Jackson Pollock (19 page)

Pollock, by now, was quite familiar with Surrealist art, which had been shown regularly
in this country for more than a decade. De Chirico had exhibited in New York as early
as 1927, Miró in 1928, Dali in 1933, and all of them were included in the Museum of
Modern Art’s celebrated exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” of 1936. But
it was not until the Surrealists migrated to New York that Pollock became fully aware
of their accomplishments. Their arrival coincided with a critical moment in American
painting, when the political art of the thirties had been abandoned but a new style
had yet to be defined. Pollock, along with many others, began looking to the Surrealists
as a source of new ideas. This is not to imply that he had any interest in the melting
watches of Salvador Dali. For Pollock the magic of Surrealism lay in its freedom from
academic convention. He was a great admirer of Miró, whose fantasy creatures and playful
calligraphy were to have a definite influence on him. Another Surrealist whom Pollock
admired was André Masson, a pioneer of “automatic” drawing, who was living in Connecticut
during the war years.

Unlike Cubism, which was essentially a painting style, Surrealism was an organized
movement, with leaders and followers,
manifestos and magazines, exhibits and excommunications. It was founded in Paris soon
after World War I by André Breton, a tall, magnetic poet with a large head and pronounced
features invariably described as leonine. After studying medicine and serving as a
doctor in psychiatric wards during the war, Breton developed an interest in the connection
between dreams, madness, and poetry. In 1921 he made a pilgrimage to Vienna to meet
Freud, whose writings were to be central to Surrealism. In 1924 Breton issued the
first of his Surrealist manifestos. The goal of Surrealism was the radical transformation
of human life, not only socially but at the deepest levels of existence. Its principal
technique was “psychic automatism,” or the exploration of the unconscious.

Despite its literary leanings, Surrealism found a following mostly among painters.
With values colored by the First World War—pessimism, irrationality, intense subjectivity,
and eroticism—the movement spread quickly outside France. Its early leaders were de
Chirico in Italy, Max Ernst in Germany, Salvador Dali in Spain, and René Magritte
in Belgium. By the 1930s most of the Surrealists had gravitated to Paris, where the
movement continued to flourish until the outbreak of World War II.

By the time the Surrealists arrived in New York, the movement was essentially defunct.
The painters Breton had recruited were all famous, and the advanced positions they
had taken in the twenties had been widely accepted. No longer was anyone issuing manifestos
or calling for revolution. For Breton, his five years in New York were lonely and
depressing. He complained bitterly about having to live among “uncultivated” Americans
and refused on principle to learn any English or visit the downtown cafeterias where
artists congregated. He ran out of money and was forced to take a job with the Office
of War Information reading propaganda news on the radio. At one point he became friendly
with David Hare, the New York sculptor, and started a review called
VVV
, but it ended badly. His wife Jacqueline, who served as the review’s translator,
left him for Hare and took along his one child.

Of all the Surrealists living in New York, Pollock became
friendly with one. Born in Chile, Roberto Matta was a latecomer to Surrealism and
a rarity among the émigrés in that he spoke English fluently and was interested in
meeting American painters. He loathed Breton, whom he found insufferably rigid, and
was determined to keep Surrealism from degenerating into an academy by starting an
offshoot movement composed entirely of Americans. But first he would have to educate
them, or so he thought. “I found that they were absolutely ignorant,” Matta said of
the painters he met in New York. “They knew nothing about Rimbaud or Apollinaire,
and they were just copying the outward forms of Picasso and Miró.” When Matta suggested
to Mother-well that they start a group dedicated to exploring Surrealist techniques,
Motherwell went to talk to Pollock.

Pollock at first was reluctant to get involved in Matta’s group or, for that matter,
in any activity connected with the Surrealists. He didn’t speak French, had no interest
in learning it, and resented the Surrealists’ obvious disdain for American culture.
He had already turned down a chance to participate in an important group show, “First
Papers of Surrealism,” which had been organized by Breton at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion
in October 1942. “Jackson didn’t like the Surrealists because he thought they were
anti-American,” David Hare once said. “And the Surrealists didn’t like him because
they expected to be courted all the time. Jackson wouldn’t court them at all.”

