Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  23

  INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY

  For America as well as for Jackson Pollock, 1939 was a year of anticipation, suspended at the end of the endless thirties like a question mark. The Depression had passed (or so the government claimed) but nothing had taken its place exactly. Certainly not prosperity. Nine and a half million people were still out of work, hundreds of thousands still clung demoralized to the WPA lifeline, and the news from Europe grew more ominous every day. The result was a vacuum, a stillness into which people read the future according to their moods.

  Nothing captured the air of urgent ambivalence like the world’s fair that opened in the meadows of Flushing, New York, on April 30, 1939. Jackson Pollock was among the millions who paid seventy-five cents to gawk down the flag-draped, tree-shaded Constitution Mall, file through the ultramodern color-coded exhibits, and pose before the fair’s centerpiece, the Trylon and Perisphere—the only fair buildings painted stark white. The surrounding pavilions, in pastel colors and garden settings, covered almost 1,200 acres, every acre permeated by a relentless optimism too self-conscious to be entirely convincing. The theme of the fair was “The World of Tomorrow” (reassurance was the subtext), and everywhere the future was on display. At the Westinghouse pavilion, visitors were introduced to the medium of the future, television, and signed their names to a time capsule destined for the year 6939. On the Farm of the Future at the Borden’s exhibit, machines, not farmer’s or farmer’s sons, did the milking. At the General Motors building, the Futurama ride took fairgoers through the car-filled, carefree world of 1960. When it was over, each visitor was given a blue and white button proclaiming, “I Have Seen the Future.”

  For Jackson, the summer of 1939 marked the first anniversary of his hospitalization. Although still in therapy with Henderson and still “having problems with living and painting,” as Sande wrote Charles in March, at least he was back in the world, not watching it from behind the fence at Bloomingdale’s. In June, he accompanied Sande and Arloie and a group of friends to a big farmhouse near the town of Ferndale in Bucks County, only a few miles up the road from the house in Frenchtown where he had spent a miserable few weeks two years before. Jackson always found comfort in the Pennsylvania countryside, but this summer he seemed especially susceptible to its tranquilizing beauty. “He was so moved by the hills, by the fields, by the beauty of it,” recalls Nene Schardt who used to ride with Jackson in an open car down the back roads. “I would say how beautiful it was, and he would say, ‘You don’t talk about it, you inhale it. It becomes part of you. It goes through a creative process in your psyche and then it comes out.’” For the moment, however, Jackson seemed more concerned with his psyche than with the creative process. Although he spent hours on the road and on the trails that crisscrossed the hills behind the farm, he seldom sketched. “He didn’t even take sketch pads with him the way he used to,” Schardt recalls. “He didn’t do things on the spot anymore.” For relief from the relaxation, he would trek to a nearby abandoned quarry for a wade in the knee-deep water or ride into town to buy supplies or just to watch the Amish amble in and out. At night, activity focused around the big cast-iron stove in the kitchen. Most of the food came from the backyard garden and the neglected fruit trees around it. Except for baking an occasional pie, he seldom helped with what was known as “the farming.”

  Without electricity, there were no appliances, no lights, and no late nights. Butter and beer were kept cold in the well. Guests materialized almost every evening. Some, like Jackson’s brother Jay and wife Alma, and Joe and Margaret Meert, just moved in. Others, like Ed and Wally Strautin and Phil and Musa Goldstein, rented farmhouses nearby, but “everybody shopped together and made food together,” Wally Strautin remembers. “It was a crazy summer.” After dinner, in the long hours of waning light, the conversation turned to art or to gossip, brought back from frequent trips into the city to submit work, report to WPA supervisors, or pick up checks.

  The summer had an immediate, if temporary, therapeutic effect. For the first time in years, Jackson tried to control his drinking. A friend’s wife remembers seeing him at a loft party that summer. “Everyone was drinking except Jack Pollock,” she says, “and I thought, ‘Well, he’s pretty straitlaced.’ Then somebody said to me, ‘He can’t drink. He has a problem.’”

