Jackson Pollock (16 page)

On the surface they were an unlikely pair—the courtly cosmopolitan Graham and his
moody friend from the West. On his first visit to Pollock’s studio Graham politely
asked the young artist whether he had ever visited Paris, only to have Pollock blurt
“Let Paris come see me!” To someone else the comment might have sounded like so much
adolescent boasting, but Graham was tempted to take him seriously. He knew that Pollock
was genuinely wary of French culture and couldn’t help but admire him for it. For
while many New York painters—Graham included—were then painting in a style so derivative
of Picasso as to border on rank imitation, Pollock’s work looked different. And though
Pollock had not yet produced any great paintings, to glance around his studio was
to suspect that one day he would. Graham recognized Pollock’s originality.

“Graham probably wanted to be like Pollock,” his wife once
said. “He wanted to be the sort of guy who could punch a policeman in the nose.” She
later recalled that on his first visit to their apartment—at 54 Greenwich Avenue—Pollock
spent a few minutes looking at the primitive sculptures exhibited in every room. Delighted
by Pollock’s interest in his art collection, Graham removed a few art books from the
shelves of his extensive library and tried to show Pollock some reproductions. But
Pollock refused to look. “Artists shouldn’t look too much at what other artists do,”
he announced. “An artist should do what’s in himself.” He proceeded to give a short
lecture on Graham’s good friend Arshile Gorky, claiming he was doomed for mediocrity
because he painted too much like Picasso. Pollock’s stubborn, arrogant pronouncements
at times made Graham angry, but even when he was angry, he knew that Pollock had a
point.

One interest that Pollock and Graham had in common was primitive art. When the Museum
of Modern Art organized the show “Indian Art of the United States” in 1941, the two
men went to see it together. For Pollock the show was familiar terrain. In the lobby
of the museum Navahos demonstrated sand painting techniques, which no doubt evoked
for him the lore of his childhood. As Sande once said: “In all our experience in the
West there was always an Indian around somewhere.” Pollock, who stated in 1944 that
he had “always been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art,”
felt an instinctive affinity with native art, and, as usual, his enthusiasm spilled
over into his work. In a number of his pictures he adopted a bold yellow-red-black
color scheme. He also added arrows, slashes, and pictograph markings to his lexicon
of signs and symbols. Pollock’s easy identification with tribal art was applauded
by Graham, who recognized immediately that Pollock was putting into paint the theories
that Graham had set forth in writing. As a critic and aesthetician, Graham believed
that a primary purpose of a modern art was “to re-establish a lost contact with the
unconscious . . . with the primordial racial past,” to discover in one’s art the sort
of spontaneity and authenticity he discerned in the art of Picasso, primitive cultures—and
Pollock.

Graham often told Pollock that he considered him “the
greatest painter in America.” Whether or not Graham actually believed this—he told
the same thing to de Kooning and many others—he offered Pollock essential moral support.
He stopped by his studio at least once a week to see how his work was progressing
and invariably had something nice to say.

Pollock looked to Graham for guidance in his work, and the older painter was to have
a definite influence on him. But his influence was at most indirect. A few years earlier,
in 1937, Graham had written an important article called “Primitive Art and Picasso,”
in which, as one might expect, he likened the work of Picasso to tribal art. He may
well have given this article to Pollock in the course of their friendship, for Pollock
made a number of pictures that are based on the reproductions accompanying the article.
One of the reproductions showed an Alaskan Eskimo mask made from wood and feathers
(
Fig. 11
). The mask had two holes in it—one directly above the other—and Graham felt the holes
could be interpreted as either two eyes or two nostrils. This deliberate ambiguity
reminded Graham of the distorted features one sees in the heads of Picasso, and the
mask, he wrote, was reflective of “a master artist’s freedom of speech.” For Pollock,
who wanted nothing more than to be a “master artist,” the mask became a symbol of
his struggle. He painted the image of the Eskimo mask into several paintings dating
to this period, such as
Masqued Image, Composition with Masked Forms
, and
Naked Man
, in which a Picasso-like personage possesses, in the place of a head, a mask. But
it is in the painting
Birth
that Pollock exploited the Eskimo mask for his strongest statement to date.

Birth
(
Fig. 12
) is a painting of violent, enraged creativity. As the title implies, it shows a birth
scene, but the image is almost impossible to make out. What we see instead is a series
of discs that look like the Eskimo mask, each one interlocking with the next to form
a powerful chain of activity. It is easy to discern the influence of Picasso here,
for Pollock has managed quite effectively to appropriate the Spaniard’s most daring
innovations—his shallow space, flattened forms, and thick “cloisonné” outlines; his
total dismantling of illusion. But in spite of the foreign influences, the painting
is clearly the work of an American. Pollock
has sounded a distinctly native chord in his color scheme—red, white, and blue—a poignant
prophecy of his imminent breakthrough (or birth, so to speak) as the first American
painter to battle Picasso for a style of his own and to succeed.

In October 1940, five months after he was laid off from his job, Pollock was rehired
onto the Project. But the job brought him no peace of mind. Layoffs were still common,
the future of the Project was uncertain at best, and employees were being harassed
for their political activities. Less than two weeks after Jackson rejoined the Project,
Sande reported to Charles that a number of artists who had signed a petition to have
the Communist party put on the ballot had consequently been fired; since Jackson and
Sande both had signed the petition, they suspected they were next. “The irony is,”
Sande noted, “that the real Party People I know didn’t sign the damn thing and it
is suckers like us who are getting it. . . . Needless to say we are rigid with fright.”

