Jackson Pollock

by Deborah Solomon

  A painting that has been catalogued as Untitled (Naked Man with Knife) (Fig. 10) is probably the most explicitly violent work of Pollock’s career. It shows a ritual sacrifice. A naked young boy, who resembles the artist, clutches a knife with both hands and prepares to plunge it into his victim, who is trying to escape. His arms flail, his legs kick, his mouth screams. Naked Man with Knife is a painting about conflict, a continuing theme of Pollock’s as he struggled toward artistic maturity. The style of the painting—with its massive forms, harsh diagonals, and dramatic light-dark contrasts—is reminiscent of Orozco, who offered Pollock a way of dispensing with Benton. The painting can be read as a private allegory of that very imperative.

  Pollock produced many drawings in 1939, and they too show Orozco’s influence. He borrowed the Mexican’s ancient symbols—serpents, axes, maimed human figures—while yanking them out of context and fusing them together into images so frenzied they lack even a hint of coherent meaning. Yet perhaps Pollock intended his drawings only as personal jottings. For most of them were made for Dr. Henderson, who encouraged him to use the process of drawing as a way of gaining access to his unconscious.

  In eighteen months of therapy with Dr. Henderson, Pollock gave the doctor eighty-two drawings and one gouache as part of his treatment. The “psychoanalytic drawings,” as they are known, later became the focus of vociferous scholarly debate. In 1970 Dr. Henderson sold the drawings to a San Francisco art gallery amid charges that he had violated his patient’s confidentiality. Sixty-five of the drawings were exhibited the following November at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Though the drawings themselves offered few aesthetic revelations—the critic Lawrence Alloway dismissed them as “heavy-handed and banal, the work of a man who did not get going as an artist until 1942”—the simple fact that Pollock had undergone Jungian analysis inspired an outpouring of revisionist criticism that read specific Jungian meanings into Pollock’s paintings. Throughout the seventies, fashionable Jungian phrases such as “the terrible mother,” “the night sea journey,” and “the union of opposites” were ubiquitous in Pollock criticism. The assertions tended to be doctrinaire and at times reduced Pollock’s art to little more than systematic illustration of Jungian theory.

  While there is no evidence to support the claim that Jung had a major influence on Pollock’s art—like most painters, Pollock was much more influenced by art than by literature—it is safe to say that Pollock was interested in Jung. In one of his sketches from this period he noted “the four functions of consciousness” as defined by Jung (intuition, feeling, sensation, and thinking) and coded them according to color. Other sketches are abundant with such Jungian staples as mandalas and trees of life. And Pollock did subscribe to Jung’s theories on creativity. Jung believed that art comes from the unconscious, from buried “primordial images” that the artist must seize and shape into art. This was no news to Pollock, who, long before he ever heard the word “unconscious” had been using his art (or trying to use it) as an expression of his deepest instincts. The problem was finding a vocabulary of forms, which Jung, of course, could not help him with. But Picasso could.

  No other artist played as pivotal a role in Pollock’s development as Picasso, and no painting was as pivotal as Guernica. Picasso’s famous elegy for the Basque town of Guernica was first exhibited in New York in May 1939 at the Valentine Gallery, on East Fifty-seventh Street. It was shown a second time in New York from November 1939 to January 1940 in a large Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Though the hundreds of works in the show have since become synonymous with high culture, the public was initially appalled by what it saw, and The New York Times felt obligated to warn its readers that they “may well turn in dismay or frank disgust from some of his art’s grotesque phrases.” These words of caution surely were meant to apply to Guernica: A dagger-tongued horse writhes in agony, a woman shrieks in a burning house, a mother holds a dead child. It’s a painting as urgent as front-page news, with its newspaper tones of black, white, and gray and flattened forms pinned like headlines to the picture surface. Guernica proved that the Cubism of Picasso was not simply a set of aesthetic principles but a means of expressing overwhelming emotion—“the fear and the courage of living and dying,” in the words of Eluard.

