Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Jackson had good reason to puzzle. Baziotes’s demonstration was a reprise of Siqueiros’s workshop. Now, as then, an errant rivulet of paint might suggest the outline of an animal; a burst of spray paint, kinky hair; a swirl of lines, a bird’s nest. There was nothing new in that. What may have puzzled Jackson was that the Surrealist theory of automatism, as explained by Baziotes, promised much more than that, more than da Vinci’s game of reading the cracks in the wall. The theory, at least, was much closer to Jung than to Rorschach. Images were supposed to originate in the unconscious, not merely find labels there. “Everything wells up and is given as it appears,” wrote Max Ernst. “The great thing is for the show not to be lost, and it is here that the artist’s hand intervenes, not to add but to record.” What truth of the unconscious was “recorded” by a swirl of lines that could be read as a bird’s nest or a bale of wire or a tornado funnel? For all his trying, Baziotes hadn’t yet gone beyond “doodle-reading” to solve the fundamental Surrealist problem: how to establish a minimum of conscious, artistic control over the creation of an unconscious image.

  Still, Jackson learned an enormous amount from the gentle Baziotes. The son of Greek immigrants, Baziotes was another of the surrogate father/brother figures to whom Jackson was inevitably drawn. He had all the qualifications: short and wiry and powerfully built like Roy; an ex-boxer like Jay (he considered boxing the most “psychologically useful” preparation for painting); charming, sociable, and well read like Charles. His family, like Jackson’s, had suffered financial ruin in the Depression. His “education” had consisted of selling newspapers, shining shoes, standing guard for bootleggers, working in a hat factory, and making stained glass, before he finally enrolled briefly in Leon Kroll’s class at the National Academy. Wherever he went, he took an umbrella (whatever the weather) and his wife Ethel, a woman of piercing intelligence, epic devotion, and Byzantine serenity. One friend recalled seeing them “dressed like a proud working couple on a gray Sunday stroll … they were ‘one bone and one flesh,’ bonded for life and perhaps beyond.”

  From 1939 on, Baziotes was Jackson’s liaison to the small but active American Surrealist community that existed before the arrival of the Europeans. In the spring of 1940, they saw a show of works by Wolfgang Paalen, the Austrian Surrealist who had studied with Hofmann in Munich. Paalen’s eerie dreamscapes with their abstract backgrounds created by the use of fumage and foregrounds filled with jagged forms (knives, skeletons, and the beaks of terrifying birds) only underscored the connection between automatic writing, as John Graham was explaining it at the time, and the Surrealist games of Baziotes. That same month, Gerome Kamrowski saw Jackson and Baziotes emerging from a Miró exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. Jackson, of course, had been familiar with Miró‘s organic forms and elegant compositions since at least 1938 when Sande began work on the Marine Terminal mural under James Brooks, an ardent Miró admirer, but he had much to learn from Baziotes about Miró‘s biomorphic inventiveness, which was increasingly evident in Baziotes’s own work.

  Still, Baziotes’s experimental heart remained with Masson whose more recent illusionistic paintings were shown jointly at the Willard and Buchholz galleries early in 1942. There Jackson may have seen for the first time the dribbled color and mazy, wandering line of the reclusive Frenchman. The technique, of course, was nothing new. Jackson had been squeezing paint directly from the tube on and off since the Siqueiros workshop. In 1940, he had ransacked the workshop of Theodore Wahl emptying all his tubes of paint directly onto a single canvas. “When I returned, the place was a mess,” recalls Wahl, “and I didn’t have to ask who did it.” But Masson’s images were much more than a mess. What had been, in Siqueiros’s hands, a craftsman’s technique, and, in Jackson’s, a form of doodling, was, in Masson’s, a new way to create subtle, psychologically expressive abstract images.

  By the winter of 1942, Jackson was conducting his own “Surrealist experiments” at every available opportunity. Peter Busa remembers him sitting at a table in a WPA studio “squeezing paint out of a tube and just seeing where it went.” “He talked about the ‘free agent,’” Busa recalls, “the element in Surrealism where you don’t touch the canvas, where you just let the paint fall.” Years later when a friend asked Jackson, “How much did the Surrealist movement affect you?” he responded, “The only person who really did get through to me was Masson.”

