Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  The forces that shaped these antagonistic views were gathering energy as early as the middle of the nineteenth century when industrialization began to transform women from producers into consumers and, at the same time, art into leisure. Where Jennie McClure wove rugs that she sold to neighbors, daughter Stella made lace for her curtains and frilly clothes for her babies. Stella may have worked hard, as hard in some ways as her mother; but her aspirations were far higher. Where Jennie aspired only to keep the family fed, Stella aspired to a life of finery and leisure—the life promoted in her stacks of women’s magazines. She joined the millions of women who, according to Ann Douglas, a feminist and cultural historian, swept aside the old, cliquish, largely male market for more challenging fare and replaced it with an immense new market for sentimental literature and art. “American culture,” writes Douglas, “seemed bent on establishing a perpetual Mother’s Day”; on satisfying the “enormous need of its authors and readers for uncritical confirmation of themselves and instantaneous satisfaction of their appetites.” In the 1850s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a thunderous success while Moby-Dick languished in obscurity. The era of American “mass culture,” feminized and sentimentalized, had begun.

  This was the burden of history, concentrated in childhood training, that Jackson and his fellow artists inherited. It was a distinctly American legacy. Nowhere else were there so many fathers who, like Roy Pollock, considered it a crime against nature to be unmanly or “unproductive,” and so many mothers who, like Stella, confirmed their aspirations by instilling in their sons delicate sensibilities and a respect for “culture.” Given their upbringing, it was inevitable that male artists in the art world of the thirties, forties, and fifties would be condemned to a constant struggle to appease their insecurities, to reconcile their fathers’ injunctions with their mothers’ aspirations; that they would all but exclude female artists from their company; that they would pass women around like bottles of whiskey; that they would feel compelled to walk the barroom gauntlet, snarling insults, hurling profanities, and picking fights in a running parody of masculinity. “In all that aggression and machismo,” recalls Leslie Fiedler, who occasionally visited New York’s most famous artists’ bar, the Cedar, “there was always a trace of hysterical desperation.”

  No artist was more desperate than Thomas Hart Benton.

  Twenty years before Jackson Pollock drank, raged, and bullied his way into popular iconography, Benton had already begun to cast a Paul Bunyonesque shadow on the landscape of American art. No one cussed more fluently. “Benton’s language made me blush,” says Mervin Jules, a Benton student in the early thirties, “and my language was the language of a labor organizer for the National Maritime Union.” No one could hurl such flaming insults or ignite such outrage. Museums were run, Benton told a group of reporters in 1935, by “a pack of precious ninnies who walked with a hip swing in their gaits and affected a certain kind of curve in their wrists.” No one painted on a grander, more ambitious scale. At the age of thirty, he began an epic mural cycle of seventy-five large panels in which he hoped to capture the whole sweep of American history. No one’s rages were more titanic. In a fight with Burl Ives, a hulking, six-foot-four folk singer, Benton grabbed a poker from his fireplace and, according to a witness, “just about bashed Ives’s skull in.” No one made more enemies or kept them longer. “Leftists attacked him as a chauvinist,” notes the introduction to his autobiography, “rightists accused him of radicalism, even Communism … [those in the] museum world have dismissed him as an Ozark hillbilly and even some liberals have been fearful [of] his provincialism.” No one was more of a man. “He was short but powerfully built,” Herman Cherry recalls. “His voice was deep, he was strong, and he was purposeful. He told marvelous stories about going to whorehouses. He was as masculine as a man could possibly be, masculine in every sense of the word.”

  Tom Benton

  It was in this last and greatest of his roles, the role of the “man’s man,” that Benton made his most lasting contribution to American art. Such was its power that, despite rejecting his art and denouncing his political views, an entire generation of artists was shaped by Benton’s archetypical machismo. What Hemingway was to a generation of writers, Benton was to a generation of American painters, the ideal against which, consciously or unconsciously, they measured themselves—as drinkers, as fighters, as rebels, as provocateurs, as womanizers, as debunkers, as outsiders, as Americans, and as artists.

