Jackson Pollock

by Deborah Solomon

  That spring Benton decided after twenty-three years in New York to return to his native Missouri. Disheartened and depressed by recent attacks on American Scene painting, he had come to believe that the East Coast art establishment was dominated by Communist sympathizers unwilling to tolerate anyone who didn’t share their ideas. Already he had been hooted down at the John Reed Club, where, he wrote, “an enraged Commie threw a chair at me and turned the meeting into a yelling shambles.” For the past few months he had been sparring with Stuart Davis in the magazine Art Front, with Davis arguing that Benton’s belligerent “nationalism” was only one step removed from fascism. According to Davis, Benton was a “petty opportunist . . . who should have no trouble selling his wares to any fascist government.”

  Establishment art critics came to Benton’s defense, but no amount of favorable publicity could convince him to remain in New York. In farewell interviews in the local newspapers Benton railed against New York intellectuals and their uncritical embrace of communism. “They want to take the Marxist slant at everything,” Benton told the Herald Tribune. “Why, gol ding it, the Marxian idea was built up in 1848. How can it be valid in every gol dinged detail today? Communism is a joke everywhere in the United States except New York.”

  With those parting words Benton left New York in April 1935 and settled in Kansas City, where he continued to paint in the Regionalist style until his death in 1975. It does not diminish his accomplishments to note that although he strove for half a century to free American art from European influence, he did not achieve this goal. He traveled the country more extensively than any artist before or after him, visiting the steel mills of the Northeast and the cotton plantations of the South and the corn fields of the Midwest, as if subject matter alone could define an American painting style. But for all his talk about being a Regionalist, Benton was essentially a Mannerist; he draped the figures of El Greco in farmers’ overalls and continued the stylistic conventions of sixteenth-century Florence. Among the many ironies of his career is the fact that the student whose talents Benton described as “most minimal” and who worked in the abstract vein that Benton abhorred would one day accomplish exactly what Benton had sought for himself: Pollock would invent an American painting style. And among the many ironies of Pollock’s career is that he no more thought about creating a national art movement than he imagined that he, a painfully shy person incapable of talking in public, would become its internationally known leader.

  But in the spring of 1935 Pollock was devastated by the departure of Benton and Rita. Rita had assured him before leaving that he was welcome to visit them in Kansas City and to continue summering in Chilmark, but that wasn’t much of a comfort. There would be no more spaghetti dinners, no musical jams, no shows at the Ferargil Gallery. No more afternoons with T.P. No more walks down Eighth Street, when he could look up at the Benton’s apartment and know from the blue light that somebody was home. For the past five years, ever since Pollock had arrived in New York, the Bentons had cared for him like a son, and with their departure, he lost all sense of purpose. “He was truly a lost soul,” Tolegian wrote to Benton many years later. “When you and Rita left New York, he took to heavy drinking, even spoke to me of suicide a number of times.” Three years would pass before Pollock acknowledged to himself that somehow he’d have to free himself from the burden of Benton’s influence.

  5

  The Project

  1935–38

  At one point during the Depression, Pollock noted wryly to his family: “Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn’t have as far to fall.” He could have easily made the same claim about artists, who, accustomed to being poor, had little to lose from the collapse of the American economy. Many artists were actually better off in the thirties than before or after it, for by 1935 the government had created one of its more successful relief programs, the WPA Federal Art Project. Thousands of artists, most of whom had been supporting themselves with menial part-time jobs, were suddenly earning a respectable wage of $23.86 a week to paint on a full-time basis. Pollock, who was to work on the Project for the next eight years, once told an interviewer that he was “grateful to the WPA, for keeping me alive during the thirties.”