  Clearly, in a different but no less profound way, Bill Baziotes “got through” to him as well. The two men had what Ethel Baziotes calls “an unconscious collaboration.” More than anyone before or after, Baziotes shared Jackson’s uneasy relationship with his art. “When I am away from my canvas,” he wrote, “I look at the world as realistically as I can. And when I return before my canvas, it is there that the world becomes mysterious. It is there when a few brushstrokes start me off on a labyrinthine journey.” Like Jackson, Baziotes approached the act of painting like a fighter entering the ring to do battle with demons. “What happens on the canvas is unpredictable and surprising to me,” he said. “Once I sense the suggestion, I begin to paint intuitively. The suggestion then becomes a phantom that must be caught and made real. As I work, or when the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.”

  Baziotes also taught Jackson that “to talk about art is to be tainted,” that “too many veils should not be lifted.” According to his wife, he agreed with Matisse that “artists should have their tongues cut out.” He also rejected “the affectations of scholarship,” in the belief that “there were some places where words shouldn’t trespass,” says Ethel Baziotes. He spurned critics and dealers and even museum directors in order to avoid being “caught in their web” of words and wrangling and inevitable compromise. The worst fate that could befall an artist, in Baziotes’s estimation, was to become a “phony”—an artist who abandoned “his own kingdom” in a misguided search for acceptance and approval. It was a lesson that Jackson learned well—perhaps too well.

  In the winter of 1941, Jackson may have accompanied Baziotes to Gordon Onslow-Ford’s lectures on Surrealism at the New School for Social Research. If he did, what he heard was reassuring, but hardly new; Onslow-Ford argued that the artist should “look within himself’ for subject matter. The lectures did, however, mark the beginning of the end for the short-lived independent Surrealist movement in America. Onslow-Ford, an English artist who had been in Europe since 1937, had come to preach the true gospel of Surrealism, Breton’s gospel. Everything that existed before was apostasy. (Years later he still claimed to be “the person who introduced Surrealist painting to New York.”)

  The Europeans had arrived.

  The visit of the European Surrealists to America has often been trumpeted as a great catalytic episode in American art. “It was the challenge of ideas that created a tremendous movement,” said Pierre Matisse, whose New York gallery benefited lavishly from the sudden presence of the European artists he exhibited. “It was the possibilité of American artists meeting [the Surrealist artists].” “Their being here was overpowering,” says Ethel Baziotes. “Its importance can’t be overstated. These were fascinating men with highly perfected artistic ways. They had form, and the Americans were searching for form. The ideas the Europeans brought with them were utterly fascinating. They were catalytic. It was like one flame meeting another and making a larger flame.”

  The metaphor is unintentionally apt. In fact, the Surrealists’ visit generated considerable friction, heated controversy, and smoldering resentment, but little creative fire. Surrealist ideas—ideas that had crossed the ocean years before—proved catalytic, but the visit itself proved divisive and counterproductive for both hosts and guests. Far from galvanizing the Surrealist movement in America, it drove American artists out of the Surrealist fold in search of new solutions under new labels, blackened the name of Surrealism, and obscured its contribution to American art for the next quarter-century.

  To begin with, very few American artists actually met their new guest
s. Unlike other European visitors such as Mondrian and Léger who “really enjoyed the New York scene,” the Surrealists tended to remain clannish and aloof. They frequented the same cafés, Larré and the Free French Canteen, where they sat, ate, and conversed only with one another, complaining about the weather, the food, the hectic pace, and “longing for the bistros of Paris.” They gathered for parties at the homes of those few Americans, like Bernard and Becky Reis, who had both the money to subsidize their high style and the cultural insecurity to suffer their condescensions. In the summers, they vacationed together, clustering in enclaves like the Hamptons where they were fed and indulged by American Francophiles Sara and Gerald Murphy. Some, like Masson, “kept away from everything” by moving to Connecticut. “They were terrible snobs,” says Clement Greenberg. “The Americans were too grubby.” Few of the Surrealists could speak English well and some of those who could, refused to.

