Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Gradually, as the weekly checks from the U.S. Treasury continued to arrive, the money “began to seem real,” and its implications began to sink in. “Before that I had no idea that you could make a living as an artist,” remembers Peter Busa. Mercedes Matter, the daughter of abstract artist Arthur B. Carles, and herself a painter, recalls: “It was marvelous. You can’t imagine how wonderful it was to get that money just to paint. It was the most important thing that ever happened to me or to this country as far as art was concerned.” Even those artists who had hesitated at first soon flocked to the new program. Willem de Kooning quit his $250-a-month job designing window displays for A. S. Beck shoe stores. “I decided that if I worked at a job I was poor,” a friend remembers him saying. “If I painted, I just didn’t have any money.” For most artists, who, like Jackson and Sande, had been living on a trickle of relief payments and an occasional odd job, however, twenty-three dollars a week was a fortune. They “really had a field day,” recalled May Rosenberg.

  They began to look for space, and instead of cheap apartments rented places with decent light, paying as much as twenty or thirty dollars a month for an abandoned small business loft with cracked john, broken walls, tin ceilings, and a skylight. They became skilled carpenters and plumbers, shrewd electricians who knew more than just how to wire a lamp. Teaching and helping each other, they installed sinks and lights and kerosene heaters and gas stoves … all at practically no cost. They painted thousands of acres of floors and walls and tin ceilings among them, investing God knows how much time and energy, so that dingy, depressing fire-traps became enviable, spacious islands of serenity.

  But new studios, new life-styles, and in more than a few cases, new partners were only the first and most superficial of the changes that emerged from the exhilaration of August 1935.

  In an astonishingly short time, the modern art world in America was born.

  As Jackson and Sande knew from personal experience, the “art project” announced that summer was not the government’s first attempt to aid unemployed and destitute artists. As early as 1932, then-governor Franklin Roosevelt had authorized a special work-relief program for New York’s artists. Devised by state relief director Harry Hopkins, the program directly affected only about a hundred artists, but it made classes—like Ben-Shmuel’s sculpture workshop at Greenwich House—available to a large number of young artists, like Jackson, who couldn’t have afforded them otherwise. When, three months after the inauguration, artist George Biddle wrote his former Groton schoolmate, now President Roosevelt, urging direct federal support for artists, his plea fell on sympathetic ears. By November 1933, Hopkins, now director of the Civil Works Administration (CWA), was providing federal funds to continue the “teachers’ project” in settlement houses and boys’ clubs around New York.

  But Biddle and others around Roosevelt, including Hopkins, felt that more direct, systematic aid was needed. In December, they succeeded in setting aside a small portion of the CWA’s vast work-relief allocation to fund the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). Under the authority of the Treasury Department, PWAP would hire artists to create art “of the best quality available” for the embellishment of public buildings. Although modest by comparison to later efforts, PWAP was a landmark. For the first time, the United States government was directly subsidizing the arts.

  Inevitably, the program ignited a fire-storm of controversy. In the field, agents were besieged by marginal and self-styled “artists.” “The first applicant in Los Angeles,” writes a historian of the New Deal’s art projects, “was a plumber who ‘did a little painting.’ He was followed by a flood of little old ladies who painted little scenes from nature, art students, and down-at-the-heel commercial artists. Fully three-fourths of Southern California’s applicants were not bona fide artists.” Because state, not federal, officials examined each applicant’s bona fides, standards varied wildly. As Sande and Frank discovered when they applied unsuccessfully for CWA jobs in the winter of 1933–34, local politics could frustrate the best of federal intentions. In areas like Southern California where officials were hostile to relief efforts and to avant-garde art, too few artists qualified. In New York City, where the climate was more hospitable, too many qualified. Artists were put to work cleaning and repairing the city’s statues and monuments.

