Pollock did not make preparatory drawings for any of his paintings. This was somewhat unusual, as the customary practice in art school was to undertake a painting only after one had planned it out in a series of drawings. But Pollock had no patience for the long, technical process by which a charcoal sketch is developed into a finished painting and did away with it. He apparently started his canvases with only a vague idea of how they would develop and figured it out as he went along.
In June 1931, after completing their first year at the League, Pollock and Tolegian planned a “sketching trip” across the country. Encouraged by their teacher and his fabled sojourns in the American heartland, they came up with the idea of hitchhiking home to Los Angeles and collecting “local color” as they traveled. Their goal was to amass enough raw material to fuel them with painting ideas at least until the end of the next school year.
No sooner had Pollock and Tolegian set out than they realized their plans would have to be changed. The highways outside the city were packed with homeless, unemployed men, and almost no one was offering rides for fear of being robbed. So much for their leisurely sketching trip. They ended up hopping freight trains from state to state, an adventure that Pollock took to with the ease of a veteran hobo. One day in Indianapolis the two boys were chasing a train when Tolegian started to slow down. “Run faster!” Pollock yelled, but his friend couldn’t keep up. Pollock hopped aboard by himself and made the rest of the trip on his own. “My trip was a peach,” he wrote a few weeks later. “I got a number of kicks in the but and put in jail twice with days of hunger—but what a worthwhile experience.” The life of a hobo held a wondrous appeal for him, and it did not dampen his enthusiasm to discover that the interior of America bore little resemblance to the upbeat place depicted in Benton’s murals. Poverty was everywhere. “The miners and prostitutes in Terre Haute,” he wrote, “. . . their both starving—working for a quarter—digging their graves.” Pollock labeled these instances of hardship “swell color,” innocently parodying his teacher’s ideas.
Three weeks after setting out, Pollock arrived home in Los Angeles bubbling over with tales about his trip. His parents, who by then had reconciled, were horrified to learn of his adventures on the railroad. “I would have been worried sick,” his mother wrote, “if I knew he had been bumming the freight train. He sure took lots of chances of getting killed or crippled for life. But he is here safe & I am sure glad.”
Pollock spent the summer in Wrightwood, California, a mountain resort in the Angeles National Forest, where his father had rented a log cabin. Along with Tolegian, who had made the trip west in a mere nine days, he was able to find a job as a lumberjack. Every morning at dawn Tolegian picked up Pollock in an old, battered Ford and headed up a mountain path to the Cajon Pass, where the two young artists cut down trees, cleared away brush, and made way for a planned road. It was “sure hard work,” according to Jackson’s mother, “but better than nothing they just cut it down and trim it up so isn’t as hard as cutting into stove wood. Can’t cut very fast until they get used to hard work again and cools off a little, has been very hot.”
One evening the boys were driving down the mountain path when they got into an argument. Tolegian told Pollock he was no good at working on a team: he pushed on the dragsaw when he was supposed to pull and pulled when he was supposed to push. “That’s all I had to say,” Tolegian later recalled. Pollock, enraged by this bit of criticism, pressed his saw against his friend’s throat and raised it slowly, forcing Tolegian to lift his chin until he could barely see the road. When Tolegian let go of the wheel for a moment to try to grab the saw from Pollock’s hand, the car swerved into the mountainside and was wrecked.
With the approach of fall Pollock contemplated his return to New York with anxious reluctance. He had hoped to work at his drawing that summer, but somehow the months had slipped away from him. He had also hoped to save up some money, but there was “damned little left” from his lumberjack job. Writing to Charles in a dejected mood, he questioned the point of returning to the League when “more and more I realize I’m sadly in need of some method of making a living.” His mother had told him not to worry about money, for she was perfectly willing to help him out financially until he finished his schooling. “You’re entitled to it,” she often said, reminding him that his education was a necessary part of his training as an artist. But Jackson could tell that his father thought otherwise. “Dad still has difficulties in loosing money—and thinks I’m just a bum—while mother still holds the old love.”
For all his worries about his future Pollock returned to New York in the fall of 1931 eager to begin his second year at the League. Benton had managed to get him a part-time job in the school lunchroom, easing any financial pressures while conferring further legitimacy on his studies. Mornings Pollock studied under Benton. Afternoons he worked in the lunchroom, clearing tables, sweeping the floor, and quickly establishing himself among dozens of schoolmates as Benton’s most ardent champion.
The lunchroom of the League was a popular artists’ hangout, dominated by the figure of Arshile Gorky, an imposing, melodramatic Armenian-born painter who seldom came to school without his two Russian bloodhounds. Gorky worshiped the School of Paris and was already painting abstractly. His rivals accused him of copying Picasso, which invariably prompted Gorky to remark in his booming voice, “Has there in six centuries been a better art than Cubism? No!” Although Gorky never actually studied at the League, he could be found in the lunchroom most any afternoon with his friend Stuart Davis, who taught on the faculty. Davis had recently pioneered an Americanized version of Cubism in his Egg Beater series, four works based on fragmented images of a rotary egg beater, a rubber glove, and an electric fan, which he had nailed to a table in his studio and had used as his sole subject matter for an entire year. “That lunchroom was crazy,” the sculptor Philip Pavia once said. “On one side you had Gorky and Stuart Davis, and on the other side you had the Jackson and the Benton crowd.”