  1. LeRoy Pollock, the artist’s father, was orphaned at the age of three and grew up to be a fruit and dairy farmer. (Courtesy Frank Pollock)

  2. Stella Pollock, the artist’s mother, was a gifted seamstress. The dress she is wearing in the photograph is typical of her handiwork. (Courtesy Frank Pollock)

  3. This family portrait was taken in Chico, California, when Jackson (far right) was five years old. In the top row, left to right, are brothers Charles and Jay. Brothers Sande and Frank are seated. The family was poor, but Stella made sure that her sons were well dressed. (Courtesy Frank Pollock)

  4. The entire student body of the Walnut Grove School, Glenn County, California, 1922. Jackson Pollock, then ten years old, is in the second row, on the far left. His brother Sande is standing behind him, and his brother Frank is in the back row next to the teacher. (Courtesy Frank Pollock)

  5. At the age of sixteen Pollock enrolled at Manual Arts High School, in Los Angeles. Soon after he declared his ambition to become “an Artist of some kind.” (Courtesy Archives of American Art)

  6. Following in the footsteps of his brother Charles (center), Jackson moved to New York to study at the Art Students League. Manuel Tolegian (right) was one of his classmates and a close friend. (Courtesy Archives of American Art)

  7. Thomas Hart Benton was Pollock’s art teacher. He once said of his pupil: “Pollock was a born artist. The only thing I taught him was how to drink a fifth a day.” (Courtesy Jessie Benton)

  8. Pollock often joined Benton, his wife Rita, and son T.P. for a night of music-making at the family’s apartment in Greenwich Village. Benton played the harmonica and Rita played the guitar. (Courtesy Jessie Benton)

  9. Benton had a beach house in Chilmark, on Martha’s Vineyard, where Pollock spent many of his summers. (Courtesy Jessie Benton)

  10. In 1936 Pollock worked as an assistant to David Alfaro Siqueiros (left), the youngest and most militant of the “big three” Mexican muralists. (Courtesy Archives of American Art)

  11. Another important influence on Pollock was John Graham, an erudite Russian émigré with firsthand knowledge of Picasso and Cubism. (Courtesy Max Granick)

  For Pollock, Guernica was an epiphany, awakening him to the power of abstract painting. For so many years he had failed to take heed of the Cubist revolution, blinded by his loyalty to Benton. But it was clear to him now that Picasso was the greatest living painter and one he would have to contend with if he harbored any ambitions of his own. Around 1939 Pollock produced a number of small paintings in the Cubist style. He also filled several sketchbooks with variations on Guernica, and approximately half of the drawings he gave to Dr. Henderson in the course of his psychotherapy relate directly to the mural’s iconography. But this is not to imply that Pollock submitted to Picasso’s influence wholeheartedly. To the contrary, Guernica galvanized his fiercest competitive instincts, and his work from this period shows far more independence than his earlier work. Among Pollock’s sketches based on Guernica are some drawings of a bull—Picasso’s alter ego—in which he splintered and fragmented the image as if threatening to do away with it altogether. But Picasso could not be reckoned with so easily, and Pollock’s obsession with him would span many years.

  “Jack is doing very good work,” Sande reported to Charles in the spring of 1940. “After years of trying to work along lines completely unsympathetic to his nature, he has finally dropped the Benton nonsense and is coming out with an honest and creative art.”

  But then again he found himself beset by all kinds of problems. As Pollock had feared, he was dismissed from his job on the Project. His layoff, in May 1940, was the result of a new rule requiring that artists be “rotated”—or terminated for at least a
month once they had worked eighteen months. The layoff came at a bad time; Sande, who had been contributing to the cost of his brother’s psychotherapy, had been laid off from his job the previous spring and had spent five months out of work before being rehired at a lower salary. “A winter of ups and downs with the latter in the majority,” Sande reported to Charles a few days after Jackson’s layoff. “I was off the Project from August to January. Just getting things leveled out and now Jack gets kicked off this week without much chance of getting back on.”