  Not that the New York program was free of rancor. There, federal largesse only fueled an artistic debate that had been smoldering for years between modernists—typically young, left-leaning, and unemployed artists who shared Biddle’s belief that artists should follow the example of the Mexican muralists and document the “historic social revolution” of the time—and traditionalists who were generally older and better paid. When Juliana Force, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and a modernist, was appointed PWAP regional chairman, the presidents of all the major art societies charged that she “identified with a definite art movement” and would favor “a very small percentage of those artists professionally engaged.” Jackson and Sande, still under Benton’s sway, sided with Force’s conservative critics. “There is a woman in charge of all art projects,” Sande wrote Reuben Kadish, “a political designing woman who will stop at nothing to see that her clique of fa[i]ries are given work. She is a bitch and actually amounts to an Art Dictator and is rapidly becoming a very serious menace to Art in general here in N.Y.” John Sloan took a more sanguine view, characterizing the fierce infighting that accompanied each new federal initiative in the arts as “the natural result of throwing corn in the chicken coop. There are bound to be feathers flying.”

  Feathers flew at the White House, too, where the ideological battle lines had been drawn over a replacement for PWAP. Treasury’s Edward Bruce proposed a plan that eliminated “need” altogether as a basis for supporting artists. Quality would be the sole criterion. Knowing that Congress would resist funding a work-relief program not based on need at a time of so much need, Bruce proposed that the program be supported by setting aside one percent of construction costs on federally funded building projects for “embellishments.” Hopkins, on the other hand, was formulating a far grander scheme that called for “ending the dole, expanding the rural rehabilitation projects, and giving other reliefers jobs on useful projects.” In the democratic spirit of Hopkins’s proposal, an artist would be treated more or less like any other worker and given a job appropriate to his or her skill at a wage that was “adequate for the maintenance of health and decency.” The tug-of-war for Roosevelt’s support was still going on when, on April 28, after only four and a half months, PWAP funding ran out and more than 3,700 artists were thrown back on the dole. Fed up with a fickle bureaucracy, artists grew increasing militant. Between 1934 and 1935, membership in the Artists Union more than doubled.

  While many of the PWAP’s projects in New York were simply abandoned, some were transferred to the local work-relief agency, the Emergency Relief Bureau (ERB), among them Job Goodman’s ceramics class at the Henry Street Settlement House, which Jackson had attended the previous winter. Sometime in early 1935, Jackson signed up for another Goodman class, this one in life drawing, also sponsored by the city’s relief agencies. Although little more than a rehash of the procedure Benton taught at the League (the thirty-eight-year-old Goodman was, in fact, a former Benton student), the class did at least provide live models and free materials. In February, Jackson was pulled from the relief rolls and, based on his carving experience with Ben-Shmuel, assigned to the monument restoration project, another of the programs rescued from PWAP. The pay of $1.75 per hour was relatively princely, but the work—cleaning the pink marble Firemen’s Memorial at 100th Street and Riverside Drive with solvents—was dirty, tedious, and, in the middle of winter, with winds spinning off the icy Hudson, frigid. The daily commute north—one hundred blocks on the grimy Ninth Avenue El—undoubtedly tested his limited capacity for adversity and abstinence.

  Both the weather and the working conditions improved in spring when Jackson was assigned to clean the
equestrian statue of George Washington in Union Square, only a twenty-minute walk from the loft on Houston Street. By that time, Sande had joined him and the job became just another excuse for drinking and bad-boy bravado. Maria Piacenza remembers taking a break from her job on Union Square one afternoon that spring. “A big crowd had gathered around the statue and there were Jackson and Sande, hamming it up, scrubbing the horse, making a big point of scrubbing the rear end and the under-parts. Everybody was howling.”

  It wasn’t long before Jackson somehow managed to attract the opprobrium of his supervisors in a program that was supervised very loosely, if at all. In June, he was demoted from “Stonecarver” to “Stone Carver Helper,” and his pay was cut in half, to eighty-five cents per hour. He continued on the restoration project another month, glumly cleaning the Augustus Saint-Gaudens statue of Peter Cooper in the traffic-congested oven of Cooper Square.

