Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  After walking away from the Orland farm, he had stopped briefly in Phoenix before arriving at his final destination, Los Angeles. By a stroke of luck, one of his first acquaintances there was a prominent local art critic, Arthur Millier, who promptly arranged a job for him as a copyboy at the Times. Eventually, he worked his way into the art department where his job included “layout, fancy lettering for the Sunday supplement, and scaling photographs.”

  As soon as he had saved enough money, he enrolled at the Otis Art Institute and moved to nearby Echo Park, within sight of the revolving gold cross of Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple. The routine at Otis was deadly dull, consisting mostly of drawing from casts and live models. For news of more exciting developments, like the works of Matisse and the French School, he had to rely on magazines, word of mouth, and traveling exhibitions. One show in particular, an exhibition of Mexican painters at Exposition Park, had captured his imagination. The brooding, polemical, often violent paintings of Orozco, Siqueiros, and Rivera proved to Charles that art could be more than plaster casts and sketching classes. Soon, rotogravures and layouts lost their appeal. “I got bored with my job,” he recalls, “so I gave it up, thinking that I would go to Mexico.” Then one day, while browsing in the little Japanese fruit stand where he had bought the Dials for Jack and Sande, he picked up a copy of Shadowland, a movie magazine that featured articles on painting and music. In it, he found an article by Thomas Hart Benton.

  On the recommendation of Arthur Millier, he dropped plans for Mexico and headed instead to New York City to enroll at the Art Students League where Benton had just joined the faculty. At Benton’s apartment near Abingdon Square, Charles was “received with open arms.” Within a few months, he was a fixture both in Benton’s class at the League and in the Bentons’ household. By 1927, they had found him a roomier flat in the same building and by 1928, they were inviting him to their summer house on Martha’s Vineyard. In exchange for babysitting her infant son, T. P., Rita Benton offered him genuine Italian spaghetti and helped him find work designing motion picture display cards for a Long Island printing firm.

  Charles repaid his teacher’s generosity with total devotion. “Whatever talent I had when I came to New York was nonexistent,” he says. “I had only enthusiasm, excitement, and a burning desire to study with him.” Under the influence of the pragmatic, earthbound Benton, Charles’s conception of art, and the artist, had also changed. Instead of a “pretty pasttime” appreciated, if not created, largely by women, art to Benton was an athletic event, a manly exercise involving structure and movement and muscle. The new view of the artist extended even to Benton’s wardrobe, which the clothes-conscious Charles quickly adopted, trading in the white spats and silk vests of Los Angeles for the rumpled shirts and suspenders that Benton considered the uniform of manhood.

  For the first few weeks, after Frank left for Big Pines, Jackson had the new, more approachable Charles all to himself. Together they drove to the little town of Claremont, thirty miles east of Los Angeles, to see the mural that Orozco had recently finished at Pomona College. In a vast Gothic arch at one end of the student refectory, they saw the giant figure of Prometheus filling the space above the fireplace. Painted in harsh, bleak browns and grays, he stood twenty feet tall, yet still seemed somehow crowded into the triangular space, pressed down on one great trunk-like knee, surrounded by a rabble of smaller figures, arms outstretched, in a chorus of fear and despair.

  Charles in his “Benton Period”

  It wasn’t a “fine” painting in the classroom sense: the legs were too big for the body, the hands ill-formed, the head too small—all “mistakes” that Jackson himself had made countless times. It looked nothing like the perfect drawings of Harold Lehman or Phil Goldstein. But it possessed an undeniable power. It seemed to prove everything Charles had been saying about muscular art and a new kind of artist. And if Jackson missed the emotional intensity of the image, the directness of the style, the political implications of the subject matter, or the potential of mural-size painting, Charles was there to point them out and offer explanations, however incompletely understood. More than any book or article, Charles’s admiration conferred on this unfamiliar art a new and indelible fascination for Jackson.

  Sometime around the Fourth of July, Charles and Stella left for Wrightwood to visit Frank and Roy. Sande and Arloie joined them for a while, sleeping together in a tent beside the cabin, with Stella’s blithe acquiescence, before Sande returned to his job in Los Angeles. In the midst of so much movement, and despite his hunger to be with Charles, Jackson remained in Los Angeles, memories of the fight with his father in Santa Ynez the previous summer still fresh in his mind.

