Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Asserting his independence was only the first step in what appeared to be a desperate new drive to prove his manhood. Although no longer in Benton’s class, he faithfully attended the revived Monday night meetings of the Harmonica Rascals, reveling more than ever in Benton’s cartoonish bravado and bonhomie. When visiting for supper, he would linger after Tom left for his evening class to savor Rita’s flirtatious attention, then return to the rooming house and hint heavily to friends of their illicit affair. The rumor spread quickly, fed by Jackson’s calculated silence and drunken braggadocio. At League parties, alcohol—available legally as of December 5, 1933, for the first time in thirteen years—became the magic touchstone. Around women, it transformed him into “a dog in spring,” alternately insatiable and abusive. Axel Horn recalled seeing Jackson at one party “roaring like a Satyr in hot pursuit of a frightened nymph through the corridors. … Out of the mildest and most recessive person I knew had emerged a fire-breathing dragon!” Around men, it transformed him into a “wild Indian,” “a maniac,” a “Mr. Hyde.” “He was a mean drunk,” Mervin Jules remembers. “We often had to pull him away from an argument in order to prevent a fight.” At a Puerto Rican dance hall in Harlem, his pugnacity triggered a knife fight with “strangers” that could easily have proved fatal, although he apparently emerged from it unscathed. “If Americans get in a fight,” he reportedly told a friend afterward, “they punch each other. But they don’t have to die. Up there, in Harlem, somebody has to die.”

  Not even a brush with death could sober him up for long, however. Around Christmas time, the Harmonica Rascals were invited to perform at the town house of Joel Elias Spingarn, a professor at Columbia and social activist who often invited groups of like-minded friends to his elegant house on the Upper West Side to share views on human rights, economic reform, and the threat of fascism in Europe. For this holiday get-together, a formal affair, Spingarn’s young wife, Amy, a former student at the Art Students League, had hired additional staff, laid in extra supplies of liquor and a banquet of hors d’oeuvres, and made special arrangements for her former teacher Tom Benton and his little harmonica group to entertain her guests.

  When Benton arrived, he was accompanied by Jackson, Manuel Tolegian, and the other players, as well as Maria Piacenza, Rita Benton’s attractive niece who had only recently left high school in Brooklyn and entered the “sophisticated Bohemian” world of her uncle Tom. At the Spingarn house, “the maids greeted you and butlers circled around handing out gold-tipped cigarettes,” Piacenza recalls. “I’d never seen anything like it.” The group played through its repertoire with Benton stomping the floor, Tolegian playing the harmonica, and Jackson struggling with the mouth harp. “I didn’t know what to think about Jackson,” Piacenza remembers. “He was a beautiful young man, a very handsome boy, and very silent. It was very difficult to communicate with him except when he was drunk, which was often.”

  When the music stopped, Jackson headed straight for the bar.

  After a few drinks, Maria could see that Jackson “was just looking for a fight. There was a certain strangeness about him; he was suddenly offended by the bourgeois atmosphere.” At one point, he staggered up to a couple of men in tuxedos and muttered something about “stuffed shirts.” Fists flew, and the bar was demolished. After that, “it was a free-for-all,” Piacenza recalls. “All I remember is that Jackson grabbed my hand and we ran, because the cops were coming. I felt badly because these people hadn’t been anything but kind and hospitable. But Jackson was exultant, so thrilled with his bruised knuckles.”

  Arshile Gorky and Peter Busa

  If Jackson hoped to win Maria’s girlish heart with such derring-do, it must have come as a blow when she began dating Manuel Tolegian. Ever since the summer at Wrightwood, the two old friends had been drifting apart, but the combination of Tolegian’s one-man show at the Ferargil Galleries in 1934 and his success with Maria proved to be more than Jackson could tolerate. Joe Delaney recalls a drinking bout one night about this time when Jackson blurted out, “I don’t give a damn about Tolegian!” Although he later denied it, Manuel told several people that sometime during the fall, he awoke in the middle of the night and saw Jackson standing over his bed, drunk and brandishing a knife. Piacenza tried to mend the rift by inviting both men to a spaghetti dinner on the roof of her apartment building, but they immediately fell to drinking and quarreling. “Then they had this crazy fight,” Piacenza recalls. “They rolled around on the roof and at one point they rolled out to the edge. I was just in terror. I knew they were going to fall off and I’d find them both dead at the bottom.”

