Jackson Pollock (9 page)

Pollock defended Benton’s ideas not only in the lunchroom but privately as well. In
long, rambling letters to his parents, invariably mailed after weeks of delay, he
spoke proudly of his teacher and offered unequivocal endorsement of his ideas. Writing
to his mother during his second year at school, Pollock asked her whether his brother
Sande, who was still living in Los Angeles, had “heard Thomas Craven lecture there
or not—he should have. I meant to write him about it, he is one critic who has intelligence
and a thorough knowledge of the history of art. I heard that he was made quite a joke
there which is not unlikely for the element of painters found out there.” Thomas Craven,
a tall, natty, acerbic art critic, was a close friend of Benton’s and the leading
champion of American Scene painting. He hated the French avant-garde, arguing in articles
and books that such artists as Matisse and Brancusi produced meaningless decoration
that was destined for obscurity since no one could understand it. Pollock could not
have picked a more small-minded critic to admire. Many years later Craven would say
of his onetime supporter: “All Pollock does is drink a gallon of paint, stand on a
ladder and urinate.”

In spite of his allegiance to Benton, Pollock’s aspirations were not nearly as clear-cut
as many of his schoolmates believed. In moments of daydreaming he still thought about
becoming a
sculptor. Then again, he was also interested in mural painting. Either way, he had
made a crucial decision: somehow he was going to become a great artist, willing himself
into what he knew he already was. “And when I say artist,” he wrote to his father,
“I don’t mean it in the narrow sense of the word—but the man who is building things—creating
molding the earth—whether it be the plains of the west—or the iron ore of Penn. Its
all a big game of construction—some with a brush—some with a shovel—some choose a
pen . . . Sculptoring I think tho is my medium. I’ll never be satisfied until I’m
able to mould a mountain of stone, with the aid of a jack hammer, to fit my will.”
(At the time, sculptor Gutzon Borglum was carving his famous memorial on the face
of Mount Rushmore, a project that received wide coverage in the New York newspapers
and that Pollock must have been familiar with.)

Pollock’s grandiose ambitions were in glaring contrast to his accomplishments. The
most he could hope for at the time was that Benton might make him class monitor, a
position he had applied for but felt “doubtful about getting.”

In October 1932, after spending another summer in California, Pollock began his third
year at the League. He was now living at 46 Carmine Street (“a happy Italian street”)
and, much to his satisfaction, could claim the distinction of being class monitor.
His main responsibilities were hiring the models for class and assisting Benton with
teaching demonstrations, in exchange for which he was exempted from having to pay
tuition. He was highly conscientious in his duties, especially when compared to his
teacher. One night when Benton failed to show up for class, someone started shouting,
“What the hell are we paying for?” As others joined in the protest, Pollock left the
classroom and returned an hour or so later with Benton in tow. On another occasion,
Peter Busa complained to Pollock that Benton had yet to offer any criticism of his
work. “You wait,” Pollock reassured him. “When he comes through that door, he’ll be
right over to you.”

That December, Benton was thrust into the limelight again with the unveiling of his
series of murals for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Pollock had helped him install
them—they
were hung in the museum’s reading room—and lending to the excitement was the fact
that the museum had opened only one month earlier, at 10 West Eighth Street. The Whitney
murals, which continued the themes set forth in the New School murals, were no less
controversial.
The New York Times
called the project a “conspicuous success,” while Paul Rosenfeld of the
New Republic
found it so offensive he dubbed the room “the ex-reading room.” A few days after
the Whitney murals went on view, Benton was offered his largest commission yet: the
chance to paint the history of Indiana for the Indiana Pavilion at the 1933 Chicago
World’s Fair. Ignoring his teaching duties at the League, he promptly set off for
Indianapolis, not to return to New York until the following fall.

When Benton left, his class was taken over by John Sloan, a tall, dapper, sixtyish
painter who was one of the founders of the so-called Ashcan school. His own work was
highly realistic, a tendency he encouraged in the work of his students as well. For
Pollock, who was long past the point of submitting to the rigors of realistic drawing,
Sloan held little appeal. “We have a substitute,” he reported to his father, “who
I think little of, and I probably won’t stay with him for long.” He dropped out of
the class in less than a month—and never studied painting in school again.

With Benton off in Indiana, Pollock decided to devote himself to sculpture. He was
primarily interested in stone and mentioned to his parents that he was thinking of
working in a quarry or a tombstone factory to learn “something about stone and the
cutting of it.” Although these plans never materialized—“I’m about as helpless as
a kitten when it comes to getting my way with jobs and things”—Pollock did sign up
for a couple of courses in sculpture. For two months he studied under Robert Laurent,
who was born in Brittany and well known in the thirties for his voluptuous nudes.
His class at the League met at night. Pollock also signed up for a morning class at
Greenwich House, a settlement house near Sheridan Square that offered free classes
in art and music.

Pollock’s teacher at Greenwich House was Ahron Ben-Shmuel, a gruff, belligerent man
whose massive carvings in granite
and marble had names like
The Warrior
and
The Pugilist
. Pollock took an immediate liking to him and often stopped by his studio on Jane
Street to watch him work. Ben-Shmuel’s specialty was stone carving. Rather than have
his students make art, he taught them how to shape rough, natural stones into square
blocks—how to prepare a stone for sculpting rather than actually sculpt it. “So far
I have done nothing but try and flatten a round rock and my hand too,” Pollock noted
good-naturedly to his father, “but it’s great fun and damned hard work.” He found
it easy to submerge himself in his work, while recognizing that sculpture, with its
cold-blooded, mechanical procedures, held none of the possibilities inherent in a
single charcoal line. “I like it better than painting—drawing tho is the essence of
all.”

