Jackson Pollock (7 page)

On the surface Pollock could not have picked a more unlikely mentor than Benton, a
sworn enemy of abstract painting. Born in the Ozark town of Neosho, Missouri, in 1889,
he was the son of a congressman and the great-nephew of U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton,
a feisty champion of Jacksonian democracy. As a child Benton had been discouraged
by his parents from pursuing a career in art; they were afraid that such a profession
might one day lead their eldest son to resemble the effeminate “scented dudes” they
had known in Washington society. While defying his family’s wishes by becoming a painter,
Benton upheld its traditions in his art. An ardent populist, he believed that art
should appeal to the man on the street. A patriot as well, he was determined to secure
for American painting the prestige and prominence accorded the art of Europe. A zealous
crusader, he truly believed in the power of his pictures to win wars, battle unemployment,
and help the country fulfill its national destiny.

In 1908, after dropping out of high school, Benton went to Paris to study art. “What
the hell,” he once declared, “there wasn’t any art in America.” Like many other American
artists, he drank at the Café du Dôme, saw the works of the French Impressionists
at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, and learned about Cubism at the Académie Julian, a mecca
for Americans abroad. He experimented with Synchromism, an American variation on Cubism
founded in part by his friend Stanton Macdonald-Wright. But he quickly grew disillusioned.
While other Americans in Paris were converting to abstract painting, Benton conducted
himself like a foreign spy, quietly collecting evidence for the case he would soon
launch against modern art. “It is absurd,” he once said, “to stick a Cézanne water-color
in the face of an average intelligent
American citizen and expect him to find much in it. The same goes for a Braque or
a Kandinsky pattern. Most Americans on seeing them will say, ‘If that’s art, to hell
with it.’ ”

After returning from Europe, Benton settled in New York and set about planning a highly
ambitious project: a series of large paintings and Renaissance-style murals that would
glorify American history and culture. His timing could not have been better, for the
contemporary revival of fresco painting in Mexico had prepared the way for a mural
movement in New York. Early in 1930 (a few months before Pollock arrived in New York)
Benton received his first mural commission—from the New School for Social Research,
which was under construction on West Twelfth Street. The school’s director, Alvin
Johnson, acting on a suggestion from the critic Lewis Mumford, invited both Benton
and Orozco to decorate the walls of the school. Orozco, assigned to the dining room,
painted an epic of class struggle that included portraits of Lenin, Gandhi, and the
Mexican leader Felipe Carrillo Puerto. The Marxist ideas implicit in his murals caused
many of the school’s conservative patrons to withdraw their support. Benton’s mural,
to the contrary, offended the radicals, who, he later wrote, “were mad because I didn’t
put in Nikolai Lenin as an American prophet.”

Entitled
America Today
, Benton’s New School murals (which were purchased in 1984 by the Equitable Life Assurance
Society and soon after put on permanent display in the lobby of its New York headquarters
amid considerable publicity) consist of a series of nine separate panels based on
his “sketching trips” across the country. For the previous five summers he had driven
around in a Chevrolet truck sketching sharecroppers, prizefighters, burlesque dancers,
and the sort of colorful people he believed captured the character of the country.
But
America Today
might more suitably be titled
America Yesterday
. Although painted during the Depression, it makes no reference to the five million
men out of work, the abandoned factories, or the empty trains stalled between cities.
Instead Benton portrayed a country in motion—plowing, sowing, reaping, mining, building,
traveling, and dancing, each action accentuated to the point of parody by the
bulging musculatures, mannered forms, and swirling rhythms that characterize Benton’s
style. For one brief moment when the country was on the verge of collapse, Benton
offered reassurance that America’s pioneer spirit could rescue it from the Depression.
Conservatives applauded him, radicals lambasted him, and establishment critics began
urging American painters to follow Benton’s example and “sing in their native voices.”
Benton was forty-one years old when he finished the murals. Along with Grant Wood
and John Steuart Curry, he was suddenly famous as a leader of Regionalist painting,
and so assured was his reputation that, as he put it himself, “I improved my brand
of whiskey.”

