Jackson Pollock (5 page)

In the spring of 1924, after school had let out for the year, Stella and her sons
left Phoenix. With the hope of seeing her husband, who was laying roads in Arizona’s
Tonto National Forest, Stella accepted a job as a cook at Carr’s Ranch, a summer resort
on the edge of the forest. It turned out to be a disappointing time for her. LeRoy,
based only thirty miles away in Miami, visited his family only once in the course
of the entire summer. No longer could Stella pretend that distance alone accounted
for her husband’s long absences. Unable to reconcile with LeRoy, Stella decided it
would be best to return to California, where she could at least rejoin her two older
sons, both of whom were in Los Angeles. On the advice of a friend, she settled on
Riverside, a prospering citrus town that was connected to Los Angeles by a trolley
line. That September, after camping for a few weeks, the family rented a small frame
house at 1196 Spruce Street, the first of their three addresses in Riverside in the
next three years.

For Jackson, who was almost thirteen, the years in Riverside were a time of excruciating
loneliness. Besides being a poor student, he had no friends at school, isolated from
others by anxieties that left him all but incapacitated. His brother Sande already
had a girlfriend—Arloie Conaway, the pretty daughter of orange growers, would later
become his wife—but Jackson was much too shy around girls even to attempt conversation.
Among boys he fared worse, wanting desperately to be part of a group but forced into
solitude by his hostile distrust of his peers. While he managed to graduate from the
Riverside middle school without incident, a troublesome event occurred in his freshman
year of high school. One day Jackson showed up for an ROTC practice drill in a uniform
that was slightly tattered, prompting a student officer to reprimand him for his appearance.
In a fit of anger disproportionate to its cause Jackson grabbed the cadet by his coat
and called him a “Goddamn son of a bitch” in front of the whole platoon. The outburst
cost him his ROTC membership. Deprived of his one incentive for continuing school,
Jackson dropped out of Riverside High in March of his freshman year.

He spent the remainder of the school year at home, afflicted by a discontent so profound
that his mother and brothers found
it impossible to talk with him. He seldom showed any warmth or compassion, even in
response to wrenching events. One day Jackson walked into the backyard to find his
brother Frank crying uncontrollably. Cradled in his arms was Gyp, the family dog,
who had died only moments before. “What are you crying about?” Jackson shouted angrily.
“It’s just a goddamn dog!” But two decades later, when Pollock was in his thirties,
he visited a dairy farm and saw a litter of puppies. He picked one out for himself
and named it Gyp.

Jackson’s years in Riverside were not entirely without consolation. He grew closer
to his father, whom he and Sande visited one summer at the Grand Canyon, making the
trip in a used Model T, which they bought for twelve dollars. With LeRoy’s help, the
two brothers were able to obtain their first jobs, joining their father on a surveying
team and assisting with the laying of roads along the northern edge of the canyon.
For Jackson, who was fifteen, it was a rewarding, purposeful summer. As Sande later
recalled, he was a conscientious worker and took pleasure in physical labor, as if
rigorous work helped clear his mind of distractions. A photograph taken that summer
shows Jackson seated on a cliff, leaning casually against a boulder. He appears in
profile, his long blond hair combed straight back to reveal an impressively large
forehead and fine Roman features. His gaze is steadied on the sweeping scenery before
him, and a pipe dangles from his mouth. The image hints at Jackson’s self-composure
in the months he spent with his father.

LeRoy, however, was incapable of providing Jackson with a lasting sense of direction
or purpose. He was a weak, melancholy, self-pitying man who, by his own admission,
felt trapped by circumstance. “I am sorry that I am not in a position to do more for
all you boys,” he wrote to Jackson in Riverside, “and I sometimes feel that my life
has been a failure—but in this life we can’t undo the things that are past.” It has
been said that LeRoy had little influence on his son, but a lack of influence is of
course its own kind of influence. To Jackson, his father was more vivid as an absence
than as a presence, leaving him with a fierce need to find someone or something he
could believe in completely. A
few months after Jackson dropped out of school, his family would make its last move—to
Los Angeles—and Jackson would soon declare his ambition to become “an Artist of some
kind.” The unassuming phrase perfectly captures the dual aspects of the young man’s
personality: his need for a capital belief and at the same time a subversive unwillingness
to commit himself to any one belief in particular.

