Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  In such an unstructured, stimulating environment, Jackson should have flourished. Without the rules, the coaches, the teachers, and the requirements that had always stymied him, the energy of his pent-up rivalry with Charles should have been released. Instead, he found at the Art Students League only what he had found elsewhere: frustration. For regardless of the auspicious freedom and opportunities, sooner or later he had to confront the common denominator of the art school experience, the moment when pencil touched paper.

  For Jackson the dreaded moment came in Tom Benton’s Studio 9. Alone on the fifth floor at the top of the stairs, Studio 9 had the cozy air of a converted attic, a cul-de-sac where classes were never disturbed by other students passing noisily in the hall. During the day, sunlight sifted through the frosted north-facing windows, filling the room with soft, even light. In the evening, when Jackson had his first class, the windows formed a faint blue backdrop to the glow of funnel lamps.

  His first impression was probably similar to that of another student, Axel Horr (later Horn), who walked into Benton’s class two years later:

  They were all huddled in a tight group around the model stand in one corner of the room. Seated on stools and holding drawing boards on their laps, each student was busily scratching out a drawing with a grocer’s pencil on brown wrapping paper. Several squatted on the stand itself, forming a solid group whose core was the model. She was a young girl with the pleasing fruity contours and surface textures of a warm peach. She also sat on a stool and was distinguishable from the rest because she was nude and without a drawing board. Otherwise she seemed as occupied and involved as everyone else.

  Benton didn’t believe in elaborate introductions or gradual immersion. With criticisms scheduled only twice a week, Jackson could easily have begun Benton’s class, as Horn did, without Benton. The class “monitor”—a student who collected monthly fees in exchange for the waiver of his own fee—probably made a few housekeeping remarks, but the business of the class went on, undistracted by the appearance of a new student.

  Benton’s first scheduled visit was the next day, Tuesday, September 30. Class veterans recognized his impatient footsteps on the stairs and knew to have their questions ready by the time he reached the fifth floor hall. He would call out, “Anybody want criticism?” from the studio doorway, and if there were no immediate responses, quickly disappear. “He wouldn’t go near you unless you asked him to look at something,” says Horn who, like most of the students, seldom did. At first, Jackson may have been among the many students who went weeks without exchanging a word with their teacher. When summoned to a question, Benton might offer anything from general comments about “the rhythm,” “the nature of the structure,” or “the nature of the relationship between solids and voids”; to a demonstration, taking a pencil or charcoal to sketch a “correction” on a student’s drawing; to a lecture. Often his comments were unrelated to the picture in front of him. “He seemed to talk more about life than about art,” Herman Cherry remembers. “He’d been through the art-for-art’s-sake stuff and wanted to get back down to earth.”

  Benton’s classroom manner may have been relaxed, but, as Jackson soon discovered, his teaching method was anything but. Fifteen hours of studio time each week were devoted almost exclusively to drawing from nude models. Through his occasional critiques and choice of monitors, Benton conveyed what he thought to be the artist’s true objective—“to be able to articulate and express the softness, the tensions, the recessions and the projections of the forms that together make up the human figure.” Benton’s folksy term was “the hollow and the bump”—a term that became synonymous with the distinctive undulating lines of his own work. For Benton, these recessions and projections were a pictorial equivalent of the “Baroque rhythms characteristic of Michelangelo’s” muscular sculptures; his models were chosen for their hollow-and-bump muscular definition and posed to emphasize their contours. He encouraged his students to explore the landscape of the human form by touching the models’ naked bodies—male and female—“to identify the direction and shape of a particular muscle or bone.” (Ticklish models soon learned to avoid Benton’s classes.)

