Jackson Pollock (14 page)

Pollock had been referred to Dr. Henderson by a friend of Helen Marot, the elderly
teacher who had hired him some years earlier to work as a janitor at the City and
Country School. Marot, an amateur psychologist then in her mid-seventies, took an
active interest in Pollock’s well-being, and the two of them became rather close at
this time. She often stopped by 46 East Eighth Street to look at Pollock’s work and
was invariably impressed by it; she told all her friends that Pollock was a genius.
Pollock sometimes returned her visits but usually on nights when he had been drinking.
Her friend and neighbor Rachel Scott recalls one occasion when Pollock woke up the
entire block by standing outside Marot’s apartment shouting “Let me in, let me in,”
until the elderly woman got out of bed to open the door for him. Another time he showed
up at her apartment in such a frightening condition that Marot telephoned Dr. Henderson
to ask what she could do to help him. The doctor, who felt that Marot was helping
Pollock satisfy an unfulfilled need “to give and receive feeling,” told her the best
thing she could do was to continue to be Pollock’s friend.

There were other problems besides his alcoholism that year. His main worry was his
job. As public criticism of the WPA mounted, layoffs were becoming increasingly common.
Employees of the WPA were ridiculed in the press as “boondogglers” and “leaf-rakers,”
and there were rumors that the whole program was about to be shut down. For Jackson
and Sande, who were each earning about ninety dollars a week on the easel division,
the situation was nerve-racking. “Of immediate concern around here is the lay-offs,”
Sande wrote to Charles in January 1939. “There are one hundred and ten pink slips
in the mail right now. The union is stirring and raising hell but frankly I can’t
see that we can do so very much about it.” Two months later Sande wrote again to say
that he and Jackson had been “investigated” by the government, presumably for Communist
activities, and while neither was a fellow traveler, such inquiries kept them “in
a constant state of jitters.”

For all his troubles, Pollock was making genuine progress in his art. Many of his
paintings belonging to this period show the influence of José Orozco, to whom Pollock
turned at the end of
the thirties in an effort to break free from the style of his past. It is not hard
to understand his attraction to Orozco, an idealist obsessed by injustice and oppression.
His theme was eternal conflict, and he slammed it on wall after wall. “Christ, what
a brutal, powerful piece of painting. I think it is safe to say that [Orozco] is the
only really vital living painter.” So wrote Sande Pollock of Orozco’s frescoes at
Guadalajara, which he saw in reproduction early in 1939. Jackson left no written response
but certainly shared his brother’s admiration of the Mexican. Around 1939 (the paintings
are undated so one can only speculate as to the year) Pollock started painting violent
pictures that owe a lot to Orozco. He painted scenes of people on fire and women giving
birth to skeletons; he showed ritual sacrifices in which the victim tries to get away
or else clutches himself in fear. The paintings mark a radical break from the lonely
little landscapes that Pollock had been painting throughout most of the thirties.

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)