Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Left: C. 1934, enamel on porcelain plate, 18” diameter, signed on back, “For Rita / Jackson.” Right: C. 1934, enamel on chinaware bowl, 17” diameter

  Such an outpouring of creativity and experimentation did not go unnoticed. For the first time in his life, Jackson began to hear a murmur of accolades. After his visit to Martha’s Vineyard in the spring of 1934, Benton wrote, “I think the little sketches you left around here are magnificent. Your color is rich and beautiful. You’ve the stuff old kid—all you have to do is keep it up.” Mingled with the praise were reservations—the same reservations Jackson would hear often over the next twenty years. “You ought to give some time to drawing,” Benton couldn’t resist adding, “but I do not somehow or other feel the lack of drawing in the stuff left here. It seems to go without it.” Sensitive to his student’s depression, Benton may have exaggerated his praise, but even talking in private with their niece, Maria Piacenza, Tom and Rita insisted that Jackson was “a genius.” (Years later, looking at Jackson’s work in retrospect, Benton was more circumspect. “By 1934,” he wrote, “Jack was showing compositional ability of an unusual sort.”)

  The broader public judgment, to the extent Jackson perceived it, was more reserved. Of the three paintings that he exhibited during this period—Threshers at the Brooklyn Museum, Cotton Pickers at the Temporary Galleries of the Municipal Art Committee, and Cody, Wyoming at the Ferargil Galleries—only the last one “sold”—in exchange for a suit of clothes. Yet a consensus was forming among his friends that Jackson, in Charles’s phrase, “had something cooking.” Charles Mattox remembers seeing Jackson’s sketches for proposed murals and thinking “he was one of the better people in that group.” When Reuben Kadish arrived in New York in the winter of 1935–36, he could see that Jackson’s “self-confidence had begun to coalesce because various people thought that he had a helluva lot on the ball.” One of the people who thought so was Burgoyne Diller, the supervisor of the mural division. Another project artist, Jack Tworkov, recalled a conversation with Diller. “[He] told me about a painter he considered one of the most talented on the Project. He looked upon him as a great hope for American painting. He named Pollock and it was almost the first time I heard the name.”

  Untitled, c. 1935, cast bronze, 6½” × 9” × 4¾”, front and back

  19

  AN ANTIDOTE TO REGIONALISM

  It was at this creative peak that Jackson once again encountered David Alfaro Siqueiros, the revolutionary Mexican painter whose dynamism and fecundity were legend among militant young artists. Only four years earlier, both men had come away from their first brief meeting in Los Angeles strangely untouched. This time they struck sparks.

  After leaving Los Angeles—at the request of local officials—Siqueiros had gone to Buenos Aires, where he continued to pursue his ambitious vision of a worldwide “syndicate of artists.” In February 1936, he arrived in New York to represent Mexico at the American Artists Congress. Under the sponsorship of George Gershwin, he remained in New York and, within weeks, began organizing another “workshop” of artists like the one Kadish, Goldstein, and Lehman had joined in Los Angeles. It was to be “a laboratory of traditional and modern techniques in art,” according to Siqueiros’s introductory statement, read to the Artists Union by Jackson’s old classmate, Harold Lehman: “We shall experiment with all the modern tools which can be employed by the artist. … We invite all of you to come and work with us and help us in the building and developing of what we have started.”

  At thirty-eight, Siqueiros was still “the naughty boy of Mexican art,” a man of adolescent temper tantrums ready to “throw down his painting machines at any moment [and] rush out into the street to make a demonstration, or throw stones at capitalistic windows.” Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1898 to a libertine father, Siqueiros, like Jackson, had been scarred by a childhood of inattentive parents and insensitive schooling. At thirteen, he was jailed for the first of many times; at fourteen, he left home to join the revolutionary Batallón Mamá, an army of children who fought to overthrow Porfirio Diaz; by fifteen, he was a battle-tempered lieutenant. The rest of his life had followed more or less the same pattern, as the war moved off the battlefield and into the streets, into words, and into his painting. “The ideal goal of art,” he wrote in 1923, “… should be one of beauty for all, of education and of battle.” Although not a heavy drinker, he shared Jackson’s predilection for violence and “uncontrollable excesses.” When he spoke, especially in English, he fired words like a rivet gun. “It didn’t matter whether he was talking about peanuts or politics,” recalls Reuben Kadish. “Everything was explosive.” He was, according to one observer, “a man on fire.”