In September 1928 Pollock joined the sophomore class of Manual Arts High School in
Los Angeles, a public school specializing in the industrial arts. The school, a ten-minute
walk from the Pollock home at 1196 Thirty-ninth Avenue, near Exposition Park, was
a large, impersonal institution, with more than four thousand students and a standardized
curriculum that took little account of individual needs. Although Manual Arts was
a “boresome” place of “rules and ringing bells,” as Pollock described it, it was in
this unlikely setting that he recognized his ambition to become an artist. One class
made school worthwhile for him. He studied art under Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky,
or Schwanny to his students, a man who provided Pollock with the guidance and inspiration
so sorely lacking in the rest of his school day, if not in his life.

Schwankovsky, a tall, bespectacled painter with a cropped mustache, a goatee, and
long black hair, was a highly unorthodox teacher, known in Los Angeles for his espousal
of occult mysticism
and his equally heretical advocacy of modern art. His customary outfit included a
burgundy velvet jacket and sandals, and his appearance, at once refined and bohemian,
confirmed his students’ quaint notions of how an artist should look. “I’m going to
make serious painters of you,” Schwankovsky used to say, although he was much less
interested in molding his students than simply joining them in the practice of art.
Soon after Pollock started school Schwankovsky stirred up a citywide controversy by
bringing models into the classroom and having his students draw from life rather than
follow the traditional method of copying antique casts. “We are very fortunate in
that this is the only school in the city [to] have models,” Pollock wrote appreciatively
to his brothers Charles and Frank, who had since moved to New York City. Charles was
studying at the Art Students League, and Frank, who had followed him east, was studying
part time at Columbia. “Altho it is difficult to have a nude and get by the board,”
Pollock continued, “Schwankavsky [sic] is brave enough to have them.”

Under Schwankovsky’s influence Pollock quickly fashioned an artistic identity for
himself. Like his teacher, he grew his hair to his shoulders—“a style associated with
European artists and poets like Oscar Wilde,” according to a classmate. He subscribed
to
Creative Arts
magazine, read modern poetry in the
Dial
, and in letters to his brothers abandoned capital letters (“my letters are undoubtedly
egotistical but it is myself i am interested in now”). And in a notable display of
bravado, he changed his first name to Hugo, after Victor Hugo, in the hope of impressing
his English teacher, a lady he admired from afar. To his classmates, who continued
to call him Jackson rather than Hugo, Pollock radiated an image of artistic vanity
in spite of his shyness. To Harold Lehman, a classmate, he was “an immature person
with fancy ideas but no discipline.” Manuel Tolegian, another classmate, observed,
“That fellow thought he was someone important, but to me he always seemed like an
orphan.” The sculptor Reuben Kadish, referring in particular to Pollock’s flowing
blond hair, once commented, “Jack didn’t want to be mistaken for anything other than
an artist.”

In Schwankovsky’s class, which met five times a week in a basement studio, Pollock
first began to draw. He felt immediately dissatisfied with his work, and his high
school image as a cocky young artist contrasts sharply with the insecure, self-disparaging
person who emerges from his letters. Writing to Charles, his accomplished oldest brother,
Pollock confessed to being “doubtful of any ability.” He went on to offer a devastating
appraisal of his earliest artwork: “my drawing i will tell you frankly is rotten it
seems to lack freedom and rythem it is cold and lifeless, it isn’t worth the postage
to send it.” While the asperity of these comments is surely related to Pollock’s sense
of unworthiness in the shadow of his older brother, his harsh self-criticism was not
entirely unjustified. None of his high school drawings survives, but it may be said
on the basis of later work that by no means was Pollock a precocious draftsman. As
his brother Sande once said, “If you had seen his early work you’d have said he should
go into tennis, or plumbing.”

