Despite its literary leanings, Surrealism found a following mostly among painters. With values colored by the First World War—pessimism, irrationality, intense subjectivity, and eroticism—the movement spread quickly outside France. Its early leaders were de Chirico in Italy, Max Ernst in Germany, Salvador Dali in Spain, and René Magritte in Belgium. By the 1930s most of the Surrealists had gravitated to Paris, where the movement continued to flourish until the outbreak of World War II.
By the time the Surrealists arrived in New York, the movement was essentially defunct. The painters Breton had recruited were all famous, and the advanced positions they had taken in the twenties had been widely accepted. No longer was anyone issuing manifestos or calling for revolution. For Breton, his five years in New York were lonely and depressing. He complained bitterly about having to live among “uncultivated” Americans and refused on principle to learn any English or visit the downtown cafeterias where artists congregated. He ran out of money and was forced to take a job with the Office of War Information reading propaganda news on the radio. At one point he became friendly with David Hare, the New York sculptor, and started a review called VVV, but it ended badly. His wife Jacqueline, who served as the review’s translator, left him for Hare and took along his one child.
Of all the Surrealists living in New York, Pollock became friendly with one. Born in Chile, Roberto Matta was a latecomer to Surrealism and a rarity among the émigrés in that he spoke English fluently and was interested in meeting American painters. He loathed Breton, whom he found insufferably rigid, and was determined to keep Surrealism from degenerating into an academy by starting an offshoot movement composed entirely of Americans. But first he would have to educate them, or so he thought. “I found that they were absolutely ignorant,” Matta said of the painters he met in New York. “They knew nothing about Rimbaud or Apollinaire, and they were just copying the outward forms of Picasso and Miró.” When Matta suggested to Mother-well that they start a group dedicated to exploring Surrealist techniques, Motherwell went to talk to Pollock.
Pollock at first was reluctant to get involved in Matta’s group or, for that matter, in any activity connected with the Surrealists. He didn’t speak French, had no interest in learning it, and resented the Surrealists’ obvious disdain for American culture. He had already turned down a chance to participate in an important group show, “First Papers of Surrealism,” which had been organized by Breton at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in October 1942. “Jackson didn’t like the Surrealists because he thought they were anti-American,” David Hare once said. “And the Surrealists didn’t like him because they expected to be courted all the time. Jackson wouldn’t court them at all.”
At the same time Pollock was genuinely interested in Surrealist art and the technique of psychic automatism, so he decided to join Matta’s group. The meetings were held on Saturday afternoons in Matta’s apartment on Ninth Street, and they lasted for a couple of months. Pollock rarely talked at the weekly gatherings—Matta once described him as “fermé” (closed up)—but was articulate when he did. Once Matta asked each of the artists in the group to give a definition of a flower. “A flower is a fox in a hole,” Pollock said, and although no one was quite sure what the comment meant, its ambiguity only heightened its value. Another time Pollock stared for a few moments at the smoke rising from his cigarette. Which is the empty space, he wondered aloud, the smoke or the air? Pollock was interested in Matta’s theory of “psychic morphology,” which maintains that forms, like feelings, are constantly undergoing change. Once Pollock mentioned that a good example of this theory could be found in Navaho art, where men step out of their skins to become thunderbirds. Motherwell started to elaborate on the subject, but Matta quickly silenced him. “The reason Jackson is successful,” Matta said, “is because he doesn’t talk too much.”
Matta would give the artists assignments and once told them to illustrate time by drawing the hours of the day. Pollock drew an alarm clock that metamorphosed into a jumble of scribbles. When Motherwell noted that Pollock had successfully demonstrated Matta’s theory about the evolution of forms—the clock had evolved into an abstract image—Pollock told Motherwell that he hated the word “abstract.” If you draw a line, he said, it can be seen as either figurative (it can be a profile) or abstract (just a line). Pollock didn’t like to label his art. An abstract image was as real to him as a figurative one. It all came from the same source, from inside.
