At the same time, away from the rigors of League classes, New York, and the rivalry with Charles, another kind of drawing began to appear among the run of “hairy,” undistinguished imitations Jackson produced over the summer. Occasionally, his battle with spontaneity turned into a rout—the proportions of a figure, begun impatiently, would go wildly astray; a doodle would grow uncontrollably to fill a page. When, in frustration, he chose not to correct a mistake but to pursue it, the result was an image that looked nothing like the others. What began as the folds of a saint’s drapery in an El Greco study would be transformed into an Orozco-like interplay of lights and darks. An outline of a torso would become a skein of swirling lines. Among Jackson’s efforts, these were still the discards, born more out of frustration than inspiration and invariably first to be thrown away. But in his conversations with Reuben Kadish among the mason jars, Jackson may already have begun to glimpse their significance. “I told him what Gauguin said,” Kadish remembers, “that one day somebody is going to come along and work with color and tone—and without any image that has any reference point in nature. And the result is going to be like music.”
Except for a short trip with Whitney Darrow to Ensenada, Mexico, and, undoubtedly, some commotion surrounding the Tenth Olympiad being held at the Coliseum in Jackson’s old neighborhood, the summer passed languidly, and, in September, Jackson and Darrow laid plans to return to New York by the southern route. (Frank and Marie returned separately.) In a clattering old Ford that Darrow bought for $100 on Jackson’s recommendation, the two set out across the high deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and the Texas panhandle.
For the first time in years, Jackson felt in control, and the confidence made him buoyantly charming and high-spirited. On the familiar stretches of bright, barren road, he could play older brother to Darrow’s timid city boy—Sande to Darrow’s Jack. “I never had been to the desert before,” Darrow recalls, “but you could tell Jackson was in his element.” At Jackson’s insistence, they avoided towns and rooming houses and slept out on the open desert, freezing all night amid snakes and cacti, then baking all day in the black coupe. When Darrow took the wheel, Jackson leaned back on the passenger side, propped his dusty cowboy boots on the dashboard and played his mouth harp “until the coyotes complained,” or rolled a cigarette of Bull Durham tobacco and lit it with a flick of his thumbnail across a big Diamond kitchen match. “Jackson was always doing the Benton thing,” says Darrow. “We were out west and he wanted me to know how good he was out there. We tried chewing tobacco, even, but when we spit it out the car window, it blew back in our faces.” At night, Jackson built a campfire. “Once he shot a rabbit and we ate it. I guess his family were hunters.” In the morning, Jackson was up in time to watch the sun rise—“he loved that kind of thing”—and to cook up eggs and bacon or a can of beans. “We almost never ate at a restaurant,” says Darrow, “and we almost never stopped.”
Detail, mid-1930s, pencil and colored pencil on paper, 18” × 12”
Mid-1930s, ink and crayon on lined paper, 8½” × 7”
When they did stop, never for long, it was usually to sketch. Using a brand-new set of Chinese ink sticks—rectangular crayons of water-soluble color that, in the waterless desert, he had to moisten with spit—Jackson felt an unfamiliar rush of confidence. “He would spit on them and slash away at the desert scenes with earth colors,” remembers Darrow, who, because he saw himself more as a cartoonist than as a draftsman, mostly watched. Facing the landscape of his childhood and feeling the freedom that the Pollocks always connected with the open road, Jackson soon abandoned any effort at “spiralic countering” or “bumps and hollows” and yielded to spontaneity. “He did a desert scene with the cactus and the sun coming from behind,” Darrow recalled, “putting it down on the paper with great physical energy,” applying the colors “liberally … in a frenzied, un-Benton manner.”
Benton’s subject matter, however, was inescapable. Through Amarillo and the Texas panhandle, Jackson saw the oil derricks and decaying one-street towns that Benton had painted in Changing West. In Arkansas, they detoured to see plantation workers harvesting the September cotton just as Roy Pollock had seen them thirty-seven years before with Ralph Tidrick, and just as Benton had painted them. Heading south to New Orleans, they watched black workers unload bananas and load cotton bales onto boats tied along the Mississippi—“the negro—swell stuff,” Jackson wrote his mother. In the hill country of Tennessee, they toured the heart of Benton’s America, traveling roads that Benton had walked only a few years before, glimpsing a Benton sketch in every town and every turned head.
Ten days after setting out and with ten dollars left in their pockets—just enough to have the Ford towed away—they arrived in New York. For Jackson, after the frustrations of the previous winter, the trip had been a modest triumph capping a recuperative summer: no scenes, no tantrums, no binges. “He was a very likeable, warm person,” Darrow recalled. “I don’t remember ever having any contretemps with him, or any unpleasantness.” Even on the same thirsty stretches of desert where Jackson had first experienced drunkenness, there had been no drinking—the surest sign that his confidence had recovered, at least partially, from two disastrous years of competition with Charles. “I remember we bought a cold bottle of milk at a country store in the desert,” says Darrow, who wasn’t a drinker. “Our drinking problem was finding something to quench our thirst. We never drank alcohol the whole trip.”
By the time he reached New York, Jackson was filled with an optimism for the coming year that even Elizabeth’s cold reception couldn’t deflate. Charles had not so much forgiven the ax incident as purged it from his memory, and was again ready to assume his caretaking duties. Over Elizabeth’s acid objections, Jackson immediately moved into Charles’s new studio at 46 Carmine Street, a relatively spacious two-room apartment in an old house on what Jackson called “a happy Italian Street” in the West Village. Elizabeth, who now worked part-time at a real-estate agency in nearby Washington Square, had located both the studio and an apartment across the street where she and Charles set up permanent housekeeping for the first time, sharing a single ground floor toilet (“a stinking relic of another time”) with a Scottish couple. During the summer, between trips to their tent on the sand dunes, they had already moved Charles’s studio into the front room and Jackson’s bed and few paintings into the smaller back room. Jackson and Elizabeth crossed paths only at dinnertime, when they shared a bowl of spaghetti and a glass of California wine by candlelight—for a while Charles was too poor to have the electricity turned on—and glowered at each other across the table. “He never looked me in the eye,” Elizabeth recalls. “He feared me greatly, as well he should have, because I had the sharp tongue of a snake.”
At the Art Students League, the reception was considerably warmer. The new term began on Monday, October 3, with a triumph: Benton, returning late from Martha’s Vineyard, appointed Jackson class monitor. To most students, the position was little more than a bureaucratic necessity, but to Jackson it meant both financial relief—as monitor he would be exempt from the twelve dollar monthly fee—and acceptance. After two years of struggle, Benton had finally acknowledged him as an artist. Coming on top of the summer in Los Angeles, the drive back, and Charles’s forgiving reception, the appointment was just one more sign that pieces of the stubborn puzzle were finally beginning to fall into place. For the first few weeks of class, Jackson greeted students with a “pleased smile on his face” instead of the moody cowboy reserve his classmates had come to expect. For the first time, he obviously felt like he belonged among them.
Consistent with the League’s laissez-faire philosophy and long-standing practice, Jackson approached most of his bureaucratic duties with a nonchalance that bordered on neglect. “I don’t think he took the attendance, because nobody cared about attendance,” says classmate Axel Horn. “He would know who was registered and who wasn’t so he could identify a crasher. But he didn’t care, and neither di
d anybody else, really. It was that low-key. If there was too much of a draft, he would close the window.” Only one aspect of the job received Jackson’s special attention: the selection of models. Despite its billing as “mural painting,” Benton’s class was still a “life class” in which drawing from a nude model was the central ritual. Models served weeklong stints, then moved on to other classes and other schools. Male and female models usually alternated weeks, but Jackson’s attention, like Benton’s, focused almost exclusively on the males. “He was pretty careful about choosing them,” Joe Delaney remembers. “He wanted them to have as perfect a body as he could get.” Benton had long ago realized that masculine bulges illustrated the theory of hollows and bumps far better than feminine curves. As a result, his favorite models came not from the standard group that made the round of League classes but from the male world of bars and gyms. They were men like “Tiger” Ed Bates, a black man with “a beautifully developed figure,” whom Mervin Jules had found through Bates’s brother, a bouncer at the Apollo Theater; and Hank Clausen, a burly, blond Swede who posed during the day and wrestled “professionally” at night. Both Bates and Clausen were among Jackson’s, and Benton’s, favorites. Clausen posed and wrestled on the West Coast as well, and often returned with news from Macdonald-Wright’s class at Otis. Every Monday, Jackson would “pose” the model on a chair or stool to emphasize his rippling anatomy. At every class for the rest of the week, the model would hold the same pose. “Benton was a muscle and bone man,” says Whitney Darrow, “and I remember Pollock poking and pinching the models to show the other students where the muscles were and how they felt. The models were a little squeamish sometimes. I don’t think models would allow that today.”
Benton still appeared every Tuesday and Friday at the top of the stairs and solicited questions, but the students who knew him sensed the distraction in his voice. Over the summer, he had completed the murals for the library of the Whitney Museum entitled The Arts of Life in America. The attendant publicity, on top of the critical attention still being given the New School murals, had begun to pull him away from the League and into a vortex of celebrity and controversy. Not that he fought the current. The New School murals had enhanced his reputation, but had done nothing to relieve his persistent financial problems. (Benton summarized their economic impact on his life by saying, “I improved my brand of whiskey.”) The Whitney commission, on the other hand, had allowed him to pay off debts and helped create a bull market for his paintings that Rita deftly exploited.
Benton’s murals had caught the public eye at a time when America was becoming fashionable again. After a decade in which legions of American artists, writers, and critics had virtually abandoned their country—some literally—to the “Babbitts, Rotarians, and boosters,” the hardships of the Depression brought quiet celebration. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and others of the “lost generation” returned home from Europe. In 1932, the year that Benton completed the Whitney murals, William Faulkner wrote of his Mississippi home in Light in August, John Steinbeck turned for the first time to his native California for Pastures of Heaven, James Farrell revisited the streets and pool halls of his impoverished Chicago youth in Young Lonigan, and John Dos Passos published the second book in his U.S.A. trilogy. In the same year, the best-selling nonfiction book was The Epic of America, by James Truslow Adams, a self-critical journey into America’s past.
Even at the time, Benton recognized that he had been caught fortuitously on the crest of a wave “much wider and deeper than art.” “We were psychologically in tune with our time,” he wrote. “We could hardly have avoided some kind of success.” His murals gave form to the pride and idealism that swept the country in the midst, paradoxically, of its worsening plight. Within the art world, the murals also crystallized the decade-long conflict between “European” abstraction and home-grown realism. In the twenties, painters had gone on a stylistic exodus. Many, like Benton, had studied abroad and brought the abstraction of Picasso and Matisse back to a baffled public. In the thirties, these artists felt the same homeward tug that writers felt. Abstraction was foreign; realism was American. And of the realists—the truly American painters—Tom Benton was the most visible, the most vocal, and, according to Time magazine, “the most virile.” The other leaders, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, worked quietly in the media vacuum outside New York City: Wood in Stone City, Iowa, painting the same rolling fields that Roy Pollock had worked as a boy (as of 1932, Wood and Benton had not even met); Curry in Westport, Connecticut, painting the natural and psychological landscapes of his native Kansas. Thus, without a contest, the mantle fell to Benton. Almost overnight, he became the champion of a nationalistic movement in art that its critics inaptly dubbed “Regionalism.” “Neither Wood, Curry, nor I,” Benton protested, “ever held ourselves, either in space or time, to any American region.”
In many ways, the newest “ism” in American art had found the perfect spokesman in Tom Benton. Almost a decade before the term “American Wave” was coined, at a time when, according to Frederick Lewis Allen, the cocktail parties of New York and the cafés of Paris still bristled with criticism of America as “a standardized, machine-ridden, and convention-ridden place,” to which “people with brains and taste naturally perferred the free atmosphere of Europe,” Tom Benton had already undergone a personal repatriation.
