Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Abstractionists responded to Benton’s argument with cries of outrage. “We hated it,” remembers George McNeil, who later helped found the American Abstract Artists. “We felt about it the way people think about Creationism now—backward and dumb, just plain dumb.” The leftist press accused the Regionalists of “incipient Fascism.” Arshile Gorky dismissed Regionalism as “poor art for poor people”; others scoffed at its nationalistic claims, noting pointedly that Benton’s mural technique was borrowed from Italian masters. “By a curious paradox,” wrote a prominent dealer, “Mr. Benton stridently went native in an Italian sarong and Mr. [Grant] Wood preached love of his country in parched Flemish.”

  But Benton’s blend of grass-roots rhetoric and artistic revanchism threw others into a panic of self-doubt. Most abstract artists were strongly political—Communists or Communist sympathizers—and many were already uneasy with the essential elitism of abstract art. As Orozco and the other Mexican muralists had pointed out, if art should be for the people, then how could one defend an art the people couldn’t comprehend? “While most rejected the Regionalist adulation of the virtues of rural America,” artist Jerome Kainen later said, “they respected its call for social responsibility in art.”

  Soon, however, politics triumphed over art. Instead of seeking an alliance with Social Realist artists like Hugo Gellert or Louis Lozowick, Benton tried to smite them with his nationalist sword. He told a meeting of artists at the John Reed Club that they “couldn’t paint anything real about America because their European-derived Communist preconceptions wouldn’t permit real experiences of American institutions.” For a while, the Social Realists continued to embrace Benton—in January 1933, his works, as well as those of Curry and George Biddle, were represented in a show at the John Reed Club called “The Social Viewpoint in Art.” In the end, his opposition proved hugely beneficial to the Social Realists, whose Marxism became an attractive alternative to the Regionalists’ chauvinistic nationalism. In an ironic turn, Benton’s crusade gave added legitimacy to the notion that art could be used as an instrument of social enlightenment or as propaganda, a notion that over the next decade would propel American art in directions Benton never imagined.

  Through the fall of 1932, the controversy escalated. With Thomas Craven as his “hatchet man” and the press largely in his camp—his sharp, off-color remarks made good copy—Benton traded blows with his adversaries, alternating hyperbole, demagoguery, and personal vilification. When Benton claimed that “there are no artists in Paris—none at all” at a time when Picasso, Matisse, and Braque were working there, even his admirers cringed. His detractors responded with apoplectic derision. “Benton was a dirty name,” McNeil remembers. “We respected the motives of the Social Realists, but Benton we had absolute contempt for. He was beyond the pale. In a Fifth Avenue café, you couldn’t even talk about him. You wouldn’t acknowledge that he existed. He was like refuse.” When critics did talk about Benton, it was with the same scorn later heaped on Father Coughlin, Martin Dies, and other “narrow-minded, mean-spirited, rabble-rousing” public figures of the thirties. Benton responded to his accusers with broadsides against the entire art world, leveling what to him was the most devastating charge of all—effeminacy. In increasingly crude and caustic terms, he blamed effeminate men, especially homosexuals, for abstraction’s stranglehold on contemporary art.

  Far be it from me to raise my hands in any moral horror over the ways and tastes of individuals. If young gentlemen, or old ones either, wish to wear women’s underwear and cultivate extraordinary manners it is all right with me. But it is not all right with the art which they affect and cultivate. It is not all right when, by ingratiation or subtle connivance, precious fairies get into positions of power and judge, buy, and exhibit American pictures on a base of nervous whim and under the sway of those overdelicate refinements of taste characteristic of their kind.