  David Alfaro Siqueiros

  Also like Jackson, Siqueiros was capable of disarming warmth and charm. His revolutionary zeal for “the class war” often showed itself as a childlike idealism, and his fiery intensity generated a potent charisma. “Things happened around him,” recalls Axel Horn, who joined the workshop soon after Sande and Jackson, “and that made you want to be near him.” When Sande, who had worked at the fringe of the Los Angeles workshop, brought Jackson to the studio on Union Square and introduced him to Siqueiros, there was, according to witnesses, a deep, instant bond between them. “They had a great rapport,” recalls Reuben Kadish. “They seemed to reflect each other in a strange way. Each felt the other’s intensity. When you put them in the same room, they really bounced off each other.” Another friend remembers them as “extremely simpático.” Almost immediately, they established a barroom physical rapport, beginning most workdays at the studio with five minutes of arm wrestling and horseplay. More than once, assistants found them on the floor “twisting and wrestling,” rolling over each other in adolescent play.

  In April, when Jackson and Sande arrived, Siqueiros’s huge loft on the top floor of 5 East Fourteenth Street was bustling with preparations for the upcoming May Day celebration. While outside an unusually warm spring brought Union Square to an early boil, inside more than a dozen artists—including Lehman, Horn, Clara Mahl, Louis Ferstadt, and George Cox, a group of young sculptors, and a “core” of Hispanic artists who traveled with Siqueiros—worked feverishly on banners, posters, and a giant float. Many also worked on the Project (Cox was working with Jackson on the Job Goodman mural); all worked without pay. “People contributed time and energy because this was a way of being current,” Axel Horn remembers, “a way of being in the avant-garde of the art enterprise, of contributing to the development of new ideas.” Although Siqueiros addressed all his co-workers as “comrade,” and all the participants thought of themselves as “practicing artists” rather than students, a de facto hierarchy was observed, with the master’s inner circle of Hispanic artists on the uppermost rung. Harold Lehman, who had worked with Siqueiros in Los Angeles, assumed an informal supervisory role over the American artists. Although irritated by Lehman’s arrogance—“He spent much of his time indicating how good he was,” recalls Horn—most of the others, including Jackson, generally deferred to his considerable skill. At the other end of the ladder, Jackson and Sande “followed directions” and “acted basically as assistants,” according to Lehman, laying in color over large areas after forms had been blocked in by others. “Jackson never took a central role,” Horn remembers. “He never generated the ideas. He never masterminded any of these things. Not because he was junior, but because that wasn’t what he felt secure doing. Lehman and Siqueiros did most of the painting.”

  As May 1 approached, the workshop grew more chaotic: paints, panels, tools, pieces of float, and bits of scenery piled up in the big open space. Throughout the day, spray guns hissed, the compressor chugged, drill presses and jigsaws whined, hammers pounded, and the rumble of Union Square rolled in through the open windows. Artists shouted to one another across the din. Even Charles Pollock, who visited his brothers in the workshop in mid-April, was roused from his usual sangfroid, later describing the scene as “outlandish.” Indeed, compared
to Studio 9 at the Art Students League, where both Charles and Jackson had practiced spiralic countering, Siqueiros’s workshop was a brave and dazzling new world, a calamitous introduction to a new way of thinking about art. “You can’t imagine how appealing this experience was to young people,” says Reuben Kadish, “how different it was from what we’d run across in art school, in life drawing. [Siqueiros] was overturning the whole idea that the only thing worthwhile in art was what was being represented, the whole neoclassical ideal, the whole Greco-Roman tradition.”

  In his studio, Siqueiros generated a “torrential flow of ideas and new projects” with a child’s eye for investigation and surprise. Paint itself was a source of endless discovery, especially the new industrial paints like Duco—a synthetic nitrocellulose-based paint developed for automobiles. (Siqueiros’s passion for the new paint earned him the sobriquet “Il Duco.”) Synthetic resins like Duco were not only stronger, more durable, and more malleable than organically based oils, they were new: products of the technological era. What medium could be more fitting for an art that “belonged” to the workers of that era? “Lacquer had so many possibilities,” recalled Axel Horn, “that we tried everything. We threw it around, we dripped it, we sprayed it, we chopped it with axes, we burnt it, just to see what would happen.” They applied it in gossamer-light veils of spray and in thick, viscous globs. For a hard edge, they sprayed it through stencils or friskets. For texture, they added sand and paper, pieces of wood and bits of metal. “It was like high school chemistry class,” said Horn. “When the teacher leaves the room and there’s a mad dash for the chemical cabinet. You grab things and throw them in the sink and throw a match in to see what will happen.” Mistakes (“failed experiments”) could be scraped off easily—the new paints dried to hardness “almost instantly.” Instead of canvas duck or Belgian linen, they used concrete walls, Masonite panels, and plywood boards nailed together like siding on a house—industrial surfaces for industrial paints. “As early as 1936,” claims Harold Lehman, “we had already announced the death of easel painting.”

  New materials demanded new methods, new ways of creating images. A painter should work the way a worker works, Siqueiros believed. In applying paint, he should use a spray gun; for plaster, a plaster gun. In one corner of the Union Square workshop stood a silk-screen frame, long considered merely an industrial tool for sign-making. Siqueiros used it to reproduce original works of art as well as posters and placards for the May Day celebration. To create a likeness, Siqueiros relied on the new, more accurate technology of imaging: photography. For portraits, he would photographically enlarge smaller portraits onto giant Masonite panels, then paint the enlarged images with an airbrnsh. “A lot of people were using these materials, these techniques,” Horn recalls, “but he came along and said, ‘This is all usable in art.’”

  No matter how large the image, Siqueiros never worked from a drawing or a cartoon, preferring to work directly—in “partnership” with his materials. He studied the dynamics of paint—its density, its viscosity, its flow rate—in an effort to incorporate those dynamics into the image, letting the paint itself help create the painting. In an experiment similar to one Jackson had seen in Schwankovsky’s classroom, Siqueiros fastened a plywood board to a lazy Susan (“liberated” from a local cafeteria) and poured different color paints directly from the can onto the board as it spun, producing “striking halations of color,” according to Horn. “Accidental” images were also created by pouring paints of different colors onto a board, then pouring thinner on top. As the thinner began to flow it would form rivulets through the layers of color, creating “the most fantastic, weird patterns,” Harold Lehman recalls. Patterns, in turn, suggested images. By directing the flow of paint—guiding it with a brush, tipping the surface—Siqueiros could “seize” the image and develop it. “Many of his images started the same way,” says Lehman, “with automatic dissolvings of paint from which he would pick out images and develop them. That wasn’t just one of Siqueiros’s techniques, it was the technique.” Sometime that year, on a visit to Axel Horn’s apartment, Jackson laid a canvas on the floor and tried to duplicate Siqueiros’s technique by dripping paint across it.