Pollock arrived in New York in time to watch Benton complete his last three months
of work on the New School murals. Pollock had great enthusiasm for the project, and
almost every afternoon visited a loft around the corner from the school, where he
could expect to find his teacher at work. (Among the ironies of Benton’s career is
that he never touched a brush to a wall; he painted the New School murals on movable
panels.) There was always something that needed to be done, and Pollock quickly made
himself indispensable. Often he “action posed,” which means that he was asked to assume
certain positions—tilt his head a certain way or look in a certain direction or raise
his arm to a certain height—so that Benton could get the details right. When Benton
didn’t need a model, Pollock managed to make himself useful in other ways, eagerly
volunteering to mix egg-tempera paints, wash out brushes, or even sweep the floor.
Occasionally Benton would slip him a dollar bill, insisting that he deserved it for
all his help. But watching Benton work was reward enough for Pollock. “Benton is beginning
to be recognized as the fore most American painter today,” Pollock boasted to his
father sometime later. “He has lifted art from the stuffy studio into the world and
happenings about him, which has a common meaning to the masses.”

To his schoolmates Pollock was a solitary dreamer, clearly absorbed by Benton’s teachings
but too unsure of himself to try to accomplish anything on his own. No one ever thought
he would be famous; to the contrary, many of his classmates felt
sorry for him. By now he was a tall, rangy youth, with unruly blond hair that fell
in his eyes and a round-shouldered posture that suggested to many a lack of confidence.
He shuffled his feet when he walked. People considered him shy, aloof, and somewhat
threatening. In conversation he often seemed distracted but then suddenly would “give
you a quick look as if to see whether he’d punch you in the nose or not,” according
to his schoolmate Reggie Wilson. The painter Will Barnet recalls him as “hurrying
down the corridor with an angry scowl on his face.” Pollock tended to make a better
impression on women, around whom he retired his combative stance. Such classmates
as Frances Avery and Yvonne Pène du Bois, whose father taught at the League, remember
him in terms of his sweet smile, his gentle, self-effacing manner, and his threadbare
clothes. Avery once invited him to her family’s home for a Sunday-night dinner of
roast chicken. He didn’t say a word throughout the meal. After he left, Avery’s mother
wondered aloud, “Why couldn’t that nice young man come to dinner without wearing overalls?”

Benton’s course, “Life Composition, Painting and Drawing,” met weekday nights in Studio
9. On most nights the dozen or so students in the class would pull up wooden stools
and spend the three-hour sessions sketching from a life model. Benton taught them
to draw the human figure according to his “hollow and bump” method, concentrating
on muscles rather than surface detail. Pollock worked hard at the assignments but
knew from the beginning that life drawing would never be his forte. Rather than stimulating
him, the technical demands of his craft only frustrated him. Yvonne Pène du Bois remembers
the sight of him hunched over his sketch board, struggling. “He couldn’t draw,” she
said, “and he knew he couldn’t draw, and I think it made him miserable.” The painter
Joe Delaney recalls Pollock’s “jittery hands,” as if even the task of holding a stick
of charcoal set him on edge. Benton recognized from the outset that Pollock had little
in common with his brother Charles, the perennial star pupil of every art class. Jackson’s
abilities, he later wrote, “seemed to be of a most minimal order.”

Besides drawing from the figure, Benton also had his students
“analyze” reproductions of late Renaissance and Baroque paintings, breaking down the
images into cubes, volumes, and linear movements. For Pollock, who had an intuitive
sense of rhythm, the analytical exercises proved much less difficult than drawing
from life. As Benton later wrote, “He got things out of proportion but found their
essential rhythms.”

Judging from his letters to his parents, Pollock felt satisfied with his progress
at the League, however unpromising he may have seemed to his classmates. He accepted
his limitations with remarkable equanimity, recognizing from the start that art was
a process of evolution—not revolution—that would require of him a lifetime of hard
work. “A good seventy years more,” he joked to his father, “and I think I’ll make
a good artist.” Writing to his mother, he confided with self-insight, “I have much
to learn tecnequelly yet. I am interested and like it which is the main thing.” Under
Benton’s influence he had finally acquired a sense of direction; for the moment that
was enough. For the first time in his life he was “doing every thing with a definite
purpose—with out a purpose for each move—thers chaos.”

