On the surface Pollock could not have picked a more unlikely mentor than Benton, a sworn enemy of abstract painting. Born in the Ozark town of Neosho, Missouri, in 1889, he was the son of a congressman and the great-nephew of U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a feisty champion of Jacksonian democracy. As a child Benton had been discouraged by his parents from pursuing a career in art; they were afraid that such a profession might one day lead their eldest son to resemble the effeminate “scented dudes” they had known in Washington society. While defying his family’s wishes by becoming a painter, Benton upheld its traditions in his art. An ardent populist, he believed that art should appeal to the man on the street. A patriot as well, he was determined to secure for American painting the prestige and prominence accorded the art of Europe. A zealous crusader, he truly believed in the power of his pictures to win wars, battle unemployment, and help the country fulfill its national destiny.
In 1908, after dropping out of high school, Benton went to Paris to study art. “What the hell,” he once declared, “there wasn’t any art in America.” Like many other American artists, he drank at the Café du Dôme, saw the works of the French Impressionists at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, and learned about Cubism at the Académie Julian, a mecca for Americans abroad. He experimented with Synchromism, an American variation on Cubism founded in part by his friend Stanton Macdonald-Wright. But he quickly grew disillusioned. While other Americans in Paris were converting to abstract painting, Benton conducted himself like a foreign spy, quietly collecting evidence for the case he would soon launch against modern art. “It is absurd,” he once said, “to stick a Cézanne water-color in the face of an average intelligent American citizen and expect him to find much in it. The same goes for a Braque or a Kandinsky pattern. Most Americans on seeing them will say, ‘If that’s art, to hell with it.’ ”
After returning from Europe, Benton settled in New York and set about planning a highly ambitious project: a series of large paintings and Renaissance-style murals that would glorify American history and culture. His timing could not have been better, for the contemporary revival of fresco painting in Mexico had prepared the way for a mural movement in New York. Early in 1930 (a few months before Pollock arrived in New York) Benton received his first mural commission—from the New School for Social Research, which was under construction on West Twelfth Street. The school’s director, Alvin Johnson, acting on a suggestion from the critic Lewis Mumford, invited both Benton and Orozco to decorate the walls of the school. Orozco, assigned to the dining room, painted an epic of class struggle that included portraits of Lenin, Gandhi, and the Mexican leader Felipe Carrillo Puerto. The Marxist ideas implicit in his murals caused many of the school’s conservative patrons to withdraw their support. Benton’s mural, to the contrary, offended the radicals, who, he later wrote, “were mad because I didn’t put in Nikolai Lenin as an American prophet.”
Entitled America Today, Benton’s New School murals (which were purchased in 1984 by the Equitable Life Assurance Society and soon after put on permanent display in the lobby of its New York headquarters amid considerable publicity) consist of a series of nine separate panels based on his “sketching trips” across the country. For the previous five summers he had driven around in a Chevrolet truck sketching sharecroppers, prizefighters, burlesque dancers, and the sort of colorful people he believed captured the character of the country. But America Today might more suitably be titled America Yesterday. Although painted during the Depression, it makes no reference to the five million men out of work, the abandoned factories, or the empty trains stalled between cities. Instead Benton portrayed a country in motion—plowing, sowing, reaping, mining, building, traveling, and dancing, each action accentuated to the point of parody by the bulging musculatures, mannered forms, and swirling rhythms that characterize Benton’s style. For one brief moment when the country was on the verge of collapse, Benton offered reassurance that America’s pioneer spirit could rescue it from the Depression. Conservatives applauded him, radicals lambasted him, and establishment critics began urging American painters to follow Benton’s example and “sing in their native voices.” Benton was forty-one years old when he finished the murals. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was suddenly famous as a leader of Regionalist painting, and so assured was his reputation that, as he put it himself, “I improved my brand of whiskey.”
