To thank Pollock for his baby-sitting, Rita would have him to dinner a few times a week. Like all the members of the Benton household, he was expected to help with dinner. Carefully choosing an item within his budget, Rita suggested that he contribute to the meals by bringing a turnip. Pollock never failed to show up for dinner without a turnip in his hand.
Pollock got along well with the Bentons’ little boy. During their afternoons together T.P. would climb up onto Pollock’s lap and ask to be told about their friend Jack Sass, a make-believe hero from the West. In his travels on a stallion Jack Sass had seen all the spooky sights of western folklore—ghost towns, abandoned gold mines, unattended campfires burning through the night. He wasn’t afraid of anything.
After Pollock had gone home for the day, T.P. would excitedly relate to his parents the latest adventure of Jack Sass. Benton listened patiently to the stories while thinking to himself that Jack Sass was the hero Pollock would never be. “Jack must have told him some big tales,” he later wrote, “perhaps in compensation for his own poor and frustrated conditions. Jack Sass was Jack Pollock without the frustrations.”
On the many occasions he ate at the Bentons’ house Pollock was unfailingly polite, even on the nights when wine was served with dinner. But stories came back to the family about his “wild behavior” when under the influence, and one night that fall Rita was summoned to St. Vincent’s Hospital after Pollock had injured himself in a drunken brawl. He had been returning from a party earlier in the evening when he spotted a wealthy-looking man walking a dog on lower Fifth Avenue. In a mischievous mood, he approached the man, got down on all fours, and petted the dog in a friendly manner but then jumped up suddenly with an angry look on his face. “You son of a bitch,” he shouted. “You feed that dog when I’m starving.” The man beat him up, and Pollock landed in the hospital suffering from head injuries and charged by the police with battery and assault. Though the charges were dropped, Pollock remained hospitalized for a few days, and it was Rita who sat by his bedside and nursed him back to health. “My mother talked about that incident all the time,” her son T.P. later recalled. “She thought it was horrible. To everyone in my family Jackson seemed so gentle.”
Besides stopping by for casual visits, Pollock showed up at the Bentons’ every Monday night to play in a band called the Harmonica Rascals. It had been founded by Benton a few years earlier after he had casually picked up a toy harmonica belong to T.P. and tried to play it. With the first few sounds he conceived a new ambition, deciding to collect folk songs on his trips across the country and teach them to his students and friends in New York. Using his own system of musical notation—he referred to the notes of the scale by number—he managed to collect hundreds of folk songs, and it wasn’t long before his Monday-night gatherings were attracting some of the best fiddlers and guitar strummers in the city. Among his followers was Charles Seeger, whose son Pete once said that the first time he heard the famous traditional song “John Henry,” it was played by Benton on the harmonica, with the elder Seeger accompanying him on the guitar.
For Pollock the main attraction of the Monday-night musicals was listening to Rita play the guitar and sing. He loved watching her perform, and his appreciation of her talents was no doubt heightened by his own ineptitude at singing or playing an instrument. As Benton later wrote, “Jack tried to play the harmonica with us but ran into some kind of ‘bloc’ about reading or playing the notes.” To keep him from dropping out of the band, Benton gave him a Jew’s harp, thinking it would be easier for him to play since he wouldn’t have to read notes; all he had to do was hum into the instrument and pluck a single string. That too gave him difficulty, but at least he enjoyed it. “[I] can’t play a damned thing,” he wrote to his family, “but it kinda puts me to sleep at nite and I kinda get a kick out of it.” It surely must have pleased him to discover that Benton thought he at least looked like a musician: The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley (Fig. 6), which was named after a folk song and exhibited at the Ferargil Gallery that April, includes a portrait of Pollock playing the Jew’s harp, his blond bangs hanging in his eyes.