Besides participating in Matta’s group, Pollock joined his newfound friends in playing Surrealist parlor games. The stubborn nonjoiner sat in a circle with Motherwell, Baziotes, and their wives and drew blindfolded. He also played a game called “Male and Female”: a sheet of paper is passed around a group and each person adds a random anatomical detail to create androgynous monsters. “Eventually,” Motherwell once said, “we realized it was really sort of nonsense,” and the group was disbanded. But Pollock seems to have gotten something from it. He was soon to produce a painting called Male and Female, which was probably titled after the game.
In 1942 Pollock produced only three paintings, but it is generally agreed that they mark his arrival at creative maturity. It took him twelve years to reach this point, and the results were impressive. One of the first things one notices about his 1942 paintings, as a group, is their size. Whereas previously his canvases had tended to be small—his early Self-Portrait had measured a tiny 5″ × 7″—his new paintings were very large. Male and Female is a vertical canvas standing about six feet high. The Moon Woman is just under six feet. Stenographic Figure, a horizontal painting, is five and a half feet long. Clearly Pollock was feeling more sure of himself, and for good reason.
Stenographic Figure (Fig. 13) is a semiabstract painting that appears to show a reclining female nude. Several critics believe that the painting actually shows two figures—a man and a woman—and they may well be right. The disagreement over the painting’s subject matter seems somehow appropriate, for ambiguity is a theme of the work. Rather than creating a human figure, Pollock has given us mere hints of one. A blue triangle evokes a woman’s head. Two red rings beneath it suggest breasts. A series of cursive black lines might be legs—or are they ribs? Nothing is spelled out. The woman is rendered in shorthand. There’s a lot of tension in this work—between figuration and abstraction and, compositionally, between the large, binding rectangles that make up the painting’s background and the free-form calligraphy activating its surface. Stenographic Figure is a good example of Pollock’s increasing ability to thrash out his preoccupations in pure painterly terms; and that this work owes quite a bit to both Picasso and Miró does not diminish its strength.
Pollock continued to borrow heavily from artists he admired, while simultaneously nullifying almost all traces of his debt. Male and Female (Fig. 14), which is widely considered his first major work, bears some startling similarities to a painting by Kandinsky called Striped. (Pollock could have seen it at the Nierendorf Gallery in 1942.) The Kandinsky painting (Fig. 15) is an abstraction dating to 1934, when the artist was living in Paris. It consists of five vertical panels, or “stripes,” against which floats a whimsical arrangement of circles, crescents, spirals, and other geometric forms. Two of the forms vaguely suggest human figures: one looks like a helmet and the other resembles a fetus. These two forms bear a distinct likeness to the two head-forms in Pollock’s Male and Female, which, like the Kandinsky, also consists of five vertical stripes. That Pollock seems to have borrowed his format from Kandinsky is of course less important than what he did with it.
Male and Female is a symbolic portrait of a man and a woman. The female figure, which occupies the left side, is a joyous tribute to femininity. Her head is a black half-moon, decorated with long-lashed eyes stacked one on top of the other à la Picasso. Her chest is a curving red mound, and her womb is a fat red curlicue. The male figure, like the female, embodies genital characteristics: whereas she is curvilinear, he is rigid and erect. The man and the woman stand c
lose together, each one fully conscious of the other’s presence. She bats her eyes at him, and he in turn opens his mouth as if about to gobble her up. Plainly he desires her, and a sense of sexual urgency is further suggested by the frenzied overlay of scribbles, scrawls, and Navaho-like slash markings that activate the picture’s surface. In the upper left corner, black, white, and yellow pigment is splashed freely onto the blue background, an early herald of the “drip” paintings Pollock was to begin five years later.
The scholarly literature on this painting has centered, rather peculiarly, on what the work reveals about the artist’s sexuality. Several writers believe that the figure on the left is actually a man; the red curlicue has been described as a limp phallus. Similarly, the figure on the right has been interpreted as a woman, the mechanical maw now a symbol of female aggression. Still other writers discern male and female characteristics in both figures; William Rubin, for instance, feels that the painting attests to the “bisexuality or sexual unsureness present in all individuals and usually repressed to the lowest levels of the psyche.”