  Pollock tried hard to get his job back. In order to be rehired, he first had to be recertified for public relief—he had to prove that he was poor—which entailed visiting the offices of the Work Relief Bureau and answering a litany of questions from government clerks: Did he have a savings account? Property holdings? Support from relatives? Insurance policies that could be readily converted to cash? Had he considered joining the army? Was he aware that the army had openings for healthy young men? “It makes any one nervous,” Sande wrote to Charles, “to have to go through such a humiliating experience and Jack is especially sensitive to that sort of nasty business.”

  Pollock remained out of work throughout the summer, and it was a terrible period for him. On June 4 Helen Marot died suddenly at the age of seventy-five. “The effect of this loss,” according to Dr. Henderson, “was to push him back again into some of his old troubles, with an alcoholic binge as the outward symptom.” Many of his drinking sprees ended in the detoxification room at Bellevue Hospital, where Sande would take him to help him sober up. Then, a few weeks after Helen Marot’s death, Pollock learned that his doctor could no longer treat him. Dr. Henderson was moving to San Francisco that fall and had no choice but to refer Pollock to another analyst. The news was more than Pollock could bear, for Henderson, at the very least, had been the one person who could sympathize with all his doubts.

  One night that June, Pollock’s high school friend Manuel Tolegian was awakened by the sound of smashing glass. He got out of bed and looked out the window of his apartment, at 28 Vandam Street. Pollock was standing across the street, beside a pyramid of rocks. “He broke a window on every floor of my building,” Tolegian later recalled. “Tenants came running out of the building shouting ‘What the hell is going on?’ I ran downstairs and beat him up.” It was the last time the two friends ever saw each other.

  Later that summer Tolegian decided after ten years in New York that he was giving up his hope of becoming a great artist and moving back to Los Angeles to work in the family business. On the whole, he had not done poorly in New York. He had already had a one-man show at the Ferargil Gallery. And his harmonica playing—he had started out under Benton—had landed him a minor role in the Broadway play The Time of Your Life. But he could barely support himself and felt obligated to consider more practical plans.

  Pollock, by comparison, did not consider any other career, although he had fared much worse as an artist than everyone he knew. In the ten years since he had come to New York he had received virtually no public recognition. He was twenty-eight years old, jobless, and drinking heavily. His brothers were married and having children, but Jackson didn’t even have a girlfriend. The worst part was that besides failing to prove himself in the eyes of the world, he had not proved even to himself that he possessed genuine talent. As he lamented to Charles that summer: “I haven’t much to say about my work and things—only that I have been going thru violent changes the past couple of years. God knows what will come out of it all—it’s pretty negative stuff so far.”

  It was at this discouraging moment, in the fall of 1940, that Pollock befriended one person who believed in his talent unequivocally. His name was John Graham, he was fifty-nine years old, and he was highly regarded as a painter, critic, collector, dealer, and the author of a slim, esoteric book called Systems and Dialectics of Art (1937). While the date of their meeting is uncertain, it is generally agreed that John Graham was the first to “discover” Pollock.

  “Of course he did,” Willem de Kooning once said. “Who the hell picked him out? The other critics came later—much later . . . It was hard for other artists to see what Pollock was doing—their work was so different from his. It’s hard to see something that’s different from your own work. But Graham could see it.”

  John Graham was born Ivan Dabrowsky in Kiev in 1881, the son of minor nobility. After studying law at the University of Kiev, he worked on the staff of Czar Nicholas II and went on to serve as a cavalry officer in Archduke Michael’s “Wild Brigade” during the First World War. During the Russian Revolution he was incarcerated in Red Army prisons and later offered several versions of his escape, the most colorful of which maintained that he fell before a firing squad and was taken for dead. After fleeing to Warsaw, Graham returned to Russia to join the counterrevolutionaries as a White Guard in the Crimea, a stronghold of opposition to the Soviet government. When the Bolsheviks secured power in 1920, Graham left the country and ended up in New York; he signed up to study at the Art Students League under John Sloan. During the 1920s he made frequent trips to Paris, where he exhibited his work at the Zborowski Gallery and sought out his idol, Picasso, whom he proclaimed “infinitely greater than the rest of them.” Graham’s sojourns to Europe ended abruptly with the Depression. Reduced to poverty, he hawked his paintings on street corners for fifteen dollars apiece and became an underground legend among a loose group of New York artists that included Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, David Smith, and, by the end of the thirties, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. The painters prized Graham’s erudition and his firsthand knowledge of the European avant-garde, for he kept them posted on the latest news from abroad. As Graham scrawled in his diary shortly before his death in 1961, with characteristic theatricality, “I brought culture to the U.S. and didn’t even have a social security card. The irony of it now.”