  The idea of a federal art program had first gotten under way in 1933 when President Roosevelt received a letter from a painter named George Biddle, a childhood friend of his from the Groton School. Biddle suggested to the president that he consider starting an art program based on the example of the Mexican mural movement of the 1920s, explaining that the Mexican government had paid artists “plumbers’ wages” to decorate the walls of the country. Roosevelt at first was ambivalent. Only one week earlier Diego Rivera had sparked a well-publicized controversy by painting a portrait of Lenin in a mural in Rockefeller Center. Ordered by the Rockefeller family to remove the portrait, Rivera had offered to balance it with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln; five days later he was forced to stop work. The incident served as a warning to Roosevelt, who later confided to Biddle that the last thing he needed was “a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Building.”

  Despite his reservations Roosevelt forwarded Biddle’s letter to the Treasury Department, where it fell into receptive hands. By the end of the year the government had created the Public Works of Art Project, the first federally funded art project in this country. Although the PWAP was a small-scale undertaking that folded after five months, it seems to have allayed any fears the Roosevelt administration may have had about giving tax dollars to artists. As Harry Hopkins, the director of the New Deal programs, put it, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”

  The government enlarged its relief activities to artists in August 1935 with the creation of the WPA Federal Art Project. To qualify for a job, an artist had to prove only that he was poor, a criterion that few had trouble meeting. Almost all of the future Abstract Expressionists worked on the Project. Willem de Kooning designed a mural for the Williamsburg Housing Project but was fired within a year when the government discovered that he wasn’t an American citizen. William Baziotes taught art in Queens. Arshile Gorky, who ironically described WPA art as “poor art for poor people,” painted a mural for the New York World’s Fair, as did Philip Guston. As for Pollock, he joined Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Ad Reinhardt on the Project’s easel division, which required them to produce about one painting a month for allocation to schools, post offices, and other government buildings. So basic was the experience of working on the Project that Barnett Newman, who had a job in his family’s clothing manufacturing business at the time and couldn’t get onto the Project, regretted it for years afterward. “I paid a severe price for not being on the Project with the other guys,” he once said. “In their eyes I wasn’t a painter.”

  When Pollock first joined the Project he signed up for the mural division, deciding to pursue his early interest in public art. But he quickly realized that he had no patience for the teamwork required of mural painters. Within a few months he had switched to the easel division—the largest of the Project’s sections—electing to work at home and produce about one painting a month for allocation to government buildings. As simple as it may have sounded, Pollock soon found himself subjected to a long list of regulations that made his earliest days on the Project a rather bewildering experience. Among the many rules enforced by the government was the one that artists on the easel division, who all worked at home, had to report to an office on East Thirty-ninth Street every morning and at the end of the day to punch a time clock. Failure to punch the clock resulted in the withholding of a paycheck. Pollock, who was not an early riser by nature, had difficulty meeting the 8:00 A.M. check-in. The artist Jacob Kainen recalls Pollock racing frantically toward the time clock seconds before the deadline, dressed in pajamas.

  Within a year the government had dropped the time-clock policy in response to complaints from artists in Brooklyn and the Bronx, who were spending the better part of their workday in tran
sit. But artists remained subjected to many other regulations that were no less confounding. For one, they were required to submit a painting to the government every four to eight weeks, depending on the size of the canvas. They were given four weeks for a 16″ × 20″ canvas, six weeks for a 24″ × 36″ canvas, three weeks for a watercolor. Even more absurd, a few months after the Project began, artists were ordered to stop signing their paintings, the rationale being that bridge builders and bricklayers don’t sign their work, so why should painters? The basic assumption underlying the Project was that artists were no different from any other government employees and that paintings were just another form of property. It is this mentality that helps explain why almost none of Pollock’s WPA paintings survive: the majority were destroyed by the government.

  When the federal government began phasing out the Project in the early forties, it disposed of the artwork in its possession as if it were so much scrap metal. In a typical incident in March 1941 the government decided to clean out a storage closet in which more than six hundred and fifty watercolors had accumulated; the paintings were incinerated. Among the destroyed watercolors, according to government documents, were works by Milton Avery, Jack Tworkov, Loren Maclver, I. Rice Pereira, Sande Pollock, and Jackson Pollock. Twelve of Pollock’s watercolors were destroyed, and judging from their titles—Sunny Landscape, Baytime, Martha’s Vineyard, and so on—they consisted of works he had completed during his summers in Chilmark.