  No one felt the force of Benton’s oversized personality more fully or was more transfixed by it than Jackson Pollock. No one outside the Pollock family would have a more enduring influence on Jackson’s development until, more than ten years later, he passed into the hands of Lee Krasner. Even then—long after Benton’s theories of art, his style, and his classroom techniques had sifted into Jackson’s subconscious or out of his art altogether—the irresistible imprinting force of Benton’s personality remained. In his mannerisms, his profanity, his pugnacity, his drunkenness, his vulgarity, and his misogyny, Jackson proved a willing, often predisposed, student. But at a deeper level, the two men, separated in age by more than twenty years, were not so much teacher and student, or even surrogate father and surrogate son, as they were partners in a struggle—a struggle rooted in their profound ambivalence toward art and toward the role of artist. Ultimately, Benton’s power over Jackson was based on the deep, unspoken sympathy that passed between them, on the tendency of like material to take like forms, of like pasts to produce like men.

  At first glance, Thomas Hart Benton and Paul Jackson Pollock would seem to have little more in common than birthplaces on the same side of the Mississippi River. Unlike Cody in 1912, the little town of Neosho in southwestern Missouri had been settled for half a century by 1889, the year of Benton’s birth. In Cody, there were no houses like the one that Benton’s father built on the high ground overlooking the town, a proud house of wood and stone, with such “marvels” as a tin-lined bathtub, central heating, and a glass-walled conservatory. On April 15, 1889, Thomas Hart Benton was born within its handsome walls in rustic splendor while, 250 miles to the north, fourteen-year-old Stella McClure went sourly about her farm chores and twelve-year-old LeRoy Pollock plowed his neighbors’ fields.

  Although Tom Benton claimed his ancestors were “southern hill people” and therefore “frontiersmen” rather than “tidewater aristocrats,” the Bentons were—by Tingley standards at least—nobility. The “great hero of the tribe” was Senator Thomas Hart Benton who for thirty years had been the Democratic voice of the United States Senate, adviser to Presidents, champion of small farmers, defender of the gold standard, and enemy of slavery, even in slaveholding Missouri. The Benton family was so proud of “Old Bullion Benton” that they made sure there was at least one Thomas Hart in every generation. So no one was surprised when Maecenus Eson (“M. E.”) Benton, whose father had also been Thomas Hart, gave his firstborn son the family’s best name.

  Like Old Bullion, Tom was both cursed and blessed by the Welsh blood of the Benton clan. He had the Benton physique—short and stocky, tending toward portly in age—and the Benton disposition: moody and choleric in private, proselytic and combative in public. “From obscurity in pre-Revolutionary North Carolina, through its adventures in frontier Tennessee,” Tom Benton wrote at the end of his life in an account undoubtedly tainted by hindsight, the Benton clan “was always engaged in conflicts, either of its own making or of the making of its enemies. It was a family fated, it would seem, for turmoil.”

  In fact, most of the turmoil in Tom Benton’s family centered around his father, M. E., and his mother, Lizzie Wise. They were, at best, an improbable pair. He, according to his unsympathetic son, “was not, in any sense, a romantic figure—short, thick-necked, with reddish skin, a red beard and a protruding belly.” She, on the other hand, by Tom’s enamored telling, was “a tall, willowy, black-haired and brown-eyed Texas beauty” who “sang and tinkled at the piano.” She was the spoiled baby in a f
amily of thirteen Waxahachie Wises, a “Celtic”-looking clan of Scotch-Irish origin that had, at some point in its history, shared the Carolina hill country with the Welsh Bentons before moving on to Texas. Just as the Bentons had bequeathed contentiousness to their descendants, the Wises had passed along an innate dignity arising from an unshakable belief in their own moral superiority. Being simple and largely uneducated people, the Wises had interpreted their pride and touchiness as signs of religious “electness.” This was especially true among the strong-minded women of the clan who, according to Tom, “found themselves apppointed brides of Christ or, if not quite that, numbered among his closest intimates.”

  In her youth, Lizzie Wise had shared her sisters’ self-righteous devotion, but gradually her aspirations fixed on more temporal rewards. Like Stella McClure, she longed for the life of refinement, the life of luncheons and fringed parasols, formal parties and “pictures on the wall”—in short, the life of a lady. Maecenus Eson Benton, with his successful practice, his political aspirations, his big house and tin-lined tub, was her key to that life.