  Only occasionally did the Surrealists reach across the cultural barrier to embrace the natives. Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Seligmann, in particular, made an effort to be accessible. Gorky was a favorite of Breton and Tanguy, and the Matters, of course, were always bienvenu. But most of the newcomers restricted their communications to the few Americans who, like Mercedes Matter and Fritz Bultman, could speak French. “The Surrealists arrived like visiting royalty,” writes May Rosenberg, “bearers of sacred visions to the heathens; trippers among the lollipops.”

  Artists in exile. Left to right, front row: Roberto Matta Echaurren, Ossip Zadkine, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger; second row: André Breton, Piet Mondrian, André Masson, Amédée Ozenfant, Jacques Lipchitz, Pavel Tchelitchew; in back: Kurt Seligmann and Eugene Berman.

  The pitch of arrogance and contempt was set by Breton, who, according to Max Ernst, “insisted in thinking everything not French imbécile.” From the moment he arrived, bowing and kissing ladies’ hands, dispensing les mots justes, Breton embodied European Surrealism at its haughtiest. Some were beguiled. “Breton may have spoken fifteen minutes with you,” recalls Ethel Baziotes, “but that fifteen minutes would last the rest of your life.” Others smarted under his “autocratic and priestlike condescensions.” Admirers called him le pape (“the pope”) and treated him with a reverence that struck their American hosts as unnatural, if not perverse. “It was amazing the respect all these grown men gave [him],” said Becky Reis. “It was ingrained in them that he was superior.” Breton exercised his authority with a whim of iron. “He was full of prejudices,” said David Hare, the editor of Breton’s short-lived magazine VVV. He refused to learn English—fearing it might pollute his classical written French—wouldn’t eat eggs, and abhorred homosexuality. He ordered one of his followers, Nicolas Calas to marry or face excommunication. He particularly relished parlor games in which he used his immense power to inflict small indignities. His favorite was La Vérité, a game of his own devising, in which players were required to reveal their deepest emotional secrets. Peggy Guggenheim, who despised the game, called it “a form of psychoanalysis done in public. The worse the things that we exposed, the happier everyone was.” Especially Breton, who enforced the rules of the game with the humorless intensity of a schoolmaster, screaming out “Gage!” (“Foul!”) at even the most minor infraction. “He got mortally offended if anybody spoke out of turn,” Guggenheim recalled, “part of the game was to inflict punishment on those who did so.” Punishment consisted of “being brought blindfolded into a room on all fours and forced to guess who kissed you.”

  The Surrealists’ oblivious, self-indulgent life-style struck many as gallingly frivolous and irresponsible against a backdrop of battlefield dispatches and wartime shortages. “In this country the visitors displayed a life-style that was staged and elegant,” wrote May Rosenberg. “Languid or passionate, they seemed to be having a good time, an intellectually suave time.” What were Americans to think of a community that found it amusant when Léonor Fini decorated her apartment with piles of autumn leaves and perfumed excrement? The whimsy, lyricism, and hedonism of their art and poetry seemed almost calculated to offend the more pragmatic, masculine, and Puritan sensibilities of their hosts. Their absolute, unquestioning obedience to Breton smacked of totalitarian mind-control. Their obvious disdain for America seemed at best ungrateful and at worst—with Americans fighting to free Europe—treasonous. (Dali triggered a furor when he exhibited a painting depicting an American plane being shot down.) Their precious preoccupation with matters literary, their disdain for “the brush,” seemed maddeningly obtuse and retardataire.

  To make matters worse, the European interlopers were co-opting more and more of the attention of American dealers, collectors, and museums—of which there was already an acute shortage. Not just uptown dealers like Julien Levy, who had always shunned young American artists and taken aesthetic marching orders from Breton; not just “the Museum of Modern Art people” like Barr, who had always favored Continental artists. What really stung was the way in which even beginning collectors, notably Bernard Reis, “swallowed all Gallic innovations whole.” “[Reis’s] only money was spent on Europeans,” recalled Robert Motherwell. “To the degree that he had any American paintings I am sure we gave them to him.”