  Orozco’s Prometheus, 1930, fresco, 20’ × 20’

  Without Charles, Jackson sank back into a restless depression. The unexpected arrival of his cousin Paul McClure provided some distraction but little comfort. Through a sweltering July and August, Jackson remained cloistered in the tiny bungalow, sketching furiously and turning over in his mind what Charles had told him. “He only seemed to be interested in seeing things he could reproduce,” McClure remembers. When McClure could engage him in conversation, it was invariably about Charles. “It was clear that Jack idolized Charles. He wanted to do what Charles did. He said, ‘Charles can do this so I guess I’ll try it.’”

  In early September, as Charles and Frank were preparing to return to New York, they urged Jackson to join them. “If you want to be an artist,” Frank remembers Charles saying, “there’s only one place to be, and that’s where it’s all happening. That’s New York.” The summer had shown Jackson that there was nothing, and no one, in Los Angeles to hold him. Before leaving, however, he went to Berthe Pacifico’s house and asked her to marry him and come to New York. “We could live in Greenwich Village,” he argued, “and you could go to music school.” Over her mother’s vehement objections—“She thought we were too young”—Berthe said yes to marriage but no to New York, dismissing Jackson’s dreamy plans with a wave of her hand. “You’re so naive,” she sighed.

  On September 10, 1930, the Buick left Los Angeles carrying one more Pollock brother than when it arrived. For a change of scenery, Charles, who did most of the driving, decided to take the northern route through Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Missouri, then coasted Route 40 into New York. In one of the brief pockets of conversation about New York, school, art, Benton, and “the big question,” which Charles recalls was “what is it all going to add up to,” the subject of names arose. Jackson had assumed that as an artist he would use his full name: Paul Jackson Pollock. Charles thought that was “too long,” and Paul Pollock “didn’t sound very interesting.” He suggested that Jackson stick with Jackson. “It sounded more forceful, it seemed to me, or euphonious, if you like,” Charles remembers. “Jackson Pollock had a certain ring to it.”

  Jackson’s family never called him Jackson, however. To them, he would always be Jack.

  11

  THE BEST PAINTER IN THE FAMILY

  To Jackson’s eye, New York in the fall of 1930, almost a full year after the great crash, was still a city of lofty ambition. He could see it in the skyline, where the unfinished Empire State Building’s 102-story silhouette stretched even native necks in astonishment. Beside it, the Chrysler Building, with its steel crown, and other, lesser towers—Woolworth, Chanin, Waldorf—stood in random array, many still showing their skeletons and topped by construction cranes. During the late twenties these buildings had become the city’s arrogant symbols, simultaneously solid and ephemeral, real and delusional, part hard Manhattan schist, part weightless aeries, thrusts of form and energy that deserved their name, stolen from sailors’ efforts to describe the topmost sail on a high-masted schooner: moon-sail, cloud-raker, sky-scraper. Like a stone armada in the full furl of ambition, they sailed in what Malcom Cowley called “dynamic immobility” through the island’s deep, unyielding granite.

  Jackson could see the ambition in the “amplitude and
onrush” of street life; in the long lines of men waiting outside burlesque houses on Forty-second Street, bathed in Mercurochrome light; in the crowded, smoky balconies of movie houses that specialized in triple features, where the homeless often spent the night; in the cheap carny fair of vivid, vulgar amusements that went on perpetually just off the elegant avenues; in the start-stop steeplechase of 25,000 cabs through canyons already clogged with newsstands, vendors, carts, beggars, shoeblacks, kiosks, flower girls, and trams, all of them washed by the “eddy and mill and bustle of the common, garish crowds.” On Broadway, he could see it in the dazzling hues of neon that ringed Times Square. He could see it below the streets, where seven million people every day funneled through the dark passages of New York’s subway system and into the clattery cars, pressed together “like dried figs done up in cellophane.” He could see it as he traveled the “licorice ribbon” avenues north toward Harlem on the Third, Sixth, or Ninth Avenue Els. Down each passing street, glimpsed blinkingly, he could see the contrasts that fueled the ambition: out one side, the limestone town houses and towers of celebrity; out the other side, tenement shells in endless rows of anonymity.