  In public, these ominously contrary personalities proved surprisingly complementary in advancing M. E.‘s political career. The new Mrs. Benton, in her St. Louis gowns, played the gracious hostess at her husband’s frequent political dinners. In an era when only men could vote, her “brunette handsomeness” won the support of more than one state party leader, and her strange refusal to invite other women to her parties had few political repercussions. The combination of her charm and his bonhomie—along with his populist views on eastern bankers and railroad tycoons—soon made M. E. Benton a likely candidate for the United States Congress.

  Whatever its public advantages, the marriage was, from the outset, a private disaster. “Lizzie Wise may have been, probably was, a docile bride-to-be, complaisant and sweet of tongue,” Tom Benton wrote years later, “but once she got her papers, she spit the bit of the marriage vow out of her mouth and asserted herself.” The Benton line of “plain men of the people” collided with the superior Wises, and the result was an unceasing campaign of domestic warfare.

  Using a potent combination of threats, wiles, tears, and frequent fainting spells, Lizzie quickly trained her new husband to submission. Immediately after becoming pregnant, she evicted him from the marriage bed and, except for those occasions on which she conceived three more children, never welcomed him back. The Benton children were often awakened in the middle of the night by their mother’s indignant screams when their father tried to enter her room. Tom Benton, who lay awake frightened on many such nights, later recalled: “I was aware of the anger and sense of outrage she felt for days following.” To Lizzie, “sex was a plain manifestation of the Devil, and though it had to be put up with in marriage, was a nasty thing.”

  Maecenus Eson Benton

  Elizabeth Wise Benton

  The ultimate battleground for M. E. and Lizzie Benton was the nursery, and no one saw more combat than their firstborn, Thomas Hart. “I was conditioned very early in my life to accept strife and argument as basic factors of existence,” he later wrote, “as inescapable concomitants of human association.” M. E. may have given the boy his family’s best name, but Tom Benton, with his dark Celtic complexion and Wise family features, always belonged to Lizzie. From an early age, he accompanied her into her dressing room, where his father was forbidden, to admire her clothes and, later, advise on her choice of dresses. Like young Jackson, he watched his mother’s “busy hands” as she did her fine embroidery and crewelwork. She designed the clothes he wore, and he, in turn, later designed patterns for her needlework. Like Stella Pollock, Lizzie tended a flower garden, doting especially on roses. Her gardening “was done more in the spirit of the artist,” Tom wrote admiringly, “… the one expression of her ego which reached beyond self concern into an area of objective accomplishment.” Young Tom took an “unusual interest” in the artistry with which his mother arranged flowers from her garden for her dinner table and worked closely with her on the elaborate preparations for her frequent luncheons, dinners, and parties. “Her taste in general was that of the American ladies’ magazines of the nineties,” Benton wrote. “She possessed an aesthetic responsiveness, a disposition to take pleasure in the qualities of things.” Benton’s most vivid memory of his mother, like Charles Pollock’s memory of Stella, was of “rid[ing] in a high, fringe-topped buggy with my mother around the town square behind a big white horse she calls Rex [while] men bow to her and tip their hats.”

  Whenever Tom wandered away from home, Lizzie packed him a lunch, and he invariably returned with a gift of wildflowers or persimmons. In the evening, he joined her on her promenades around Neosho’s town square in his white pants and blue jacket with the brass buttons. When he reached “the mooncalf age,” she convinced him that boys who masturbated at night died in their sleep and went to hell. Until he left home, she planned all his parties—systematically excluding all females except herself.

  Thomas Hart Benton, age 3

  Tom Benton may have felt at home in his mother’s world of place cards, Paris fashions, and persimmons, but he never stopped longing to be a part of another, very different world.

  Like Roy Pollock, M. E. Benton was a man who felt truly comfortable only in the company of other men. A jovial, expansive man with an ear for the earthy idioms and rhythms of the Ozarks, he spent as much of every day as possible in his law office entertaining political cronies with jokes and stories and political wisdom packaged in colorful anecdotes. The men who filled his office were not unlike him. Tom Benton described them as “expository men who drank heavily, ate heartily, and talked long over fat cigars, the ends of which they chewed.” Theirs was emphatically, if not pathologically, a man’s world, “always reeking with cigar smoke,” and from the very start, Tom Benton felt excluded from it.

