Jackson Pollock (15 page)

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.”