  About this time, Jackson found a new friend, one untainted by the past, a short, soulful young man named Peter Busa, who had just taken a room at the boardinghouse on Fifty-eighth Street and enrolled at the League. A refugee from college—after two years at Carnegie Tech he could no longer afford the tuition—and from an Italian-American family in Pittsburgh whose savings had been wiped out by the crash, Busa provided the perfect ear for Jackson’s mounting anxieties. The two spent long hours together in the little rooms on Fifty-eighth Street ridiculing their suspicious and parsimonious Irish landlady who served baked beans every night, discussing Benton’s methods, sketching, and drinking. Like Jackson, Busa had only recently lost his father, a painter of church murals from Sicily. He, too, had left his family to perform a vague but urgent penance. In a soft, confessional voice, he told Jackson of being assaulted by the “wolves” while riding the rails and, in turn, assaulting the next fresh young prey that entered the jungle. “That common experience of riding the rails gave us something to talk about from the first day,” Busa remembers. “It sealed our friendship.”

  Woman, c. 1933, oil on Masonite, 14⅛” x 10½”

  The conversations with Busa were Jackson’s first opportunity to explore territory that had always been forbidden in his own family. “He told me that he had a problem and that he was trying to go through with it,” says Busa. “And I said, ‘Is it alcoholism?’ and he said, ‘No, that’s only part of it. It’s what causes alcoholism.’ But when he started to get to his problem, I would say, ‘What is it?’ and he would break down and cry and say he didn’t know himself.” At that point, Busa would just listen patiently. “I was sure he had had encounters with men,” Busa remembers, “and I think he was troubled by some of those experiences. He didn’t need anybody to tell him he had homosexual drives. All I used to say was ‘Any port in a storm.’”

  Throughout the fall and winter, Jackson caromed between weekend visits to the cabin in Devil’s Hole and freefall binges of alcohol and machismo; between soul-searching conversations with Peter Busa and random explosions of anxious rage. “He was unrecognizable from one minute to the next,” recalls Maria Piacenza. Busa, who heard the tales of each new outrage through the League grapevine, was puzzled by “the two Jackson Pollocks.” “I was aware of the contradictions in his behavior. So I said to him, ‘Hell, all this crap about you going around and raising hell—I find you very gentle.’” To which Jackson replied, “Never mistake gentleness for weakness.” The spiral of self-abuse—the spiral from which his family had rescued him two years before—was again spinning out of control. Friends found it harder and harder to coax him home “upright.” He would careen into the street, daring cars to “run me over,” punch out store windows, then lapse into “comatose” silence. Binges that two years before would have ended on a friend’s couch now ended abruptly in the gutter. At a League party on a night boat up the Hudson, with the sound of jazz echoing across the dark river, Jackson unscrewed all the light bulbs, throwing the crowd into darkness, then climbed unsteadily to the top of the railing and flailed about wildly. “He was waving his arms,” recalls Philip Pavia. “He called out, ‘I’m gonna jump. I’m gonna jump,’ and we all laughed our heads off.” Suddenly Jackson turned his back to the crowd and looked into the darkness as if he really was going to jump. Nathan Katz, Bernie Steffen, and several others grabbed him and wrestled him t
o the deck where he turned strangely docile and vacant. “Jackson always left you with a feeling of emptiness,” says George McNeil, “as if he was living in an abyss.”