Whatever Pollock lacked in facility, however, he made up for in vision. It is rather
extraordinary that in his first written appraisal of his artwork he should have faulted
his drawing for lacking “freedom and rythem,” qualities he considered important, if
not the essence of drawing. While most students were trying to master perspective
and learn how to draw a realistic likeness of a face, a hand, or a bowl of fruit,
Pollock had no patience for such details. The rules of art ran against his instincts.
Already he was seeking “freedom” from formal conventions, sacrificing detail to the
whole. He could not achieve what he wanted; on the other hand, he fully intended to.
“i think there should be an advancement soon if it is ever to come,” he noted to Charles
with characteristic self-disparagement, “and then i will send you some drawings.”

At school Pollock felt uncomfortable among his peers. People “frightened and bored”
him, he wrote, forcing him to remain within his “shell.” But for all his timidity,
Pollock had no difficulty befriending—and at times alienating—his fellow students
in Schwankovsky’s class. Philip Goldstein, a dark, angular, intense young artist who
worshiped Piero della Francesca, would later
become well known as Philip Guston. He and Pollock spent many afternoons at the home
of Manuel Tolegian, an affable, powerfully built youth of Armenian descent, who had
converted a chicken coop behind his house into a studio for himself and his friends.
Together, working in the dark, cramped, low-roofed studio, the three boys would pick
out reproductions from their favorite art books and spend long hours copying the pictures.
Both Guston and Tolegian had a natural talent for drawing; the studio walls, covered
with pencil sketches after Uccello and Piero, offered testimony to their ability.
Pollock’s work, by comparison, was noticeably undistinguished. But no matter how frustrated
he may have felt, he was unwilling to admit to his classmates that he considered his
work lacking. To the contrary, Pollock would criticize his friends’ work. “You think
that’s original?” he used to say, eyeing his schoolmates’ copies of Renaissance masters.
“What’s so original about that?” Though Guston tended to ignore these boyish displays,
Tolegian would become furious, reminding Pollock in his deep, booming voice that to
be a great artist one first had to master anatomy, linear perspective, and so on.
Pollock apparently delighted in rousing his friend to anger. He signed Tolegian’s
yearbook “For more and better arguments. Hugo Pollock.”

Pollock preferred sculpting to painting or drawing. He and his friends sometimes visited
a quarry near the Los Angeles River, where they purchased blocks of limestone and
sandstone for carving. Pollock, who stored his materials in Tolegian’s backyard, soon
accumulated a huge pile of stones, much to the dismay of Tolegian’s mother. Whenever
she spotted Pollock arriving at her house with another block of stone, she would run
to the back door and scream in her native Armenian, “What has this crazy man brought
to my backyard?” With a chisel and a hammer Pollock chipped away at one block after
another, and on weekend afternoons the backyard studio would reverberate with the
sounds of his labors—the chime of the hammer as it struck the chisel, the plink-plink-plink
of the chips as they splintered from the stone. His friends felt sorry for him, thinking
he was no better at sculpture than at drawing. Nonetheless they recognized the
pleasure he took in carving. Tolegian described Pollock as “more at ease with a rock
than a human being.”

In his groping efforts at self-understanding, Pollock looked to Schwankovsky not only
for artistic guidance but spiritual guidance as well. His teacher was a friend and
follower of the noted Hindu philosopher Jeddu Krishnamurti, who, in the spring of
1928, had visited Los Angeles and founded a camp in the Ojai Valley, eighty miles
north of the city. Schwankovsky, immediately impressed by the Hindu’s ideas, asked
him to give a talk to his students, and one Saturday afternoon, amid predictable controversy,
the “world teacher” visited Manual Arts. For Pollock, who had never attended church
in his youth or practiced any religion, theosophy was a virtual epiphany. With marked
enthusiasm, he visited Ojai, read theosophical tracts, and shared his findings with
his father, who, a month after school began, assured him, “I think your philosophy
on religion is O.K.” It is not difficult to understand Pollock’s identification with
Krishnamurti, a gentle, sensitive heretic who, according to his writings, had been
unhappy in his youth and determined to find a goal, any goal, to which he could devote
himself completely. His teachings, a paean to individual rebellion, confirmed a precept
that Pollock had divined on his own: the moment you follow someone else, you cease
to be your own leader. Appropriately, then, a year after starting school Pollock tired
of following Krishnamurti, bluntly informing his brothers, “I have dropped religion
for the present.”