Jackson Pollock (12 page)

Within a year the government had dropped the time-clock policy in response to complaints
from artists in Brooklyn and the Bronx, who were spending the better part of their
workday in transit. But artists remained subjected to many other regulations that
were no less confounding. For one, they were required to submit a painting to the
government every four to eight weeks, depending on the size of the canvas. They were
given four weeks for a 16″ × 20″ canvas, six weeks for a 24″ × 36″ canvas, three weeks
for a watercolor. Even more absurd, a few months after the Project began, artists
were ordered to stop signing their paintings, the rationale being that bridge builders
and bricklayers don’t sign their work, so why should painters? The basic assumption
underlying the Project was that artists were no different from any other government
employees and that paintings were just another
form of property. It is this mentality that helps explain why almost none of Pollock’s
WPA paintings survive: the majority were destroyed by the government.

When the federal government began phasing out the Project in the early forties, it
disposed of the artwork in its possession as if it were so much scrap metal. In a
typical incident in March 1941 the government decided to clean out a storage closet
in which more than six hundred and fifty watercolors had accumulated; the paintings
were incinerated. Among the destroyed watercolors, according to government documents,
were works by Milton Avery, Jack Tworkov, Loren Maclver, I. Rice Pereira, Sande Pollock,
and Jackson Pollock. Twelve of Pollock’s watercolors were destroyed, and judging from
their titles—
Sunny Landscape, Baytime, Martha’s Vineyard
, and so on—they consisted of works he had completed during his summers in Chilmark.

In a separate incident in December 1943 the government quietly disposed of numerous
other artworks by auctioning them off at a Flushing warehouse, along with scrap iron
and other surplus property. Thousands of oil paintings, which had already been removed
from their stretchers, were offered for sale by the pound. A plumber purchased the
entire lot, thinking that the canvases could be used to insulate pipes. He later realized,
however, that when pipes heated up they burned the oil paint, giving off an unpleasant
smell. The plumber contacted a junk dealer, who purchased the canvases and sold them
to Roberts Book Company, a curiosity shop on Canal Street. The owner of the bookstore
heaped the truckload of ragged, mildewed canvases on long tables in the back room
of the store. Among the first to pick through the stack was Herbert Benevy, an art
collector and the owner of the Gramercy Art Frame Shop. His selection, purchased at
three dollars a canvas, included works by Milton Avery, Alice Neel, Joseph Solman,
Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. Two of Pollock’s paintings were rescued in this
way.

In September 1935, after nine years in New York, Charles Pollock accepted a job in
Washington, DC, as a staff artist for the
Resettlement Administration. Hired to work in the agency’s “special skills” division,
he joined a team of accomplished artists that included Ben Shahn and settled in Potomac,
Maryland. He returned to New York only for occasional visits, and the days when Jackson
could depend on Charles for unstinting personal support promptly ended.

Upon leaving New York, Charles turned over the lease on his apartment at 46 East Eighth
Street to Jackson and Sande, who were still sharing a single room on Houston Street.
Their new apartment, in the hub of Greenwich Village, was comparatively luxurious,
occupying the entire top floor of a five-story building and including such novelties
as hot-water plumbing and a private bath. At the far end of the floor-through was
a large, sunny room with a view of Eighth Street, and Jackson didn’t hesitate to plunk
down his easel and claim the room as his studio. Sande, who had also joined the Project’s
easel division, set up a studio in a small, dark room adjacent to Jackson’s—the first
of his many concessions to his brother in the seven years they were to live together
on Eighth Street.

From his earliest days on the Project’s easel division Pollock had difficulty meeting
his monthly requirement. The problem was that he had begun to feel impatient with
painting in the Regionalist style. Cotton pickers, wheat threshers, and people playing
instruments no longer held his interest as subjects, and he knew that somehow he would
have to break free from Benton.

Pollock’s problems were well known on the easel division. His fellow painters had
heard that he had become “disaffected” from his work, according to Carl Holty. Weeks
would go by during which he failed to stop by the Project office to hand in a painting
or pick up art supplies, and people wondered where he was.

Pollock’s supervisor on the Project was Burgoyne Diller, a former schoolmate of his
from the League, who painted in the geometric style of Mondrian. In spite of their
artistic differences, Diller recognized Pollock as a promising young artist and went
out of his way to help him. At one point when Pollock had missed his monthly deadline,
Diller stopped by the Eighth Street
apartment to see what the problem was. “The Project can’t use this work,” Pollock
told him despairingly as he took Diller around his studio and showed him a few canvases
that were obvious failures. “I’m in a bog,” he said. “I can’t do anything.” Diller
reassured him: “It’s okay. You’re on the Project. Go on.” And so Pollock went on,
handing in paintings that he couldn’t believe anyone really wanted.

Not all of Pollock’s paintings were accepted by the Project. Some were returned to
him for additional work, others were rejected outright. Writing to Charles about a
year after joining the Project, Pollock sounded understandably discouraged. “There’s
no news here—not having much luck with painting. Got my last picture turned back for
more time . . . if it had been a good picture I wouldn’t have consented.”

Sande Pollock understood the difficulties his brother was facing. As one who had never
been an admirer of Benton’s and who in fact felt that Regionalism was “nonsense,”
he thought it only logical that Jackson should have reached a dead end in his work.
Sande admired the Mexicans: Rivera, Orozco, and David Siqueiros, the last of whom
he had studied with in Los Angeles. When, in the spring of 1936, Siqueiros opened
a workshop in New York—it was located in a townhouse on Union Square—Sande suggested
to Jackson that the two of them volunteer to work there.