  Sentimental Journey, Albert Pinkham Ryder, oil on canvas, 12” × 10”

  Sometime during the tumultuous fall of 1933, Jackson returned to painting. Presumably he continued to sculpt on weekend visits to the Devil’s Hole cabin, but it would be another ten years before he returned openly to the medium. Yet the emotional needs that had compelled him toward sculpture remained unmet. When he began to paint again, the images that emerged were not the postcard western scenes of Tom Benton; they were dark, brooding images of death. Working from a skull he had “borrowed” from Bridgman’s anatomy studio, he painted the scenes that still haunted him: a huge woman with pendulous breasts surrounded by five emaciated figures and a disembodied skull; a woman hovering—perhaps mourning—over the skeleton of a large animal as a crowd of skull-faces closes around her. The style is no longer Benton’s. There are still echoes of the hollow and the bump in the droop of a breast or the bend of a knee, but the complex interplay of short, undulating lines has been replaced by threatening swells and unexpected jabs and everywhere the marks of the turbulent brush that Jackson had struggled for so long to control. Instead of Benton’s mannered cheerfulness, there is the obsessive moodiness of Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose works he would have seen at the Ferargil Galleries where Benton exhibited. Studying Ryder’s small, heavily impastoed canvases (and, undoubtedly, the monograph on Ryder prepared by the Ferargil’s director, Frederick Newlin Price, in 1932), Jackson’s eye was drawn to the images that reflected his own ordeal: tenebrous images like Sentimental Journey, in which a hearse-like wagon, driven by a man in a top hat, wearily rounds a bend into the moonlit distance. In Going West, Jackson painted the same wagon, transposed to the land of his childhood, rounding the same ominous bend surrounded by apocalyptic swirls of angry sky and churning landscape. In another of the paintings illustrated by Price, Death Rides the Wind (which later was determined to be a forgery), a mounted Grim Reaper charges across a barren landscape in the eerie ecliptic half-light of a hidden moon, his victim, apparently, an unsuspecting steer grazing beneath a skeletal tree. In Jackson’s two versions of the same scene, the Grim Reaper is transformed into a cowboy and the steer into a skeleton, but death remains a constant.

  Going West, 1934–36, oil on composition board, 15⅛” × 20⅞”

  In the same paintings, memory intrudes for the first time in Jackson’s art—not the convenient, picturesque memory of Benton’s murals or Jackson’s earlier Bentonesque works, but specific memories from his own childhood: the threatening bull outside Phoenix, Stella’s overturned wagon, the cayuse stampede near the Grand Canyon. In paintings like Going West and The Wagon, the past insinuates itself in the Roy-like figure of a wagon driver urging his horses ahead of him, in a windmill tower from Chico, a long-line skinner from Cody, or a water caisson from Orland. In one untitled work, unusually large for this period, Jackson paints a farm family gathered in their barnyard among the chickens for what could be a formal portrait. The featureless totemic figures of a mother and father loom huge on each side of the canvas (a composition he will return to again and again in coming years). The mother, who towers over the father, cradles one faceless child in her arm while another peers out warily from behind her. A tiny, doll-like child sits precariously on the skull-faced father’s knee. In the foreground, two older children, knowledgeable in the mysteries of sex, urge together a cow and a bull. The roiling barnyard threatens to rise up and engulf them; the dark sky is streaked with ominous flashes of orange and red. Everywhere, like smoke from two fires, Jackson’s bleak, uncertain past intertwines with Ryder’s dark, turbulent style. Skies lower menacingly, the ground convulses, the sun and moon, often obscured, offer little light, figures move in faceless chiaroscuro. They are not nightmare images, but anxious dreams caught at the first moment of unaccountable darkness, when the potential for terror is first perceived.

  Mid-thirties, pencil and crayon on lined paper, 4” × 7”

  Peter Busa recalls that Jackson’s obsession with his father’s death had led him to questions about “fate” and “chance” and “what he had done to deserve it all.” Someone—Richard Davis, perhaps—had given him a copy of Moby-Dick, and Jackson had laid siege to it repeatedly—“he must have tried to read it not once but ten times,” Busa recalls—perhaps identifying with Captain Ahab’s obsessive search for meaning in the seeming arbitrariness of life:

  All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask If man will strike, strike through the mask!