  With Charles in New York, about 1931

  New York was the city of ambition because it was where ambitious people were drawn, like Melville’s wise man to water. They put up with the noise, the filth, the conflict and confusion, even grew addicted to the mindless intoxication of it all. They proclaimed themselves—like Whitman, Melville, Thomas Wolfe, and thousands of others in the ceaseless flow of talent—natives of Manhattan and accepted the permanent status of stranger. It was a city, wrote John Dos Passos, “full of people wanting inconceivable things.”

  No one wanted inconceivable things more than Jackson Pollock.

  But New York was Charles’s world: the last in a long line of special places, beginning with the sanitarium in Phoenix, in which Charles was at home, and Jackson merely an uneasy guest. He slept on Charles’s couch, ate meals prepared by Charles’s girlfriend, Elizabeth, and followed Charles as he settled back into his orderly, exotic New York existence. “In a sense, Charles was sort of a surrogate father,” Frank recalls of Jackson’s first days in New York. “He was an adviser and a counselor and he guided Jack.” Everywhere they went together, Jackson felt the admiration that his oldest brother enjoyed. “He was very suave and very subtle,” remembers a classmate at the Art Students League, “but his head was screwed on straight.” The Bentons welcomed him as an artist—he could “out-Benton Benton,” according to Rita—and as a friend, favoring him with an apartment on Union Square, a suitcase full of Benton’s early abstract works, and invitations to the Benton summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.

  Charles, and perhaps Benton, too, helped introduce Jackson to the contentious world of American art in the early 1930s. He had already gleaned bits and pieces of art news from Schwankovsky and more knowledgeable students like Goldstein and Lehman, but nothing could have prepared him for the civil war brewing in New York. In the two decades since the 1913 Armory Show, the reign of American realist painters like Robert Henri and George Bellows had been challenged by the Cubist and Fauvist revolutions of Picasso and Matisse. American artists like John Marin and Marsden Hartley—and even former realists like John Sloan—espoused the new ideology: subject matter was subordinate to form; the future of art lay in abstraction, not, as Sloan now said, in “the disease of imitating appearances.” Even Thomas Hart Benton had clambered aboard the modernist bandwagon in the twenties, painting brightly colored Synchromist works under the influence of his friend Stanton Macdonald-Wright, exhibiting with Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell at the Anderson Galleries in the important Forum Exhibition of 1916, and fraternizing at Alfred Stieglitz’s radical modernist “291” gallery.

  But the decade of rootless prosperity, uninhibited experimentation, and international disillusionment that followed the war had generated a counterrevolution, a movement “back” toward traditional values, both in the art world and in the nation: a “country-wide revival of Americanism,” Benton called it. Even as Warren G. Harding called for “not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy, not revolution but restoration,” Edward Hopper set out to make a pictorial record of alienated America, and William Gropper painted the plight of the poor and the dispossessed. By 1930, caught up in the tide of isolation and introspection that swept the nation, these and other artists had begun to reverse the fortunes of international modernism in America.

  The “American Wave” had not yet crested, as Jackson could see by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art and the Fifty-seventh Street galleries. In fact, the term wasn’t coined until 1931. But its momentum was clearly building. “There can be little doubt that the ascendancy of abstraction in the artistic universe is on the wane,” wrote Walter Abell in the American Magazine of Art in 1930; abstraction was nothing more than an adventure—“an adventure which is all but over.” Alfred Barr noted that, from 1925 to 1930, only five articles on modern art appeared in the two most important journals devoted to art. Already the American Wave had begun to draw additional strength from political artists like the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco who believed that abstraction was for the elite while art should be for the people—an argument that the Depression had rendered grimly persuasive. “The way of George Bellows, the early John Sloan, and Thomas Eakins was being revived after the novelties of the famous Armory Show of 1913 had worn off,” wrote one of the new realist painters. “An Americanist movement, though it was not clearly defined, was in the air.” Within a year, the author of that statement would emerge as the new movement’s most articulate spokesman: Thomas Hart Benton.

