Jackson Pollock (11 page)

Benton and Rita were deeply concerned about Pollock’s welfare, realizing that he could
barely afford to feed or clothe himself, let alone pay for art supplies. They wondered
what they could do to help him. Had he asked for a loan, they gladly would have given
it to him, but as Rita later wrote: “Jack was a very
proud and sensitive young man. There was no way of giving him money.” One day Benton
suggested to Pollock that he consider decorating some plates and bowls—plates are
much easier to sell than paintings, Benton told him—and exhibiting them in the “relief
show” that Rita was planning to hold at the Ferargil Gallery that December. Pollock
was not adverse to the suggestion; he accompanied Rita to a plate warehouse downtown,
allowed her to buy him a stack of plates, and, working at the Bentons’ apartment,
decorated the china with designs that Rita later described as “most beautiful.” On
one of the plates he dripped and splattered paint, his first known use of the technique
that later became his dominant one.

Rita had not long before convinced the owner of the Ferargil to turn over the gallery’s
basement to unknown, indigent artists, thinking it was the least she could do at a
time when so many artists were struggling. She planned to hold a Christmastime exhibit,
and Pollock was more than willing to help her out. Along with Manuel Tolegian, he
cleared out the basement, built sculpture stands, and whitewashed the cinder-block
walls. He assisted with sales too, visiting the gallery almost every afternoon that
December to sit at a table in the entranceway and answer questions from visitors.
The show received wide publicity, with
The New York Times
reporting: “Mrs. T. H. Benton Collection One of Several in Which High Standard Is
Reached.” Among the works on exhibit were Pollock’s painted plates and bowls. As Benton
had predicted, every one of the plates sold—to Rita. For years afterward Pollock’s
plates could be found on the fireplace mantel of the Bentons’ home in Chilmark.

Benton encouraged Pollock to exhibit his work every chance he could get, be it in
the basement of the Ferargil, at neighborhood centers like the John Reed Club, or
in the outdoor art shows in Washington Square Park. Benton also recommended that he
submit his work to the popular competition-exhibitions organized annually by the Brooklyn
Museum, and it was at this venerable institution that Pollock made his museum debut.
In February 1935, a month after the Ferargil show closed, Pollock and Benton (and
more than a hundred others) participated in the
museum’s “Eighth Biennial Exhibition of Water Colors, Pastels and Drawings by American
and Foreign Artists.” Pollock’s entry, entitled
Threshers
, has since been lost, but the information he supplied for the catalogue helps clarify
the nature of his youthful ambitions. Asked to provide a biographical sketch, Pollock
stated that he was born in Cody, had studied under Benton, and, with notable bravura,
went on to claim that he was represented by the Ferargil Gallery. He also stated that
he worked in fresco, another instance of wishful thinking.

By now Pollock was working at a new job, having just been transferred by the city
from Home Relief to Work Relief, a program established the previous spring to put
the unemployed to work. He was hired as a “stone cutter,” presumably having indicated
on his application that he had studied stone carving under Ben-Shmuel and possessed
certain skills. However promising the job may have sounded, it turned out to be no
more challenging than his previous job as a janitor. As a so-called stone cutter,
Pollock joined a crew of laborers who were sent around the city to clean public monuments.
Not long after he started he was demoted without explanation to a “stone carver helper.”
Thus Jackson Pollock, who dreamed about painting frescoes and exhibiting at the Ferargil,
spent his twenty-third year cleaning bird droppings from public statuary for sixty-five
cents an hour.

That spring Benton decided after twenty-three years in New York to return to his native
Missouri. Disheartened and depressed by recent attacks on American Scene painting,
he had come to believe that the East Coast art establishment was dominated by Communist
sympathizers unwilling to tolerate anyone who didn’t share their ideas. Already he
had been hooted down at the John Reed Club, where, he wrote, “an enraged Commie threw
a chair at me and turned the meeting into a yelling shambles.” For the past few months
he had been sparring with Stuart Davis in the magazine
Art Front
, with Davis arguing that Benton’s belligerent “nationalism” was only one step removed
from fascism. According to Davis, Benton was a “petty opportunist . . . who
should have no trouble selling his wares to any fascist government.”

Establishment art critics came to Benton’s defense, but no amount of favorable publicity
could convince him to remain in New York. In farewell interviews in the local newspapers
Benton railed against New York intellectuals and their uncritical embrace of communism.
“They want to take the Marxist slant at everything,” Benton told the
Herald Tribune
. “Why, gol ding it, the Marxian idea was built up in 1848. How can it be valid in
every gol dinged detail today? Communism is a joke everywhere in the United States
except New York.”

With those parting words Benton left New York in April 1935 and settled in Kansas
City, where he continued to paint in the Regionalist style until his death in 1975.
It does not diminish his accomplishments to note that although he strove for half
a century to free American art from European influence, he did not achieve this goal.
He traveled the country more extensively than any artist before or after him, visiting
the steel mills of the Northeast and the cotton plantations of the South and the corn
fields of the Midwest, as if subject matter alone could define an American painting
style. But for all his talk about being a Regionalist, Benton was essentially a Mannerist;
he draped the figures of El Greco in farmers’ overalls and continued the stylistic
conventions of sixteenth-century Florence. Among the many ironies of his career is
the fact that the student whose talents Benton described as “most minimal” and who
worked in the abstract vein that Benton abhorred would one day accomplish exactly
what Benton had sought for himself: Pollock would invent an American painting style.
And among the many ironies of Pollock’s career is that he no more thought about creating
a national art movement than he imagined that he, a painfully shy person incapable
of talking in public, would become its internationally known leader.