  Untitled (Family Scene), 1930–1934, tempera on Masonite, 26¼” × 42¼”

  Jackson’s obsession with finding a pattern in the arbitrary—the face behind the mask—led him first to sidewalk poker games and three-card monte, “He liked to gamble,” Busa recalls, “and in New York, in those days, if you wanted to gamble, all you had to do was walk around the corner. It appealed to his notion that there is some logic in chance, that there has to be a certain rhythm to the way things happen, that there is no such thing as arbitrary or random.” In Greenwich Village, in the early hours of the morning, he would follow with fascination trails of urine left by police horses on patrol. “One time, a policeman caught him at it and nearly hauled him in,” Busa recalls. “But I said, ‘No, you’ve got the wrong person here. He’ll give you a thesis about it.’ I said, ‘He’s going to college and this is part of his work.’ The cop was really baffled, and he let us go. But Jackson had a fascination with that kind of thing.”

  In his drawings, Jackson turned to “doodling” to explore the arbitrary. For the first time, patches of doodling appear in the margins of letters and notes and larger sketches, spreading indulgently across other images—sometimes geometric, sometimes swirling, sometimes reworked with colored pencil or wash. Occasionally, an entire sheet is filled with a pattern gone out of control—or just allowed to happen—perhaps hiding an earlier image.

  In the same year, Jackson painted his first self-portrait. It was the appropriate culmination to a period of self-absorption, self-deception, and self-abuse. In it, the twenty-two-year-old Jackson paints himself as a child. He is nine or ten years old—his age when Roy Pollock left home—harrowed, emaciated, hollow-eyed. He stares out of the Ryderesque gloom, half in darkness, struggling to conceal his fears. The painting was not based on an old photograph; it is the face that Jackson Pollock saw in the mirror. It is the void. Maria Piacenza saw the painting after it was completed. “I felt it was so revealing,” she remembers. “It was the painting of a madman. It was the very painful, very exposed painting of a very turbulent man. … There was all this hatred boiling up behind this little boy’s face.” With the other paintings, the self-portrait marks the beginning of a new period in Jackson’s art. He has found a new and inexhaustible subject matter: the frightened child in the mirror. Instead of America’s past or Benton’s past, he has discovered the backward path, the path back into his own past and his own subconscious. He will pull the image out of the void.

  17

  THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE

  Reports of Jackson’s latest outrages eventually reached their intended audience. Late one midwinter night in 1933, Bruce Mitchell and Whitney Darrow appeared at Charles Pollock’s door on Eighth Street to announce that Jackson had been arrested and taken to the Jefferson Market jail not far away. He had gone on a rampage in a local nightclub and assaulted a cop. Although he later dismissed the incident as “something minor,” at the time Charles was anxious enough about the prospect of a criminal prosecution to enlist the help of Ernest Howe, an Englishman and friend of Elizabeth’s, to testify in Jackson’s behalf. At the arraignment the next day, Howe, a grave, elderly man who barely knew the accused, persuaded the jud
ge to let Jackson off with a “severe admonishment.”

  Whether or not Jackson had learned a lesson, the family certainly had. After only two or three months on his own, Jackson was invited back to live in the Eighth Street apartment with Charles and Elizabeth. Another rescue effort had begun.

  For the most part, the family accepted it with practiced resignation. “I had hoped Jack would spring out for himself this year,” Frank wrote Charles as 1933 came to an end, “but I suppose conditions make the present set-up the wiser.” Elizabeth was far less sanguine. “He came with this peculiar dissatisfied, selfish temperament to two young people who were greatly in love and deeply involved in their own lives,” she recalls. “He and I conducted ourselves as if we were armies under truce.” Over Elizabeth’s objections, Charles devoted increasing amounts of time and energy to keeping his little brother preoccupied and sober. Through the wall that separated Jackson’s small studio from the rest of the apartment, Charles maintained an uncharacteristically conscientious vigil. “I had my studio in front so I could be aware of Jack, of his physical movements,” he remembers. “I knew he was having a hell of a struggle.” As often as possible, he would stop at Jackson’s door and “ask to see what he was working on.” Probably at Charles suggestion, both brothers prepared sketches for a proposed mural at Greenwich House. Charles, technically accomplished and intellectually au courant as always, depicted a pushcart vendor being run down by a large truck (the workingman’s fate in an oppressive capitalist system); while Jackson, working summarily in oil on brown wrapping paper, evoked Benton’s Monday night “musicales” with a murky blue Ryderesque drawing of five men playing instruments. Despite the bonds that always connected their artistic lives, it was the first and only project on which the two brothers cooperated.