Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Frustrated and resentful of government regulations, artists waged a guerrilla war against the bureaucracy. Sande Pollock’s name change was just one of thousands of skirmishes—some fought in the name of artistic freedom, some in a Robin Hood-like redistributional game—between artists and project officials who were often just other artists. Many held part-time jobs and concealed the extra income, using it to rent better apartments—which also went unreported—or to spend summers in the country. No act of “subversion” was more widespread than pilfering from WPA supplies. “We figured on a 25 percent loss over our allotment from stealing,” recalls Charles Mattox, who in the first years of the project assisted the supervisor of technical projects, sculptor David Smith, and manned the supply window at the WPA distribution center on Thirty-ninth Street. “A lot of the artists were very resentful that they couldn’t just take what they wanted.” In bureaucratic retaliation, Mattox and Smith carefully calculated how much sizing and how much paint were required to cover a canvas—“we took into account if somebody used more impasto”—how much thinner the cleanup would consume, and how much “mileage” a painter could get from a brush, and doled out supplies strictly according to the formula.

  Eventually, Holger Cahill, FAP’s director, managed to blunt the most insensitive regulatory intrusions. He abolished the hated “force account” rule, allowing artists to paint in their own studios by their own clocks. Not long afterward—probably not coincidentally—Jackson transferred from the mural division to the easel division. Under the new rules, artists were required only to report periodically to the WPA office (usually once a month) and to produce a minimum quota of paintings (usually one every month to six weeks), and even these loose requirements could be readjusted to suit an individual’s working habits.

  Meanwhile, the glacier of government largesse was fundamentally reshaping the artistic landscape. Largely relieved of the need for part-time work, artists had more time to spend with one another. At the WPA offices, at the Artists Union, in lofts and bars and cafeterias, they met and talked and, for the first time, felt a genuine sense of community. “What a break it was,” recalls Peter Busa. “We were all young, and there was no such animal at the time as a master of fine arts degree, so the WPA really amounted to a graduate program in art. It was an experience we shared. It was really the first art community I was ever aware of.” Stories circulated of artists helping other artists, usually by shielding them from inane regulations. “There was a wonderful feeling of people being for each other,” says one of the few women artists on the project. “We were all together and we all cared—about serious things, about each other.” The project was “like one big happy family,” says another artist.

  Already, in the bars and coffee houses of the Village, a group identity was beginning to take shape that would endure for more than two decades, a male identity based largely on machismo and beer—what Charles Pollock called “the fraternity of painters.” “The project changed many things,” says Ibram Lassaw, a sculptor, “but most of all it changed the image of the artist. It put an end to the idea that being an artist was somehow unmasculine.” Rooted in the furtive pleasures of Prohibition, drinking would become the new community’s central ritual. Already, WPA paychecks triggered check-cashing sprees “not unlike payday binges in the army or navy.”

  In time, the barroom machismo spilled over into artistic competitiveness and bitter feuds. “All artists made enemies,” recalls Charles Mattox. “The better they were, the more enemies they made. There was a lot of rivalry on the project.” Personal enmities, aggravated in turn by political manipulations of project money and favors, deepened old rifts—political, philosophical, and artistic—further fragmenting the community beneath the surface of homogeneity and self-help. Within a decade, critics would drive the wedges of their favor into these rifts and split Jackson’s world apart.

  Finally, the projects changed the relationship between the community of artists and the society at large. Such a change had always been part of Roosevelt and Hopkins’s master plan. The projects, they hoped, would become a “symbol [of] people’s interest in [the artist’s] achievement.” Even TRAP’s Edward Bruce hoped that government support would “[bring] to the artist for the first time in America the realization that he was not a solitary worker.” By 1936, however, the projects had already begun, not to bring the artists and their public closer together, but to drive them further apart.

  At a time when a saleswoman at Woolworth’s earned $10.80 for a fifty-hour week and many others made as little as $7.00 a week, when Ph.D.‘s were camping in Morningside Park and professional men were still sleeping in the subways, Jackson and his fellow artists, only a few of whom had children to support, were earning $23.86 a week for unsupervised work, at home, often in rent-free apartments. In return they were required only to produce one painting every four to six weeks, a painting that, in most cases, disappeared into permanent storage. Even compared to others on work-relief, artists were a pampered lot. The average WPA worker (most of whom were classified as construction workers) cost the government only $60 a month, compared with $100 a month for each artist. “The people who worked on the WPA were really part of an aristocracy,” recalls Reuben Kadish. “Almost every artist I knew was more flush than they had ever been before.”