His first year at the League, Pollock lived with his brother Charles in a fifth-floor
walk-up at 46 Union Square. The apartment, which had previously belonged to Benton,
looked out on Union Square Park, a grassy patch on Fourteenth Street known as the
place to talk about radical politics. The two brothers set up their easels in the
living room, leaving neither with any privacy and exacerbating what was already a
strained living situation. Although Charles had found a part-time job as an elementary-school
art teacher, he worked only one day a week and spent most of his time painting at
home. For Jackson, who attended school at night and was free during the day, it was
difficult to work in his brother’s presence. He couldn’t concentrate on so much as
a single sketch with Charles standing across from him dashing off drawings with obvious
confidence and ease, reminding him of his mediocrity.

Charles tried his hardest to encourage Jackson, recognizing that his brother had a
low opinion of his abilities. But Jackson resisted his help. He refused to show Charles
his paintings, and instead
of hanging them up, used to turn them against the wall. Equally dissatisfied with
his sketches, he developed an unfortunate habit of ripping them up. Charles would
try to salvage them, collecting the scraps, placing them in a drawer and assuring
his brother that his work was worth saving. But it was inconceivable to Pollock that
his early work might ever be of interest; he didn’t even bother to sign or date his
paintings.

Such self-effacing behavior could alternate unpredictably with hostile outbursts.
One night a few friends were gathered at the apartment when Jackson, who had been
drinking, picked up a hatchet and started swinging it above his head. “He was trying
to impress the girls,” recalled Marie Levitt, his future sister-in-law. The girls
started laughing, but Charles knew better. “Put that down,” he ordered. Jackson continued
to swing the hatchet, swiping a small oil painting that was hanging on the wall. He
slashed his brother’s painting in half.

Prohibition was still in force, and Pollock rarely drank during his student days.
But drinking made him so destructive that he quickly acquired a reputation at school
as a troubled youth. One night the League administration planned a moonlight sail
for students, renting a large touring boat that cruised the Hudson River. Pollock,
drunk on gin, started racing around the boat, removing light bulbs from their sockets
and tossing them overboard. The moving boat grew darker, and students started to panic.
“I’ll go get them,” Pollock volunteered good-naturedly as he climbed up on the railing
of the boat and prepared to jump into the Hudson. Terrified that he would drown, his
classmate Bernard Steffen wrestled him to the ground, dragged him to the boiler room,
and locked him in there for the remainder of the boat ride. “When he was drunk, he
was always doing some suicidal thing,” said the sculptor Nathaniel Kaz, recalling
one Saturday night when Lionel Hampton was performing in the League ballroom. Pollock
passed out in the middle of the dance floor. To keep people from stepping on him,
Kaz and a few others rolled him to the side of the room and shoved him under a bench,
where he slept for the night.

For all his troubling behavior, Pollock had no difficulty winning
the affection of people who recognized his genuineness. Among his early supporters
was Rita Benton, his teacher’s wife, a plump, pretty, vivacious brunette of Italian
descent. She was known among Benton’s students for her Sunday night “spaghetti dinners”—lively,
casual gatherings at which the Bentons provided the food and the students brought
the drinks. One night that fall the Bentons invited the three Pollock brothers—Charles,
Frank, and Jackson, the last of whom Rita had not yet met but had heard about from
her husband. Rita was immediately charmed by him. Upon being served his dinner Jackson
stared intently at his plate and, without a trace of irony, informed Rita that he
had no idea how to eat spaghetti. “As kids we ate chicken and pork,” Frank later explained,
“not spaghetti!” Rita found this highly amusing and promptly gave Jackson a lesson
in how to eat spaghetti with a fork and a spoon. After that Rita made a point of watching
out for him, inviting him over for dinner at least once a week and having him baby-sit
for T.P., her four-year-old son. One day that winter, when Pollock was sick with the
flu, Rita sent biscuits and cream to his apartment. Benton too felt protective toward
Pollock. He knew that he suffered from “a sense of ineptitude,” a feeling he could
empathize with, having been greatly frustrated himself as a young artist.