  Graham was a familiar sight along Third Avenue, haunting antique shops, jewelry shops, and fur shops in search of a rare find. “It was said,” Thomas Hess once wrote, “that he could walk into any junk shop and find a beautiful object for 50 cents.” Tall and regal, with imperiously arched eyebrows that crowned icy blue eyes, Graham looked like the displaced aristocrat that he was. De Kooning recalls the sight of him marching in a May Day parade shouting “We want bread!”—while waving hands encased in expensive chamois gloves. Graham knew almost every artist in New York and made a practice of stopping those he didn’t know (he claimed he could tell them by their paint-spattered clothes) to introduce himself and invite himself up to their studios. He kept a list of the most promising artists in New York, and by 1940 it was headed by Jackson Pollock. After his first visit to Pollock’s studio, Graham returned home and “couldn’t stop talking about Pollock,” according to his wife, Constance. “He said that Pollock was really crazy but that he was a great painter.”

  On the surface they were an unlikely pair—the courtly cosmopolitan Graham and his moody friend from the West. On his first visit to Pollock’s studio Graham politely asked the young artist whether he had ever visited Paris, only to have Pollock blurt “Let Paris come see me!” To someone else the comment might have sounded like so much adolescent boasting, but Graham was tempted to take him seriously. He knew that Pollock was genuinely wary of French culture and couldn’t help but admire him for it. For while many New York painters—Graham included—were then painting in a style so derivative of Picasso as to border on rank imitation, Pollock’s work looked different. And though Pollock had not yet produced any great paintings, to glance around his studio was to suspect that one day he would. Graham recognized Pollock’s originality.

  “Graham probably wanted to be like Pollock,” his wife once said. “He wanted to be the sort of guy who could punch a policeman in the nose.” She later recalled that on his first visit to their apartment—at 54 Greenwich Avenue—Pollock spent a few minutes looking at the primitive sculptures exhibited in every room. Delighted by Pollock’s interest in his
art collection, Graham removed a few art books from the shelves of his extensive library and tried to show Pollock some reproductions. But Pollock refused to look. “Artists shouldn’t look too much at what other artists do,” he announced. “An artist should do what’s in himself.” He proceeded to give a short lecture on Graham’s good friend Arshile Gorky, claiming he was doomed for mediocrity because he painted too much like Picasso. Pollock’s stubborn, arrogant pronouncements at times made Graham angry, but even when he was angry, he knew that Pollock had a point.

  One interest that Pollock and Graham had in common was primitive art. When the Museum of Modern Art organized the show “Indian Art of the United States” in 1941, the two men went to see it together. For Pollock the show was familiar terrain. In the lobby of the museum Navahos demonstrated sand painting techniques, which no doubt evoked for him the lore of his childhood. As Sande once said: “In all our experience in the West there was always an Indian around somewhere.” Pollock, who stated in 1944 that he had “always been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art,” felt an instinctive affinity with native art, and, as usual, his enthusiasm spilled over into his work. In a number of his pictures he adopted a bold yellow-red-black color scheme. He also added arrows, slashes, and pictograph markings to his lexicon of signs and symbols. Pollock’s easy identification with tribal art was applauded by Graham, who recognized immediately that Pollock was putting into paint the theories that Graham had set forth in writing. As a critic and aesthetician, Graham believed that a primary purpose of a modern art was “to re-establish a lost contact with the unconscious . . . with the primordial racial past,” to discover in one’s art the sort of spontaneity and authenticity he discerned in the art of Picasso, primitive cultures—and Pollock.