  The world-owes-me-a-living attitude that first showed itself in widespread cheating and pilfering was given political legitimacy by radical union groups beginning with the Unemployed Artists Group in 1933 and later the Artists Union. Founded the same year as PWAP, the Artists Union formalized the emerging sense of community, reflecting both the common experience of the project and the common perception of the bureaucratic enemy against which only a united voice could be effective. Pointing to the close relationship between artists and the state in Communist countries, these groups argued that the government had an affirmative duty to support artists. To the extent that the projects “deprived workers of the right to work in their chosen occupations,” they were inadequate. Not all artists shared this view, but most, like Jackson, came to view the weekly Treasury check as more than a temporary windfall. By the time World War II brought an end to governmental subsidies, seven years later, the artistic community had become addicted to a life-style and a level of prosperity largely unheard of in the Bohemian days before the projects. Stripped of their privileges, artists would welcome with open arms the new breed of entrepreneurial dealers who appeared after the war, hoping both to recapture the old prosperity and to replace the old “symbol of people’s interest” with the new. “There’s no doubt that government sponsorship led artists to think they couldn’t live without sponsorship of some kind,” says Reuben Kadish. “That’s one thing Pollock learned, too: somebody else has got to put up the dough.”

  In the spring of 1935, Tom and Rita Benton left New York. On a lecture tour to the Midwest earlier that year, Benton had been invited to serve as director of painting at the Kansas City Art Institute. To sweeten the offer, a group of prominent Missourians, impressed by Benton’s Indiana mural at the Chicago fair, dangled the prospect of a similar commission. (Eventually, the Missouri legislature, persuaded by Benton’s unassailable political and artistic credentials, authorized $16,000 for a mural in the statehouse.) Citing a boom in art-related activities in the country’s heartland, Benton tried to put a regionalist face on his departure: “I began to feel that I, a western artist, the better part of whose work was motived by western subject matter, should find a way of being part of the change that was coming in my homeland.”

  In fact, Benton had long since overstayed his welcome in New York. Years of rhetorical jousting in Art Digest and Art Front magazine, punctuated by drunken outbursts, had left him few allies and legions of enemies. Even close friends like Lewis Mumford, who enjoyed Benton’s company but whose political affinities were with the modernist camp, had come to think of Benton’s art as just another of his embarrassing personal eccentricities. At the same time that his self-portrait appeared on
the cover of Time and the country enjoyed a wave of government-subsidized “Regionalist” art, Benton sulked and brooded through his last, unproductive winter in New York. In April, after twenty-three years, he emptied his studio on East Eighth Street, packed his paintings and furniture in a truck—probably with Jackson and Sande’s help—and left for Missouri, telling a newspaper reporter in a parting shot that New York “had lost all masculinity.”

  Four months later, Charles Pollock left for Washington, D.C., to take a position with the Resettlement Administration, a government agency that relocated poor farmers, offering them better land, newer equipment, and free training. The two departures were not unrelated. Benton had intended to take Charles with him to assist on the mural in Jefferson City, but mysteriously withdrew the invitation at the last minute. “I think it had to do with Rita and Elizabeth,” says Charles in retrospect. “It was a simple matter of the wives not getting along.” The aborted trip forced Charles to reassess his foundering career. Although his paintings had been exhibited at the Ferargil Galleries, reproduced several times in magazines, and even given a favorable mention in the New York Times, he was no closer to supporting himself as an artist than he had ever been. Movie posters, art classes, and Elizabeth’s salary were still his mainstays. He could have signed on to the Project, but his pride precluded anything that smacked of the dole. “To get on the WPA, you had to be at poverty level,” he recalls, “and I didn’t want to go out that way.” For years, Tom and Rita had been his only regular patrons—seldom buying but often making introductions, lobbying for gallery showings, and arranging jobs. Without them, the prospects were dim indeed. Elizabeth’s vigorous, Rita-like campaign to woo prospective buyers had met with little success, and her bitterness was beginning to show in ways other than hostility toward Jackson. In California, Stella was talking of selling quilts to stave off poverty. The family’s dignity was at risk. The Resettlement Administration appeared to offer a way out. Because relocation was often especially traumatic for rural, uneducated farmers, the agency had established a Special Services Division to help them preserve their cultural heritage. As part of that effort, musicologist Charles Seeger had begun recording and documenting American folk music. Charles’s job would be to illustrate the volumes of sheet music that Seeger’s project generated. Sometime in August, he gave Sande and Jackson the key to the Eighth Street apartment and, with Elizabeth, gave up on New York after nine years of trying.