Pollock arrived in New York in time to watch Benton complete his last three months of work on the New School murals. Pollock had great enthusiasm for the project, and almost every afternoon visited a loft around the corner from the school, where he could expect to find his teacher at work. (Among the ironies of Benton’s career is that he never touched a brush to a wall; he painted the New School murals on movable panels.) There was always something that needed to be done, and Pollock quickly made himself indispensable. Often he “action posed,” which means that he was asked to assume certain positions—tilt his head a certain way or look in a certain direction or raise his arm to a certain height—so that Benton could get the details right. When Benton didn’t need a model, Pollock managed to make himself useful in other ways, eagerly volunteering to mix egg-tempera paints, wash out brushes, or even sweep the floor. Occasionally Benton would slip him a dollar bill, insisting that he deserved it for all his help. But watching Benton work was reward enough for Pollock. “Benton is beginning to be recognized as the fore most American painter today,” Pollock boasted to his father sometime later. “He has lifted art from the stuffy studio into the world and happenings about him, which has a common meaning to the masses.”
To his schoolmates Pollock was a solitary dreamer, clearly absorbed by Benton’s teachings but too unsure of himself to try to accomplish anything on his own. No one ever thought he would be famous; to the contrary, many of his classmates felt sorry for him. By now he was a tall, rangy youth, with unruly blond hair that fell in his eyes and a round-shouldered posture that suggested to many a lack of confidence. He shuffled his feet when he walked. People considered him shy, aloof, and somewhat threatening. In conversation he often seemed distracted but then suddenly would “give you a quick look as if to see whether he’d punch you in the nose or not,” according to his schoolmate Reggie Wilson. The painter Will Barnet recalls him as “hurrying down the corridor with an angry scowl on his face.” Pollock tended to make a better impression on women, around whom he retired his combative stance. Such classmates as Frances Avery and Yvonne Pène du Bois, whose father taught at the League, remember him in terms of his sweet smile, his gentle, self-effacing manner, and his threadbare clothes. Avery once invited him to her family’s home for a Sunday-night dinner of roast chicken. He didn’t say a word throughout the meal. After he left, Avery’s mother wondered aloud, “Why couldn’t that nice young man come to dinner without wearing overalls?”
Benton’s course, “Life Composition, Painting and Drawing,” met weekday nights in Studio 9. On most nights the dozen or so students in the class would pull up wooden stools and spend the three-hour sessions sketching from a life model. Benton taught them to draw the human figure according to his “hollow and bump” method, concentrating on muscles rather than surface detail. Pollock worked hard at the assignments but knew from the beginning that life drawing would never be his forte. Rather than stimulating him, the technical demands of his craft only frustrated him. Yvonne Pène du Bois remembers the sight of him hunched over his sketch board, struggling. “He couldn’t draw,” she said, “and he knew he couldn’t draw, and I think it made him miserable.” The painter Joe Delaney recalls Pollock’s “jittery hands,” as if even the task of holding a stick of charcoal set him on edge. Benton recognized from the outset that Pollock had little in common with his brother Charles, the perennial star pupil of every art class. Jackson’s abilities, he later wrote, “seemed to be of a most minimal order.”
Besides drawing from the figure, Benton also had his students “analyze” reproductions of late Renaissance and Baroque paintings, br
eaking down the images into cubes, volumes, and linear movements. For Pollock, who had an intuitive sense of rhythm, the analytical exercises proved much less difficult than drawing from life. As Benton later wrote, “He got things out of proportion but found their essential rhythms.”
Judging from his letters to his parents, Pollock felt satisfied with his progress at the League, however unpromising he may have seemed to his classmates. He accepted his limitations with remarkable equanimity, recognizing from the start that art was a process of evolution—not revolution—that would require of him a lifetime of hard work. “A good seventy years more,” he joked to his father, “and I think I’ll make a good artist.” Writing to his mother, he confided with self-insight, “I have much to learn tecnequelly yet. I am interested and like it which is the main thing.” Under Benton’s influence he had finally acquired a sense of direction; for the moment that was enough. For the first time in his life he was “doing every thing with a definite purpose—with out a purpose for each move—thers chaos.”