  When Jackson looked beyond the idyllic summer, however, the future must have seemed far less benign. Storm clouds had been gathering over the WPA since the previous fall when the Dies Committee loosed its anti-Roosevelt wrath on Federal One. In January 1939, a new Congress, smelling blood, cut fifteen hundred artists from the project rolls. In March, Sande wrote Charles: “We have been investigated on the project. Don’t know yet what the result of it all will be.” With a fraudulent name-change on his conscience, Sande feared the worst. “Should they ever catch up with my pack of lies, they’ll probably put me in jail and throw the key away.”

  In July, the ax fell, not just on Sande but on the entire Federal Arts Project. All artists who had been on the federal payroll for more than eighteen months were automatically terminated. Overall, more than 775,000 workers lost their WPA jobs that summer. In addition, all WPA employees were required to swear a loyalty oath. Renamed the WPA Art Program and demoted from a federal project to a bundle of state projects with reduced federal funding, the Project survived the summer purge but only as a shadow of its former self. Those lucky few who survived the cuts became subject to the vagaries of state and local control. (Within months, many local officials would demand a return to the dreaded force account requiring artists to report to central workshops.) The unlucky, including Sande, went on relief. Jackson was spared only because the stay in Bloomingdale’s had interrupted his seniority. In May of the following year, his eighteen months would be up.

  On September 1, 1939, with crowds still elbowing their way into the General Motors exhibit to goggle at the World of Tomorrow, German troops invaded Poland.

  Sometime during the future-obsessed year of 1939, Jackson Pollock undoubtedly contemplated his own future. While many artists responded to layoffs and cutbacks on the Project by demonstrating in the streets, occupying WPA offices, confronting police with linked arms, and being dragged off to jail, most knew that the grand old ship was sinking. The prospect of life without the Project brought artists like Jackson face-to-face with a fact that had been largely forgotten in the decade since the crash: for a vanguard artist in America, there was no such thing as success. Of the generation of American artists who had returned from Paris in the twenties filled with modernist fervor, none had reached even the nethermost niches in the pantheon with Picasso and Matisse. A very few, like Jan Matulka and Vaclav Vytlacil, had won teaching positions at generally conservative bastions like the Art Students League. Many, like Benton and Max Weber, had abandoned some or all of their modernist ideals. The vast majority had labored through the first half of the decade in the same impoverished obscurity that befell artists of every stripe.

  The Project had brought relief, but not redemption. The modern movement remained firmly rooted in Paris. “In the late thirties there was a feeling that American art could never achieve the status, could never become the aesthetic equal of French art,” recalls Lee Krasner. “Absolutely no one thought American painting could rival French painting, then or ever. I don’t remember anybody who even thought in those terms at the time.” Even Arshile Gorky, an artist as talented, knowledgeable, urbane, and accomplished as any in Jackson’s generation, held out little hope. One evening in the late thirties, he and a group of artists met in Willem de Kooning’s studio to discuss the dilemma of American painting. Gorky opened the meeting with the bleak pronouncement: “We are defeated,” then proposed an unorthodox solution. “Gorky suggested we work on a group painting,” recalled Lee Krasner who was also in the room. “[He said,] ‘one person could draw better, another person has better ideas, another is better at color. What we have to do is sit and talk this over and come up with a thought. Then
we’ll all go home and do our separate things and bring them back and decide who should draw it, who should paint it, who should color it.’” The plan never went any further. According to Krasner, the artists repaired to their studios, took one look at their easels, and threw up their hands in despair.

  Gallery shows became the American artists’ lifeline to the “force and vitality” of French painting. Like colonials ogling fine, finished goods from the motherland, they flocked to Pierre Matisse, Valentine Dudensing, Julien Levy, and the other predominantly European galleries to see works by the Cubist, Expressionist, and Surrealist masters. “One knew exactly which galleries to go to to see what you wanted to see,” said Krasner. “We’d look forward to those shows with enormous anticipation. It wasn’t a case of you might see this or that; we went with a great sense of hunger.”

  At the summit of the distant and inaccessible peak of European artistic achievement stood Pablo Picasso. “He has painted everything and better,” claimed one observer, “he has exhausted all pictorial sources. … Picasso is devastating.” Gorky said wistfully that he would be content to achieve even a “little bit” of Picasso’s quality. Some critics were beginning to question whether there could be art after Picasso. “At that time,” says Lionel Abel, “people were saying, how can you be a revolutionary after Picasso? How can you do anything different after Picasso?” One critic declared unequivocally: “Picasso is the greatest painter of the past, present, and future.”

  This was the prospect that Jackson faced in 1939 when he looked into his own future: the piled centuries of Western art reaching back to Lascaux, rooted immovably in European soil, and surmounted by the towering figure of Picasso.

  Jackson had no way of knowing, of course, that the world was on the verge of upheaval; that within three years, America would come to rescue the “European tradition;” that within five years, New York would replace Paris as the center of the art world and American art would topple the piled centuries of European preeminence; or that within ten years, Jackson himself would confront Picasso on level ground.

  The person who gave Jackson his first glimpse of this heroic future—and helped make it possible—was John Graham.

  An aristocratic Polish refugee from the revolutionary excesses of his adopted homeland, Russia, Graham had little in common with his predecessor in Jackson’s life, Tom Benton. Although clearly fond of Jackson, Graham played a role that was always primarily artistic, not emotional—a healthy change from the ambiguities of the relationship with Benton. Graham also represented a final rejection of Benton’s facile “America First” notions—a rejection that Jackson had been rehearsing for years in his experiments with Siqueiros and Orozco. In befriending the cosmopolitan Graham, who traveled to Europe often and claimed to know Picasso, Jackson announced his readiness to confront the Europeans.

  John Graham

  Like Benton, Graham was an extraordinarily physical man. He was known to receive friends in the nude and perform acrobatic tricks while conversing. (Even in his sixties, he could do a headstand without using his hands.) Strong and sinewy like Roy Pollock, with powerful hands and arms and ice-blue eyes, he dominated people with energy rather than size. “You always knew the moment you entered a room where Graham was,” said painter Ludwig Sander, “[and] that he was the superior being in that room.” Decked out in striped silk shirt, flannel pants, double-breasted waistcoat, watch and chain, cuff links, flowing cravat, and sometimes even a monocle (all bought at secondhand stores on Third Avenue), he walked with the ramrod back and slightly bowed legs of the cavalry officer he had once been. Every morning, he shaved his entire head, leaving only his imperiously arched eyebrows and a mustache that rounded the corners of his thin lips at a demonic angle. “He was a showman,” says Ron Gorchov. “Anything to amuse people.”

  Dazzlingly well read and widely acquainted, Graham was a fountainhead of eccentric, unequivocal, and often inconsistent opinions. Willem de Kooning recalled seeing him marching in a May Day parade in the thirties, enthusiastically chanting “We want bread!” while waving a hand clad in an elegant beige chamois glove. When Jackson met him in 1939, Graham had only just begun to show an interest in Theosophy, alchemy, numerology, astrology, and the occult—interests that would later lead him to declare himself “a universal genius in communication with occult higher powers.” Already he believed that “any repetitive act—even one as ordinary as ironing clothes—was a form of prayer and put one in touch with Divine Powers.” More than anything, he hated smoking (because it was “primitive,” not because it was unhealthy) and concrete (“the proliferation or use of concrete is the most destructive force in modern society,” he warned). “He never hated anything or liked anything for the same reason everybody else did,” recalls Graham’s friend Roger Wilcox.

  Aside from a pragmatic preference for rich women, Graham was an avowed fetishist. More than once, a female sunbather on Coast Guard Beach near East Hampton opened her eyes to find Graham staring at her feet. “With women, he had fetishes,” says Wilcox—a foot fetish, a fetish for crossed eyes, even a blood fetish. At parties, Wilcox remembers overhearing an exchange between Graham and a woman to whom he had just been introduced:

  GRAHAM: “Do you bleed much?”

  WOMAN: “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  GRAHAM: “I mean do you bleed much? Women bleed, you know, and I would love to see you bleed.”

  When asked why many of the women in his paintings showed wounds on their necks and cheeks, Graham responded, “Because all women should be wounded.” Yet women remember him as “utterly charming,” “extremely elegant,” and “very sophisticated.” “It would be nice,” says Hedda Sterne wistfully, “if all artists were such fascinating personalities.”

  The origin of Graham’s personality—more like a Byzantine mosaic of eccentricities—is one of the minor mysteries in the history of modern art. Unlike Benton, who wrote extensively of his youth (and with increasing honesty as he approached death), Graham was a ruthless editor of the past. “No one knew anything exactly about him,” Sterne remembers. “He could have had any kind of past.” Legends filled the vacuum, including claims that he was an intimate of the imperial family (he kept a portrait of Czar Nicholas on his desk). Graham exulted in the enigma and replenished it regularly with revisions of his story, new versions of himself that grew increasingly bizarre and contradictory as he grew older. Eventually, he claimed that an eagle had left him stranded on a rock in the middle of the ocean where his mother, a sorceress, found him. “When I grew up,” he wrote, “[mother] explained that I was the son of Jupiter and a mortal woman and that is why He had to send me to live with the human beings though I was not altogether human.” His age, like his origin, changed according to his mood. At various times, he claimed to be 100, 460, and 2000. Finally, presumably to put the matter to rest, he claimed to be immortal.

  The records indicate that John Graham was actually Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowski and was born in Warsaw in 1887. Several versions of his ancestry survive: that he was descended from a Scottish mercenary employed by the czar’s army; that he was the son of a Russian count and an Englishwoman; that he was the scion of an aristocratic White Russian family. There was nobility in his blood—German on his mother’s side, Polish on his father’s—although considerably diluted. His family was, apparently, among the many dispossessed Polish gentry who fled to Kiev (where Graham was baptized) after the uprising of 1863 when Poland was still partitioned. The Dombrowskis must have brought with them some wealth, for, despite the systematic repression of émigré Poles, he attended the Imperial Lyceum and the University in Kiev, obtained a law degree, married, and fathered two children. When Russia entered World War I, he joined a unit of the imperial cavalry with the colorful name “the Circassian Regiment of the Wild Division,” under the command of the czar’s younger brother, Grand Duke Michael (later, briefly, Czar Michael II). He held the relatively low rank of cornet. Years later, Graham shamelessly embellished his caval
ry experience, claiming that he belonged to the czar’s household guard. In fact, he served most of his tour on the Romanian front, one of thousands of cavalrymen in the grand duke’s beleaguered division and far from Czar Nicholas’s battlefield headquarters at Baranovichi. Nevertheless, Graham proved an excellent horseman and, apparently, a brave soldier, receiving the St. George Cross for valor at least once (and perhaps as many as three times, by his telling).

  In 1918, the war ended and the revolution began. Although Graham later claimed that he joined the counterrevolutionary movement in the Crimea, was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks (in the same cell with the czar), and miraculously escaped a death sentence, the record indicates that he either fled or was smuggled across the reconstituted Polish border to Warsaw and simply headed west, pausing only long enough for his second wife, Vera, to have a child in Germany before boarding a steamer in Southampton bound for New York.

  Although he had apparently shown little interest in art while in Russia, Graham enrolled in John Sloan’s class at the Art Students League and quickly distinguished himself. Among the eager Americans starving for legitimacy, he found a receptive audience for his exuberant self-inventions. To them, he presented himself as a Continental artist, an exponent of Cubism, who had made the mandatory pilgrimage to Gertrude Stein, Paul Éluard, and André Breton, and hobnobbed with the avatars of the avant-garde—Picasso in particular. (Throughout the twenties and thirties he continued to boast of frequent trips to Europe to catch up on the latest developments and see former associates—although all such claims were later thrown into doubt.)

  While his art would remain generally unappreciated until long after his death, Graham’s genuine intellect, ostensible Parisian connections, and eccentric personality won him an almost immediate following among his younger fellow artists. A biographer lists his credentials: “a connoisseur of art and women, a witty and acerbic teller of tall tales and adventure stories, a proselytizer for Cubism, and a discoverer of gifted young artists.” Eventually, his circle of “discoveries” included Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, Jean Xceron, Adolph Gottlieb, Dorothy Dehner, and Willem de Kooning, whom Graham introduced in the mid-thirties as “the best young painter in the United States.” Another of Graham’s protégés was a young sculptor named David Smith who summered near him at Bolton Landing, New York. “His annual trips to Paris kept us all apprised of abstract events,” Smith later wrote. Clement Greenberg called Graham “a missionary in the wild.”