But in the spring of 1935 Pollock was devastated by the departure of Benton and Rita.
Rita had assured him before leaving that he was welcome to visit them in Kansas City
and to continue summering in Chilmark, but that wasn’t much of a comfort. There would
be no more spaghetti dinners, no musical jams, no
shows at the Ferargil Gallery. No more afternoons with T.P. No more walks down Eighth
Street, when he could look up at the Benton’s apartment and know from the blue light
that somebody was home. For the past five years, ever since Pollock had arrived in
New York, the Bentons had cared for him like a son, and with their departure, he lost
all sense of purpose. “He was truly a lost soul,” Tolegian wrote to Benton many years
later. “When you and Rita left New York, he took to heavy drinking, even spoke to
me of suicide a number of times.” Three years would pass before Pollock acknowledged
to himself that somehow he’d have to free himself from the burden of Benton’s influence.

At one point during the Depression, Pollock noted wryly to his family: “Bums are the
well-to-do of this day. They didn’t have as far to fall.” He could have easily made
the same claim about artists, who, accustomed to being poor, had little to lose from
the collapse of the American economy. Many artists were actually better off in the
thirties than before or after it, for by 1935 the government had created one of its
more successful relief programs, the WPA Federal Art Project. Thousands of artists,
most of whom had been supporting themselves with menial part-time jobs, were suddenly
earning a respectable wage of $23.86 a week to paint on a full-time basis. Pollock,
who was to work on the Project for the next eight years, once told an interviewer
that he was “grateful to the WPA, for keeping me alive during the thirties.”

The idea of a federal art program had first gotten under way in 1933 when President
Roosevelt received a letter from a painter named George Biddle, a childhood friend
of his from the Groton
School. Biddle suggested to the president that he consider starting an art program
based on the example of the Mexican mural movement of the 1920s, explaining that the
Mexican government had paid artists “plumbers’ wages” to decorate the walls of the
country. Roosevelt at first was ambivalent. Only one week earlier Diego Rivera had
sparked a well-publicized controversy by painting a portrait of Lenin in a mural in
Rockefeller Center. Ordered by the Rockefeller family to remove the portrait, Rivera
had offered to balance it with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln; five days later he was
forced to stop work. The incident served as a warning to Roosevelt, who later confided
to Biddle that the last thing he needed was “a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s
head on the Justice Building.”

Despite his reservations Roosevelt forwarded Biddle’s letter to the Treasury Department,
where it fell into receptive hands. By the end of the year the government had created
the Public Works of Art Project, the first federally funded art project in this country.
Although the PWAP was a small-scale undertaking that folded after five months, it
seems to have allayed any fears the Roosevelt administration may have had about giving
tax dollars to artists. As Harry Hopkins, the director of the New Deal programs, put
it, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”

The government enlarged its relief activities to artists in August 1935 with the creation
of the WPA Federal Art Project. To qualify for a job, an artist had to prove only
that he was poor, a criterion that few had trouble meeting. Almost all of the future
Abstract Expressionists worked on
the Project. Willem de Kooning designed a mural for the Williamsburg Housing Project
but was fired within a year when the government discovered that he wasn’t an American
citizen. William Baziotes taught art in Queens. Arshile Gorky, who ironically described
WPA art as “poor art for poor people,” painted a mural for the New York World’s Fair,
as did Philip Guston. As for Pollock, he joined Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and
Ad Reinhardt on the Project’s easel division, which required them to produce about
one painting a month for allocation to schools, post offices, and other government
buildings. So basic was the experience of working on the Project that Barnett Newman,
who had a job in his family’s clothing manufacturing business at the time and couldn’t
get onto the Project, regretted it for years afterward. “I paid a severe price for
not being on the Project with the other guys,” he once said. “In their eyes I wasn’t
a painter.”

When Pollock first joined the Project he signed up for the mural division, deciding
to pursue his early interest in public art. But he quickly realized that he had no
patience for the teamwork required of mural painters. Within a few months he had switched
to the easel division—the largest of the Project’s sections—electing to work at home
and produce about one painting a month for allocation to government buildings. As
simple as it may have sounded, Pollock soon found himself subjected to a long list
of regulations that made his earliest days on the Project a rather bewildering experience.
Among the many rules enforced by the government was the one that artists on the easel
division, who all worked at home, had to report to an office on East Thirty-ninth
Street every morning and at the end of the day to punch a time clock. Failure to punch
the clock resulted in the withholding of a paycheck. Pollock, who was not an early
riser by nature, had difficulty meeting the 8:00
A.M
. check-in. The artist Jacob Kainen recalls Pollock racing frantically toward the
time clock seconds before the deadline, dressed in pajamas.