  In a separate incident in December 1943 the government quietly disposed of numerous other artworks by auctioning them off at a Flushing warehouse, along with scrap iron and other surplus property. Thousands of oil paintings, which had already been removed from their stretchers, were offered for sale by the pound. A plumber purchased the entire lot, thinking that the canvases could be used to insulate pipes. He later realized, however, that when pipes heated up they burned the oil paint, giving off an unpleasant smell. The plumber contacted a junk dealer, who purchased the canvases and sold them to Roberts Book Company, a curiosity shop on Canal Street. The owner of the bookstore heaped the truckload of ragged, mildewed canvases on long tables in the back room of the store. Among the first to pick through the stack was Herbert Benevy, an art collector and the owner of the Gramercy Art Frame Shop. His selection, purchased at three dollars a canvas, included works by Milton Avery, Alice Neel, Joseph Solman, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. Two of Pollock’s paintings were rescued in this way.

  In September 1935, after nine years in New York, Charles Pollock accepted a job in Washington, DC, as a staff artist for the Resettlement Administration. Hired to work in the agency’s “special skills” division, he joined a team of accomplished artists that included Ben Shahn and settled in Potomac, Maryland. He returned to New York only for occasional visits, and the days when Jackson could depend on Charles for unstinting personal support promptly ended.

  Upon leaving New York, Charles turned over the lease on his apartment at 46 East Eighth Street to Jackson and Sande, who were still sharing a single room on Houston Street. Their new apartment, in the hub of Greenwich Village, was comparatively luxurious, occupying the entire top floor of a five-story building and including such novelties as hot-water plumbing and a private bath. At the far end of the floor-through was a large, sunny room with a view of Eighth Street, and Jackson didn’t hesitate to plunk down his easel and claim the room as his studio. Sande, who had also joined the Project’s easel division, set up a studio in a small, dark room adjacent to Jackson’s—the first of his many concessions to his brother in the seven years they were to live together on Eighth Street.

  From his earliest days on the Project’s easel division Pollock had difficulty meeting his monthly requirement. The problem was that he had begun to feel impatient with painting in the Regionalist style. Cotton pickers, wheat threshers, and people playing instruments no longer held his interest as subjects, and he knew that somehow he would have to break free from Benton.

  Pollock’s problems were well known on the easel division. His fellow painters had heard that he had become “disaffected” from his work, according to Carl Holty. Weeks would go by during which he failed to stop by the Project office to hand in a painting or pick up art supplies, and people wondered where he was.

  Pollock’s supervisor on the Project was Burgoyne Diller, a former schoolmate of his from the League, who painted in the geometric style of Mondrian. In spite of their artistic differences, Diller recognized Pollock as a promising young artist and went out of his way to help him. At one point when Pollock had missed his monthly deadline, Diller stopped by the Eighth Street apartment to see what the problem was. “The Project can’t use this work,” Pollock told him despairingly as he took Diller around his studio and showed him a few canvases that were obvious failures. “I’m in a bog,” he said. “I can’t do anything.” Diller reassured him: “It’s okay. You’re on the Project. Go on.” And so Pollock went on, handing in paintings that he couldn’t believe anyone really wanted.

  Not all of Pollock’s paintings were accepted by the Project. Some were returned to him for additional work, others were rejected outright. Writing to Charles about a year after joining the Project, Pollock sounded understandably discouraged. “There’s no news here—not having much luck with painting. Got my last picture turned back for more time . . . if it had been a good picture I wouldn’t have consented.”