By now Pollock was living at 46 East Eighth Street, on the same block as the Bentons. He shared the fifth-floor apartment with his brother Charles and his brother’s future wife, Elizabeth England. As the one who did the cooking and cleaning, Elizabeth came to resent Jackson and often complained to Charles that she failed to understand why he had to live with them. She was embittered by the fact that Jackson didn’t have a job and couldn’t contribute to household expenses. Sometimes Elizabeth returned home from work to find Jackson lying on his bed, lost in reverie and oblivious to the condition of his room. “Clean up this stinking mess or I’m calling the health department!” she’d scream as Jackson just lay there silently. Other days she found him sitting by the coal-burning stove in the kitchen, his feet propped up on a chair, waiting for his brother to come home. Elizabeth would lash out at him: “You’ve used up all the coal!” Pollock didn’t bother to defend himself, knowing that Elizabeth hated having to live with him and that nothing he could say would change her feelings toward him. He was polite to her, thanking her for dinner on the nights she cooked and offering to help with the dishes. But he spent increasing amounts of time at the Bentons’.
Charles never criticized his brother, assuming all blame for the trouble he caused while continuing to encourage him with his art. One day Charles suggested to Jackson that he consider designing a mural for Greenwich House, which had just announced plans to commission an artist to decorate the building’s lobby. The prospect of painting his own mural held a definite appeal for Jackson, and he quickly got to work preparing a proposal. On a sheet of heavy brown grocer’s paper he painted two scenes, one of which, presumably based on Benton’s Harmonica Rascals, shows a group of five musicians writhing to the beat of their music (Fig. 7). One of the musicians plays a fiddle, another a clarinet. The other instruments cannot be made out, however; the forms in the painting are so crude that even the musicians are barely recognizable. Pollock, as usual, sacrificed detail to the whole, ignoring the outward appearance of the scene while managing to capture the rhythm and animation underlying it.
Whatever the merits of his mural study, Pollock felt dissatisfied with it, realizing how inappropriate it was as a design for the lobby of Greenwich House. He decided not to submit it after all and didn’t even bother to finish it. It certainly would not have eased his frustration to read in The New York Times that May: “Greenwich House is exhibiting sketches submitted by Charles Pollock for a series of proposed murals . . .”
That summer Pollock was invited by the Bentons to join them at their beach home in Chilmark, Massachusetts, an isolated fishing town on the western edge of Martha’s Vineyard. He arrived in August after accompanying Charles on a drive to Los Angeles to see their mother. The Bentons’ place on the Vineyard was strikingly scenic, consisting of a weather-beaten cottage perched on a high hill that overlooked the harbor of Menemsha and a rickety barn, overgrown with roses, that served as Benton’s studio. No sooner had Pollock arrived on the Vineyard than Benton and Rita told him that he too could have his own studio as well as private living quarters—providing he was willing to live in a chicken coop. Thrilled by the idea of having his own place, Pollock went to work renovating the coop, a small, squat, dilapidated shack adjacent to the barn. He cleaned it out, built a small table, and covered the dirt floor with wooden boards. He cut a large window in a wall. Benton helped him out by building a few shelves, soon to be stocked with painting supplies, and Rita brought over an army cot from the house. The coop was nicknamed “Jack’s Shack,” and it would be Pollock’s summer residence for the next three years. “I am inclined to believe,” Benton later wrote, “that he was happier during his Martha’s Vineyard visits than in any other time in his life. Contented maybe is a better word.”
Pollock’s days on the Vineyard could not have been more simple. Mornings he helped out around the hou
se, pumping water, mowing the grass, and volunteering to take on such projects as painting the trim of the house. Fond of gardening, he weeded the flower patch and planted new varieties. By noon Rita would have packed up a picnic lunch, and the foursome would set off on an outing, Benton and Rita walking side by side and Pollock carrying T.P. on his shoulders. Pollock and the boy usually strayed off on their own after lunch to sail T.P.’s boat in Menemsha Pond or swim naked beneath the cliffs, accompanied by their make-believe friend Jack Sass.
