Jackson Pollock (8 page)

With Benton’s help Pollock began his second semester at the League exempted from the
school’s twelve-dollar monthly tuition. Benton had managed to secure for him a merit-based
scholarship, much to the dismay of his other students. “That fellow couldn’t draw!”
said Manuel Tolegian, who had just arrived in New York from Los Angeles and, at Pollock’s
urging, signed up to study under Benton. He was startled to discover that his high
school friend had risen to prominence so quickly. For Pollock it was a good term.
He grew closer to Benton, who, having recently finished his New School murals, spent
most of his evenings in class sketching beside his students. (“I had a model there,”
he explained, whereas in his studio he couldn’t afford to hire one.) Pollock, by comparison,
was no longer interested in sketching from life. According to his classmate Frances
Avery, he spent most of his time “fooling around” with the techniques of mural
painting under Benton’s approving gaze. He was expert at making gesso panels, silky
white boards suited for tempera painting. One night the painter Harry Holtzman, who
was studying across the hall under George Bridgman, walked into Benton’s classroom,
noticed what Pollock was doing, and asked him a few questions about the unusual panels.
“Pollock volunteered to make me a few,” he later recalled, adding that Pollock “tailed
after Benton like a puppy dog. Whatever Benton did, he wanted to do too.”

To consider Pollock’s earliest paintings—less than a dozen survive from his three
years at the League—is to recognize his debt to Benton. Like his teacher, he painted
in the Regionalist vein, depicting horse plowers, wheat threshers, and other agrarian
subjects; not a single scene of New York City survives among his works. A small painting
that has been catalogued as
Camp with Oil Rig
(
Fig. 1
) is a somber, mud-colored, Regionalist-style landscape showing a tall brown derrick,
a couple of gray shacks, and two crooked poles for a clothesline. The sky swirls and
the ground sways in a “hollow and bump” style reminiscent of Benton. But
Camp with Oil Rig
has nothing in common with the upbeat, flag-waving spirit of American Scene painting.
Pollock has painted a melancholy scene. The workers are nowhere in sight, the shacks
look closed up, a lone shirt flaps on the clothesline. One senses in this painting
Pollock’s obvious restlessness with the rhetoric of Regionalist art. Already he was
striving for something more personal.

As much as he admired Benton, Pollock was incapable of submitting wholeheartedly to
any one style or tradition. In his need to escape the political art of the thirties,
he turned to the example of Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917), whose work he would
have seen at the Ferargil Gallery, where Benton also exhibited. (“The only American
master who interests me is Ryder,” Pollock boldly told an interviewer a decade later.)
It is not difficult to understand his interest in Ryder, a solitary eccentric who
for most of his years lived in a cramped garret on Eleventh Street, dressed in tattered
rags, and personified the image of the romantic artist. He was well known in the thirties
for his lunar seascapes
and nocturnal pastorals, haunting, poetic works that are the very antithesis of Benton’s
graphic, illustrative realism.

It is possible to discern Ryder’s influence in Pollock’s
Self-Portrait
(
Fig. 2
), one of his earliest known works. (He painted it on a gesso panel.) This small,
eerie painting, like Ryder’s own
Self-Portrait
, shows a crudely rendered head modeled in reddish pigments and heavily veiled in
shadow. The similarities end there. Pollock’s
Self-Portrait
is an unsettling work in which he depicts himself as a frightened little boy, his
eyes wide with terror.

Like most young artists, Pollock didn’t hesitate to copy the painters he admired.
He unabashedly stole whatever images interested him, while translating them into an
idiom of his own. Most of his early paintings consist of subject matter taken from
Ryder—mournful-looking horses, solitary riders, ghostly little boats—transposed into
rhythmic, swirling landscapes reminiscent of Benton.
Going West
(
Fig. 3
), one of Pollock’s finest early paintings, is a spooky, moonlit landscape that shows
a man in a broad-brimmed hat driving a team of mules and two wagons along a mountain
road. The subject matter bears an unmistakable likeness to Ryder’s
Sentimental Journey
(
Fig. 4
). But other aspects of the painting—the glowing yellow moon and the swirling halo
encapsulating the scene—evoke Benton’s
Moonlight Over South Beach
(
Fig. 5
), one of his most uncharacteristic works. That the Benton painting is a seascape
did not deter Pollock from putting it to use in a western scene: a swirling body of
water is transformed into whirling mountains. More important, Pollock did away with
Benton’s horizon line, melding earth and sky together in circular motion. Already
he was striving for compositional wholeness, as if seeking in his art the kind of
completeness he rarely knew in his life. Derivative as
Going West
is, it possesses an undeniable originality and is a good example of Pollock’s talent
for fusing disparate influences into a harmonious creation of his own.

Pollock did not make preparatory drawings for any of his paintings. This was somewhat
unusual, as the customary practice in art school was to undertake a painting only
after one had
planned it out in a series of drawings. But Pollock had no patience for the long,
technical process by which a charcoal sketch is developed into a finished painting
and did away with it. He apparently started his canvases with only a vague idea of
how they would develop and figured it out as he went along.

In June 1931, after completing their first year at the League, Pollock and Tolegian
planned a “sketching trip” across the country. Encouraged by their teacher and his
fabled sojourns in the American heartland, they came up with the idea of hitchhiking
home to Los Angeles and collecting “local color” as they traveled. Their goal was
to amass enough raw material to fuel them with painting ideas at least until the end
of the next school year.