  At the League, Jackson and his fellow Monday night musicians leapt to Benton’s defense, forming what Axel Horn called a “hard core of devotees … who carried [Regionalism] to the level of a cult.” In the lunchroom, where Benton was increasingly referred to simply as “that son-of-a-bitch,” Jackson joined his teacher’s attacks on Picasso and echoed his homophobic diatribes. “He liked that kind of talk,” Philip Pavia remembers. Without the leavening of Benton’s agile intellect, however, Jackson’s argument seldom rose above “a very primitive level.” When Mervin Jules tried to explain his view that the Impressionists’ use of color was more “realistic” than the modeled forms of “realists” like Benton, Jackson responded with a terse “Oh, yeah? That’s your folly.” Pavia recalls trying unsuccessfully to explain to Jackson the hypocrisy of Benton rejecting European influence while embracing the “wop culture” of the Italian Renaissance. “Jackson wasn’t a talker,” says Milton Resnick. “He would challenge you, but it was all more like ‘You want to fight?’” Jackson’s visceral tactics proved more useful at a public forum at the John Reed Club where Benton’s “outlandish statements” so agitated the audience that the meeting erupted into a “yelling shambles.” When an “enraged Commie” threw a chair at the podium, Jackson and his fellow students jumped onto the stage and formed a cordon around their leader.

  Soon the number of students in Benton’s class began to fall precipitously, from twenty-nine when Jackson first enrolled in 1930, to only seven in the fall of 1932. Benton’s raw language and the harshness of his criticism had always frightened away the “menopause crowd” of elderly women who made up much of the League’s total enrollment. “If they signed up, they soon gave up,” recalls Mervin Jules, another of Benton’s student bodyguards. But now, with the temperature of the public debate rising, attendance had fallen perilously close to the League’s unofficial minimum. Shaken by the prospect that the course might be canceled, Benton sent Jackson and the remaining “faithful Bentonites” in the class to the League cafeteria during the next monthly sign-up period to recruit “new, naive, and uninformed” students to fill the class. “Conscripts like that didn’t last very long,” says Jules, “but at least they met the quota.”

  Despite Jackson’s fierce loyalty, Benton was increasingly preoccupied by the larger controversy, and their time together dwindled. Now when Jackson came to Hudson Street for dinner, other guests—critics, writers, journalists, anyone who might help advance the cause—held center stage. “We had many ardent discussions at our table with dinner guests,” Benton recalled years later, “[but] Jack never entered these. … He had no verbal facility. He had read too little anyhow to be at ease with the subjects discussed.” In particular, Jackson seemed incapable of understanding the theories behind Regionalism: “He followed a Benton example but this was in matter of form rather than of content,” Benton observed. “He did not have … my interests in history.” Jackson still posed for occasional sketches and helped prepare Benton’s gesso panels; he still played in the Monday night musicales; but more and more he felt cheated and abandoned by his mentor.

  In the late fall of 1932, when rumors spread that Benton was being considered for another major mural commission, Jackson saw an opportunity to recover his lost place. Despite Benton’s refusal to hire him for the Whitney murals the previous summer (“Jack would not have been qualified for such work,” Benton wrote), Jackson began working on a series of clay and plasticine models, painted black and white, like those his teacher had done in preparation for the New School murals. Whitney Darrow remembers Jackson’s crude maquettes as “swirling objects, objects with interesting curves and strong forces” which he anxiously brought to the League for Benton’s critique. According to Mervin Jules, who also submitted maquettes for Benton’s approval, there was never any doubt about their purpose: “We were all hopeful that we might get to work on a mural.”

  In December 1932, Benton accepted a commission from the state of Indiana to paint a mural depicting Indiana’s “social history” for an exhibit at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, a task that would take eight months.
In the end, he avoided deciding which students to take with him by taking none. Before leaving, however, he did help arrange for Jackson to become a full member of the League, entitling him to use the graphics workshop on Saturdays. It was an honor that offered little consolation.

  Only days after Benton left, Jackson received word that his real father was seriously ill.

  In fact, Roy Pollock had been ill for some time. He was only fifty-five years old and still stronger than any of his sons, but the years of road work and camp living had taken their toll, both visible and invisible. In a photograph that he gave to Frank during the summer of 1930, he stares at the camera, tightlipped as always, holding his huge saddle-leather hands like a schoolboy, his bright blue eyes struggling behind folds of tired flesh. For all the physical rigors of his life, his real suffering had not been at nature’s hands.