In these peaceful surroundings Pollock found it easier to concentrate on his work. It was a highly productive time for him, and he turned out a series of watercolors and oil paintings loosely based on the view of Menemsha Pond from the window of his hilltop studio. Most of his Chilmark seascapes are small in size, crude in execution, and solitary in mood, and they bear far less resemblance to the actual landscape than to the ghostly, lonely “in-scapes” of Albert Pinkham Ryder. Typical of Pollock’s Vineyard scenes is T.P. Boat’s in Menemsha Pond (Fig. 8), a very small painting (it measures only 5” × 6”) in which a tiny white boat floats on a still pond, oddly isolated from the harbor and clouds that swirl around it. In Seascape (Fig. 9)—widely regarded as one of Pollock’s strongest early works—the mood is more urgent, with a small white sailboat heading into turbulent waters. The painting is dominated by the image of waves, which are rendered almost abstractly in thick, rough, roiling strokes of turquoise and black, each one intertwining with the next to form a flowing whole. Seascape offers a good example of Pollock’s instinct for “allover” composition—practically every inch of the canvas is charged with equal intensity or emphasis—a significant feature of his later work.
Among the people Pollock met through the Bentons was Helen Marot, an elderly social reformer who summered in Chilmark and was a longtime friend of Rita Benton. At sixty-nine she was still attractive, with shiny auburn hair, a light complexion, and a caring, deferential manner that made people feel appreciated. She had achieved prominence earlier in life as a labor leader, author, and editor of the Dial but had grown disillusioned with social causes. As Lewis Mumford later wrote in his autobiography, “Overnight the Helen Marot I had known on ‘The Dial’ dropped the preoccupations of a whole lifetime, as if they were so many soiled garments.” Seeking more fundamental insight into the human condition, she turned to psychology. By the time she met Pollock she was teaching at the City and Country School, a progressive private school in Greenwich Village founded by her lifelong companion Caroline Pratt. The two elderly women took an immediate interest in Pollock, recognizing in his shy, hesitant manner a person of unusual sensitivity, and offered to help him however they could. They already knew his brother Charles, who taught art at their school on a part-time basis, and suggested to Jackson after meeting him in Chilmark that he too should consider working at the school. They offered him the job of janitor.
Having found his first full-time job, Pollock didn’t hesitate to move out of Charles’s apartment after returning from Martha’s Vineyard in September 1934. In his eagerness to escape a strained living arrangement, he left the spacious apartment on Eighth Street for markedly inferior accommodations: a small unheated room one flight above a lumberyard at 76 West Houston Street, where he slept on a mattress thrown on the floor and cooked simple meals for himself on a tiny wood-burning stove. Impoverished as he was, Pollock was still better off than many of his neighbors. Houston Street was lined with Depression-style shanties, and it was rare that Pollock left his building without stepping over a sleeping derelict in the entranceway.
That October, Pollock’s brother Sande arrived in New York from Los Angeles intent on pursuing a career in art. He had wanted to join Jackson and Charles in New York for many years, partly because he had missed them so much. It had made him sad to have to say goodbye to them at the end of each summer, and the last time had been the hardest. “I felt so sorry for Sanford,” his mother had written to her sons in New York, “he broke down and cried he hated to see you leave would loved to [have] gone with you.” Now Sande had finally come to New York, hitchhiking across the country and arriving in Manhattan with “34 cents in my pocket, and California clothes—not even an overcoat.” He headed directly for Jackson’s apartment and was startled to find his kid brother living in abject poverty. Excited anyway to be in New York, Sande moved into Jackson’s apartment and, for lack of a job, accompanied Jackson every night to the school where he worked as a janitor.
Every afternoon around four the two brothers set off for the City and Country School, at Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue. They shared Jackson’s job, Sande helping him empty garbage cans, sweep floors, and, once a week, mop the hallways of the five-story building. “Much as Jackson hated the janitor job,” Sande later recalled, “he did it conscientiously. If he was committed to doing something, he would do it right and not loaf.” The job paid ten dollars a week, which was hardly enough to support the two brothers and forced them to depend on government handouts. They managed to get on the rolls of the New York Emergency Relief Administration—better known as Home Relief—a state-run welfare program that provided them with a meager stipend and a limited amount of food, consisting for the most part of bags of cornmeal and occasional scraps of meat. With the onset of winter their situation worsened. They stole to survive, sneaking coal and wood from neighborhood markets.
