Jackson Pollock

by Deborah Solomon

  The Pollock family was considerably smaller than the newspaper item indicated. LeRoy, who was working as a surveyor for the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, never visited his family in Orland. And Charles, the oldest son, had also moved away from home, to Los Angeles, where he found a job in the layout department of the Los Angeles Times and where he would soon be joined by his brother Jay. More important, Charles had enrolled at the Otis Art Institute, the most prestigious art school in the West. He had decided, at age eighteen, that he was going to become a great artist.

  Charles’s decision to pursue a career in art is almost startling considering the cultural isolation of his youth. The towns in which the Pollock boys grew up offered no evidence of a living tradition in the fine arts. Painting and drawing, if they were practiced at all, were considered little more than leisure pastimes for women. As an example of the frivolous status accorded the arts, one can look to the Fifth Annual Glenn County Fair, held in Orland two months after the Pollocks’ arrival. The fair’s so-called art department, according to the local newspaper, offered cash prizes for “paintings on china . . . contestants are also invited to design a lampshade.” And it was not only in rural California that art was defined as painted plates and lampshades; the United States itself had yet to produce a self-sustaining tradition in the fine arts and was still dependent on Europe for its cultural identity.

  On the other hand, Charles’s decision to pursue a career in art seems almost inevitable given his natural talent for drawing and the reinforcement he received from his mother. Stella, as one might expect, was thrilled by his decision to study at a leading art school and harbored grand visions for his future. In 1923, when Jackson was eleven, the family visited Charles in Los Angeles and was immediately impressed by the suave and sophisticated young artist who greeted them. As Frank once exclaimed: “He was wearing spats, and we had never known anyone to wear spats before!” Inspired by their brother’s example, the two younger Pollock boys, Sande and Jackson, soon declared that they too were going to be artists. As Sande has said, “Charles started this whole damn thing. He left home damned early. Charles was the fellow who had the intellectual curiosity all along.”

  Stella once told a newspaper interviewer that whenever Jackson was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he invariably replied, “I want to be an artist like brother Charles.” Unlike his brother, however, Jackson had not yet demonstrated a facility for drawing. In his entire youth, according to his family, he did not produce a single sketch. This in itself is significant. It’s almost as if Pollock suffered from “painter’s block” years before he ever picked up a paintbrush. As much as he wanted to be an artist, the subversive aspects of his personality prevented him from even trying. He was a solitary, withdrawn boy who seems from his earliest years to have felt dissatisfied with himself, as though conscious of a certain unworthiness that set him apart from his talented older brother. These feelings of inadequacy unleashed in him an anger so overwhelming that it all but paralyzed him during these years, while hinting at the makings of the fiercely competitive artist that Pollock would prove to be.

  The farm in Orland, which the family had traded for the Janesville inn, soon fell idle. The land went untilled, the crops unharvested, the cows unmilked. Depressed by her husband’s absence, Stella simply watched out for checks from LeRoy and waited for him to come home. To make matters worse, she realized after having purchased the property that it lay outside the central school district. Rather than attending the new modern school downtown, Jackson, Sande, and Frank had to go to an obscure one-room schoolhouse on the edge of town, a two-mile walk from their house. A group photograph of the Walnut Grove School’s entire student body—twenty-five kids in grades one through eight—provides us with our first intimations of Jackson’s relations to his peers. He is a large, intense, self-conscious blond boy who is standing by himself at the end of the middle row, conspicuously alone. While other children appear to be fidgeting, Jackson stands at perfect attention, his expression solemn, his arms rigid at his sides, as though making a deliberate effort to assume the correct pose and to minimize any differences between himself and the other children. This image of self-restraint contrasts sharply with his brothers’ spontaneity, with Sande standing behind him (as Sande always would), smirking at the camera, and Frank, who is next to the teacher, obviously amused at having to stand there.