One day in the lunchroom Pollock overheard Gorky bragging to a group of students that he could probably convince Matisse to give a lecture at the League during his next visit to the United States. As other students listened in awe, Pollock walked over to the table and angrily blurted out, “What do we need those Europeans for?” Gorky became furious and started screaming at him, “Where do you think the Renaissance came from?” Pollock sided with Benton on every issue, no matter how narrow his teacher’s ideas. A major controversy erupted at the League after Benton learned that the school planned to hire the well-known German painters Hans Hofmann and George Grosz. Benton believed that a Depression-ravaged country should not be offering jobs to foreigners, an opinion Pollock adopted as his own and was more than willing to defend. “Pollock was posing as an artist,” said his classmate Whitney Darrow, Jr., later a cartoonist for The New Yorker, “not with a beret, goatee, and flowing tie, but as an antieffete type, a rough American artist, based on what he had learned from Benton.”
Pollock defended Benton’s ideas not only in the lunchroom but privately as well. In long, rambling letters to his parents, invariably mailed after weeks of delay, he spoke proudly of his teacher and offered unequivocal endorsement of his ideas. Writing to his mother during his second year at school, Pollock asked her whether his brother Sande, who was still living in Los Angeles, had “heard Thomas Craven lecture there or not—he should have. I meant to write him about it, he is one critic who has intelligence and a thorough knowledge of the history of art. I heard that he was made quite a joke there which is not unlikely for the element of painters found out there.” Thomas Craven, a tall, natty, acerbic art critic, was a close friend of Benton’s and the leading champion of American Scene painting. He hated the French avant-garde, arguing in articles and books that such artists as Matisse and Brancusi produced meaningless decoration that was destined for obscurity since no one could understand it. Pollock could not have picked a more small-minded critic to admire. Many years later C
raven would say of his onetime supporter: “All Pollock does is drink a gallon of paint, stand on a ladder and urinate.”
In spite of his allegiance to Benton, Pollock’s aspirations were not nearly as clear-cut as many of his schoolmates believed. In moments of daydreaming he still thought about becoming a sculptor. Then again, he was also interested in mural painting. Either way, he had made a crucial decision: somehow he was going to become a great artist, willing himself into what he knew he already was. “And when I say artist,” he wrote to his father, “I don’t mean it in the narrow sense of the word—but the man who is building things—creating molding the earth—whether it be the plains of the west—or the iron ore of Penn. Its all a big game of construction—some with a brush—some with a shovel—some choose a pen . . . Sculptoring I think tho is my medium. I’ll never be satisfied until I’m able to mould a mountain of stone, with the aid of a jack hammer, to fit my will.” (At the time, sculptor Gutzon Borglum was carving his famous memorial on the face of Mount Rushmore, a project that received wide coverage in the New York newspapers and that Pollock must have been familiar with.)
Pollock’s grandiose ambitions were in glaring contrast to his accomplishments. The most he could hope for at the time was that Benton might make him class monitor, a position he had applied for but felt “doubtful about getting.”
In October 1932, after spending another summer in California, Pollock began his third year at the League. He was now living at 46 Carmine Street (“a happy Italian street”) and, much to his satisfaction, could claim the distinction of being class monitor. His main responsibilities were hiring the models for class and assisting Benton with teaching demonstrations, in exchange for which he was exempted from having to pay tuition. He was highly conscientious in his duties, especially when compared to his teacher. One night when Benton failed to show up for class, someone started shouting, “What the hell are we paying for?” As others joined in the protest, Pollock left the classroom and returned an hour or so later with Benton in tow. On another occasion, Peter Busa complained to Pollock that Benton had yet to offer any criticism of his work. “You wait,” Pollock reassured him. “When he comes through that door, he’ll be right over to you.”
That December, Benton was thrust into the limelight again with the unveiling of his series of murals for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Pollock had helped him install them—they were hung in the museum’s reading room—and lending to the excitement was the fact that the museum had opened only one month earlier, at 10 West Eighth Street. The Whitney murals, which continued the themes set forth in the New School murals, were no less controversial. The New York Times called the project a “conspicuous success,” while Paul Rosenfeld of the New Republic found it so offensive he dubbed the room “the ex-reading room.” A few days after the Whitney murals went on view, Benton was offered his largest commission yet: the chance to paint the history of Indiana for the Indiana Pavilion at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Ignoring his teaching duties at the League, he promptly set off for Indianapolis, not to return to New York until the following fall.
When Benton left, his class was taken over by John Sloan, a tall, dapper, sixtyish painter who was one of the founders of the so-called Ashcan school. His own work was highly realistic, a tendency he encouraged in the work of his students as well. For Pollock, who was long past the point of submitting to the rigors of realistic drawing, Sloan held little appeal. “We have a substitute,” he reported to his father, “who I think little of, and I probably won’t stay with him for long.” He dropped out of the class in less than a month—and never studied painting in school again.