  A year earlier, the loss of either Benton or Charles would have thrown Jackson into another round of self-abuse culminating in emotional collapse. By 1935, however, his fragile world had more or less stabilized around Sande. Just as the projects had relieved Charles of the financial burden of supporting Jackson, Sande had relieved him of the emotional burden. “If any kind of situation presented itself that would be difficult for Jack to cope with,” recalls Reuben Kadish, “Sande took care of it.” Jackson continued to drink, often to the point of incapacity, but without the self-destructive determination of previous years. The two moved out of the Houston Street loft and into the spacious and, by comparison, luxurious apartment on Eighth Street. It was accepted without discussion that Jackson would take the large front room with its ideal north light—the room that had been Charles’s studio. For his bedroom, Jackson took the small adjacent room he had used before, and Sande moved into the big bedroom in back. A tiny room off the living room was designated as Sande’s studio, although he seldom used it.

  In this hothouse of financial security and Sande’s care, Jackson thrived. The move to Eighth Street, in fact, marked the midpoint of a two-year period of relative emotional tranquillity and extraordinary creative activity.

  As early as the spring of 1934, even before Sande’s arrival, Jackson had shown signs of recovering from the year of confusion and depression that followed his father’s death. Intrigued by a set of lithographic prints that had been pulled for Charles by Theodore Wahl, a Kansas native well known among Benton students, Jackson eagerly sought out Wahl’s print shop on MacDougal Street in the Village. “He came blasting in and said, ‘I want to do a lithograph,’” Wahl remembers. Despite Jackson’s ignorance of the lithographic process, Wahl gave him a prepared stone “just to get rid of him.” As if refreshing his memory—it had been almost a year since he had created a completed image—Jackson rapidly sketched on the stones images that still showed the marks of Benton and Ryder: horses and farmhands, threatening skies and turbulent landscapes. Later that spring, at Martha’s Vineyard, he sketched the sea, the rocky coast, and the sailboats in Menemsha Harbor with an unusually lucid hand. With Benton’s help, he experimented with watercolor, duplicating on paper the style of his Bentonesque oils on canvas. First on the Vineyard, then on the trip across country with Charles, he recorded images—some on paper, more in his memory—that would reappear over the next years in other moods and other forms. A field of Mississippi cotton pickers would be transformed into a tranquil Bentonesque anecdote in oil, a simple watercolor of Vineyard Sound into the heavy impasto of a Ryderesque sea, a bather emerging from the ocean into a mythic figure on a ceramic bowl.

  Cotton-pickers, c. 1936, 24” × 30”. A typical Project painting.

  Jackson was already developing a habit that would later confuse and frustrate art historians in their efforts to date his often undated paintings or to trace the “line” of his stylistic development. Although still firmly rooted in Benton’s classroom, he had begun to experiment freely with other styles, other moods, other media. “By that time he was beginning to reach out for different solutions,” recalls Reginald Wilson. “You could sense his ambition.” A Bentonesque study would be followed by a Ryderesque seascape, and that by a semi-abstraction, all in a single creative breath. By early 1935, Sande’s arrival had rekindled his interest in the Mexican muralists and another style was added to the shifting mix. In February, even as the Brooklyn Museum was exhibiting one of his works for the first time (a small, presumably Bentonesque watercolor or gouache quaintly titled Threshers), Jackson was painting the vast, lewd mural in the style of Orozco on the walls of the Houston Street loft. By the time he saw his first full-scale exhibition of Ryder’s paintings at the Kleeman Galleries in late 1935, he had already visited the Museum of the American Indian at Broadway and 155th Street, awakening deep childhood memories of burial grounds and cliffside dwellings.