  Proximity to the Europeans bred not only contempt and resentment but also a more realistic assessment of their art. Willem de Kooning, for example, found himself in the same studio with Léger and the French abstractionist Jean Helion, who had recently escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp. “One day I looked at what I was doing,” de Kooning later told Lionel Abel, “and I said it’s just as interesting as what they’re doing. And it was, too.” Abel remembers that “it meant a lot to [Bill] to be able to compare himself to a first-rate painter like Léger.” Similar epiphanies were occurring throughout the community of American artists. David Smith said of Mondrian and Lipchitz, “We have met them and we have found that they were humans like we were and they were not gods.” Jackson Pollock, too, began to ask the inevitable question. “I don’t see,” he told an interviewer in 1943, “why the problems of modern painting can’t be solved as well here [in America] as elsewhere.”

  By the end of 1942, despite Breton’s last-ditch effort to salvage his hegemony with the publication of VVV, Surrealism was a movement in disarray, its earlier convictions undermined by factional infighting and the trauma of dislocation. American artists, filled with newfound confidence and emboldened by the pervasive “can-do” attitude of wartime America, crowded into the breach.

  In the ensuing scramble, Jackson Pollock was little more than a bystander. By 1942, he was known widely, if not well, and generally perceived, mostly on the strength of Graham’s recommendation, as “a diamond in the rough.” Among the American Surrealists, the front-runners should have been Gorky and Baziotes. But neither man was suited to the political battlefield. Although Gorky was extremely knowledgeable and widely respected, his aesthetic sensibilities were too changeable for him to play the role of ideologue. (“Gorky is like a cow,” Jackson told a friend. “You know, they forage and eat, and then they get back in the stable and they’re still chewing. … Gorky will look at Picasso for hours, then go back to his studio and make a Picasso in the Gorky style.”) In 1943, Gorky spent nine months at a farm in Virginia—the first of many long stays outside New York—and was already showing signs of moodiness and emotional isolation. Baziotes was the more likely candidate. Among all those who later claimed the title of “founder of the American Surrealist movement,” Baziotes was the one who deserved it most. Yet he was determined to avoid the contest for power and credit. “He cared only about the integrity of the search,” says Ethel Baziotes. “He was completely aloof from the audience. … We both knew critics and dealers and museum directors quite well, but he never moved in their orbit.” That, of course, was precisely the orbit in which the contest would be fought.

  One artist who didn’t share such qualms was Roberto Sebastian Matta Echaurren, known simply as Matta. Basque by origin, Chilean by bir
th, Matta had lived in Paris where he studied architecture with Le Corbusier before joining the Surrealist circle in 1937. Despite his reputation as a libertine, Matta was received by the prudish Breton as “a loved son, the heir apparent.” In 1939, however, almost two years ahead of the main wave of European artists, he forsook Paris and came to New York. Unlike the Europeans who were to follow, Matta was young, spoke excellent English, mixed often with American artists, and made friends easily. Robert Motherwell’s reaction was typical: “He was the most energetic, poetic, charming, brilliant young artist that I’ve ever met.” “Matta was like a firebrand,” says Becky Reis. “He could ignite the imagination and the enthusiasm of anybody about the arts, a very explosive personality.” In the year before Breton’s arrival, Matta “touched base with everyone,” nestling his way deep into the ranks of those Americans who considered themselves Surrealists.

  As the lone “European” Surrealist in New York (other than Dali who was by now completely discredited) Matta could play the Promethean role that suited his ambition. In Paris, he had been a promising protégé. Alone in New York, he was a “genius.” At the age of thirty, with only a handful of paintings to his credit, he was given a show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, an honor that none of his American friends could claim. But Breton’s arrival changed all that. “No one paid any attention to him after [the Europeans] arrived,” recalls Steve Wheeler, a young artist at the time. “He was pushed back into the shadow. The older Surrealists who were around the triple V magazine would have nothing to do with him. They considered him an upstart.”