No sooner had Pollock and Tolegian set out than they realized their plans would have
to be changed. The highways outside the city were packed with homeless, unemployed
men, and almost no one was offering rides for fear of being robbed. So much for their
leisurely sketching trip. They ended up hopping freight trains from state to state,
an adventure that Pollock took to with the ease of a veteran hobo. One day in Indianapolis
the two boys were chasing a train when Tolegian started to slow down. “Run faster!”
Pollock yelled, but his friend couldn’t keep up. Pollock hopped aboard by himself
and made the rest of the trip on his own. “My trip was a peach,” he wrote a few weeks
later. “I got a number of kicks in the but and put in jail twice with days of hunger—but
what a worthwhile experience.” The life of a hobo held a wondrous appeal for him,
and it did not dampen his enthusiasm to discover that the interior of America bore
little resemblance to the upbeat place depicted in Benton’s murals. Poverty was everywhere.
“The miners and prostitutes in Terre Haute,” he wrote, “. . . their both starving—working
for a quarter—digging their graves.” Pollock labeled these instances of hardship “swell
color,” innocently parodying his teacher’s ideas.

Three weeks after setting out, Pollock arrived home in Los Angeles bubbling over with
tales about his trip. His parents, who by then had reconciled, were horrified to learn
of his adventures
on the railroad. “I would have been worried sick,” his mother wrote, “if I knew he
had been bumming the freight train. He sure took lots of chances of getting killed
or crippled for life. But he is here safe & I am sure glad.”

Pollock spent the summer in Wrightwood, California, a mountain resort in the Angeles
National Forest, where his father had rented a log cabin. Along with Tolegian, who
had made the trip west in a mere nine days, he was able to find a job as a lumberjack.
Every morning at dawn Tolegian picked up Pollock in an old, battered Ford and headed
up a mountain path to the Cajon Pass, where the two young artists cut down trees,
cleared away brush, and made way for a planned road. It was “sure hard work,” according
to Jackson’s mother, “but better than nothing they just cut it down and trim it up
so isn’t as hard as cutting into stove wood. Can’t cut very fast until they get used
to hard work again and cools off a little, has been very hot.”

One evening the boys were driving down the mountain path when they got into an argument.
Tolegian told Pollock he was no good at working on a team: he pushed on the dragsaw
when he was supposed to pull and pulled when he was supposed to push. “That’s all
I had to say,” Tolegian later recalled. Pollock, enraged by this bit of criticism,
pressed his saw against his friend’s throat and raised it slowly, forcing Tolegian
to lift his chin until he could barely see the road. When Tolegian let go of the wheel
for a moment to try to grab the saw from Pollock’s hand, the car swerved into the
mountainside and was wrecked.

With the approach of fall Pollock contemplated his return to New York with anxious
reluctance. He had hoped to work at his drawing that summer, but somehow the months
had slipped away from him. He had also hoped to save up some money, but there was
“damned little left” from his lumberjack job. Writing to Charles in a dejected mood,
he questioned the point of returning to the League when “more and more I realize I’m
sadly in need of some method of making a living.” His mother had told him not to worry
about money, for she was perfectly willing to help him out financially until he finished
his schooling. “You’re entitled to it,” she often said, reminding him that his education
was a necessary
part of his training as an artist. But Jackson could tell that his father thought
otherwise. “Dad still has difficulties in loosing money—and thinks I’m just a bum—while
mother still holds the old love.”

For all his worries about his future Pollock returned to New York in the fall of 1931
eager to begin his second year at the League. Benton had managed to get him a part-time
job in the school lunchroom, easing any financial pressures while conferring further
legitimacy on his studies. Mornings Pollock studied under Benton. Afternoons he worked
in the lunchroom, clearing tables, sweeping the floor, and quickly establishing himself
among dozens of schoolmates as Benton’s most ardent champion.

The lunchroom of the League was a popular artists’ hangout, dominated by the figure
of Arshile Gorky, an imposing, melodramatic Armenian-born painter who seldom came
to school without his two Russian bloodhounds. Gorky worshiped the School of Paris
and was already painting abstractly. His rivals accused him of copying Picasso, which
invariably prompted Gorky to remark in his booming voice, “Has there in six centuries
been a better art than Cubism? No!” Although Gorky never actually studied at the League,
he could be found in the lunchroom most any afternoon with his friend Stuart Davis,
who taught on the faculty. Davis had recently pioneered an Americanized version of
Cubism in his
Egg Beater
series, four works based on fragmented images of a rotary egg beater, a rubber glove,
and an electric fan, which he had nailed to a table in his studio and had used as
his sole subject matter for an entire year. “That lunchroom was crazy,” the sculptor
Philip Pavia once said. “On one side you had Gorky and Stuart Davis, and on the other
side you had the Jackson and the Benton crowd.”

One day in the lunchroom Pollock overheard Gorky bragging to a group of students that
he could probably convince Matisse to give a lecture at the League during his next
visit to the United States. As other students listened in awe, Pollock walked
over to the table and angrily blurted out, “What do we need those Europeans for?”
Gorky became furious and started screaming at him, “Where do you think the Renaissance
came from?” Pollock sided with Benton on every issue, no matter how narrow his teacher’s
ideas. A major controversy erupted at the League after Benton learned that the school
planned to hire the well-known German painters Hans Hofmann and George Grosz. Benton
believed that a Depression-ravaged country should not be offering jobs to foreigners,
an opinion Pollock adopted as his own and was more than willing to defend. “Pollock
was posing as an artist,” said his classmate Whitney Darrow, Jr., later a cartoonist
for
The New Yorker
, “not with a beret, goatee, and flowing tie, but as an antieffete type, a rough American
artist, based on what he had learned from Benton.”