Adding to Pollock’s worries was the possibility of being drafted. As the war in Europe
worsened, it was beginning to seem inevitable that the United States would soon be
involved. That October, Pollock registered with his local draft board as required
by the government. He felt terrified by the prospect of military duty and discussed
with his psychotherapist whether or not he was fit to serve, particularly in light
of his alcoholism. Pollock was now seeing Violet Staub de Laszlo, a first-generation
student of Jung, to whom Dr. Henderson had referred him upon leaving New York. Dr.
de Laszlo, who felt that Pollock’s main problem was his “great doubt about himself,”
tried to persuade him that joining the service could be a beneficial experience for
him; she thought it might enhance his self-esteem. But Pollock was adamant about not
wanting to serve.

On May 6, 1941, Dr. de Laszlo wrote the draft board: “I have found [Pollock] to be
a shut-in and inarticulate personality of good intelligence, but with a great deal
of emotional instability who finds it difficult to form or maintain any kind of relationship.”
The doctor also wrote that while there was no reason to believe Pollock was schizophrenic,
“there is a certain schizoid disposition underlying the instability.” She recommended
that
her patient be given a special psychiatric examination, which Pollock underwent at
Beth Israel Hospital on May 22. During the exam he indicated to a doctor that he had
been institutionalized at New York Hospital three years earlier. The government requested
proof of his hospitalization, which Dr. de Laszlo promptly supplied in writing. To
his relief, Pollock was classified 4F.

So completely self-absorbed was Pollock that besides being unwilling to serve in World
War II, he appears to have resented the small sacrifices the war demanded of him.
When war broke out, travel restrictions went into effect, making it difficult for
him to leave the state. In his sole written reference to the war during the years
it was being fought, Pollock complained to one of his brothers that World War II was
interfering with his vacation plans: “If it weren’t for this god damned war I’d head
west for a while.” As the forties wore on, however, and the death toll grew, Pollock
came to realize how fortunate he had been to be allowed to stay home and paint. In
1946 he noted appreciatively: “I have been able to paint all thru the war—and am very
grateful for the opportunity and tried to make the most of it.”

In the summer of 1941 Sande Pollock was laid off from the Project again, and five
weeks passed before he managed to get rehired. The layoff came at a bad time, for
the rent on his apartment had just been raised from thirty-five to fifty dollars a
month, and he and Jackson had had enough trouble paying it even when they both were
employed. Compounding their problems, their mother, who was now in her late sixties,
was threatening to come to live with them. For the past few years Stella had been
living in Tingley, Iowa, with her ailing mother, but with the old woman’s death that
July she was eager to leave the dreary farming town and join her children in New York.
It seemed only logical to her that she should move in with Jackson and Sande, as she
could not afford an apartment of her own.

Sande thought this was a terrible idea. In a series of letters to Charles, in Michigan,
he tried to convince him that their mother would be better off anywhere but in New
York. Not the least of his reasons was that her presence would be “extremely trying”
for Jackson, who was still struggling with alcoholism. There was also the problem
of money. “I hate like hell to write a hard luck letter,” Sande wrote that August,
going on to say that the situation on the Project “makes for a helplessness that is
almost overwhelming.” Stella ended up moving to Michigan, where she would live with
Charles and his family until moving to New York the following year.

In the three years that had passed since his release from New York Hospital not much
had changed in Pollock’s life. He was still on the Project, still struggling to meet
his monthly quota, still drinking in spite of psychiatric care. But his obscurity
and loneliness were about to end. In November 1941 John Graham mentioned to Pollock
that he was organizing a show at McMillen Inc., an antique and fine-furnishings company
on East Fifty-fifth Street. He wanted to include one of Pollock’s paintings—how about
Birth
? Pollock was very pleased to be selected for the show, which promised to be an interesting
one. Entitled “American and French Paintings,” the exhibit would pair established
Europeans like Picasso and Matisse with young Americans almost no one had heard of.
One of them was de Kooning, another Lenore Krasner.

Those names were unknown not only to the general public but to Pollock as well. Lenore
Krasner. Who was
she
? “A damn good woman painter,” Pollock soon told his brother.

When Lee Krasner learned in November 1941 that John Graham planned to include her
in the show “American and French Paintings,” she was ecstatic that her work would
be hanging in the same room as that of her idols Picasso and Matisse. But she was
also curious: Who was Jackson Pollock and why didn’t she know him? “I prided myself
on knowing just about everybody in the New York art world,” she later explained.

She asked around. She asked her friends in the American Abstract Artists group if
they had ever heard of Jackson Pollock. No one had. Then one night she was attending
an opening at the Downtown Gallery when she ran into the painter Louis Bunce, a former
schoolmate of Pollock’s at the League. Pollock, he told Lee, was a very good painter
who lived right around the corner from her, on Eighth Street. Lee was then living
in a studio on East Ninth.

The next day Lee walked over to his apartment. At the top of the stairs she was met
by Sande Pollock, who pointed her to his
brother’s studio. Jackson must have been surprised by this woman in his doorway, who
told him boldly, “I’m Lee Krasner and we’re in the same show.” Lee Krasner was thirty-three
years old, four years older than Pollock. She stood five feet five, with strong features
and shiny auburn hair cut in a pageboy style.

Lee took in Jackson’s features and realized she had seen him once before. Five years
earlier she had been dancing at a loft party sponsored by the WPA Artists’ Union when
Pollock had drunkenly cut in. “He stepped all over my feet,” she once said. “He never
did learn to dance.”