Spurned by Breton and the others, Matta plotted his revenge. According to Wheeler, “He said, ‘Fuck you, guys, I’m going to have my own movement.’” The only place to start a new movement was, of course, among the Americans. “By allying himself with the younger American painters,” says Wheeler, “he could arrogate power to himself.” Largely through his contact with Baziotes, Matta concluded that automatism was the only Surrealist idea that retained any viability for American artists, and he moved quickly to promote himself as its champion. Soon after John Graham’s McMillen show, he began to lay secret plans for an event that would upstage Breton and, in one audacious stroke, end European artistic hegemony. “He wanted to show the Surrealists up as middle-aged grey-haired men who weren’t zeroed into contemporary reality,” according to Robert Motherwell. The show would feature only American artists—and Matta. “He realized that if he made a manifestation by himself, or even if he had a beautiful show by himself,” said Motherwell, “the Surrealists could say, well, he’s a Surrealist and he’s very talented; but if there were a group who made a manifestation that was more daring and qualitatively more beautiful than the Surrealists themselves, then he could succeed in his objective of showing them up.”
Matta outlined the plan to Baziotes, hoping he would help recruit his friends to the new movement, but Baziotes once again refused to get involved. He did, however, provide a list of the artists he thought might respond to Matta’s pitch, a list that included Gorky, Kamrowski, Busa, de Kooning, and Pollock. But with anti-European resentments already percolating among the Americans, Matta was determined to find a local co-sponsor to give his new movement an American imprimatur. He selected Robert Motherwell, a young, unknown artist from California whom he had met on a trip to Mexico in the summer of 1941. To the aristocratic and class-conscious Matta, Motherwell seemed like the perfect choice: educated at Stanford and Harvard, polished, cosmopolitan, articulate, ambitious—in many ways, an American version of Matta himself.
It was, in fact, a disastrous choice.
Robert Motherwell in his studio, 1943
Robert Motherwell’s name appears for the first time relatively late in the chronicle of American Surrealism. In 1937, in the wake of the Museum of Modern Art’s Surrealism shows, when Gorky and Baziotes were already reading Minotaure and experimenting with Surrealist imagery, Motherwell was a twenty-two-year-old graduate student at Harvard, drifting toward a Ph.D. in philosophy. In 1939, when Baziotes took Jackson to Kamrowski’s studio to settle a dispute over automatism, Motherwell was teaching philosophy at the University of Oregon. By 1940, he had come to New York but, by his own admission, didn’t know any American painters and didn’t care to meet any. Preferring “the French milieu,” he studied engraving with Kurt Seligmann and took to hanging around the edges of the growing refugee community. It wasn’t until the summer of 1941, on the trip to Mexico with Matta, Matta’s wife, and Barbara Reis (Bernard and Becky’s daughter), that Motherwell was finally introduced to Surrealism. “In the three months of that summer,” he said later, “Matta gave me a ten-year education in Surrealism.” In Mexico City, he visited Wolfgang Paalen, whose show Baziotes and Jackson had seen at the Julien Levy Gallery the year before. On the same trip, he also found a wife—a dark, stunningly attractive Mexican actress named Maria Ferrera, described by a friend as “a little, capricious ariel floating around.”
On his return from Mexico, Motherwell began to paint seriously for the first time and, with Matta as a sponsor, redoubled his efforts to ingratiate himself into the community of European artists. At first, they were intrigued by his brashness. While most Americans remained standoffish, if not hostile, Motherwell—describing himself as “imbued with French culture”—strode fearlessly into the Surrealists’ gatherings and engaged them in intellectual conversation. “I would talk to Max Ernst,” he recalled. “[He] probably was the first painter before me to have a degree in philosophy and … was perfectly willing to talk about intellectual things.” In public, Ernst and the others tolerated the nervy young American, often teasing him with arch, ambiguous comments—“You have a tremendous capacity to grow”—that he invariably took as compliments. He later told an interviewer that in the course of “ransacking the cultural world for talent,” the Europeans were particularly impressed by his intelligence, style, and good looks. “He was pleasant to look at,” says Roger Wilcox, whose wife, Lucia, was a frequent host to the Surrealists in the Hamptons, “he looked so cherubic with his round face, and he was very polite and very eager.” Breton even picked Motherwell to be the first editor of VVV (part of his halfhearted effort to build bridges to the American artistic community), although he was fired before the inaugural issue appeared.