His first year at the League, Pollock lived with his brother Charles in a fifth-floor walk-up at 46 Union Square. The apartment, which had previously belonged to Benton, looked out on Union Square Park, a grassy patch on Fourteenth Street known as the place to talk about radical politics. The two brothers set up their easels in the living room, leaving neither with any privacy and exacerbating what was already a strained living situation. Although Charles had found a part-time job as an elementary-school art teacher, he worked only one day a week and spent most of his time painting at home. For Jackson, who attended school at night and was free during the day, it was difficult to work in his brother’s presence. He couldn’t concentrate on so much as a single sketch with Charles standing across from him dashing off drawings with obvious confidence and ease, reminding him of his mediocrity.
Charles tried his hardest to encourage Jackson, recognizing that his brother had a low opinion of his abilities. But Jackson resisted his help. He refused to show Charles his paintings, and instead of hanging them up, used to turn them against the wall. Equally dissatisfied with his sketches, he developed an unfortunate habit of ripping them up. Charles would try to salvage them, collecting the scraps, placing them in a drawer and assuring his brother that his work was worth saving. But it was inconceivable to Pollock that his early work might ever be of interest; he didn’t even bother to sign or date his paintings.
Such self-effacing behavior could alternate unpredictably with hostile outbursts. One night a few friends were gathered at the apartment when Jackson, who had been drinking, picked up a hatchet and started swinging it above his head. “He was trying to impress the girls,” recalled Marie Levitt, his future sister-in-law. The girls started laughing, but Charles knew better. “Put that down,” he ordered. Jackson continued to swing the hatchet, swiping a small oil painting that was hanging on the wall. He slashed his brother’s painting in half.
Prohibition was still in force, and Pollock rarely drank during his student days. But drinking made him so destructive that he quickly acquired a reputation at school as a troubled youth. One night the League administration planned a moonlight sail for students, renting a large touring boat that cruised the Hudson River. Pollock, drunk on gin, started racing around the boat, removing light bulbs from their sockets and tossing them overboard. The moving boat grew darker, and students started to panic. “I’ll go get them,” Pollock volunteered good-naturedly as he climbed up on the railing of the boat and prepared to jump into the Hudson. Terrified that he would drown, his classmate Bernard Steffen wrestled him to the ground, dragged him to the boiler room, and locked him in there for the remainder of the boat ride. “When he was drunk, he was always doing some suicidal thing,” said the sculptor Nathaniel Kaz, recalling one Saturday night when Lionel Hampton was performing in the League ballroom. Pollock passed out in the middle of the dance floor. To keep people from stepping on him, Kaz and a few others rolled him to the side of the room and shoved him under a bench, where he slept for the night.
For all his troubling behavior, Pollock had no difficulty winning the affection of people who recognized his genuineness. Among his early supporters was Rita Benton, his teacher’s wife, a plump, pretty, vivacious brunette of Italian descent. She was known among Benton’s students for her Sunday night “spaghetti dinners”—lively, casual gatherings at which the Bentons provided the food and the students brought the drinks. One night that fall the Bentons invited the three Pollock brothers—Charles, Frank, and Jackson, the last of whom Rita had not yet met but had heard about from her husband. Rita was immediately charmed by him. Upon being served his dinner Jackson stared intently at his plate and, without a trace of irony, informed Rita that he had no idea how to eat spaghetti. “As kids we ate chicken and pork,” Frank later explained, “not spaghetti!” Rita found this highly amusing and promptly gave Jackson a lesson in how to eat spaghetti with a fork and a spoon. After that Rita made a point of watching out for him, inviting him over for dinner at least once a week and having him baby-sit for T.P., her four-year-old son. One day that winter, when Pollock was sick with the flu, Rita sent biscuits and cream to his apartment. Benton too felt protective toward Pollock. He knew that he suffered from “a sense of ineptitude,” a feeling he could empathize with, having been greatly frustrated himself as a young artist.