  The real work of the class was done outside the classroom. Peter Busa, a League student in the early thirties, recalls that Benton “was less interested in looking at what we were doing than in principles and ideas.” The path from Studio 9 to the League’s small library on the second floor was well-worn by Benton students sent to analyze the works of his favorite old masters: Michelangelo and Tintoretto for their spatial rhythms; Rubens and Rembrandt for their complex compositions and tonality; Dürer, Schongauer, and Cambiaso for their cubistic exercises; and Signorelli, Massacio, Mantegna, Brueghel, and even Assyrian bas-reliefs for good measure. El Greco’s attenuated figures and exaggerated contours were particularly hospitable to Benton’s hollow-and-bump analysis, and Jackson’s earliest sketchbooks are filled with El Greco studies. In his life class, Benton directed students to examine drawings as well as finished paintings. “When you look at a finished work,” Busa remembers him saying, “you’re just seeing the skin of the building. Look at the drawings.” But for Benton, analysis involved far more than looking. Another League student, Mervin Jules, recalls the painstaking way Benton had them analyze the old masters:

  Every part of the picture had to be broken down into block forms and then reconstructed—everything from a horse’s pelvis to the turn of an outstretched hand. After that, you would break down the tonality—in other words, where did the light come from? When you had done that, you would take a piece of transparent paper, put it over the drawing, and, using a variety of whites and blacks, fill in the block figures to indicate the structure of the tonal relationships.

  “Benton demanded a lot of work,” a classmate of Jackson’s remembers. “His students didn’t spend much time in the lunchroom.”

  After Schwankovsky’s relaxed experimentation, Benton’s rigors were like a cold bath. Jackson’s lack of facility, an embarrassment at Manual Arts, became a grotesque handicap in a school where, among the serious students, some degree of facility was assumed. Recalling these early classes, Benton told an interviewer in 1959: “[Jackson] was out of his field. … His mind was absolutely incapable of drafting logical sequences. He couldn’t be taught anything.” Even tracing—the grade school exercise of covering an old master reproduction with a piece of translucent paper and tracing the outlines of major figures in order to understand their spatial relationships—was a “horror” to Jackson. Such exercises revealed a lack of control over a pencil that at times verged on a physical disability. Whether from impatience or from lack of coordination, he simply couldn’t discipline his hand to follow the lines beneath the tracing paper. “Every damn time, instead of tracing, he would set the paper next to the drawing and copy it freehand,” recalls Peter Busa. Even then, he would avoid the more difficult parts of the body, leaving blank circles for faces and lopping off hands altogether.

  Despite the frustrations, Jackson worked furiously, bent over his sketch pad, making the small “hairy scribble-scrabble” pencil strokes characteristic of Benton’s students. “He would labor over the most infinitesimal detail,” recalls classmate Joe Delaney, “that’s how sensitive he was. He wasn’t happy until he had the thing like he thought it ought to be, but it never was.” He would work and rework a hip, or a thigh, or a fold of drapery, until it was black with pencil marks. “Jackson’s drawings were easily the ‘hairiest,’” wrote Axel Horn in his memoir of Benton’s class. “They were painfully indicative of the continuous running battle between [Jackson] and his tools.” Delaney remembers one class in which Jackson, in the middle of a sketching frenzy, suddenly threw his pencil down and jumped up from his stool in frustration. “I’ve had enough,” he cried out, shattering the usual classroom quiet, “I gotta get the hell outta here,” and ran from the studio. “Everything Jack did in his student days was a struggle,” brother Charles remembers, “a struggle to get things to come
together the way he wanted them to. I don’t know if it was a question of drawing per se, but it was a question of getting things down on the paper in some kind of organized way that suited him.”

  Two studies of figures from Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, early 1930s, pencil and colored pencil on paper, 13⅞” × 16⅞”

  As always, Jackson’s frustration and bitterness were exacerbated by the obvious talents of those around him. The League was a touchstone in the fragmented artistic world of New York in the early thirties, and many of the city’s most ambitious artists, drawn by the faculty, came there to test their gifts. Buoyed by the constant flow of faceless students “just going along for the ride,” these ambitious and accomplished young people floated in and out of League classes, staying as long as they could afford the fees or cadge financial aid. “We were all young,” recalls one of Jackson’s classmates, “and we all thought we were geniuses and we were going to be the greatest artists that ever lived.”