At the same time Pollock was genuinely interested in Surrealist art and the technique
of psychic automatism, so he decided to join Matta’s group. The meetings were held
on Saturday afternoons in Matta’s apartment on Ninth Street, and they lasted for a
couple of months. Pollock rarely talked at the weekly gatherings—Matta once described
him as
“fermé”
(closed up)—but was articulate when he did. Once Matta asked each of the artists
in the group to give a definition of a flower. “A flower is a fox in a hole,” Pollock
said, and although no one was quite sure what the comment meant, its ambiguity only
heightened its value. Another time Pollock stared for a few moments at the smoke rising
from his cigarette. Which is the empty space, he wondered aloud, the smoke or the
air? Pollock was interested in Matta’s theory of
“psychic morphology,” which maintains that forms, like feelings, are constantly undergoing
change. Once Pollock mentioned that a good example of this theory could be found in
Navaho art, where men step out of their skins to become thunderbirds. Motherwell started
to elaborate on the subject, but Matta quickly silenced him. “The reason Jackson is
successful,” Matta said, “is because he doesn’t talk too much.”

Matta would give the artists assignments and once told them to illustrate time by
drawing the hours of the day. Pollock drew an alarm clock that metamorphosed into
a jumble of scribbles. When Motherwell noted that Pollock had successfully demonstrated
Matta’s theory about the evolution of forms—the clock had evolved into an abstract
image—Pollock told Motherwell that he hated the word “abstract.” If you draw a line,
he said, it can be seen as either figurative (it can be a profile) or abstract (just
a line). Pollock didn’t like to label his art. An abstract image was as real to him
as a figurative one. It all came from the same source, from inside.

Besides participating in Matta’s group, Pollock joined his newfound friends in playing
Surrealist parlor games. The stubborn nonjoiner sat in a circle with Motherwell, Baziotes,
and their wives and drew blindfolded. He also played a game called “Male and Female”:
a sheet of paper is passed around a group and each person adds a random anatomical
detail to create androgynous monsters. “Eventually,” Motherwell once said, “we realized
it was really sort of nonsense,” and the group was disbanded. But Pollock seems to
have gotten something from it. He was soon to produce a painting called
Male and Female
, which was probably titled after the game.

In 1942 Pollock produced only three paintings, but it is generally agreed that they
mark his arrival at creative maturity. It took him twelve years to reach this point,
and the results were impressive. One of the first things one notices about his 1942
paintings, as a group, is their size. Whereas previously his canvases had tended to
be small—his early
Self-Portrait
had measured a tiny 5″ × 7″—his new paintings were very large.
Male and
Female
is a vertical canvas standing about six feet high. The
Moon Woman
is just under six feet.
Stenographic Figure
, a horizontal painting, is five and a half feet long. Clearly Pollock was feeling
more sure of himself, and for good reason.

Stenographic Figure (
Fig. 13
)
is a semiabstract painting that appears to show a reclining female nude. Several
critics believe that the painting actually shows two figures—a man and a woman—and
they may well be right. The disagreement over the painting’s subject matter seems
somehow appropriate, for ambiguity is a theme of the work. Rather than creating a
human figure, Pollock has given us mere hints of one. A blue triangle evokes a woman’s
head. Two red rings beneath it suggest breasts. A series of cursive black lines might
be legs—or are they ribs? Nothing is spelled out. The woman is rendered in shorthand.
There’s a lot of tension in this work—between figuration and abstraction and, compositionally,
between the large, binding rectangles that make up the painting’s background and the
free-form calligraphy activating its surface.
Stenographic Figure
is a good example of Pollock’s increasing ability to thrash out his preoccupations
in pure painterly terms; and that this work owes quite a bit to both Picasso and Miró
does not diminish its strength.