  Unable or unwilling to run a farm by herself, Stella sold the Orland property in January 1923, eighteen months after purchasing it. As the Orland newspaper reported on page one, at considerable embarrassment to LeRoy, “Mr. Pollock found it impossible to attend to the development of the land and at the same time attend to his duties in other parts of the state.” It was the end of the family’s real estate holdings. As partial payment for the Orland property Stella accepted a secondhand Studebaker Special, unwisely trading the security of farmland for the mobility of the automobile. For the first time she had a car and could go wherever she pleased, but she no longer knew where she wanted to go. She drove back to Chico to seek the help of Chris Sharp, who, taking pity on the family, generously offered to board them for the winter. In the spring, after LeRoy had visited his family in Chico and informed them that he had accepted a job in the Sierra Ancha Mountains in Arizona, Stella decided that she too would return to that state. Though LeRoy wasn’t sure exactly where his work would take him, Stella was determined to be at least within a few hours’ drive of him and moved her family to Phoenix.

  The Pollocks’ second stay in Phoenix was a difficult period for them. They lived in a small rented house on Sixteenth Street, in a rundown neighborhood, struggling to get along on occasional checks from LeRoy. For Jackson, who was eleven, it was a particularly unrewarding time. Whereas in Janesville and Orland he had attended school with his older brothers and could depend on Sande to watch out for him, Phoenix had a modern school system that separated students by grades. At the Monroe Grammar School, which occupied the largest school building in the Southwest, Jackson was an outsider among the other sixth graders. Besides being new to the school, he was a noticeably poor student and was repeating the sixth grade. As Sande once said, “His grades weren’t passing in any school he ever went to.” While this may be an overstatement, Jackson made no discernible effort to excel at his studies, as though hampered by a poor self-image that condemned him to failure before the school year even began.

  One positive consequence of the family’s second stay in Phoenix was that Jackson developed an interest in American Indian culture. He and Sande often visited the ruins near Pueblo, where they explored the cliff dwellings and fooled around with arrowheads. On Sunday afternoons the brothers sometimes stopped by a park downtown where Maricopas and Pimas from nearby reservations traded their handicrafts for practical goods. The boys felt sorry for the Indians, who, as Sande later recalled, at times bartered their blankets or jewelry for as little as “a bag of beans.” For Jackson, who grew up at a time when the West was synonymous with rootlessness and change, Indian culture offered a connection to the past.

  The family’s situation in Phoenix worsened over time as LeRoy’s checks dwindled to almost nothing. With no means of support, Stella proposed to a widowed farmer named Jacob Minsch that she and her sons help him with his farm work in exchange for room and board. The irony is that ten years earlier the Pollock farm had bordered the Minsch farm. When LeRoy had stood in the alfalfa fields pointing into the distance and dreaming about acquiring additional land, he had been pointing to the Minsch land, where his wife was now working as a maid and his sons were reduced to farmhands.

  One afternoon in the fall of 1923 Jackson was playing in the barnyard of the Minsch farm when he picked up a branch from the ground and tried to break it. But it wouldn’t break. He walked over to a woodpile on top of which rested an ax in a block and started to remove the ax. A boy named Johnny Porter offered to cut the branch for him, insisting he was too young to handle a heavy ax. Jackson, surrendering the ax, placed the branch on top
of the woodpile and pointed to the spot where he wanted it cut. As Johnny raised the ax above his head, Jackson continued to point. When the ax fell, a third of Jackson’s right index finger was severed from his hand. He ran inside the house to his mother, who sewed up the wound and applied some sugar to it to help it heal.

  Jackson’s finger eventually healed, but it would always be deformed. He felt self-conscious about the injury. In later life, whenever he was photographed, he almost always switched his cigarette from his right hand to his left and concealed the maimed hand in a pocket or at his side or behind his back. One does not want to make too much of an accident, except to say that from childhood on, Jackson showed a tendency toward self-injury and that his first serious injury involved his hands.