  In that first class, only a few seats away from Jackson, sat a well-dressed, articulate student named Fairfield Porter, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who, according to rumor, had made a life sketch of Trotsky while on a grand tour of Europe. But it was his self-assurance with a pencil, not his patrician background, that Jackson envied most. Not far from Studio 9, eighteen-year-old Harry Holtzman monitored the drawing and painting class of A. S. Baylinson. Holtzman had arrived a year before Jackson, already inflamed by the works of Cézanne and the writings of Roger Fry. While Jackson labored mightily at cubic forms and Renaissance exercises in “spiralic countering,” Holtzman experimented with abstraction—more than a decade before Jackson’s first abstract work. While Jackson tried to master the hollow and the bump, another League student, James Brooks, had already rejected it—“too much rolly polly,” he scoffed—and embraced Picasso. Through Charles, Jackson met Herman Cherry, a fellow Californian who, after less than a year at the League, had worked his way into the inner circle of Benton protégés. Short and tough like Benton himself, Cherry joined Charles and the “Missouri gang” of Benton intimates: Joe Meert, Bernard Steffen, Archie Musick, all of whom had left the Midwest to study under Tom. Meert, a close friend of Charles, was a gentle, reticient man, “a dreamer,” who painted beautiful pictures with a “poetic” brush. He and Charles were generally acknowledged to be Benton’s best and favorite students. The presence of fourteen-year-old prodigy Nathan Katz (who later changed his name to Nathaniel Kaz) made it impossible for Jackson to claim any special consideration as the “baby” of the League. After winning an art prize in Michigan at the age of ten, Katz had come to New York and earned his high standing among the older students with his exquisite anatomical drawings and a seemingly unlimited capacity for bathtub gin.

  Through Benton, Jackson found a job in the cafeteria working as a busboy in exchange for meals. There, he often saw Arshile Gorky in the company of attractive women and Russian wolfhounds, holding court in dark personal splendor. “Towering well over six feet,” according to one biographer, “with a romantic shock of dark hair falling across his forehead, a full moustache, and large brooding eyes,” Gorky cut an impressive figure. He hadn’t attended classes at the League since 1926, but still visited the cafeteria often, partly to impress new students like Jackson with his tall, caped presence and arrogant erudition, but mostly to woo young female students like Josephine Fox or Stephanie de George. In a “very sad Russian voice,” Nathaniel Kaz remembers, he would plead with them: “Come to my studio, be my vooman, I give you everything.” But de George only laughed, rebuffing his advances, sometimes in the middle of the crowded cafeteria, because, according to Kaz, “she wanted a man with money, not genius, and who the hell was Arshile Gorky anyway?”

  Even Manuel Tolegian, with whom Jackson lived briefly during this period, began to seem a threat. One classmate remembers that “Jack wasn’t terribly competent as a draftsman while Tolegian was pretty accomplished.” Although often together, their constant “joking and kidding around” took on a new edge. “They would insult each other continuously,” recalls the same classmate. “Jack would call Manuel a Turk, which annoyed him no end. It seemed friendly enough, but they were getting in their jabs.” Tolegian’s budding pretensions to literary and artistic erudition only exacerbated the rift. Classmates remember him as “very dapper” and socially “aloof,” except at prestigious League functions. In the cafeteria, where he shared cleanup duties with Jackson for a while, he tried to mimic the Continental hauteur and “outlandish jargon” of fellow Armenian Gorky. “Tolegian was very verbal, and he was always explaining what he was doing,” recalls Axel Horn. “Always rationalizing it, always defining it.” Soon after arriving in New York, he began to write poetry.