Indeed, there is struggle in Male and Female, but it seems too easy to describe it as only a sexual struggle. On another level altogether, Pollock’s primary conflict here seems to be with his European predecessors. It is not accidental that he turned to Kandinsky to help him structure this painting, for Kandinsky was a master of geometric purity. But such purity is nowhere evident in the Pollock painting. It has a crude, brutish look that borders on barbarism. Pollock borrowed Kandinsky’s structure and proceeded, so to speak, to deconstruct it. This painting was executed in 1942, a crucial moment, when Europe had already produced its last great art movement (Surrealism) and American painters finally had a chance to show the way ahead. Male and Female seems to be saying that the future of art belongs to this country, not only in its hostile treatment of Kandinsky (a founder of abstract painting) but in its powerful invocation of American culture: the man and the woman in the painting look like Navaho Indian totems.
That Pollock completed only three paintings in 1942 was probably the result of external demands on his time. Since February he had been working full time for the War Services program. And as taxing as that was, by the end of the year he was spending most of his workday just trying to figure out exactly where he was supposed to be working. In October Pollock and Lee were both assigned to a vocational school in Brooklyn—to learn how to manufacture aviation sheet metal. A week after Pollock started school he was ordered back to Manhattan to rejoin the War Services program. He arrived in time to learn that President Roosevelt was folding the WPA, which was no longer needed since the war was creating work for millions. Lee was fired on the first day of 1943, and Pollock was fired January 30.
Soon after Pollock lost his job his mother visited him from Connecticut. “Well the WPA folded up,” she noted to Charles on February 10. “Lee was let out the first of the year—she is taking a drafting course gets $17.00 a week while learning. Jack is going to take a course of some sort. He has done several new paintings very nice since I was down in November. Hope he finds something to do soon.”
It was an exasperating time for Pollock, for besides being out of work, he suddenly found himself without any art supplies. (The Project had provided him with free supplies.) Hoping he might be able to trade a painting for some supplies, he went to talk to Lou Rosenthal, who owned a store on Eighth Street, across from his apartment. Was Rosenthal willing to trade twenty-five dollars worth of supplies for one Pollock painting? No, the businessman told him, he couldn’t afford to; his apartment was already cluttered with paintings by unknown artists. So Pollock went to talk to Joseph Mayer, another art store owner, but Mayer too said he couldn’t afford to trade.
In his frustration Pollock apparently took to shoplifting. Mayer was in his store one day when he spotted Pollock stuffing tubes of oil paints into his coat pockets. “Can I help you?” Mayer asked. Pollock continued to pocket the paint. “No, thank you,” he said arrogantly, “I can help myself.” The kindly businessman didn’t stop Pollock as he left the store.
In February 1943, after a month of unemployment, Pollock found a job with Creative Printmakers, a silk-screening shop on Eighteenth Street. He was hired on the night shift as “a squeegee man,” a job that consisted of sitting at a table and pushing a squeegee back and forth across a screen to print designs on scarves and plates. It was tedious work, but he seemed not to mind it too much, relieved to have found any work at all.
Within two months Pollock heard about a job he very much wanted. The Baroness Hilla Rebay, director of the Museum of Non-Objective Art (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), was hiring young artists to help run the museum and was offering them monthly stipends in addition to free art supplies. In April Pollock went for a job interview—the museum was then located in a townhouse on East Fifty-fourth Street—and brought along a few of his paintings with hopes of impressing the baroness. In the course of the interview Rebay asked Pollock whether he had brought a résumé. A résumé? But weren’t his paintings his résumé? A few days later Pollock sent the baroness a truly inventive résumé. “Biography” he scrawled sloppily at the top of a sheet of paper. After stating that he was born in Cody and had studied at the Art Students League, Pollock divided the page into three sections—“past,” “present,” and “extended present.” He defined his past as “Subjective realism” and “Subjective abstract.” He defined his present as “Subjective [and] Spacial reality,” which branched off into “non-objective spacial intensity.” He was open-minded about his future: “?”
