and Jackson had shared as they pored over them together.

  While Jackson struggled with limited success to cope with the split between his parents, his brother Frank was undergoing a similar struggle, and discovering how wrenching it could be. Since leaving Phoenix in 1917, he had lost a year at Phoenix Union High School, and the indignity of lagging behind his former classmates proved too much for the insecure and sensitive Frank. Soon, he began to cut classes, then whole days. Sande, who often joined his older brother’s truant adventures, missed more than half the school days that year, cruising the streets of Phoenix with Frank in the family Studebaker.

  At night, with other friends, Frank discovered a more potent form of rebellion. “We’d drive out of town on a sandy road in the middle of vacant desert. Just when you thought you were past civilization, somebody would have a tent out there, and they’d be making this home-brew called white mule—because it kicked like one. We’d pay maybe a quarter for a drink, and in thirty or forty minutes we’d be crazy and fighting each other. I fought a cactus once, wrestled with it until it tore me up. Then I’d start vomiting. I vomited all over that goddamned desert.” Even Sande, for all his enthusiasm, couldn’t keep up. “We’d buy in the morning and drink all afternoon. We’d go to movies or Vaudeville shows and I’d think they were hilarious because I was half-crocked.” Where was Stella? “Mother was permissive,” says Frank. “And anyway, she didn’t know what the hell was going on. If Dad had known, I would have gotten a beating. Such monkey business would have been tended to.”

  Eventually, as Frank clearly intended, both Stella and Roy found out. “One day Sande came in from an alley while I was in a pool hall assaying a shot,” Frank recalls. “He tapped me on the shoulder and said the truant officer was coming to get me. So I dropped the cue, ran out into the alley, and jumped in the car. I said, ‘I’m quitting school,’ and Sande said, ‘Me, too.’ We drove out to the ranch and I told Mother, ‘I quit school,’ and Sande said, ‘Me, too.’” If Frank was hoping, finally, for some words of reproof, some concerned anger from his mother, Stella didn’t oblige. “She simply accepted it,” Frank recalls, “and made a fast decision: instead of waiting for the school year to be over, she decided we’d take off right away.”

  Stella’s decision to leave Phoenix was not as sudden and unconsidered as it may have seemed to her outlaw sons. Earlier in the year when Jacob Minsch announced his intention to remarry, Roy had arranged for Stella to work the summer as a cook at the Carr Ranch, a rustic retreat in the mountains east of Phoenix where city folk escaped the summer heat. In some ways, the trip was a homecoming for the Pollock family. The Studebaker roared past the farm on Sherman Street and followed the Salt River east toward Mesa. Just past Apache Junction, the road started to climb out of the desert, pine and juniper began to spring from the rocky hillsides, and the river cut deeper and deeper into the valley. In ways that the Pollock boys, especially Frank, may have sensed as the road wound up the Salt River Canyon toward the Roosevelt Dam, they were confronting the past. In the vast reservoir that stretched behind the dam, they saw for the first time the source of the water that had irrigated their father’s Phoenix farm, the water that the zanjero sent, the water that puddled in the acequias and silvered the tines of alfalfa, the water that poured through hidden gopher holes and turned the hot dust black, the water on which Roy would have built his “empire.” The water represented the family life they had not known since leaving Phoenix seven years before and the father they hadn’t lived with in almost as long. Only days before leaving the Minsches, Stella had learned that the warehouse in Chico where all their worldly possessions were stored had burned to the ground. Everything, even Roy’s glass-front bookcase with the diamond-shaped panes and all his books, had been destroyed.

  The Pollock family had come full circle since abandoning Roy, and now, with nothing to show for their wandering, the survivors were coming home to him.

  Of course, as usual in the Pollock family, nothing was said about this unusual reunion. Stella had already arranged to move her family, without Roy, back to California in the fall. After three and a half years of strained absence, the summer in the mountains would be their last chance at reconciliation.

  The Carr Ranch lay at the end of sixty miles of gravel road, north of the copper mining towns of Globe and Miami on the slopes of Aztec Peak in southeast Arizona’s Sierra Ancha. To the summer visitors from the desert around Phoenix, the dry crumbly slopes with their balding cover of pines may have looked like a forest, but to the Pollock boys, who had lived within the solid green walls of Janesville, the countryside seemed invitingly open. The ranc
h itself was a cluster of about a dozen one-room sleeping cabins around a generous old farmhouse, a “dance hall”—simply a floor with a roof over it where fiddlers played on Saturday nights in the summer and “all the cowboys came out and the cowgirls cut up”—a general store and post office, and, out behind the big house, a half-dozen “housekeeping cabins” for the staff. Stella ran the big kitchen while young Apache girls from the nearby White Mountain reservation in exaggerated “native” costumes slipped back and forth into the dining room, quietly serving the food and clearing the big boardinghouse tables. “It was a family-style operation,” Frank recalls, “just the kind of operation Mother was used to.” Without electricity, the nights were long but cool and starry; the days, impeccably blue.

  A few miles north of the ranch toward the Mogollon Rim where, two years before, Zane Grey had built a cabin and begun to immortalize this corner of Arizona, Roy’s team of government surveyors made their summer camp. During the week, they hiked the rocky forests rerouting the old road to keep the grade below 6 percent. On the weekends, Roy came down to the Carr Ranch to be with Stella. The visits, it seems, were part of their unspoken bargain.

  Exploring Indian cliff dwellings, Tonto National Forest, 1924: Frank leading, followed by Sande (left), Roy, and Jackson

  On Labor Day, September 1, 1924, the last day of summer, Roy invited Sande and Jackson on a day-long hike to the Indian ruins on Cherry Creek. The ruins lay about ten miles due east of the ranch, on the other side of Aztec Peak’s 7,000-foot flank. The hike promised to be long and arduous and Roy hesitated to take twelve-year-old Jackson along, but Sande’s pleading finally persuaded him. In the pale gray predawn, the car carrying the two boys, their father, and a local guide climbed slowly up Cherry Creek Canyon between Aztec and Sombrero peaks until the road ended at the edge of a wide wash. The rest of the journey was on foot over trackless, rocky forest floor. The sun quickly sucked up the morning mist and by the time the group reached the canyon floor, where they ate lunch, it was forehead high and blistering hot. The rocks on the side of the creek burned Sande’s back as he stretched out for a brief rest with his feet dangling in the stream. Jackson sat beside him and watched as his father climbed a nearby boulder and urinated onto a flat rock below, creating a distinctive pattern on the sun-baked surface.