  While waiting for Benton to arrange his admission to the Art Students League, Jackson signed up for the free sculpture classes at nearby Greenwich House, a neighborhood association on Barrow Street that offered a variety of art-related activities. The class was given by Ahron Ben-Shmuel, a skilled stonecarver, at the Greenwich House annex two blocks away on Jones Street.

  Without a salable skill, Jackson was forced to rely on Charles—and occasional small contributions from Stella—for food and supplies. (Despite the high unemployment rate, Charles held down two jobs: as a freelance illustrator of movie cards and as a part-time teacher at the City and Country School on West Thirteenth Street.) Such assistance, however kindly proferred, only reminded Jackson that after eighteen years, Charles still had everything Jackson wanted: the admiration of his colleagues, Benton’s favor, a girlfriend, a job, steady money, independence, and emotional resolution—something that must have seemed to Jackson particularly far from his reach. Elizabeth, who had been charmed at first by Jackson’s “youth, dimples, and the flash of those beautiful teeth,” began to sense the darker feelings that moved beneath the surface. “Jackson seemed jealous of everybody that he came in contact with in New York,” she remembers, “especially Charles. Although he could always be charming when he needed to, he began to develop a sulking, resentful attitude.” “When Jackson first got to New York,” says another family member, “he spent much of his time overcoming his sense of competition with [Charles]. He needed to say, ‘Here I am. Now look at me.’” As so often in the past, Jackson determined that the only way to be recognized was to best his oldest brother. “Before he could be the best painter in the world,” recalls Gerome Kamrowski, a friend and fellow artist, “Jackson had to be the best painter in the family.”

  In late September, he left Charles’s apartment and rented a room of his own a few blocks away.

  Jackson began classes at the Art Students League on September 29, 1930. Located in a sand-colored French Renaissance building on West Fifty-seventh Street, the League was unlike any school he had attended before: the building, with its carved pilasters, arched windows, and marble hall, grander; the students, especially compared to those at Manual Arts, more diverse. In the halls, there were no monitors, dress codes, or demerits to haunt him; in the bathrooms, no gangs of
football players waiting to enforce conformity. It was, in the words of a student who attended in the thirties, “wonderfully loose.”

  Lemuel Wilmarth had wanted it that way when, in 1875, he and a handful of students bolted from the National Academy of Design and founded the League in a spare room over Weber’s Piano Rooms on lower Fifth Avenue. Rejecting the deadening drudgery of the old “alcove” system in which students labored for years drawing from plaster casts before being allowed to work from a live model, they set out to recreate the unstructured, collaborative environment of the “Parisian ateliers.” Despite its modest beginnings, the League prospered mightily and by 1892 took its place in the grand French Renaissance palazzo designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh, the architect of the nearby Plaza Hotel and the distant Dakota. But the League’s goals remained humble and its attitude toward the Prussian curricula of most art schools, hostile. In 1930, fifty-five years after its founding, there were still no required courses, no efforts to regularize instruction, no set terms, no grades, and no attendance records. Enrollment was month-to-month, with no limit on the number of months a student could linger in the same class, as long as the relatively stiff fee of twelve dollars per class per month was paid or, in cases of financial need, excused. Policy decisions were made and rare disciplinary cases handled by the Board of Control, a group of twelve students and teachers elected by League members. The board was also responsible for inviting artists to teach at the League.

  The combination of laissez-faire administration, excellent facilities, and earnest students had, in the League’s short half-century, attracted a varied and distinguished roster of artists to the faculty: William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, George Bellows, Robert Henri. Like the students and the faculty, the resulting curriculum was a potpourri. “One reason why the League is first among the art schools of this country,” said John Sloan, the former “militant illustrator” and 1913 Armory Show veteran who, in 1931, became the League’s president, “is that it furnishes such a varied menu of nourishment for the hungry art student, ranging from the conservative to the ultramodern. A student at the League can choose his studies much as he can choose his food at an Automat.”