  In the spring of 1924, after school had let out for the year, Stella and her sons left Phoenix. With the hope of seeing her husband, who was laying roads in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest, Stella accepted a job as a cook at Carr’s Ranch, a summer resort on the edge of the forest. It turned out to be a disappointing time for her. LeRoy, based only thirty miles away in Miami, visited his family only once in the course of the entire summer. No longer could Stella pretend that distance alone accounted for her husband’s long absences. Unable to reconcile with LeRoy, Stella decided it would be best to return to California, where she could at least rejoin her two older sons, both of whom were in Los Angeles. On the advice of a friend, she settled on Riverside, a prospering citrus town that was connected to Los Angeles by a trolley line. That September, after camping for a few weeks, the family rented a small frame house at 1196 Spruce Street, the first of their three addresses in Riverside in the next three years.

  For Jackson, who was almost thirteen, the years in Riverside were a time of excruciating loneliness. Besides being a poor student, he had no friends at school, isolated from others by anxieties that left him all but incapacitated. His brother Sande already had a girlfriend—Arloie Conaway, the pretty daughter of orange growers, would later become his wife—but Jackson was much too shy around girls even to attempt conversation. Among boys he fared worse, wanting desperately to be part of a group but forced into solitude by his hostile distrust of his peers. While he managed to graduate from the Riverside middle school without incident, a troublesome event occurred in his freshman year of high school. One day Jackson showed up for an ROTC practice drill in a uniform that was slightly tattered, prompting a student officer to reprimand him for his appearance. In a fit of anger disproportionate to its cause Jackson grabbed the cadet by his coat and called him a “Goddamn son of a bitch” in front of the whole platoon. The outburst cost him his ROTC membership. Deprived of his one incentive for continuing school, Jackson dropped out of Riverside High in March of his freshman year.

  He spent the remainder of the school year at home, afflicted by a discontent so profound that his mother and brothers found it impossible to talk with him. He seldom showed any warmth or compassion, even in response to wrenching events. One day Jackson walked into the backyard to find his brother Frank crying uncontrollably. Cradled in his arms was Gyp, the family dog, who had died only moments before. “What are you crying about?” Jackson shouted angrily. “It’s just a goddamn dog!” But two decades later, when Pollock was in his thirties, he visited a dairy farm and saw a litter of puppies. He picked one out for himself and named it Gyp.

  Jackson’s years in Riverside were not entirely without consolation. He grew closer to his father, whom he and Sande visited one summer at the Grand Canyon, making the trip in a used Model T, which they bought for twelve dollars. With LeRoy’s help, the two brothers were able to obtain their first jobs, joining their father on a surveying team and assisting with the laying of roads along the northern edge of the canyon. For Jackson, who was fifteen, it was a rewarding, purposeful summer. As Sande later recalled, he was a conscientious worker and took pleasure in physical labor, as if rigorous work helped clear his mind of distractions. A photograph taken that summer shows Jackson seated on a cliff, leaning casually against a boulder. He appears in profile, his long blond hair combed straight back to reveal an impressively large forehead and fine Roman features. His gaze is steadied on the sweeping scenery before him, and a pipe dangles from his mouth. The image hints at Jackson’s self-composure in the months he spent with his father.

  LeRoy, however, was incapable of providing Jackson with a lasting sense of direction or purpose. He was a weak, melancholy, self-pitying man who, by his own admission, felt trapped by circumstance. “I am sorry that I am not in a position to do more for all you boys,” he wrote to Jackson in Riverside, “and I sometimes feel that my life has been a failure—but in this life we can’t undo the things that are past.” It has been said that LeRoy had little influence on his son, but a lack of influence is of course its own kind of influence. To Jackson, his father was more vivid as an absence than as a presence, leaving him with a fierce need to find someone or something he could believe in completely. A few months after Jackson dropped out of school, his family would make its last move—to Los Angeles—and Jackson would soon declare his ambition to become “an Artist of some kind.” The unassuming phrase perfectly captures the dual aspects of the young man’s personality: his need for a capital belief and at the same time a subversive unwillingness to commit himself to any one belief in particular.