One winter evening Jackson and Sande were on their way to work when they stopped in front of New York University to observe a scene that had caught their attention. The university then housed the Gallery of Living Art, a leading collection of contemporary European paintings belonging to A. E. Gallatin, a wealthy Cubist painter and pharmacologist. Through the windows of the gallery Jackson and Sande could see Matisses and Braques gleaming against the walls, an odd backdrop to the pathetic group of hoboes clustered in front of the building, huddling between pillars to shelter themselves from the wind. The two brothers were moved by the scene—the beautiful paintings, the homeless men, art’s utter uselessness in the face of hardship. At Sande’s suggestion he and Jackson each painted the scene (the latter’s work has since been lost) and exhibited the results at the John Reed Club, a center of radical art and politics on Sixth Avenue.
Benton and Rita were deeply concerned about Pollock’s welfare, realizing that he could barely afford to feed or clothe himself, let alone pay for art supplies. They wondered what they could do to help him. Had he asked for a loan, they gladly would have given it to him, but as Rita later wrote: “Jack was a very proud and sensitive young man. There was no way of giving him money.” One day Benton suggested to Pollock that he consider decorating some plates and bowls—plates are much easier to sell than paintings, Benton told him—and exhibiting them in the “relief show” that Rita was planning to hold at the Ferargil Gallery that December. Pollock was not adverse to the suggestion; he accompanied Rita to a plate warehouse downtown, allowed her to buy him a stack of plates, and, working at the Bentons’ apartment, decorated the china with designs that Rita later described as “most beautiful.” On one of the plates he dripped and splattered paint, his first known use of the technique that later became his dominant one.
Rita had not long before convinced the owner of the Ferargil to turn over the gallery’s basement to unknown, indigent artists, thinking it was the least she could do at a time when so many artists were struggling. She planned to hold a Christmastime exhibit, and Pollock was more than willing to help her out. Along with Manuel Tolegian, he cleared out the basement, built sculpture stands, and whitewashed the cinder-block walls. He assisted with sales too, visiting the gallery almost every afternoon that December to sit at a table in the entranceway and answer questions from visitors. The show received wide publicity, with The New York Times reporting: “Mrs. T. H. Benton Collection One of Several in Which High Standard Is Reached.” Among the works on exhibit were Pollock’s painted plates and bowls. As Benton had predicted, every one of the plates sold—to Rita. For years afterward Pollock’s plates co
uld be found on the fireplace mantel of the Bentons’ home in Chilmark.
Benton encouraged Pollock to exhibit his work every chance he could get, be it in the basement of the Ferargil, at neighborhood centers like the John Reed Club, or in the outdoor art shows in Washington Square Park. Benton also recommended that he submit his work to the popular competition-exhibitions organized annually by the Brooklyn Museum, and it was at this venerable institution that Pollock made his museum debut. In February 1935, a month after the Ferargil show closed, Pollock and Benton (and more than a hundred others) participated in the museum’s “Eighth Biennial Exhibition of Water Colors, Pastels and Drawings by American and Foreign Artists.” Pollock’s entry, entitled Threshers, has since been lost, but the information he supplied for the catalogue helps clarify the nature of his youthful ambitions. Asked to provide a biographical sketch, Pollock stated that he was born in Cody, had studied under Benton, and, with notable bravura, went on to claim that he was represented by the Ferargil Gallery. He also stated that he worked in fresco, another instance of wishful thinking.
By now Pollock was working at a new job, having just been transferred by the city from Home Relief to Work Relief, a program established the previous spring to put the unemployed to work. He was hired as a “stone cutter,” presumably having indicated on his application that he had studied stone carving under Ben-Shmuel and possessed certain skills. However promising the job may have sounded, it turned out to be no more challenging than his previous job as a janitor. As a so-called stone cutter, Pollock joined a crew of laborers who were sent around the city to clean public monuments. Not long after he started he was demoted without explanation to a “stone carver helper.” Thus Jackson Pollock, who dreamed about painting frescoes and exhibiting at the Ferargil, spent his twenty-third year cleaning bird droppings from public statuary for sixty-five cents an hour.
Jackson Pollock Page 7