In private, however, the Europeans ridiculed him. According to Lucia Wilcox, “He used to come and insinuate himself into this crowd but they simply didn’t pay any attention to him.” Ernst dismissed him as “a joke.” Breton, who considered all Americans naive, deplored his intellectual pretensions and referred to him demeaningly as “le petit philosophe.” Even Matta, in an unguarded moment, agreed that he was “a windbag and a pompous ass.”
In 1942, however, Matta had a use for his new protégé. To prepare for the decisive “manifestation” that would establish their new movement, Matta and Motherwell launched an intensive campaign of recruitment and indoctrination. Using Baziotes’s list, they visited the artists’ studios with their message. Motherwell would arrange the meetings and make introductions—“he had a tremendous facility for gathering ends together,” recalled Peter Busa—then Matta would explain the movement: the need for a “revolution of the young ‘inside’ Surrealism”; the need for Americans “to develop some sort of unified direction in their art”; the need to “show up the Surrealists as a group of dogmatic painters no longer attuned to the contemporary world”; and the need for “reliance on truer versions of the technique of psychic automatism.” Motherwell would follow with an eager, lengthy explanation of Surrealist theory. One artist recalled being “annoyed because he talked more than Matta did.” During the spring and fall of 1942, Matta and Motherwell took their act to the studios of Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, Kamrowski, and Busa, meeting with mixed reviews. Gorky was bemused, de Kooning indifferent. Kamrowski and Busa were interested, however, and Pollock was “exhilarated.” “He was thrilled that Matta liked his work,” recalls Reuben Kadish. Including Baziotes, Matta now had six artists—himself, Motherwell, Baziotes, Busa, Kamrowski, and Pollock—enough to make a movement.
Years later, Motherwell would claim that he used these sessions to “initiate” Pollock and the others into “the Surrealist mysteries”—a version of history that elicited howls of laughter and derision from the artists’ friends.
On October 14, 1942, the European Surrealists staged their first New York spectacle, the “First Papers of Surrealism” show at the Whitelaw Reid mansion on Madison Avenue. The American art world had never seen anything like it. Duchamp, the master of ceremonies, strung two miles of string around the columns of the old mansion’s interior to create an airy skein as a backdrop against which the paintings would be auctioned. The sound of children playing echoed through the marble halls as a troop of youngsters, hired by Duchamp, played football, hopscotch, jacks, and jump-rope in the ballroom. Guests were encouraged to join them. In assembling the show, Breton cast the net of Surrealism wide. In addition to Miró, Masson, Ernst, Seligmann, and Magritte, he included Picasso and Klee, two artists who had resisted the Surrealist label. He even deigned to hang works by Americans Baziotes, Motherwell, and David Hare, although their presence was somewhat compromised by their proximity to pictures of Superman and Father Divine. Despite the growing rift between them, Breton also included Matta. Dali, however, was beyond forgiveness. All in all, it was a convincing display of vitality. If the Surrealists were dispirited, if their domination of the art world was threatened, there was no sign of it among the marble pillars and amused patrons on opening night.
In the shadow
of Breton’s extravaganza, Matta began work on his manifestation. Peggy Guggenheim, whose new gallery, Art of This Century, opened only a week after the “First Papers” show, had already expressed interest in Matta’s plans for a show of the “new American automatists” and seemed to share his ambitious vision of topping Breton. Now Matta had the idea, the artists, the strategy, and the sponsor. All he needed was the art.