Pollock continued to borrow heavily from artists he admired, while simultaneously
nullifying almost all traces of his debt.
Male and Female
(
Fig. 14
), which is widely considered his first major work, bears some startling similarities
to a painting by Kandinsky called
Striped
. (Pollock could have seen it at the Nierendorf Gallery in 1942.) The Kandinsky painting
(
Fig. 15
) is an abstraction dating to 1934, when the artist was living in Paris. It consists
of five vertical panels, or “stripes,” against which floats a whimsical arrangement
of circles, crescents, spirals, and other geometric forms. Two of the forms vaguely
suggest human figures: one looks like a helmet and the other resembles a fetus. These
two forms bear a distinct likeness to the two head-forms in Pollock’s
Male and Female
, which, like the Kandinsky, also consists of five vertical stripes. That Pollock
seems to have borrowed his format from Kandinsky is of course less important than
what he did with it.

Male and Female
is a symbolic portrait of a man and a
woman. The female figure, which occupies the left side, is a joyous tribute to femininity.
Her head is a black half-moon, decorated with long-lashed eyes stacked one on top
of the other à la Picasso. Her chest is a curving red mound, and her womb is a fat
red curlicue. The male figure, like the female, embodies genital characteristics:
whereas she is curvilinear, he is rigid and erect. The man and the woman stand close
together, each one fully conscious of the other’s presence. She bats her eyes at him,
and he in turn opens his mouth as if about to gobble her up. Plainly he desires her,
and a sense of sexual urgency is further suggested by the frenzied overlay of scribbles,
scrawls, and Navaho-like slash markings that activate the picture’s surface. In the
upper left corner, black, white, and yellow pigment is splashed freely onto the blue
background, an early herald of the “drip” paintings Pollock was to begin five years
later.

The scholarly literature on this painting has centered, rather peculiarly, on what
the work reveals about the artist’s sexuality. Several writers believe that the figure
on the left is actually a man; the red curlicue has been described as a limp phallus.
Similarly, the figure on the right has been interpreted as a woman, the mechanical
maw now a symbol of female aggression. Still other writers discern male and female
characteristics in both figures; William Rubin, for instance, feels that the painting
attests to the “bisexuality or sexual unsureness present in all individuals and usually
repressed to the lowest levels of the psyche.”

Indeed, there is struggle in
Male and Female
, but it seems too easy to describe it as only a sexual struggle. On another level
altogether, Pollock’s primary conflict here seems to be with his European predecessors.
It is not accidental that he turned to Kandinsky to help him structure this painting,
for Kandinsky was a master of geometric purity. But such purity is nowhere evident
in the Pollock painting. It has a crude, brutish look that borders on barbarism. Pollock
borrowed Kandinsky’s structure and proceeded, so to speak, to deconstruct it. This
painting was executed in 1942, a crucial moment, when Europe had already produced
its last great art movement (Surrealism) and American painters finally had a chance
to show the way ahead.
Male and Female
seems to be saying that the future of art belongs to this country, not only in its
hostile treatment of Kandinsky (a founder of abstract painting) but in its powerful
invocation of American culture: the man and the woman in the painting look like Navaho
Indian totems.

That Pollock completed only three paintings in 1942 was probably the result of external
demands on his time. Since February he had been working full time for the War Services
program. And as taxing as that was, by the end of the year he was spending most of
his workday just trying to figure out exactly where he was supposed to be working.
In October Pollock and Lee were both assigned to a vocational school in Brooklyn—to
learn how to manufacture aviation sheet metal. A week after Pollock started school
he was ordered back to Manhattan to rejoin the War Services program. He arrived in
time to learn that President Roosevelt was folding the WPA, which was no longer needed
since the war was creating work for millions. Lee was fired on the first day of 1943,
and Pollock was fired January 30.