With Benton off in Indiana, Pollock decided to devote himself to sculpture. He was primarily interested in stone and mentioned to his parents that he was thinking of working in a quarry or a tombstone factory to learn “something about stone and the cutting of it.” Although these plans never materialized—“I’m about as helpless as a kitten when it comes to getting my way with jobs and things”—Pollock did sign up for a couple of courses in sculpture. For two months he studied under Robert Laurent, who was born in Brittany and well known in the thirties for his voluptuous nudes. His class at the League met at night. Pollock also signed up for a morning class at Greenwich House, a settlement house near Sheridan Square that offered free classes in art and music.
Pollock’s teacher at Greenwich House was Ahron Ben-Shmuel, a gruff, belligerent man whose massive carvings in granite and marble had names like The Warrior and The Pugilist. Pollock took an immediate liking to him and often stopped by his studio on Jane Street to watch him work. Ben-Shmuel’s specialty was stone carving. Rather than have his students make art, he taught them how to shape rough, natural stones into square blocks—how to prepare a stone for sculpting rather than actually sculpt it. “So far I have done nothing but try and flatten a round rock and my hand too,” Pollock noted good-naturedly to his father, “but it’s great fun and damned hard work.” He found it easy to submerge himself in his work, while recognizing that sculpture, with its cold-blooded, mechanical procedures, held none of the possibilities inherent in a single charcoal line. “I like it better than painting—drawing tho is the essence of all.”
One Wednesday morning in March 1933 Pollock and his brothers received a telegram from their mother informing them that their father had died. The news was a shock to Jackson. He had known that his father was sick with endocarditis, but no one had told him how serious it was. Only a few weeks earlier he had naively sent his father wishes for a hasty recovery. “Well Dad,” he had written, “by god its certainly tuff getting laid up. I hope you are better now . . . and for heck sake don’t worry about money—no one has it.”
It was immediately agreed upon by Jackson, Charles, and Frank that they would not attend their father’s funeral. They couldn’t afford the trip to Los Angeles. Naturally they considered borrowing from friends, but a federal “bank holiday” had been declared that week and depositors had no access to their savings. Stella felt terrible. “I am so sorry you boys could not be at home,” she wrote them soon after the funeral, “but knew it was impossible.” She went on to offer a moving account of her husband’s death. LeRoy had died at home, having joined his wife in Los Angeles a few months earlier. She had set up a bed for him in the dining room so he could look out the windows and see “the snow capped mountains with the beautiful green hills below sunshine fresh air and flowers.” The day before LeRoy died was a Saturday. At ten that morning he listened to a radio broadcast of President Roosevelt’s famous inaugural speech (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself . . .”) which he thought was wonderful. Sunday, after listening to the Tabernacle Choir on the radio, he started to have trouble breathing. A doctor was summoned. The doctor was standing in the doorway when LeRoy looked up at his wife. “Mother,” he said, “I don’t think I can last till morning.” Stella cradled him in her arms and he died.
Contemplating his father’s death, Pollock felt a keen sense of remorse. “I always feel I would like to have known Dad better,” he confided to his mother, “that I would like to have done something for he and you—many words unspoken—and now he is gone in silence.” He had never had a chance to prove himself to his father, and dejectedly he reflected on how little he had accomplished in his twenty-one years. He was still a student, “lazying” about the League, studying sculpture while waiting for Benton to return to New York. Suddenly it seemed to him as if his last three years at school had been spent in idle dreaming, and he vowed to his mother to get on with his career. “I had many things I wanted to do for you and Dad—now I’ll do them for you, mother. Quit my dreaming and get them into material action.”
A few weeks after his father’s death Pollock left the Art Students League and set out in search of “material action.” Exactly what he hoped to find he did not say, but the matter was irrelevant anyway. It was three years into the Depression; families were living in Central Park. With his schooling behind him and no prospects ahe
ad, Pollock joined the ranks of the unemployed.
4
Life with the Bentons
1933–35
In September 1933 Benton and Rita returned to New York and moved into an apartment at 10 East Eighth Street, across from the Hotel Brevoort. It was easy to recognize their apartment from the street, for Benton’s living room studio was lit with blue bulbs. Through the windows it almost looked like a Regionalist scene: Benton, dressed in work clothes, stooped before his easel, the blue light floating around him like a shining midwestern sky from one of his paintings.
No sooner had the Bentons settled into their new apartment than Pollock resumed his friendship with them. Having finished his schooling but not yet found a job, he took to spending most of his free time at their home. Afternoons, when Rita ran errands and Benton went uptown to the Art Students League to teach, Pollock would baby-sit for T.P., their six-year-old son. By the time Rita returned, Pollock had usually mopped the kitchen floor and cleaned the apartment from top to bottom; he couldn’t do enough to please her. “Jackson adored my mother,” one of the Benton’s children later said. “And my mother took care of him like a son.”
Jackson Pollock Page 6