  Meanwhile, in Washington, the hiatus in art subsidies over the winter of 1934–35 had given Roosevelt’s opponents time to mount an attack. The art projects, they argued, were “New Deal boondoggling” at its most wasteful and wrongheaded. “That the government should provide artists and white-collar people with ‘useless’ projects was stigmatized as both immoral and ruinous of the economy,” according to Matthew Josephson. Still, Hopkins pushed ahead with his plan for a mammoth work-relief program that would include large-scale subsidies to artists. A straight-talking Iowan whose Presbyterian heritage revealed itself in a tenacious commitment to social morality, Hopkins responded to his critics with indignation: “Hell, [artists] have got to eat just like other people.” To those in Congress who insisted that artists should be “put to work with pick and shovel,” Hopkins fired back defiantly, “That is all they think about, money to repair the streets. … We are not backing down on any of these projects. I think these things are good in life. They are important. … The plain fact is we haven’t done enough.”

  The artists agreed. By the summer of 1935, two years of on-again-off-again subsidies, restrictive “quality” controls, short-lived programs, and biased selection processes had left many angry and suspicious. Sande Pollock wrote to Reuben Kadish in July, describing the economic “piss pot” in which most artists found themselves: “Conditions here in general and particularly for the artist are certainly not improving in spite of the large gestures and bullshiting from official Washington. There has been and is much talk of more Projects but it is the usual circle of procrastination.”

  In the same month, Roosevelt finally resolved the battle between Bruce and Hopkins by approving both their proposals. Almost simultaneously, the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP), under Bruce, and the Federal Arts Project (FAP), under the vast umbrella of Hopkin’s CWA, opened for business. With a relatively high percentage of non-relief artists and lofty aspirations, TRAP was soon dubbed “the Ritz” of the relief projects. Status-conscious artists, especially those already comfortable with the “approved” style and subject matter, were attracted to TRAP’s better wages and elitist reputation. Manuel Tolegian was the lone TRAP artist among Jackson’s friends. It was Hopkins’s FAP, however, with fourteen times more money and, eventually, ten times more artists on its payroll, that greeted Jackson and his friends on the morning of August 1, 1935, with the unprecedented promise of “$23.86 a week to do nothing but paint.”

  The FAP was, in fact, only one small cog in the mammoth engine of work-relief that started up in the summer of 1935 with the creation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA was the realization of Hopkins’s dream of taking America off the dole and putting it back to work. “Those who are forced to accept charity,” he said, “no matter how unwillingly, are first pitied, then disdained.” Within the next six years, the WPA would employ an average of 2,100,000 workers, spend $2 billion, and begin work on almost a quarter of a million projects, from raking leaves to building airfields. Against this epic panorama, the art projects played a relatively minor role. Only 5 percent of WPA funds (about $46 million) and 2 percent of its employees (about 38,000) were allotted to all the creative and performing arts including the Federal Music Project, Theater Project, and Writers’ Project.

  In the vast oceans of funding with which Roosevelt and Hopkins tried to “prime the pump” of the economy, it was only a few drops, but its impact on the artistic community was diluvial. Within four months, two thousand artists had joined the WPA payroll. In New York City, where, according to Matthew Josephson, there were only two hundred serious artists at the time, more than a thousand signed up. By the following year, almost six thousand were employed nationwide. Although screening procedures varied from stated to state, in New York City, virtually anyone on relief who could produce a framed painting was suddenly a self-supporting artist. Among all the industries and businesses affected, directly and indirectly, by work-relief efforts, only the art “business” achieved essentially full employment.

  In a community as small, insular, and arcane as the art world, such massive intervention inevitably produced massive dislocation. Harry Hopkins had tried to minimize the side effects of federal subsidies by consulting experts like Audrey McMahon, administrator of New York’s aid programs for artists, and appointing Holger Cahill, a museum curator and art lover with catholic tastes, as FAP’s director. Nevertheless, the marriage of government bureaucracy and artistic license was troubled from the start. “We were the backward natives and they were the British colonists,” says Peter Busa, who, like most of Jackson’s friends, joined the WPA early. “The government was going to civilize us, only we didn’t want to be civilized in that way. It was a real clash of cultures.”