  M. E. missed much of his son’s childhood traveling the state on prolonged trips, “erecting and mending political fences.” But as Tom must have sensed, there was more to his father’s absence than the demands of a political life. Like Roy Pollock, M. E. Benton began early to withdraw from his family. His son remembers him as “a perpetually serious, dour and sometimes irritable and suspicious man who could barely keep his temper under control.” Intensely private, he developed “an addiction to odd and inexplicable ways of self-communion.” He was often overheard talking vigorously to himself, and spent hours adding, subtracting, and dividing enormous figures with no apparent significance on any handy piece of paper. Out of political necessity, he continued to entertain, but as soon as the last guest had departed, he would retire “in moody silence to the library and lose himself in [his] curious arithmetical game.”

  Tom’s early efforts to earn a place in his father’s distant, male world invariably went awry. Knowing M. E.‘s passion for hunting, Tom practiced hard to perfect his aim. But when M. E. challenged him to kill the woodpeckers that were making holes in the eaves of the Neosho house, he balked. He did manage to wing one of them, but the sight of the wounded bird flapping pathetically at his feet so unnerved him that he refused to ever pick up a gun again. Among M. E.‘s hunting buddies he became known as “the worst game-shy hunter there ever was.”

  In 1896, M. E. Benton won a seat in Congress and the domestic battles moved to the far grander stage of Washington, D.C. With “visions of a fabulous Washington life,” Lizzie threw herself into the round of political and diplomatic receptions and, with her tall Texas beauty and natural graciousness, quickly became a welcome ornament on the Washington party circuit. Observers sometimes commented that “the homeliest man in Congress” was married to the prettiest wife in Washington.

  Soon Lizzie set her sights on a bigger house in a better neighborhood. Mindful of his Missouri constituency and the need to “keep his Washington life as unpretentious as possible,” M. E. resisted, sparking a series of fierce confrontations, one of which Tom recounted in his memoirs:

  After hearing some unusually angry exchanges betwee
n my parents I ran into our little A Street parlor to find my mother lying on the floor at my father’s feet with only the whites of her eyes showing. … [My] father was red-faced and grim and when he shoved me hurriedly out of the room I sensed something serious was happening.

  By fall of the following year, the Bentons had moved to a more “socially proper address.” Like Stella Pollock, Lizzie Benton was bent on realizing her magazine fantasies regardless of the consequences.

  Convinced by his embroidery patterns and flower arrangements that Tom was an artistic genius, Lizzie fanned every faint ember of inclination with gifts of “drawing pencils, inks, crayons, tablets, and sheets of drawing paper.” She kept his pictures close at hand to show visitors and fished for compliments at every opportunity. By the time Tom entered the Force School in Washington, his mother’s guests “were saying that I should have some training,” Tom recalled, “even saying that I was a born artist.” Lizzie needed no prodding. She arranged for a series of art tutors, beginning with an elderly woman who taught Tom to paint watercolor wreaths on place cards, followed by more formal lessons at the Corcoran Gallery and then at the Western High School in Georgetown.

  In a futile effort to make the enterprise more palatable to M. E.—who, according to his son, considered art a pastime for old ladies and effeminate men—Tom confined his drawings to subjects of indisputable masculinity: trains in the beginning; then, when the battleship Maine was blown up in Havana Harbor in 1898, exploding battleships. At the onset of the Spanish-American War, he began drawing soldiers “parading behind waving flags or shooting off guns in imaginary battles.” When M. E. gave him a set of books on Indians, Indians began appearing in Tom’s sketchbook. When Lizzie tried to redirect his talents to more suitable, genteel subjects, Tom resisted. One early art lesson ended in “bitter disappointment” when he discovered that the teacher painted only flowers. “As a depictor of battleships, marching soldiers, wild Indians and heroes of mythology,” Tom wrote, “the ‘sissy’ subject matter of my teacher revolted me.”