He got the job.
At the museum Pollock assisted with sundry tasks. He ran the elevator, counted visitors as they came in, and was often sent down to the basement to help make frames. While he tended to his chores with his usual eagerness to make himself of use, he quickly acquired a reputation as a braggart. The painter and musician Leland Bell, a coworker at the museum, later recalled his amusement at Pollock’s frequent jabs at the collection. Pointing to an Arp, Pollock would say, “I could do an Arp easy!” He was particularly hard on Paul Klee, who was fond of making small pictures and whose work, Pollock claimed, lacked monumentality. “Klee? I could do a Klee easy.” No one took him very seriously.
From the day he started work, Pollock made a point of keeping out of the way of Baroness Rebay, a fanatical devotee of nonobjective art. She was a great promoter of Kandinsky and championed his belief that nonobjective painting was not so much an art movement as a mission to free people from material concerns. Businessmen in particular, the baroness believed, could benefit from abstract art, “as it carries them away from the tiresome rush of the earth.”
The baroness required that all her assistants bring in their work on a monthly basis so she could criticize it. Pollock was glad to comply. For his first critique he brought in a drawing that was typical of his current style, combining Picasso-like figures with freely scrawled calligraphy. The baroness went rigid when she saw the drawing. With a long steel rod she pointed to a form that resembled a human figure. “This,” she said in her German accent, “NO!” She tore his drawing in half.
But while the baroness was insulting Pollock, a much more influential member of the Guggenheim circle had already recognized his talent. Peggy Guggenheim owned a celebrated gallery called Art of This Century. The place was loathed by the baroness, who, as self-appointed guardian of Solomon Guggenheim’s reputation, felt that his art-dealing niece had sullied the family name by propagating “mediocrity, if not trash.”
No one in New York was to play a larger role as a collector, dealer, and art patron during the war years than Peggy Guggenheim. The daughter of a copper magnate, she had grown up on East Seventy-second Street with the Stillmans and Rockefellers for neighbors but fled her staid surroundings at an early age. She spent the twenties in Paris, where she became part of a group of American expatriate artists and writers, and in 1938 she opened a gallery in London called Guggenheim Jeune. But she was much more inter
ested in collecting art than selling it and soon closed the London gallery with hopes of starting her own museum. Her goal, she once said, was to buy “a picture a day,” and she more or less succeeded at it. As the war raged she tramped through the studios of Paris with a shopping list in hand and quickly amassed a leading collection of modern art.
After arriving in New York as a refugee from the war—she managed to get her art collection to the U.S. by shipping it as “household goods”—Peggy Guggenheim opened a gallery, in October 1942, on the top floor of 30 West Fifty-seventh Street. (She called it a gallery-museum and, with characteristic stinginess, charged all visitors twenty-five cents admission.) Frederick Kiesler had helped her design the place, and it was surely the most eccentric-looking gallery in New York. In the room reserved for abstract art, frames were taken off paintings, paintings were taken off walls, the walls themselves were removed; the art, supported by brackets, jutted into space against a backdrop of undulating blue linen. A second room, reserved for Surrealism, was comparatively conservative, featuring concave walls of unfinished wood and a lighting system that alternately illumined and darkened bizarre exhibits; in one corner a whirring motor brought small Klees into view for ten seconds each. Art of This Century quickly became the principal gathering place for the European artists who were living in New York.
Peggy Guggenheim’s detractors used to say that her success as an art collector was due entirely to her advisers, who told her what to buy. This is no doubt true, but it is to her credit that she chose her mentors well. Her primary advisers in New York were Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Barr—the visionary director of the Museum of Modern Art—and James Johnson Sweeney, an art and literary critic who was close to Barr and would soon be hired by him to direct the museum’s painting and sculpture department. Another key figure at the gallery was a man named Howard Putzel, a rotund, nervous, chain-smoking art dealer from San Francisco who had worked for Peggy Guggenheim in Paris as a commission buyer and was her assistant at Art of This Century. He was to become a close friend of Pollock and Lee.
Jackson Pollock Page 13