With Benton’s help Pollock began his second semester at the League exempted from the school’s twelve-dollar monthly tuition. Benton had managed to secure for him a merit-based scholarship, much to the dismay of his other students. “That fellow couldn’t draw!” said Manuel Tolegian, who had just arrived in New York from Los Angeles and, at Pollock’s urging, signed up to study under Benton. He was startled to discover that his high school friend had risen to prominence so quickly. For Pollock it was a good term. He grew closer to Benton, who, having recently finished his New School murals, spent most of his evenings in class sketching beside his students. (“I had a model there,” he explained, whereas in his studio he couldn’t afford to hire one.) Pollock, by comparison, was no longer interested in sketching from life. According to his classmate Frances Avery, he spent most of his time “fooling around” with the techniques of mural painting under Benton’s approving gaze. He was expert at making gesso panels, silky white boards suited for tempera painting. One night the painter Harry Holtzman, who was studying across the hall under George Bridgman, walked into Benton’s classroom, noticed what Pollock was doing, and asked him a few questions about the unusual panels. “Pollock volunteered to make me a few,” he later recalled, adding that Pollock “tailed after Benton like a puppy dog. Whatever Benton did, he wanted to do too.”
To consider Pollock’s earliest paintings—less than a dozen survive from his three years at the League—is to recognize his debt to Benton. Like his teacher, he painted in the Regionalist vein, depicting horse plowers, wheat threshers, and other agrarian subjects; not a single scene of New York City survives among his works. A small painting that has been catalogued as Camp with Oil Rig (Fig. 1) is a somber, mud-colored, Regionalist-style landscape showing a tall brown derrick, a couple of gray shacks, and two crooked poles for a clothesline. The sky swirls and the ground sways in a “hollow and bump” style reminiscent of Benton. But Camp with Oil Rig has nothing in common with the upbeat, flag-waving spirit of American Scene painting. Pollock has painted a melancholy scene. The workers are nowhere in sight, the shacks look closed up, a lone shirt flaps on the clothesline. One senses in this painting Pollock’s obvious restlessness with the rhetoric of Regionalist art. Already he was striving for something more personal.
As much as he admired Benton, Pollock was incapable of submitting wholeheartedly to any one style or tradition. In his need to escape the political art of the thirties, he turned to the example of Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917), whose work he would have seen at the Ferargil Gallery, where Benton also exhibited. (“The only American master who interests me is Ryder,” Pollock boldly told an interviewer a deca
de later.) It is not difficult to understand his interest in Ryder, a solitary eccentric who for most of his years lived in a cramped garret on Eleventh Street, dressed in tattered rags, and personified the image of the romantic artist. He was well known in the thirties for his lunar seascapes and nocturnal pastorals, haunting, poetic works that are the very antithesis of Benton’s graphic, illustrative realism.
It is possible to discern Ryder’s influence in Pollock’s Self-Portrait (Fig. 2), one of his earliest known works. (He painted it on a gesso panel.) This small, eerie painting, like Ryder’s own Self-Portrait, shows a crudely rendered head modeled in reddish pigments and heavily veiled in shadow. The similarities end there. Pollock’s Self-Portrait is an unsettling work in which he depicts himself as a frightened little boy, his eyes wide with terror.
Like most young artists, Pollock didn’t hesitate to copy the painters he admired. He unabashedly stole whatever images interested him, while translating them into an idiom of his own. Most of his early paintings consist of subject matter taken from Ryder—mournful-looking horses, solitary riders, ghostly little boats—transposed into rhythmic, swirling landscapes reminiscent of Benton. Going West (Fig. 3), one of Pollock’s finest early paintings, is a spooky, moonlit landscape that shows a man in a broad-brimmed hat driving a team of mules and two wagons along a mountain road. The subject matter bears an unmistakable likeness to Ryder’s Sentimental Journey (Fig. 4). But other aspects of the painting—the glowing yellow moon and the swirling halo encapsulating the scene—evoke Benton’s Moonlight Over South Beach (Fig. 5), one of his most uncharacteristic works. That the Benton painting is a seascape did not deter Pollock from putting it to use in a western scene: a swirling body of water is transformed into whirling mountains. More important, Pollock did away with Benton’s horizon line, melding earth and sky together in circular motion. Already he was striving for compositional wholeness, as if seeking in his art the kind of completeness he rarely knew in his life. Derivative as Going West is, it possesses an undeniable originality and is a good example of Pollock’s talent for fusing disparate influences into a harmonious creation of his own.
Jackson Pollock Page 5