  Not that the elements hadn’t inflicted their share of injuries. Ever since Cody, winters had been especially hard on Roy—“too many cold drafts and too little hard work,” he would say. During the previous few winters at the county road camp near Wrightwood, colds and bouts of flu had become as inevitable as snow. So no one thought anything of it when he came home for the New Year’s holiday on the last day of 1932 feeling unusually tired and running a fever. Assuming it was again flu, Stella nursed him over the weekend, and he returned to camp in time for work on Monday, January 2. With Sande’s job threatened and Jay in and out of work, Roy’s paycheck was more vital than ever to the family’s survival. As soon as he was gone, Stella left to spend a few days with a friend in Riverside.

  Roy Pollock, about 1930

  After only two days at camp, Roy collapsed and came home. Unable to reach Stella by phone, Marie Levitt, who was visiting at the time, and whom the family already treated like a daughter-in-law, did what she could to make him comfortable. She didn’t need a doctor to tell her his condition was more serious than flu. Sande and Jay agreed: their father would never miss work for something as simple as a common cold. When Stella finally returned, she reacted with a calmness that startled Marie: “It seemed like she was prepared to withstand anything.” Nevertheless, she agreed, without her usual resistance, to take Roy to the French Hospital on College Street in central Los Angeles, where, after a series of inconclusive tests, doctors suggested it was perhaps flu after all. “They said, ‘Go home and rest, and sit in the sun, and you’ll get better,’” Marie remembers.

  But Roy didn’t get better. Instead, for three weeks, he fought increasingly prolonged spells of weakness, fever, nausea, and sweats. His temperature hovered around 100 degrees. Stella searched her red-leather-bound cookbook for the scribbled notes indicating that, on some day over the previous thirty years, Roy had liked a particular recipe. But even his appetite faded in and out, putting him for long periods beyond the reach of her most potent medicine. Despite his deteriorating condition, Stella kept the news of his illness from Charles, Frank, and Jackson for as long as possible. In a letter she wrote to Jackson shortly before his birthday, however, between reports on old friends like Reuben Kadish and cheerful inquiries about summer plans, her fears show through:

  Los Angeles has sure been hard hit this year earthquakes then Griffeth park fire over one hundred men burned to death the million $ hill fire that destroyed the water shed back of Montrose & Glendale that is why the floods was so terrible through that section lots worse than ever was told in the papers over three hundred killed lots of bodys they never will find.

  In fact, Jackson may already have heard about Roy’s condition through Marie, who, increasingly distraught over the lack of improvement and the inadequacy of the prescribed treatment, had already broken the family silence in a letter to Frank.

  Finally, on Monday, January 30, with Roy’s temperature at 102 degrees and the spells growing more severe, Stella and Marie took him to Los Angeles County General Hospital on North State Street in East Los Angeles where Marie had arranged for her uncle, Dr. S. S. Rynin, to examine him. The same day, Jay informed his brothers in New York of Dr. Rynin’s preliminary diagnosis: “Malignant Anaconditis … a bad case of heart leakage.” His description of the affliction was crude—“the heart muscle develops on the inside as well as on the outside leaving no room to take care of the blood rushing in”—but it clearly conveyed the gravity of the situation. “It will be awfully hard to impress on [Dad’s] mind to be reasonable in activity, if not some strain might end it any time.” In the same letter, Jay reported that Sande had finally lost the last part-time remnants of his job at the Times. For a while, at least, Roy would continue to receive a percentage of his wages, but that would not last long.

  News of Roy’s illness took Jackson by surprise. The same day Jay’s letter arrived, he sat down to write his father. In typical Pollock fashion, there are no overt pleas for or professions of love, just a strained effort to prove to his father that he is worthy of it. He talks of school and classes that are “damned hard work.” “If I’m able to learn anything,” he writes of a new class, appealing to Roy’s respect for perseverance, “I’ll take it full day and stick with it for three or four years—then the rest of my life.” In response to his father’s persistent doubts about his ability to support himself as an artist, Jackson writes, “artists are having it better now than before … the pot bellied financiers are turning to art as an escape from the some what blunt and forceful reality of today.”