  Overwhelmed by the ambitions of others, Jackson withdrew behind a wall of reticence and resentment. Most of his fellow students saw only a shy, moody boy “with his high heel boots and his fresh young face.” On meeting Jackson for the first time, Axel Horn noticed his expression—“the smile barely tightening the corners of the mouth, the squint as if looking through early morning mountain haze, the knitting of the brows in what seemed to be (and was indeed) a continual attempt to comprehend a bewildering and complex world.” To others, the same expression seemed “stupefied” or “just plain dense.” “Jackson always seemed to be in a daze,” one classmate recalls. At a time when most League students were inflamed by the battle over the appointment of George Grosz, a German expressionist, to teach at the League, and arguments raged in the cafeteria (and the press) about the struggle between Sloan and Jonas Lie for control of the board and the democratic soul of the League, Jackson rarely offered an opinion. Even in classroom discussions, he remained resolutely silent. When pressed for a “specific” response, he would offer lamely, “I do everything in general.” “I don’t think he could have carried on an intelligent conversation about art in the least,” says Nathaniel Kaz. In his autobiography, Benton describes Jackson’s losing battle with words:

  He developed some kind of language block and became almost completely inarticulate. I have sometimes seen him struggle, to red-faced embarrassment, while trying to formulate ideas boiling up in his disturbed consciousness, ideas he could never get beyond a “God damn, Tom, you know what I mean!” I rarely did know.

  Less than a year after arriving in New York, Jackson began to repeat the cycle of withdrawal and depression that he had left Los Angeles to break. After the flurry of letters to Charles the previous year, the flow of correspondence to family members dried up. The rare letters he did start often languished on his desk, sometimes for months, unfinished. Completed letters went unmailed. He began to destroy his drawings so ruthlessly and indiscriminately that Charles had to intervene to save what he could. “Jack was on the outside looking in,” Elizabeth Pollock remembers, “and full of envy toward those who were able to enjoy open, natural, commonplace pleasures.”

  Inevitably, Jackson turned to alcohol for the feeling of belonging that eluded him when sober. In New York, bootleg whiskey was as close as the speakeasy behind the League on West Fifty-eighth Street (“Just knock on the door and tell them Benny sent you”). If Jackson didn’t want to leave the building, he could put a dime or a quarter into one of the collections that regularly made the rounds in the cafeteria and buy a share in a bottle of bathtub gin with a fancy English label. Once drunk, Jackson had plenty of friends: fellow drinkers like Joe Delaney, the son of a black Methodist preacher from Knoxville, Tennessee, and Bruce Mitchell, a handsome, troubled boy from upstate New York. Nathan Katz and, at first, Manuel Tolegian, were often along on Jackson’s binges, and sometimes older students like Joe Meert and Bernie Steffen. For different reasons and to different effects, almost everybody at the League drank. More and more often, Jackson would disappear to some bar, and, for an evening at least, he was the best painter in the Pollock family. “We would gear up and have a hell of a good time,” Joe Delaney remembers. “Not where we got sogged, not where we didn’t know what
we was doing, but just to the peak of truthful expression to each other.” On one such occasion, at the peak of truthful expression, Jackson confided in Delaney, “Joe, you know I am great.”

  Despite his growing frustrations, the threats he saw everywhere, and the strange, grisaille landscape of his first New York winter, Jackson clung to his ambition—“It always seemed to me that he wanted to be number one,” remembers Kaz—working quietly but furiously at school during the day, drinking and railing every night to prop himself up for the next day. It was a flirtation with despair, and only one man kept him from crossing the line.

  12

  BENTON

  On a summer day in the early 1950s, after the great drip paintings, after the triumphant shows, Jackson Pollock was relaxing on the Coast Guard Beach near East Hampton with Franz Kline and Syd Solomon. All three artists were disillusioned and depressed. “We were bemoaning the lack of interest in art among most Americans,” recalls Solomon. Someone suggested half in jest that, if all else failed, they could “just chuck it all and go teach old ladies to do watercolors.” The three men laughed, and a running joke was born. Thereafter they would always kid one another about a “fall-back” career among the ladies’ clubs of America.

  Like the other artists of their generation, Pollock, Kline, and Solomon were acutely aware that, for the great majority of Americans, art was old ladies’ business. They had inherited an aesthetic world shaped by Victorian sentimentality and administered, almost exclusively, by women. Men who strayed into that world were considered, at best, unproductive, at worst, homosexual, by those outside it. While fathers, like Herman Cherry’s, demanded of their sons, “What the hell are you going to do for a living?”, mothers, like Jackson’s, cultivated their sons’ artistic ambitions like hothouse flowers.