Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  But of all Picasso’s images, none captivated Jackson’s imagination like the bull. During most of the late 1920s and thirties, bulls appeared in dozens of Picasso’s works in every medium and every incarnation, from the real bulls of the corrida de toros, disemboweling horses and goring matadors, to the fantastic bulls of classical mythology. To Jackson, Picasso’s obsession, which he followed in the pages of Cahiers d’art, was yet another confirmation: the distant and vastly enviable Picasso had fixated on the very same animal that had prowled and terrorized Jackson’s unconscious since childhood. Following Picasso’s example as well as his own inner vision, Jackson began to fill his paintings and drawings with bulls, both real and fantastical. John Graham may have told him that the Surrealists looked upon the Minotaur’s horns “as symbols of Eros (libido) and Thanatos (the death wish), the poles of the Freudian psychodynamic for the functioning of the unconscious,” and that the Minotaur’s home, the labyrinth, was actually a metaphor for the unconscious. But to Jackson the Minotaur was only a bull caught in the inexorable process of transformation that governed all the images in his unconscious. It was the bull that overturned his mother’s buggy, transforming into the farmer who scolded him, transforming into the father who didn’t love him, transforming into all the men who threatened his vulnerable world.

  Composition with Minotaur, Pablo Picasso, 1936, ink and gouache on paper, 17¼” × 21½”

  Even as he listened to Graham and devoured Picasso, however, Jackson was already transcending both of them. Never technically capable of duplicating Picasso’s imagery, he had no choice but to process it through his own vision and retell it in his own line. In that way, Jackson’s lack of technical facility had become a blessing. Even as he was studying with Graham, other more technically proficient artists like Gorky and de Kooning were retooling their imaginations to see the world through Le Maître’s eyes. Even as they occupied themselves with works that were obviously derived from Picasso’s Surrealist masterpieces, Jackson—forever locked inside his own head, behind his own eyes—began to integrate the lessons of Picasso with the lessons of the American Indian and finally the lessons of the past into paintings of astonishing originality. The terrified animals of Guernica become the terrifying animals of his childhood—shrill birds, fierce horses, and menacing bulls. The benign, expiatory transformations of primitive masks become grotesque man-beasts, and Picasso’s voluptuous women are turned back into terrorizing harpies.

  In Bird, which Pollock painted about this time, a huge bird-like creature stretches its wings almost to the edges of the canvas. Beneath it lie two severed heads—one female, perhaps, one male—in Picassoid profile. At the top, a single eye peers out threateningly from the canvas. The bird is at once terrified and terrifying. The elements are arranged formally, as in an Indian painting, the style is Picasso’s, the drawing is crude, the subject could be borrowed from Jung or from American Indian art, or both. But the image is unequivocally Jackson’s because the terror is Jackson’s. The bird is, in fact, a barnyard chicken, dredged up from memories of the Phoenix farm, terrifying to a two-year-old boy confronting it eye-to-vulnerable-eye, but also terrified of its own fate in Stella’s bloody hands.

  Even after years of artistic “training” with Benton, Ryder, Siqueiros, and Orozco, even after Henderson and Jung and Graham and finally Picasso, Jackson’s tumultuous unconscious was still the engine that powered his art.

  24

  THE WAGES OF GENIUS

  Since the days of sketching rabbits and fence posts in the hills around Riverside, Jackson’s sole ambition had been to be the best painter in the Pollock family. The fire of that ambition had propelled him through almost a decade of hardship and frustration. By 1939, however, Charles had taken a position teaching calligraphy at Michigan State University, Sande was looking for a “real” job to support his family, and Jackson had come about as far as desire and intensity could bring him. In his late twenties, his hairline already receding, facing a future without the indulgence of the Project, he could no longer play the charming naïf or the enfant terrible. Potential, even recognized potential, was no longer enough.

  By confronting him with Picasso, Graham gave Jackson a new Charles to pursue and harnessed his childhood fire to a larger ambition: to be a serious artist, perhaps even a great one.