  In a kind of desperate refrain, Jackson returns again and again to Roy’s socialist rhetoric. New York life is “hard on the bums,” he writes, “[but] after all, they are the well-to-do of this day. They don’t have as far to fall.” He defends Benton as a worthy model because “he has lifted art from the stuffy studio into the world and happenings about him, which has a common meaning to the masses.” He urges his father not to worry about money, because “no one has it. The system is on the rocks so no need try to pay rent and all the rest of the hokum that goes with the price system.” Finally, in closing, he invokes his father’s tireless optimism: “We have had extremely fine wheather as a matter of fact it has, fore the most part, been like spring—a bit chilly at times, but just enough to put some pep in a fellow.”

  By mid-February, tests had confirmed Dr. Rynin’s diagnosis. Roy Pollock was suffering from “malignant endocarditis,” a bacterial infection of the valves of the heart. Since the bright days on the Phoenix ranch, Roy had known he had a “leaking heart valve,” caused perhaps by a childhood bout with rheumatic fever, or an even earlier malformation in the womb. Perhaps he did not know—perhaps he chose to ignore—that a leaking heart was a vulnerable heart, that the harder he worked, the faster it leaked and the more vulnerable he became. “It is a case of too much hard work,” Jay wrote the brothers in New York, “his strong muscular body being overtaxed, until it became a weakness.”

  Once the diagnosis was confirmed, the outcome was inescapable. “It is fatal,” Jay wrote. “Doctors admit they are helpless, it may linger on for a year or end in a week.”

  Even at the time, some members of the family sensed an eerie appropriateness in Roy’s illness, a black poetry that Frank—next to Roy, the most poetic soul in the family—captured half jokingly in the epitaph, “My father died of a broken heart.” Roy’s affliction was due not to a chance bacterium snagging on a healthy heart, but to an inherent defect as incurable as a childhood of loss and alienation, as indelible as the image of a dying mother in an Iowa farmhouse. As far as Roy had traveled away from Tingley—down the Mississippi, to Wyoming, Arizona, and California—as hard as he had worked to heal the defect of a loveless, exploitative family, he could never stop the leak. “I sometimes feel that my life has been a failure,” he had written Jackson five years before, “but in this life we can’t undo the things that are past we can only endeavor to do the best possible now.”

  Stella received the news stoically and insisted that no one tell Roy. In his letter, Jay warned his brothers: “We have not told Dad of the seriousness of his trouble, so in your letters don
’t mention that part.” When Roy returned from the hospital soon afterward, Stella chatted about arrangements for the summer and laid plans for a trip to New York so Roy could meet his first daughter-in-law. To make his days more comfortable, she opened the convertible couch, put on a second mattress, and piled it with pillows so he could sit up and see out the east windows in the dining room “the beautiful golden hills” that led like timeworn steps to the San Gabriel Mountains beyond. On a clear day, he could see the white shroud of Old Baldy suspended in the sky above Wrightwood. Stella gave him what she could—“sunshine fresh air and flowers”—but the “drenching nightsweats” and high temperature only grew worse. The constant pain he bore “without a murmur.” Marie and Arloie came often while Sande and Jay joined the millions looking for work. On February 28, Roy’s fifty-sixth birthday, a telegram arrived from Charles, Frank, Jackson, and Elizabeth. “He enjoyed hearing from you boy’s,” Stella wrote back, “did him so much good for he was proud of each one.”

  On Saturday morning, March 4, Roy Pollock turned on his radio and waited to hear the new President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, begin his inaugural address, wondering, along with tens of millions of other anxious Americans huddled around their radios, “what Roosevelt’s answer to disaster [would] be.” According to Frederick Lewis Allen, it was a chilly, gray day in Washington, D.C., but the announcer was filled with “the synthetic good cheer of his kind, bearing down hard on the note of optimism, in fact, for he [knew] that worried and frightened people [were] listening to him.” After the oath was administered, another voice came though the crackling ether: a strong, Yankee voice. “President Hoover, Mr. Chief Justice, my friends,” it began: