Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  1939–40, gouache on paper, 21 ½” × 15½”

  Henderson later described this interpretive/therapeutic process as one in which “the analyst (out of knowledge of comparative mythology) and the patient (from his innate subjective sense of the significance of archetypal imagery) collaborate in producing a background or context from which the individual meaning of the archetypes may emerge.” Unfortunately, Jackson refused to collaborate. “He did not have free associations,” Henderson lamented, “nor did he wish to discuss his own reactions to my comments. … I had to be content with saying only what he could assimilate at any given time, and that was not much. There were long silences. Most of my comments centered around the nature of the archetypal symbolism in his drawings.”

  Such “comments” would have ranged from basic definitions and simple notions (e.g., two forms in the same drawing represented “the battle of opposites” in Jackson’s psyche), to deeper, more complicated analyses. In response to a drawing of a tree with a snake coiled at its foot which Jackson brought in, Henderson would have explained that the snake “would normally seek to encompass the principle of psychic growth as suggested by the trunk of the tree, from which it could then reach into the discriminating and productive levels of unconsciousness suggested by the branches.” In Jackson’s case, however, the coiled snake indicated “a movement of regression back to the state of unconsciousness [called] uroboric, expressing the inactivity and isolation of the infantile state.”

  Each new interpretation required additional explanation. To explain Uroborus, Henderson showed Jackson Jung’s illustration of a tail-biting snake in The Secret of the Golden Flower, and explained its significance: “a simple form of mandala which represents integration”—an explanation that in turn required him to explain mandalas and the Jungian belief in “a psychic birth-death-rebirth cycle.” Henderson also revealed one of the basic tools of Jungian pictorial analysis: curved lines and rounded forms indicate a feminine impulse; straight and jagged lines indicate a male impulse.

  The more deeply he delved into the symbology of Jackson’s drawings, however, the more uneasy Henderson must have felt. In Jungian theory, only if an artist works spontaneously out of his unconscious (in what Jung called “the visionary mode”) is his art “a genuine, primordial experience.” Otherwise, the artist lapses into the self-conscious or “psychological mode” and his art becomes “something derived or secondary … a symptom of something else.” So the success of Henderson’s “experiment,” both for Jackson’s therapy and for his own career, depended entirely on the drawings’ continued spontaneity. Previous psychological profiles of artists—Jung himself had analyzed the symbolism of Goethe’s Faust, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and Melville’s Moby-Dick—had never confronted this problem. In those studies, Jung and his disciples had confronted only the finished works, not the artists themselves in an ongoing therapeutic setting.

  As their weekly sessions continued and Jackson became increasingly familiar with Jungian theory and terminology, Henderson faced the growing likelihood that the drawings he was interpreting were, in fact, no longer “true symbolic expressions,” but mere processed images, calculated to illustrate Jungian symbols rather than discover them.

  Even if Jackson came to their initial sessions untutored in Jungian psychology (as seems likely), even if the drawings were initially spontaneous (as seems likely), even if he continued to bring the drawings without Henderson’s prompting (as seems unlikely), such a state of innocence could not have lasted for long. Jackson was too impressionable a student, too needful of attention, and too adept at ingratiating himself into the favor of father figures like Henderson to resist the bait of his analyst’s predilections, however much Henderson struggled to conceal them (as seems unlikely). Nene Schardt, who, with her husband Bernie, lived in the Eighth Street apartment for several months while Jackson was seeing Henderson, recalls him coming home from the sessions and talking about what he had “learned.” According to Schardt, Henderson told Jackson “what happened in the drawings from an unconscious point of view.” “They [Jackson and Henderson] discovered all this material from the unconscious in Jackson’s ‘doodles,’” she remembers, “and symbols that dated way back in culture.” Although he never read any of Jung’s numerous works—two of which were available in English translation by 1939—Jackson gleaned enough from his sessions with Henderson to attempt an explanation of the distinction between “anima” and “animus” in a letter to Charles. “He was thinking of incorporating that in a painting,” Peter Busa recalls.

  Inevitably, Jackson’s enthusiasm for these new ideas and images was recycled into the drawings he brought to Henderson. Symbols “discovered” and explained by Henderson quickly became leitmotifs in Jackson’s weekly offerings: the circular Chinese Tao, representing the union of opposites; the vertical “axis mundi” representing “ego-strength”; the crescent moon, representing the female; the snake, representing the unconscious; crossed lines (or arrows, or arms) representing the conflict of opposites, especially male and female; the pelvic basin, representing birth or sex or mother or all three; the mandala, representing integration. Occasionally, Jackson would sketch an image one week, test Henderson’s reaction, then repeat it the following week in a more finished form. To assert his masculinity, he drew exaggeratedly angular figures and, in two doodles, riotous jumbles of jagged lines. Despite the blatant self-consciousness of such efforts, Henderson continued to treat each new drawing as a “spontaneous” vision.

  By mid-1939, Jackson was producing images tailor-made to his analyst’s needs. Yet Henderson’s interpretations grew increasingly elaborate and abstruse. One pencil and crayon drawing from this period, in particular, provided him with a synopsis of Jackson’s case so apt and illustrative of Jungian theory that he used it for decades thereafter as a teaching tool. In it, Jackson drew two headless humanoid figures leaning against each other to form a triangle, their outstretched arms crossing at the apex like tentpoles. Between them stands a short pillar surmounted by an oval-shaped area containing a branch with four leaves. A snake coils around the pillar’s base. Above and behind the central grouping is a “schematic female torso,” sketched lightly in yellow crayon. On either side, a bull and a horse peer out from behind the torso. According to Henderson, the pole was not a simple phallus; it represented both the axis mundi and Jackson’s newfound ability to organize his psychic life so as to avoid falling back into the “jaws of the world monster” as he had in the past. The two figures, really more like giant legs, symbolized the recovery of Jackson’s “reality function” following his crippling breakdown. The crescent shapes, general pelvic-basin configuration, and confusion of anatomical features represented opposites brought into harmony, while the central oval shape containing the small plant suggested “the principle of psychic growth or development.” In short, Henderson concluded that this seminal drawing, freshly dredged from Jackson’s unconscious, announced the progress of his inner self toward integration during the months of therapy. What he failed to mention was that Jackson had already sketched the same image at least seven times in the months since Henderson had first explained it.

  The charade dragged on into the winter of 1939.

  As a true believer in the curative power of archetypes, Henderson may have thought that Jackson’s weekly drawings, however calculated and self-conscious, continued to have some genuine therapeutic value. Jackson’s reasons for persisting in the fiction were more complex. Although reluctant to discuss Jung’s ideas in any depth, and at times incapable of doing so, Jackson was nevertheless intrigued by them. Certainly he appreciated both the high standing Jung conferred on artists and his emphasis on the role of the unconscious in art. But he also responded to the mystical undertones of Jungian concepts like the collective unconscious, the visionary mode, and the archetype. A childhood of fantasy had left him susceptible to promises of spiritual escape, especially at times of crisis. In that respect, Jung was merely the success
or to the Bear Dance in Janesville and Krishnamurti at Ojai.

  To Henderson, this sketch summed up Jackson’s inner journey, c. 1939–40, crayon and colored pencil on paper, 12¼” × 18¾”.

  But the conspiracy with Henderson also fulfilled a more basic, more selfish need. Around Henderson, Jackson was safe. In their weekly sessions, there were no probing questions about Stella or Roy or Sande, no efforts to dredge up painful memories from Phoenix or Janesville or to coax out awkward sexual confessions. Henderson never even asked Jackson about his most recent self-destructive binge. After the first few sessions, the hour settled into a reassuring routine of long, abstract monologues as Henderson moved methodically through each drawing, pointing and explaining: no talk of romantic failures or sexual identification or manic-depression. Jackson and his past remained safely off limits. Only the drawings mattered. Only the drawings were needed “to help [Jackson] structure his thinking function toward achieving a more rational and objective view of his life and his art,” according to Henderson. What happened in the real world meant nothing compared to what happened in the unconscious one.

  In the real world, of course, Jackson continued to drink.

  After one particularly self-destructive binge, Helen Marot telephoned Henderson to question whether the artist was being “adequately cared for,” Henderson recalled. Marot, who had little patience for intellectual rigor at the expense of human suffering, undoubtedly demanded to know what kind of psychiatric therapy would ignore the most pressing problem in a patient’s life to concentrate on interpreting sketches. Henderson politely responded that carrying Jackson’s “reality function”—that is, keeping him out of bars—was Sande’s job, not his. And besides, Jackson always appeared sober at their sessions. Years later, Henderson claimed to be “astonished” in retrospect at “how little I troubled to find out, study, or analyze [Jackson’s] personal problems in the first year of his work with me, and especially do I wonder why I did not seem to try to cure his alcoholism.” The justification for such “unorthodox analysis,” he offered, was that it benefited Jackson’s art. “My duty was therefore to promote the welfare of this individual quality in him,” Henderson wrote, “rather than to rescue or reform his suffering ego.”

  In his ungenerous fatalism, Henderson may have been echoing Jung himself. “The lives of artists,” Jung wrote in 1933, “are as a rule unsatisfactory—not to say tragic—because of their inferiority on the human and personal side. … There is hardly any exception to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.” Because the artist must commit so much energy in one direction, Jung reasoned, it is almost inevitable that the natural balance of functions would be upset. (Jung had studied Picasso’s paintings and determined that the artist belonged to “the schizophrenic group.”) Who was Joseph Henderson to jeopardize a “divine gift of creative fire” by curing the creator?

  If the sessions with Henderson were a therapeutic failure, they were also an artistic triumph. In addition to exploiting a rich new iconography, Jackson succeeded, as he had at Bloomingdale’s, in transforming psychological insights into artistic breakthroughs. Jung’s theory that art was therapeutic nudged Jackson away from the dark, self-absorbed images of Orozco and Ryder. He began to experiment with lighter strokes, more playful images, and more open compositions. In Jackson’s long escape from the tyranny of facility, Jung’s view that genuine art originates in the unconscious (“Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation”) played a key role. Coming immediately after the experiments at Bloomingdale’s, such ideas reinforced Jackson’s growing reliance on spontaneous image-making rather than the careful, scientific methods he had tried to learn from Benton. Already in his last drawings for Henderson, Jackson had begun to drop the old search for the “correct” line, the representative line, the line that Charles could draw and he never could, and turned his struggle inward to discover the “right” line, the line unrelated to the outer world but perfectly expressive of the inner one. “He could pull a painting out of nothing,” recalls Peter Busa. “He worked by looking in rather than looking out. He once said that if you could paint what’s inside you’d need more than one lifetime to do it.”

  Henderson made one other lasting, if inadvertent, contribution to Jackson’s art. Having been raised by a Navajo nanny, Henderson was, by his own account, “obsessed” with Indian culture. While still in medical school, he had visited the Zuni and Sia tribes to see the corn dances, and the Hopis to see the famous snake dance. Only months before returning to America, he had given a lecture on these rituals to the Analytical Psychology Club in London. Because he believed, with Jung, that a colonizing people “inherit” the racial memory of the natives they displace, Henderson assumed that Jackson’s unconscious already contained Indian imagery and encouraged him to “dredge it up.” Despite his frequent visits to the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of the American Indian in New York, Jackson’s initial efforts were surprisingly uninspired: two penciled doodles on a sheet of gouaches that he made about this time, one of intertwined snakes (a motif that Henderson had shown him) and the other an Indian in feathered headdress, as much a caricature as any cigar-store mannequin.

  But his imagination had been engaged. Guided by Henderson, he began to explore the wealth of imagery in the brilliantly colored sand paintings of Henderson’s Navajo; the bold geometry of the painted skin shirts of the northwest coast Tlingit and Tsimshian tribes; and the complex and subtle sculptural massing of the Haida totem poles he saw on trips to the Museum of Natural History with Reuben Kadish. Using an “Indian palette” of bright yellow, red, blue, green, and black, he painted gouaches of geometric Indian motifs: feathered arrows, shields, snakes, birds, and lightning bolts. He was especially intrigued by the brilliant carving and inventive distortions of shamanistic masks, from the tortured forms of the Haida to the “alarming aspect” of the horned Kwakiutl to the unexpected delicacy of the Tsimshian.

  On a visit to the Museum of Natural History about this time, Jackson encountered Paul Wingert, a noted scholar of American Indian art. Wingert, astonished to find a young painter staring intently at objects that most people still considered curios, asked, “Why are you interested in these things?” “This is art,” Jackson declared; to which Wingert replied, “Nobody else seems to think so.”

  It was the animal imagery of these objects that particularly intrigued Jackson, Peter Busa remembers. “He was fascinated by the way two animals, sometimes more, would be combined in the same image.” To celebrate a mythological past in which humans existed in absolute harmony with nature, artists of the Kwakiutl, Bella Coola, Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlingit tribes often depicted humans learning skills from animals, or mating with animals and giving birth to “supernatural” offspring. The animal past and the human present were brought together in carvings that often combined human eyes, ears, or nostrils with the paws, tails, or fins of an animal.

  Jackson recognized these images as if they had sprung directly, in mid-transformation, from his own protean imagination. Since early childhood he had responded with both fascination and fear to animals, whether they were the inhabitants of his familiar barnyard world—chickens, bulls, horses—or the bears, coyotes, and mustangs that roamed his fantasy world. Like all objects, these animals were constantly undergoing a process of transmutation in his imagination, changing from form to form, from animal to human and back to animal again, as readily as objects moved through space in the real world. Now, fixed in masks and carvings, they began to appear in Jackson’s art, both in the drawings he brought to Henderson and in his paintings. The style was new, but the subjects were still deeply evocative of his own past: a bull attacking a woman in a blur of erotic desire; a bull transforming into a man, or vice versa; a horse transforming into a snake; a snake coiling abstractly inside a woman’s womb. These were the changing images he had tried unsuccessfully to capture in the “hairy drawings” he did for Benton and in the unfinished carvings for Ben-Sh
muel. In Indian imagery, he had finally found a vocabulary for putting down in two dimensions these shifting and elusive images from his unconscious.

  C. 1939–42, crayon and colored pencil on paper, 14” × 11”

  In his therapy with Wall and Henderson, as in his artistic encounters with Benton and Orozco, Jackson had shown his ability to absorb ideas, recycle them through his unconscious and into his art, and, in the process, make them his own. By the middle of 1939, his pictorial language had already transcended the esoteric world of Jungian iconography. “What is interesting about Pollock,” says fellow artist George McNeil, “is that he came from very bad influences like Benton and the Mexican muralists and other anti-painterly influences, and yet, somehow, in a kind of alchemy, he took all the negatives and made them into a positive. It’s a mystery. The rest of us were following the right path and therefore the magic didn’t issue.”

  After almost a decade of “bad influences,” it only remained to be seen how Jackson’s alchemy would work on more refined substances. If he could transform even the lead of Henderson’s Jungian archetypes into hints of genius, what “magic” would issue when he confronted the pure gold of Pablo Picasso?