  Jackson began by redrawing his circle of friends. “He knew that one single artist was not going to be able to operate on his own,” Reuben Kadish recalls. “He had gotten this idea from Benton that you’ve got to get a group together.” Up to now, Jackson’s group had been shaped primarily by his emotional needs—especially the need for fraternal camaraderie. Beginning in 1939, he finally began to venture into the small community of avant-garde painters with whom, through Graham, he felt a growing artistic affinity. Surprisingly, despite his encyclopedic connections and his reputation for making introductions, Graham seldom acted as intermediary. No matter how eager he may have been to bring together such future luminaries as Stuart Davis, David Smith, and Willem de Kooning, one Graham scholar suggests, “[He] preferred to keep Pollock to himself.”

  Nevertheless, over the next few years, Jackson managed to meet many of his fellow protégés: David Smith, whom Graham had identified as “the best sculptor in America”; Smith’s wife, Dorothy Dehner, also a sculptor; Edgar Levy, yet another of Graham’s “young outstanding American painters”; Hedda Sterne, a Romanian artist who emigrated to the United States in 1941; and Gorky’s studio-mate, the Dutchman, de Kooning. It was a diverse group, held together loosely (“one knew who was painting and what their work was about”) by shared ideals and a common sense of estrangement from the conservative mainstream in American art. Gathering ad hoc at places like the Waldorf and Stewart’s cafeterias, Ratner’s, Romany Marie’s, and the Jumble Shop, they would talk animatedly of the recent shows from Paris, the current issue of Cahiers d’art, or “Graham’s latest account of what Picasso was up to,” and share the usual complaints about rejection and injustice. Harold Rosenberg called these “the years of hanging around.”

  Gradually, half consciously, Jackson drifted away from old friends. Some left the city as Benton had: Reginald Wilson to Woodstock, New York; Stuart Edie to Iowa; Archie Musick to Colorado. Others, including Joe Meert, Bernard Steffen, Bruce Mitchell, Nathan Katz, and Joe Delaney, faded into a limbo of fondness and neglect. Remnants of the old gang continued to meet from time to time at a German bar on Thirteenth Street to horse around, play cards, and, of course, drink, but the fire had gone out of their fellowship as surely as it had gone out of the Regionalist movement.

  For Jackson, the transition from the physical, barroom world of the Harmonica Rascals to the rigors of cafeteria debate was never easy and never complete. Socially reticent and intellectually insecure, he seldom joined the impromptu discussions that were the lifeblood of Graham’s inner circle, preferring to remain at the periphery, meeting people one at a time as circumstances permitted. For everyday companionship, he turned to less threatening friends, most of whom he had met on the WPA: men like Louis Bunce, with whom he canvassed the commercial galleries “trying to get a foot in the door”; Bernie Schardt, who often accompanied him on vacations to New Jersey; Louis Ribak, a former student of John Sloan’s; and Fred Hauck, who “went ape” over Jackson’s work and won his grateful affection.

  New friends were not the only sign of new ambitions. Graham had convinced Jackson that a serious artist was also a knowledgeable artist. Compared to Graham’s breathtaking erudition and near-photographic memory, Jackson’s understanding of art history and theory was fragmentary and haphazard at best: Ryder and the Renaissance from Benton, modern sculpture from Ben-Shmuel and Robert Laurent, the Mexicans from Kadish, Sande, Goldstein, and Siqueiros, and finally an introduction to American Indian art from Henderson. Between these low hills of familiarity were broad plains of ignorance. His visits to museums and galleries prior to 1939, although a more common feature of his life than books, had done little to level out the un
even landscape. When friends came to town, he would spend days, sometimes weeks, touring the galleries to view the latest shows, but between binges, months would pass without a single sortie to Fifty-seventh Street. Museum visits, too, were more a function of camaraderie than connoiseurship, and often concluded with “a couple of ales at McSorley’s.” Accompanied by Sande, Reuben Kadish, Harold Lehman, and sometimes others, Jackson continued to visit the Museum of Natural History, and occasionally the Hispanic Society of America, as well as the uptown Fifth Avenue museums, the Frick and the Metropolitan. Everywhere he went, he found something that caught his eye: at the Hispanic Society, the “flamelike vibrancy” of the El Greco paintings; at the Frick, a reproduction of an Italian Renaissance fresco showing “a horse sniffing a corpse with dilated nostrils”; at the Metropolitan, the Etruscan figures (“Jackson thought they had such conviction and strength,” Lehman remembers). Sensitized by Henderson and Graham, both of whom he was now seeing regularly, he also began to look more closely at the collections of primitive art on view at the Museum of Natural History and the American Indian museum. In January 1941, he and Graham attended the exhibition “Indian Art of the United States” at the Museum of Modern Art and watched as Navajo artists executed sand paintings on the gallery floor.