  For Jackson, Siqueiros’s workshop fulfilled the promises Benton had made but never kept. Where Benton, despite attacks on European modernism, “aesthetic orthodoxies,” and “conformist principles,” always remained unshakably rooted in the traditions of Western art, Siqueiros offered a genuinely new vision of what art could be. Where Benton searched through four-hundred-year-old tomes to reconstruct the formulas and techniques of Renaissance mural painting, Siqueiros reached into the hardware store of technology for spray guns and silicones and asbestos panels, and talked proudly of “putting out to pasture ‘the stick with hairs on its end.’” Where Benton wrought murals and easel paintings and sketches just as Michelangelo or Tintoretto had done centuries before, Siqueiros painted floats as well as murals, banners, placards, and rally decorations. After having observed Benton through the long weeks of preparation on the New School murals—assembling the sketches, gessoing the panels, mixing the tempera, lighting the plasticine models, transferring the cartoons—Jackson must have felt liberated as he watched the spry, wiry Siqueiros standing over a twenty-five-foot-square painting laid out on the floor in front of him, spray gun in hand, shooting a jet of Duco at an image the size of a boulder. According to Axel Horn, “the possibilities inherent in the experimentation at the Siqueiros workshop offered [Jackson] a way out of his lack of technical facility.” Even Charles, who visited the workshop only once, was struck immediately by the subversive power of what he saw—the “violation of accepted craft procedures,” “accidental effect,” and “scale.” “The whole ambience,” he later wrote, “was an antidote to regionalism.”

  And to other ailments as well.

  For all his brusqueness and bluster, for all his denunciations of “fairies,” Tom Benton’s art always belonged to the world of Lizzie Wise and Stella Pollock, the world of sable brushes, well-turned lines, pretty colors, and Renaissance contrapposto. It was an art of refinement, control, repression, and indirection that Jackson was never able to reconcile with his search for a masculine self-image. Siqueiros, on the other hand, was an artist that Roy Pollock would have liked: for his politics, his workmanlike approach to the artist’s trade, his deep respect for materials, his ardent involvement with his work, his pragmatic concern for the usefulness of his labor, even the scale of his works. Before his father’s death, Jackson had tried to persuade him that an artist was just a worker whose business was “composition,” like the carpenter’s or the mason’s. Benton, he bragged, had “lifted art from the stuffy studio into the world and happenings about him, which has a common meaning to the masses.” Now, three years later, it was Siqueiros, not Benton, who delivered on that boast.

  Throughout April, as preparations for the May Day celebrations accelerated and the workshop staff swelled with volunteers, Jackson spent most of his time on the wood-frame armature for the chicken-wire and papier-mâché float. The design, conceived by Siqueiros and his entourage, called for a large central figure representing a Wall Street capitalist holding in his outstretched hands a donkey and an elephant—indicating that “as far as the working class was concerned, both political parties were controlled by enemies of the people”—and a large ticker-tape machine which, when struck by a giant, movable hammer emblazoned with the Communist hammer and sickle, would break apart and spew tape over the capitalist figure. Siqueiros called it “an essay of polychromed monumental sculpture in motion” and intended it to represent both the enormous political power of Wall Street and the unity of the North American peoples in their determination to overthrow the capitalist system.

  At the May Day parade with George Cox (far left) and Siqueiros

  With access to a car (Charles had recently signed over his Model A Ford to his younger brothers), Jackson instantly became “the person to go get something if it was needed,” acco
rding to Horn. On the morning of May 1, he and Sande helped carry the float’s giant pieces down the fire escape, reassembled them in the street below, then towed them to the parade staging area. The celebrations were bigger and more peaceful than ever as labor groups and political activists from around the country put aside factional differences and, under the surprisingly benign eyes of 1,500 New York police, celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Haymarket riots. Kicked off by a fat Hitler look-alike with bloodied hands, the “shuffling line” of marchers included “all grades and classifications of organized workers,” according to the next day’s Times, “from garment makers, striking ship-builders, teachers, lawyers, writers, dancers and actors to boondoggling WPA workers.” “The public ate it up,” recalls Harold Lehman, who followed the float nervously, fearing it might fall apart. “They gave us support all along the route, except for a few reactionaries shouting epithets.” Later, standing as spectators among the throng that filled Union Square to hear the speeches at parade’s end, Jackson and WPA friend George Cox posed proudly for a photograph with an uneasy-looking Siqueiros.