  Sande Pollock understood the difficulties his brother was facing. As one who had never been an admirer of Benton’s and who in fact felt that Regionalism was “nonsense,” he thought it only logical that Jackson should have reached a dead end in his work. Sande admired the Mexicans: Rivera, Orozco, and David Siqueiros, the last of whom he had studied with in Los Angeles. When, in the spring of 1936, Siqueiros opened a workshop in New York—it was located in a townhouse on Union Square—Sande suggested to Jackson that the two of them volunteer to work there.

  In the next few months Pollock helped out at the Siqueiros workshop almost every afternoon. He found it an interesting place, for Siqueiros, more than anyone else Pollock knew of, took amazing liberties with his materials. The youngest and most militant of the “big three” Mexican muralists, Siqueiros believed that one couldn’t paint revolutionary pictures with old techniques; it was necessary to devise new ones. While his work was realistic, he often started a canvas by placing it on the floor and spattering paint from a stick, as a way of generating images and getting ideas. Other times he worked with an airbrush, filling it up with Duco paint, a commercial lacquer used to paint cars, and spraying large surfaces. (His nickname was “Il Duco.”) But the chief purpose of the workshop was to turn out posters, floats, and other props for various Communist organizations. For Pollock, whose interest in politics was markedly superficial—he didn’t vote once in the course of the thirties, according to city election records—it is safe to say that the workshop appealed to him primarily as a place to learn about new methods.

  While most of the assistants at the Siqueiros workshop were assigned to specific projects, Pollock was far too independent to want to make posters and banners according to some visionary master plan. He never asked for assignments, and he wasn’t given any. But his admiration for Siqueiros was genuine, and he was more than willing to help out at the workshop with routine chores. He mixed paint, sawed wooden panels, pasted, plastered, and ran errands, bringing to his tasks his usual eagerness to make himself of use. None of his coworkers took him very seriously, and several were quick to fault him for his ineptitude. “He couldn’t draw,” said Axel Horn, as a way of explaining why Pollock never made posters. Harold Lehman was no less cynical, later stating angrily, “He had no ideas.”

  But for all his seeming dullness, Pollock was paying close attention to the goings-on at the workshop. He was very interested in Siqueiros’ techniques, and in fact tried them out in the privacy of his studio. In a work called Landscape with Steer, Pollock took a black-and-white lithograph of a steer and airbrushed the image with glowi
ng bursts of red, orange, and blue. Another print, Figures in a Landscape, has some large black splatters on it. One senses from these works that Pollock was looking for a freer, more liberating way to paint. On the other hand, his efforts were rather half-hearted, as if splattering paint simply for the sake of being spontaneous didn’t really interest him. First he’d have to figure out what he wanted to say with it.

  For some time Sande Pollock had been trying to save enough money to have his high school girlfriend join him in New York. In July 1936, with seventy-five dollars in savings, he bought a train ticket and sent it to Arloie Conaway, who was living with her parents on their citrus farm in Riverside, California. At the end of the month the couple were married at City Hall—Jackson served as a witness—and Arloie moved into the Eighth Street apartment. A quiet, kind, self-effacing woman, she had no thought of asking her husband when, if ever, Jackson planned on finding his own apartment. To the contrary, Arloie recognized Jackson as a hypersensitive young man who needed all the help he could get from Sande and tried not to interfere with the brothers’ relationship. On nights when she could hear Jackson drunkenly ascending the hallway stairs, she went into her bedroom, closed the door, and stayed there for the remainder of the night as Sande sobered him up in the kitchen.

  That September, Jackson decided to leave New York for an extended stay in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where a couple of his former schoolmates were renting an old farmhouse. Sande at first opposed the idea, reminding his brother that, in addition to his obligations on the Project, the rent on their apartment was thirty-five dollars a month, half of which was Jackson’s responsibility. But Jackson was adamant about leaving New York for the winter. He had accomplished very little work since joining the Project a year before and thought he might be more productive in rural surroundings; he certainly couldn’t be less productive. Besides, he now had a car—Charles had left behind a Model T Ford when he moved to Washington—and could easily commute to New York once a week or so to attend to his obligations on the Project.