  Also under Graham’s tutelage, Jackson began to cast his visual net more widely among avant-garde styles. He followed closely the shows of Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and the other Surrealists at Julien Levy’s gallery. At Paul Rosenberg’s, he studied the works of Expressionist masters like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Max Beckmann. (In July 1941, Sande wrote Charles: “[Jack’s] thinking is, I think related to that of men like Beckman [sic].”) At both Valentine Dudensing and Pierre Matisse, where important exhibitions of work by the School of Paris were on continual exhibition, he saw the paintings of Joan Miró, the Spanish Surrealist whose biomorphic images and whimsical touch would have a lasting, if delayed, effect on his own work. More and more often, in a clear break from the past, he attended these exhibitions alone. “When you’re a serious artist,” Nene Schardt remembers him explaining, “you don’t go to shows in gangs.”

  After a decade of drifting through the backwaters of Regionalism and Mexican muralism, what brought Jackson finally, belatedly, to the swift currents of Picasso and the School of Paris? Critics, and even friends of Jackson’s, detected behind his timely shifts in allegiance a lively art-political savvy. “There’s no doubt,” says Gerome Kamrowski, “that Jackson had a sense of where his career should go. He joined Benton when Benton’s star was on the rise, then jumped to Picasso when Benton began to fade.”

  How calculated were Jackson’s career moves? How sophisticated was his reading—intellectual or political—of art historical trends? How much did he actually understand, for example, of the labyrinthine abstractions of Graham’s System and Dialectics, the metaphysics of Analytical and Synthetic Cubism, or the arcana of Jungian philosophy? At the time, Jackson’s acquaintances often read into his long silences and rare, cryptic statements a failure to grasp the intellectual issues—an inference made more plausible by his self-evident lack of reading. In fact, it’s fair to say that he knew only those specifics that he could assimilate in conversation, and although extraordinarily absorbent, he never achieved mastery of the analytic subtleties of any of the theories that informed his art. What understanding he had was intuitive, not intellectual. “He had an aesthetic intelligence,” said Joseph Henderson, “but not a philosophic intelligence. … Basically uneducated, he took in a lot and his intuition was highly developed … his imagination was turning over ninety miles a minute.” A later therapist concludes that Jackson was “highly intelligent, much more so than he appeared, but it was all intuitive. His inability to express ideas went both ways—he couldn’t absorb words and he couldn’t use them, but he picked up the subtlest nonverbal signals. … His intelligence functioned in the unconscious without transposing itself into the conscious.”

  For Jackson, the process of analysis never left the canvas; it never made the leap into words. “All his great feeling and intelligence is there in his painting,” says Reuben Kadish. “His sharpness and discrimination were all focused toward painting. When you went to a museum with him, he didn’t say much, but he had a very professional eye.” Ideas independent of images were not so much incomprehensible as irrelevant. A fellow artist remembers that Jackson had “no interest in the nature of Cubism as such. He didn’t want to talk about it, but he’d go look at the paintings any time.” According to Kadish, “he understood the intensity of the paintings, and that was it. When Mondrian said something good about his stuff, he was excited. When Matta was responsive to his work, he got just as excited. And there can be nobody further apart then Matta and Mondrian. The image was the only thing that mattered.”