  Nowhere did Jackson experiment more exuberantly than in the ceramic plates and bowls he produced at Rita Benton’s urging during the winter of 1934–35. On the cramped, unlikely surfaces of these multicolored pieces, he displayed for the first time the full range of his influences and invention. In the bottom of an eight-inch bowl, an obscure brown figure stands at the seashore as the sun sets behind a thunderhead of clouds in a confusion of dark red, blue, and white. Stormy sea mirrors stormy sky. On a nine-inch oval platter, a sailboat crosses a bright Vineyard sea while ominous, Ryderesque clouds threaten to choke the sun. At the bottom of an ashtray, a Social Realist tableau in shades of rust, yellow, blue, and black disintegrates into near abstraction as two workmen wrestle a pneumatic drill in a burst of terse, vibrating lines. On the open range of an eighteen-inch plate, a Bentonesque cowboy is caught in the grim, un-Bentonesque business of shooting his lame horse while, in an incongruously playful touch, the ground sparkles with dabs of white, and, in the sky beyond, a purple Ryderesque storm gathers vengefully. In a shallow seventeen-inch bowl, an attenuated Promethean figure rises from the Vineyard waves like a Michelangelo nude and turns his Bentonesque back to watch a sailboat flounder in a churning Ryderesque sea.

  A visit from Harold Lehman, who moved to New York in September, reintroduced Jackson to the old masters. With Lehman tirelessly leading the way, the two toured New York’s museums and galleries, especially the newly opened Frick on Fifth Avenue. “They had El Grecos and Goyas and Rembrandts,” Lehman remembers, “and Jackson made a copy of a little El Greco, Expulsion from the Temple.” Not long afterward, at Sande’s invitation, Reuben Kadish and Ph
il Goldstein arrived from half a year in Mexico and camped out briefly on the Pollock brothers’ floor. They brought with them a youthful disdain for the stylistic crudities of the Mexican muralists, especially Rivera, but a renewed enthusiasm for Siqueiros’s “kinetics” and Orozco’s emotional plasticity. In early 1936, Jackson submitted a mural proposal in the style of Orozco.

  With Kadish, Jackson visited the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West, reliving summer trips to the basement displays of Oceanic art at the Los Angeles County Museum. “We would go straight to the large carvings in the Northwest Coast Indian room,” Kadish recalls. “Those pieces were very communicative.” Meanwhile, at the WPA office on King Street and at cafés and cafeterias around the Village, Jackson listened to Arshile Gorky wax eloquent on Rouault and Picasso, and a group of European artists who called themselves Surrealists.

  With new and old images shifting and recombining in his imagination, Jackson reached out in every direction to capture them. At Job Goodman’s studio on Sixteenth Street, he experimented with modeling for the first time since his abortive efforts in Robert Laurent’s class three years earlier. The opportunity arose serendipitously when Goodman, in preparation for the mural, insisted on making wax maquettes as Benton had done. “Making these Renaissance maquettes was driving [his assistants] crazy,” recalled Charles Mattox, the Project supervisor who oversaw Goodman’s mural. “So nearly everybody working there was using wax to make things of their own.” Like schoolboys, the assistants would wait for the lunch break when they could create “things which were quite free,” according to Mattox. It isn’t known how long these furtive sculpting sessions continued, or how many pieces Jackson completed, but at least one work satisfied him enough to justify the effort of casting it in bronze at a small foundry on Court Street in Brooklyn. It was a small, complex piece of interpenetrating limbs, of a bird-like creature and a manlike figure embracing, or fighting, across a barrier of driftwood-like convolutions. In the midst of work on a Bentonesque mural, while submitting mural designs in the Mexican style, listening to Harold Lehman’s endless monologues on Raphael and Rembrandt, and visiting the totemic images of the Northwest Coast Indians, Jackson created a sculpture that crossed the threshold of abstraction. Yet, within a year, he would submit to the easel division a series of placid Bentonesque landscapes hardly distinguishable from his earliest classroom work; and twenty years later, at the end of his life, he would still be “experimenting” in the style of Orozco.