  When he applied for FAP work, Sande discovered that “two people with the same last name living in the same house” could not both draw WPA checks—a regulation apparently designed to spread federal money among as many households as possible. To be eligible for his $23.86, he either had to move out of the Houston Street loft or change his last name. As always, Jackson’s needs came first. Within weeks, Sande Pollock became Sande McCoy. “I have changed my name,” he wrote Reuben Kadish in July 1935, “so as not to be known as Jack’s brother—political reasons.”

  WPA regulations also forced many artists to confront for the first time, albeit in a specious form, the question of what kind of artist they wanted to be. According to project guidelines, painters produced either murals or easel paintings—never both—and were divided accordingly. Predictably, Sande, whose only artistic experience was the mural work he had done in Los Angeles with Siqueiros, Goldstein, and Kadish, was assigned to the mural division. Jackson, with scores of paintings to his credit and only passing experience with mural painting, should have joined the easel division, but, unwilling to be separated from Sande, joined the mural division instead. The choice was made easier, no doubt, when Job Goodman was assigned an FAP mural and asked Jackson to assist him.

  By choosing murals, Jackson also avoided the dreaded “force account,” which required easel painters to show up at a supervised location, check in, and paint for a specified number of hours each week. “There was one place on Fifty-seventh Street where you could work,” recalls painter George McNeil, “and that was the only place. Of course, I didn’t like that, and neither did anybody else. It meant breaking up your day, like going to an office to work.” In the mural division, Jackson was spared the public indignity of these “easel factories,” although he didn’t escape discipline altogether. Mural supervisors were free to establish their own disciplinary standards, and Job Goodman was well known as “kind of a martinet,” a Benton ideologue who demanded regular attendance and an honest day’s work at his studio on Sixteenth Street or at the site. Otherwise, mural division artists were subject only to occasional “inspections” by traveling supervisors—usually fellow artists and often sympathetic friends—who expected only “some evidence of getting someplace.”

  Government intervention gave new pitch and moment to long-simmering political disputes within the artistic community. With a fi
rm grip on state FAP screening committees, traditionalists could gerrymander skill classifications to favor their own. Whether an artist was classified “unskilled, intermediate, skilled, or professional” determined the amount of his or her paycheck. At TRAP, artists were explicitly encouraged to do objective works for the project and abstractions on their own time. In the rare instances where modernists wrested control of the perquisites from traditionalists, the flow of favoritism was reversed. In New York City, a small but zealous group of abstractionists led by Burgoyne Diller and Harry Holtzman managed to create a small protectorate for abstract artists in the mural division, assigning murals to prominent abstractionists like Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, Byron Browne, Jan Matulka, and Ilya Bolotowsky.

  Even such small-scale rebellions, however, were often thwarted by regulations requiring every mural to have a sponsor—a school, public library, or similar institution willing to receive it. Sponsors tended to favor the traditionalists: a fashion school requested a mural depicting “the story of Costume”; an airport, the history of aviation. Goodman’s mural, The Spirit of Modern Civilization, on which Jackson worked, was installed at Grover Cleveland High School in Queens, while Lee Krasner’s abstract design for WNYC went homeless. Of the more than one thousand murals begun in the program’s first year, only a tiny fraction were abstract. “There were lots of us working on abstract murals,” recalls George McNeil, “but the whole thing was sort of mythical. We’d do murals and nothing ever came of them. They were never put in place.” In a letter to Reuben Kadish, Sande Pollock (now McCoy) lamented the plight of the artist trapped in a politically accountable bureaucracy: “If and when an artist is given a chance at a wall he is bound hard by a stinking Art Commission headed by the superpatriot, Jonas Lie. So as a result what few murals are being done are merely flat wall decorations of the lowest order.”