To recreate the sense of “community” that Breton exploited so masterfully among the Europeans, Matta arranged for the artists and their wives to meet for dinner and “games” at his Twelfth Street apartment, a dramatic, open space with curved canvas walls designed by Frederick Kiesler. The game was “the Exquisite Corpse,” the most famous of the Surrealist parlor games developed in the twenties by Tanguy and Duchamp using children’s games as models. It began with one player writing a word or a line on a piece of paper, then folding it and passing it to the next player, who added another word or line without looking at what came before. When everybody had contributed, the paper was unfolded and the resulting “poem” read aloud. (The game’s unusual name came from the first sentence derived by this method: “The exquisite corpse shall drink the young wine.”) According to Ethel Baziotes, the purpose of the game was “to locate a common meeting of the psyches.” The result, however, was usually something between Haiku and nonsense. A “poem” that Jackson wrote in the margin of a drawing about this time is typical:
the effort of the dance
the city with horns
the thickness of white.
Disappointed with their first efforts, Matta’s guests tried rearranging the lines. (The job fell to Motherwell, the intellectual among them.) When that didn’t work, they decided to “cheat,” by requiring that all contributions relate to a common topic, like “What is a Fox?” Motherwell recalled that “one rainy night one of the subjects was rain, and an extremely beautiful poem resulted from that.”
The guests seated around on Matta’s canvas chairs (also designed by Kiesler) and passing pieces of paper included Robert and Maria Motherwell; Bill and Ethel Baziotes; Peter Busa and his wife-to-be, Jeanne Juell; Matta’s wife, Ann; Lee Krasner; and, sitting by himself in a corner, Jackson Pollock. “Jackson didn’t participate too much,” recalls Ethel Baziotes. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with something so revelatory. … It was a constant source of anguish.” The gregarious Matta was confounded by Jackson’s antisocial reticence. He called Jackson “fermé. A closed man.” Only when the group made automatic drawings of males and females and psychoanalyzed them did Jackson come to life. “Jackson was the best at that,” recalls Peter Busa.
Although Matta clearly intended such evenings to be regular events, attendance began to fall off after the first few sessions. Jackson came only two or three times—at least once without Lee. Motherwell tried for a while to continue the work at his apartment on Eighth Street and Jackson attended at least one session there, but interest quickly waned. After no more than six evenings, and perhaps as few as two, the effort was dropped.
Far more important to Matta’s plans was another group that began meeting at his studio on Ninth Street every Saturday afternoon beginning in October 1942. These were the sessions at which he would shape his new movement. No hors d’oeuvres were served, no games played, and, consistent with Surrealist misogyny, no wives invited. (The Surrealists “treated their wives like French poodles,” Lee Krasner complained.) Otherwise, the participants were the same: Baziotes, Kamrowski, Busa, Motherwell, and Pollock. Matta recalled that Jackson “resented most this idea of a group,” but came anyway, persuaded by Matta’s reputation and his enthusiasm for Jackson’s work. The purpose of the sessions, as set forth by Matta, was “to find new images of man.” The program was simple, direct, and inflexible: they would make automatic drawings based on specific themes. One week, they concentrated on “natural elements”—fire, water, earth, air—and tried to capture their unconscious reactions on paper. The next week, they thought about “what it would be like to go swimming if you were blind.” Much of Matta’s explanation of automatist methods and theory was familiar to the Americans, but according to Kamrowski, “he brought such energy to the subject that in a way it didn’t make any difference what he said.”
One theme in particular obsessed Matta: “the hours of the day.” Time had been a preoccupation of the Surrealists since de Chirico’s timelessly vacant piazzas. From Dali’s melting watches to Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 A.M., the very concept of “surreality” implied a dreamlike exemption from traditional rules of time and continuity. Matta hoped that by applying the true principles of automatism, he could make a new and powerful statement about the relationship between time and space and the unconscious. “Surrealism was largely a night world (of dreams),” said Kamrowski. “Matta wanted to create a similar world for day hours.” If he succeeded, he would have outdone the Surrealists on their own terms.