  2

  Manual Arts High School

  1928–30

  In September 1928 Pollock joined the sophomore class of Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, a public school specializing in the industrial arts. The school, a ten-minute walk from the Pollock home at 1196 Thirty-ninth Avenue, near Exposition Park, was a large, impersonal institution, with more than four thousand students and a standardized curriculum that took little account of individual needs. Although Manual Arts was a “boresome” place of “rules and ringing bells,” as Pollock described it, it was in this unlikely setting that he recognized his ambition to become an artist. One class made school worthwhile for him. He studied art under Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, or Schwanny to his students, a man who provided Pollock with the guidance and inspiration so sorely lacking in the rest of his school day, if not in his life.

  Schwankovsky, a tall, bespectacled painter with a cropped mustache, a goatee, and long black hair, was a highly unorthodox teacher, known in Los Angeles for his espousal of occult mysticism and his equally heretical advocacy of modern art. His customary outfit included a burgundy velvet jacket and sandals, and his appearance, at once refined and bohemian, confirmed his students’ quaint notions of how an artist should look. “I’m going to make serious painters of you,” Schwankovsky used to say, although he was much less interested in molding his students than simply joining them in the practice of art. Soon after Pollock started school Schwankovsky stirred up a citywide controversy by bringing models into the classroom and having his students draw from life rather than follow the traditional method of copying antique casts. “We are very fortunate in that this is the only school in the city [to] have models,” Pollock wrote appreciatively to his brothers Charles and Frank, who had since moved to New York City. Charles was studying at the Art Students League, and Frank, who had followed him east, was studying part time at Columbia. “Altho it is difficult to have a nude and get by the board,” Pollock continued, “Schwankavsky [sic] is brave enough to have them.”

  Under Schwankovsky’s influence Pollock quickly fashioned an artistic identity for himself. Like his teacher, he grew his hair to his shoulders—“a style associated with European artists and poets like Oscar Wilde,” according to a classmate. He subscribed to Creative Arts magazine, read modern poetry in the Dial, and in letters to his brothers abandoned capital letters (“my letters are undoubtedly egotistical but it is myself i am interested in now”). And in a notable display of bravado, he changed his first name to Hugo, after Victor Hugo, in the hope of impressing his English teacher, a lady he admired from afar. To his classmates, who continued to call him Jackson rather than
Hugo, Pollock radiated an image of artistic vanity in spite of his shyness. To Harold Lehman, a classmate, he was “an immature person with fancy ideas but no discipline.” Manuel Tolegian, another classmate, observed, “That fellow thought he was someone important, but to me he always seemed like an orphan.” The sculptor Reuben Kadish, referring in particular to Pollock’s flowing blond hair, once commented, “Jack didn’t want to be mistaken for anything other than an artist.”

  In Schwankovsky’s class, which met five times a week in a basement studio, Pollock first began to draw. He felt immediately dissatisfied with his work, and his high school image as a cocky young artist contrasts sharply with the insecure, self-disparaging person who emerges from his letters. Writing to Charles, his accomplished oldest brother, Pollock confessed to being “doubtful of any ability.” He went on to offer a devastating appraisal of his earliest artwork: “my drawing i will tell you frankly is rotten it seems to lack freedom and rythem it is cold and lifeless, it isn’t worth the postage to send it.” While the asperity of these comments is surely related to Pollock’s sense of unworthiness in the shadow of his older brother, his harsh self-criticism was not entirely unjustified. None of his high school drawings survives, but it may be said on the basis of later work that by no means was Pollock a precocious draftsman. As his brother Sande once said, “If you had seen his early work you’d have said he should go into tennis, or plumbing.”