One Wednesday morning in March 1933 Pollock and his brothers received a telegram from
their mother informing them that their father had died. The news was a shock to Jackson.
He had known that his father was sick with endocarditis, but no one had told him how
serious it was. Only a few weeks earlier he had naively sent his father wishes for
a hasty recovery. “Well Dad,” he had written, “by god its certainly tuff getting laid
up. I hope you are better now . . . and for heck sake don’t worry about money—no one
has it.”

It was immediately agreed upon by Jackson, Charles, and Frank that they would not
attend their father’s funeral. They couldn’t afford the trip to Los Angeles. Naturally
they considered borrowing from friends, but a federal “bank holiday” had been declared
that week and depositors had no access to their savings. Stella felt terrible. “I
am so sorry you boys could not be at home,” she wrote them soon after the funeral,
“but knew it was impossible.” She went on to offer a moving account of her husband’s
death. LeRoy had died at home, having joined his wife in Los Angeles a few months
earlier. She had set up a bed for him in the dining room so he could look out the
windows and see “the snow capped mountains with the beautiful green hills below sunshine
fresh air and flowers.” The day before LeRoy died was a
Saturday. At ten that morning he listened to a radio broadcast of President Roosevelt’s
famous inaugural speech (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself . . .”) which
he thought was wonderful. Sunday, after listening to the Tabernacle Choir on the radio,
he started to have trouble breathing. A doctor was summoned. The doctor was standing
in the doorway when LeRoy looked up at his wife. “Mother,” he said, “I don’t think
I can last till morning.” Stella cradled him in her arms and he died.

Contemplating his father’s death, Pollock felt a keen sense of remorse. “I always
feel I would like to have known Dad better,” he confided to his mother, “that I would
like to have done something for he and you—many words unspoken—and now he is gone
in silence.” He had never had a chance to prove himself to his father, and dejectedly
he reflected on how little he had accomplished in his twenty-one years. He was still
a student, “lazying” about the League, studying sculpture while waiting for Benton
to return to New York. Suddenly it seemed to him as if his last three years at school
had been spent in idle dreaming, and he vowed to his mother to get on with his career.
“I had many things I wanted to do for you and Dad—now I’ll do them for you, mother.
Quit my dreaming and get them into material action.”

A few weeks after his father’s death Pollock left the Art Students League and set
out in search of “material action.” Exactly what he hoped to find he did not say,
but the matter was irrelevant anyway. It was three years into the Depression; families
were living in Central Park. With his schooling behind him and no prospects ahead,
Pollock joined the ranks of the unemployed.

In September 1933 Benton and Rita returned to New York and moved into an apartment
at 10 East Eighth Street, across from the Hotel Brevoort. It was easy to recognize
their apartment from the street, for Benton’s living room studio was lit with blue
bulbs. Through the windows it almost looked like a Regionalist scene: Benton, dressed
in work clothes, stooped before his easel, the blue light floating around him like
a shining midwestern sky from one of his paintings.

No sooner had the Bentons settled into their new apartment than Pollock resumed his
friendship with them. Having finished his schooling but not yet found a job, he took
to spending most of his free time at their home. Afternoons, when Rita ran errands
and Benton went uptown to the Art Students League to teach, Pollock would baby-sit
for T.P., their six-year-old son. By the time Rita returned, Pollock had usually mopped
the kitchen floor and cleaned the apartment from top to bottom; he couldn’t do enough
to please her. “Jackson adored my mother,” one of the
Benton’s children later said. “And my mother took care of him like a son.”

To thank Pollock for his baby-sitting, Rita would have him to dinner a few times a
week. Like all the members of the Benton household, he was expected to help with dinner.
Carefully choosing an item within his budget, Rita suggested that he contribute to
the meals by bringing a turnip. Pollock never failed to show up for dinner without
a turnip in his hand.

Pollock got along well with the Bentons’ little boy. During their afternoons together
T.P. would climb up onto Pollock’s lap and ask to be told about their friend Jack
Sass, a make-believe hero from the West. In his travels on a stallion Jack Sass had
seen all the spooky sights of western folklore—ghost towns, abandoned gold mines,
unattended campfires burning through the night. He wasn’t afraid of anything.

After Pollock had gone home for the day, T.P. would excitedly relate to his parents
the latest adventure of Jack Sass. Benton listened patiently to the stories while
thinking to himself that Jack Sass was the hero Pollock would never be. “Jack must
have told him some big tales,” he later wrote, “perhaps in compensation for his own
poor and frustrated conditions. Jack Sass was Jack Pollock without the frustrations.”

On the many occasions he ate at the Bentons’ house Pollock was unfailingly polite,
even on the nights when wine was served with dinner. But stories came back to the
family about his “wild behavior” when under the influence, and one night that fall
Rita was summoned to St. Vincent’s Hospital after Pollock had injured himself in a
drunken brawl. He had been returning from a party earlier in the evening when he spotted
a wealthy-looking man walking a dog on lower Fifth Avenue. In a mischievous mood,
he approached the man, got down on all fours, and petted the dog in a friendly manner
but then jumped up suddenly with an angry look on his face. “You son of a bitch,”
he shouted. “You feed that dog when I’m starving.” The man beat him up, and Pollock
landed in the hospital suffering from head injuries and charged by the police with
battery and assault. Though the charges were dropped, Pollock remained hospitalized
for a few days, and it
was Rita who sat by his bedside and nursed him back to health. “My mother talked about
that incident all the time,” her son T.P. later recalled. “She thought it was horrible.
To everyone in my family Jackson seemed so gentle.”