But Jackson and his colleagues weren’t interested in Surrealist terms. They wanted to make paintings, not statements. To them, Matta’s plan sounded suspiciously like one of Breton’s efforts to use art as mere sugar-coating for metaphysics. Still, out of deference to their host, they agreed to try it. At his direction, they kept logs of their daily activities and thoughts for the purpose of discovering “what common images might cross their minds at identical hours.” Lee Krasner remembered Jackson returning from one session bewildered by his instruction to “draw the hours of the day.” Although impressed by Matta’s drawings, the Americans grew increasingly unhappy with his “dogmatism.” “We worked pretty well together, except Matta was getting more and more polemical about it,” recalls Peter Busa. “We were more interested in the formal possibilities and the mechanics of it, [but] Matta felt that was kind of not very cultured.” According to Kamrowski, “Matta got to the point that he wasn’t pushing automatism so much as he was pushing this mediumistic shit—the fortune-telling and divination aspect of Surrealism that none of us cared about.” Least of all Jackson, who complained that it was “too much like a game and not serious,” and balked at keeping a log—“It reminded him of homework,” says Busa. The meetings, friendly at first, turned “intense.” Once, when Matta was demonstrating the Surrealist technique of fumage, Jackson turned to Busa and said in a stage whisper: “I can do that without the smoke.”
The end came at a meeting in late winter when Matta proposed that each person take home a pair of dice, which he would roll every hour on the hour and record the numbers that came up. “That was more than Jackson could take,” recalls Busa. “He just got up and walked out.”
Soon after Jackson left, Peggy Guggenheim withdrew her support from Matta’s plans for a manifestation. Her interest had never been more than exploratory, and although she, too, bridled under Breton’s regime, she wasn’t yet ready to join a palace coup. Instead, she offered Matta’s young Americans, including Jackson, an opportunity to contribute to a collage show planned for the spring of 1943 at Art of This Century. Matta, too, was having second thoughts about a break with his Surrealist mentors, brought on in part by the unexpected recalcitrance of his American protégés. “Matta’s allegiances were always torn,” says Ethel Baziotes. Before accepting him back into the fold, however, Breton exacted a bizarre revenge. “There was a meeting,” recalls Hedda Sterne, “and Matta had to atone by branding himself—I don’t know where on his body.”
Matta’s capitulation left Robert Motherwell as the heir apparent to the “American automatist movement”—a movement that had yet to exist anywhere outside of Matta’s ambitions. Motherwell, after all, had been Matta’s handpicked American liaison; had accompanied him on recruitment visits; had proven himself socially, politically, and artistically astute; was an excellent organizer; and best of all, knew Peggy Guggenheim, whose new gallery and flamboyant life-style had already catapulted her into a position of prominence that rivaled Breton’s. Without Motherwell’s influence, Jackson believed, Guggenheim would never have extended the collage show invi
tation.
Certainly no one wanted a position of power and influence more than Motherwell. As a newcomer and bystander at Surrealist events, he had seen, more clearly than most, Breton’s immense power. The sight left him both awestruck and envious. Harry Holtzman, a close friend at the time, recalls that soon after Matta’s surrender, Motherwell burst into his studio exclaiming, “Breton terrifies me. … He can make or break an artist.” Holtzman tried to calm him. “What the hell do you care about him for? We don’t need these guys to tell us what we should think.” “That’s all right for you,” Motherwell responded, “but I want power. When I get power I can take that point of view.”
As much as Motherwell wanted power, no one wanted to give it to him. The Europeans mocked his ambitions and the Americans resented them, responding to his pretentiousness with a mix of indignation and derision. To them, he was a baby-faced newcomer—articulate and persuasive, perhaps, but without a single legitimate claim to leadership. Where had he been when they were struggling through the Depression, Benton’s broadsides, and the ideological warfare of the Project? Where were his paintings? As of 1942, very few artists had even seen Motherwell’s early painterly abstractions, and some of those who had seen them questioned their integrity. When a friend arrived unexpectedly at Motherwell’s studio in the early forties, he found the artist on his knees, assembling tracings of forms from a Miró painting. “These were not authentic paintings,” says Roger Wilcox, “and Jackson and just about everyone else knew it.”
Jackson Pollock Page 60