  The same can be said of Jackson’s political savvy. He related to other people with the same startling, intuitive acuity that he brought to art. While incapable of manipulations that unfolded over time or involved groups of people, he was exceedingly effective at working his will in private. Nor was he above using his considerable powers to charm, cajole, or hurt the major players in his life, both personal and professional. “Jackson knew how to pick just the right thing to say in order to destroy you emotionally,” recalls Roger Wilcox. “He did that to one friend after another.” Yet nothing he did appears to have been carefully plotted. Thus, if Jackson was drawn from one type of image to another, from Benton to Orozco to Picasso, it was not in pursuit of either theoretical resolution or long-view political advantage. It was, instead, a natural, half-conscious movement dictated both by an acute aesthetic intuition and by a need for approval with deep roots in his past. If the moves appeared to be the product of uncanny political foresight, it was only because Jackson’s childhood plumb lines were extraordinarily long and sensitive.

  By the middle of 1940, Jackson began to see the fruits of his new efforts. “Jack is doing very good work,” Sande wrote Charles in May. “After years of trying to work along lines completely unsympathetic to his nature … [he] is coming out with an honest creative art.” More and more, friends who had dismissed him, however fondly, as a troubled youth were responding to him as a serious artist. Rachel Scott recalls an unannounced visit about 1940: “One night, Jackson was having dinner with neighbors whose windows looked directly into ours. When he got bored, he walked out and came over to our apartment. He was half overseas at the time, but he was very intelligent. He had a wonderful long talk with my husband [Bill Scott], who was also an artist. Afterward Bill said, ‘That man’s brilliant.’” Even old friends like Reuben Kadish began to notice a new “aura” about Jackson—a combination of the old intensity and the new confidence. “He had a way of firing the situation,” Kadish remembers. At a poker game in which matches served as chips, Jackson pounded the table to punctuate a point about Picasso and a box of matches burst into flames. Says Kadish, “It was clear that Jackson had the spark to make things happen.”

  In late May 1940, after a visit to Jackson’s studio, Helen Marot called Dr. Henderson to give him the good news. “I saw Jackson Pollock last night,” she reported, “and he talked for hours in a stormy but fascinating way about himself and his painting. I don’t know but it seems to me we have a genius on our hands.”

  Soon after Marot visited his studio, Jackson was laid off the Project—his eighteen months were up. A week later, on June 3, 1940, Helen Marot died.

  The combination of blows shattered his fragile new confidence. The night of Marot’s death he plunged into the most ferocious binge of booze and violence since Bloomingdale’s. This may have been the night that he destroyed dozens of his own paintings, slashing them repeatedly with a kitchen knife and throwing the shreds out the window, where they floated to the street like multicolored streamers. According to Kadish, Jackson saved his special wrath for the old Bentonesque paintings that still lined the studio walls. “He didn’t want the world to see that he had had any contact with Benton.�
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  At first, Henderson tried to dismiss the binge as merely “a truly glorious wake [for] a special friend.” As the “regressive” behavior continued in Marot’s absence, however, even Henderson finally had to admit that their sessions were having little, if any, real therapeutic effect. No doubt fearing that the relapse might undermine the validity of his Jungian therapeutic methods altogether, Henderson belatedly—and probably at Sande’s insistence—abandoned the analysis of Jackson’s drawings. “Thence forward [I] dwelt upon his personal conscious problems,” he recalled, “rather than upon the imagery of the unconscious.” (He may also have deigned to recommend The Common Sense of Drinking, a practical and very non-Jungian self-help book for alcoholics that Jackson read about this time.)

  For the first time, Henderson began to ask questions about his patient’s past and family experiences. He soon “discovered” the truth about Jackson’s childhood of “human deprivation on the personal level” and his “need for the ‘all-giving mother.’” He even reported a diagnosis: Jackson was suffering from a schizophrenia-like disorder characterized by alternating periods of “violent agitation” and “paralysis or withdrawal.” Henderson unhelpfully compared this form of introversion to the mental state of a “novice in a tribal initiation rite during which he is ritually dismembered at the onset of an ordeal whose goal is to change him from a boy into a man.” Jackson’s seemingly endless drunken binges were, according to Henderson, like the “wild paroxysms” of a Kwakiutl Indian induced by drinking salt water. Both were a hopeful prelude to an emotionally healthy adult future. Jackson was undergoing a “ritual death” from which he would emerge “by a ritual rebirth.”