In the next few months Pollock helped out at the Siqueiros workshop almost every afternoon.
He found it an interesting place, for Siqueiros, more than anyone else Pollock knew
of, took amazing liberties with his materials. The youngest and most militant of the
“big three” Mexican muralists, Siqueiros believed that one couldn’t paint revolutionary
pictures with old techniques; it was necessary to devise new ones. While his work
was realistic, he often started a canvas by placing it on the floor and spattering
paint from a stick, as a way of generating images and getting ideas. Other times he
worked with an airbrush, filling it up with Duco paint, a commercial lacquer used
to paint cars, and spraying large surfaces. (His nickname was “Il Duco.”) But the
chief purpose of the workshop was to turn out posters, floats, and
other props for various Communist organizations. For Pollock, whose interest in politics
was markedly superficial—he didn’t vote once in the course of the thirties, according
to city election records—it is safe to say that the workshop appealed to him primarily
as a place to learn about new methods.

While most of the assistants at the Siqueiros workshop were assigned to specific projects,
Pollock was far too independent to want to make posters and banners according to some
visionary master plan. He never asked for assignments, and he wasn’t given any. But
his admiration for Siqueiros was genuine, and he was more than willing to help out
at the workshop with routine chores. He mixed paint, sawed wooden panels, pasted,
plastered, and ran errands, bringing to his tasks his usual eagerness to make himself
of use. None of his coworkers took him very seriously, and several were quick to fault
him for his ineptitude. “He couldn’t draw,” said Axel Horn, as a way of explaining
why Pollock never made posters. Harold Lehman was no less cynical, later stating angrily,
“He had no ideas.”

But for all his seeming dullness, Pollock was paying close attention to the goings-on
at the workshop. He was very interested in Siqueiros’ techniques, and in fact tried
them out in the privacy of his studio. In a work called
Landscape with Steer
, Pollock took a black-and-white lithograph of a steer and airbrushed the image with
glowing bursts of red, orange, and blue. Another print,
Figures in a Landscape
, has some large black splatters on it. One senses from these works that Pollock was
looking for a freer, more liberating way to paint. On the other hand, his efforts
were rather half-hearted, as if splattering paint simply for the sake of being spontaneous
didn’t really interest him. First he’d have to figure out what he wanted to say with
it.

For some time Sande Pollock had been trying to save enough money to have his high
school girlfriend join him in New York. In July 1936, with seventy-five dollars in
savings, he bought a train ticket and sent it to Arloie Conaway, who was living with
her parents on their citrus farm in Riverside, California. At the end of the month
the couple were married at City Hall—Jackson served as a witness—and Arloie moved
into the Eighth Street apartment.
A quiet, kind, self-effacing woman, she had no thought of asking her husband when,
if ever, Jackson planned on finding his own apartment. To the contrary, Arloie recognized
Jackson as a hypersensitive young man who needed all the help he could get from Sande
and tried not to interfere with the brothers’ relationship. On nights when she could
hear Jackson drunkenly ascending the hallway stairs, she went into her bedroom, closed
the door, and stayed there for the remainder of the night as Sande sobered him up
in the kitchen.

That September, Jackson decided to leave New York for an extended stay in Bucks County,
Pennsylvania, where a couple of his former schoolmates were renting an old farmhouse.
Sande at first opposed the idea, reminding his brother that, in addition to his obligations
on the Project, the rent on their apartment was thirty-five dollars a month, half
of which was Jackson’s responsibility. But Jackson was adamant about leaving New York
for the winter. He had accomplished very little work since joining the Project a year
before and thought he might be more productive in rural surroundings; he certainly
couldn’t be less productive. Besides, he now had a car—Charles had left behind a Model
T Ford when he moved to Washington—and could easily commute to New York once a week
or so to attend to his obligations on the Project.

His stay in Bucks County proved to be an abject disappointment. His first week there
he set up an easel on the front porch of the house and made every effort to dedicate
himself to his work, only to find that his heart wasn’t in it. His housemate Reginald
Wilson later recalled Pollock as a “private, lonely person” who had difficulty applying
himself to his work. He often went for long drives by himself, disappearing unaccountably
for hours at a time. On the days he stayed home he was easily distracted and would
drive into town a few times a day to run needless errands. Then, three weeks into
his stay, he wrecked his car. “Jack had the misfortune of colliding with some bastard
and as a result the old Ford has been permanently laid to rest,” Sande reported to
Charles. “The other man’s car was damaged to the extent of eighty bucks which it appears
Jack will have to pay.” Depressed
by the car accident and the general bleakness of his situation, Pollock decided to
return to New York a month after he had left, even though he had already paid rent
on the farmhouse for the winter.

Back in the city, Pollock was as disconsolate as ever. He was in debt to his brother,
who had helped defray the cost of the accident, and had fallen far behind in his work
on the Project. He could no longer pretend that leaving New York was the solution
to his problems; his trip to Bucks County had merely exacerbated them. It was at this
discouraging moment, in October 1936, that Pollock met a woman who was to divert him
from his worries, at least for a few months. Her name was Becky Tarwater. She was
four years older than he was, and like other women in Pollock’s life, Becky was a
talented musician whom he admired from the moment they met. “He was really in love
with Becky,” Arloie later said. “He wanted to marry her.”

Pollock first saw her at a party in Greenwich Village to which Sande and Arloie had
taken him. A banker’s daughter from Rock-wood, Tennessee, Becky was a singer and banjo
player who happened to be performing at the party. “He asked me if he could walk me
home,” Becky recalled years afterward, adding that she declined the offer since he
appeared to be drunk. Later that night Becky was walking toward the subway on her
way home when she heard a noise behind her. She turned around suddenly and saw Pollock
standing in a doorway, peeking out and smiling at her. She laughed. She walked another
block and turned around again. Pollock had advanced to another doorway and was still
smiling at her.