For a man as obsessed with his own past as Benton, it was perhaps inevitable that his art would eventually serve to illuminate—or obfuscate—the backward path. His early years as an artist had been marked by a series of attempts to break away from his own roots, all of them unsuccessful. In 1911, he returned to Missouri after three years in Paris and showed his abstract Synchromist paintings to M. E. “His father took one look at the splashes of color,” writes Benton’s biographer, ” … and thought his son had gone mad.” Benton, who had so far avoided the rigorous abstraction of his Synchromist mentors, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, moved to New York unable to purge the last vestiges of representation from his work. After another thirteen years in the city, years in which he struggled through “semi-abstract” and “highly-generalized” styles, he returned to Neosho in 1924 to be at his father’s deathbed. Once again, ancient family dynamics—unpaid debts and the hope for a final reconciliation—had a profound impact on his artistic development. He wrote movingly of the experience in his autobiography:
I cannot honestly say what happened to me while I watched my father die and listened to the voices of his friends, but I know that when, after his death, I went back East I was moved by a great desire to know more the America which I had glimpsed in the suggestive words of his old cronies . … I was moved by a desire to pick up again the threads of my childhood.
Thus began Benton’s ten-year-long search for his own past—and, almost coincidentally, America’s; a search that began predictably in the hill country of Tennessee near his father’s boyhood home and led eventually to the New School and Whitney murals at a time when the country itself, shaken by economic tragedy, was also “moved by a desire to pick up again the threads” of its past.
Benton was quick to take advantage of being in the right place at the right time, filling his frequent speeches and interviews with the flag-waving populist rhetoric he had heard as a boy on his father’s campaign tours. “It is high time,” he wrote in Arts magazine, “that native painters quit emulating our collectors by playing weathercock to European breezes.” The press was as taken by his raw, colorful language as the public was by his easy, colorful paintings. According to his biographer, he was “poised and quick to top his last picture, blast at his adversaries, or have a hilarious good time with the press, where he said he usually drank enough to work up a good story.” He attracted near-fanatic sponsorship among newspaper critics like America Firster Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times, who called America Today “the most genuinely American murals yet produced.” Benton himself offered a weighty intellectual defense
of Regionalism, citing everything from nineteenth-century French Positivism to post–Civil War social history, but it was his populist rhetoric, filled with down-home imagery and charged with emotions from his own past, that captured the public mood. “The arts of our pioneers were simple arts perhaps,” he wrote, “but they were genuine and they were assiduously cultivated. In the backways of our country many of them have survived up to this day, and in little churches hidden away in the depths of our mountains, it is possible sometimes to hear music that is, though simple, just as genuinely music as any that may be heard in the churches of the great cities.” Even in these early salvos, ringing with God and country, old friends could hear Benton the pugilist warming up for a genuine fight.
What had begun as a justification of realism quickly became, in Benton’s contentious hands, a blitzkrieg against abstraction. “We can afford to ask whether a tablecloth and an apple, in terms of human value, are worth all the effort expended in trying to make them pictorially interesting,” he wrote as early as 1924, the year of his father’s death, referring to the still-lifes of Cézanne, to which much of modern abstraction traced its roots. “Still-lifes and their geometrical counterparts, which are equally poor in meaning are dignified by cryptic and highsounding titles and explanations—an endeavor is made to project meaning into a totally empty vehicle.” By 1932, Benton had revived these arguments and distilled them, through careless and sometimes inebriated public comments, to their demagogic essence. Only a few years later he would declaim to a reporter in New York, “If it were left to me, I wouldn’t have any museums. I’d have people buy the paintings and hang ‘em in privies or anywhere anybody had time to look at ‘em. … Nobody goes to museums. I’d like to sell mine to saloons, bawdyhouses, Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, and Chambers of Commerce—even women’s clubs.” Benton had turned from extolling the virtues of “our pioneer and simple arts” to another, darker populist tradition: intellectual-bashing—charging that the eastern establishment was, in effect, perpetrating a fraud on the honest people of the aesthetic heartland. “There is hope that art may again become a living thing,” he wrote, “of interest to plain living people, rather than a collection of objects strung up on the cold walls of institutions run for aesthetic dilettantes, amateur philosophers, and generally in memory of dead vanities.”
Jackson Pollock Page 31
