Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  No better than a competent artist whose Cézanne-like landscapes, still lifes, and movie star portraits never rose above the level of family curiosities, Schwankovsky remained at Manual Arts for thirty-two years—designing stage sets for school plays, organizing a fencing team, instituting a “color week,” and singing an occasional solo at school assemblies. In class, he would sweep through the room in his shirtsleeves, pausing only long enough to deliver a few instructions in his theatrical baritone, then sweep out as if still trailing the long velvet cape that he wore at Nellie Mae’s frequent musical soirees. Dark rumors circulated among the students about his involvement in cults, Eastern religions, and radical politics—nothing seemed impossible. To taunt his critics, he formed a cabalistic society known as the Phrenocosmian Club, described with a mixture of admiration and perplexity by the 1930 yearbook as “that deeply philosophical organization which exists without parties and without dues.”

  Although a conservative painter who later criticized “artists with no firm base in drawing who just splash the paint on the canvas,” Schwankovsky encouraged his students to “expand their consciousnesses” as artists through experiments with color and materials. According to his daughter Elizabeth, who often posed as a model for his classes, he advised them to “let your mind go and paint whatever’s in your thoughts.” He read poetry and played music while they sketched, encouraged them to paint their dreams, just as he often painted his own, and taught them innovative techniques. In one of his favorite experiments, students poured oil paints onto glass plates covered with water, or watercolors into alcohol and turpentine. The droplets of color would swirl and burst and re-form, making “crazed looking” patterns in the liquid. When the plate was put on a pottery wheel and spun, the paint drops whirled into vortices of color. If a student was quick and dexterous, he could capture the image by laying a piece of heavy paper over the plate, sucking the fine bubbles of watercolor and alcohol up into abstract clouds of quick-setting color. Schwankovsky also borrowed techniques for covering a canvas from his days as a scenic designer. “He did a lot of mixing media,” his daughter remembers. “He tried everything he could think of—combining materials, mixing matte surfaces with shiny ones. Anything to break out of the mold.”

  Jackson welcomed Schwankovsky’s experiments. They held out the promise that one didn’t have to be a draftsman—in the conventional sense, at least—to be an artist. Although his classmates found a certain “energy” and “rhythm” in Jackson’s work—“especially in the sculptures he was doing, almost like high reliefs,” one of them recalls—no one, least of all Jackson himself, had any illusions about his technical skills. After years of watching Charles’s effortless sketching, then Sande’s, he was still, at this early date, acutely aware of how inept a draftsman he was. “[Jack] couldn’t make images out of other images,” Sande said once. “If you had seen his early work, you’d have said he should go into tennis, or plumbing.”

  Schwankovsky, standing, with drawing class

  Nevertheless, Jackson was soon drawn into Schwankovsky’s inner circle of students, a small but diverse group of misfits with artistic and intellectual aspirations. Dominant among them, both for his statuesque height and precocious facility with a pen, was a darkly handsome, sharp-featured boy named Philip Goldstein (later Philip Goldy, then Philip Guston). At fifteen, Goldstein was an accomplished cartoonist who had been “drawing seriously” for three years. Like almost all his classmates, he was born elsewhere—in Montreal—but, by the standards of the day, could claim native status, having lived in Los Angeles for ten years by the time Jackson arrived. This in combination with his talent, his success with women, and his close relationship with Schwankovsky made him almost immediately an object of Jackson’s competitive envy—another Charles.

  A less conspicuous presence at the little gatherings in the art department office was Harold Hodges, a slight, shy boy who had been banished to the West Coast by a disapproving stepfather back in New York. At school, his effeminate manner and his talent as a sculptor had driven him into Schwankovsky’s circle, where he alternately brooded and anguished over his estrangement. At the edge of the group, drawn to Schwankovsky more by intellectual curiosity than by artistic ability, was Donald Brown, an eager, gangly boy whose adolescent manner and pleasant face hid a “dreamy” intellectualism and precocious melancholy. Brown was as much a prodigy of literature as Goldstein was of art. At sixteen he was reading the novels of James Joyce and John Dos Passos and the poetry of e. e. cummings and the French Surrealists André Breton and Paul Éluard. He had ferreted out the latest avant-garde publications like transition and established himself in Los Angeles’s embryonic literary community.

  For Jackson, the supercilious Goldstein, the effeminate Hodges, and the cerebral Brown were, each in his own way, as unreachable and unsupportive as his three oldest brothers had been. What he needed most among Schwankovsky’s disciples was an unthreatening ally: a Sande. He found one in Manuel Tolegian.

  It’s difficult to give an accurate account of Manuel Tolegian prior to his meeting Jackson Pollock in the fall of 1928. Tolegian was an inveterate embellisher of history, especially his own. Like Jackson, he told his life not as it was but as he wished it had been. Born Jeriar Tolegian on October 18, 1911—although even his birthdate varied in the telling—and raised in and around Fresno, California, Tolegian, like Jackson, had been shaped by a childhood of transience and emotional dislocation. Never free of financial problems, Jeriar’s father, Manuel, shuttled his family from city to country looking for construction jobs or farmland to work. In the early twenties, after losing his modest savings in one of the brief but devastating downturns that foreshadowed the Depression, he moved to Los Angeles and opened a small grocery store. A year later, he died of cancer. At age fifteen, Jeriar Tolegian, like Jackson, faced the loss of his father. Soon afterwards, he began calling himself by his father’s name and spinning fantastic tales about his father the architect and builder, who made a fortune in the construction business, designed stained-glass windows, illuminated manuscripts, wrote poetry, and, most implausibly of all, encouraged his son to pursue a career in art.

  The five boys roamed everywhere together, both at school and afterwards at Tolegian’s house where Manuel had converted a backyard chicken coop into a makeshift “studio.” Squeezed into the tiny, windowless coop, they spent endless hours thumbing through art books and copying their favorite images. The fruits of their labors—pencil sketches after Piero della Francesca, Uccello, and other Renaissance masters—lined the coop’s rough-plank walls. Jackson did his best during these sessions, but next to the accomplished drawings of Goldstein, Hodges, and even Tolegian, his best wasn’t nearly good enough. “He worked hard trying to make conventional drawings,” Tolegian recalled, “but he just didn’t have what it takes.” Occasionally, his envy and frustration erupted into violence. One afternoon at school, he tried to throw Goldstein, the most talented of the group, down a flight of stairs.

  In a ceremony of considerable significance to him, Jackson taught the other boys how to smoke a pipe, despite Mrs. Tolegian’s injunction against tobacco chewing and smoking. Manuel’s family recalls the strange sight of the tiny chicken coop shrouded in a suspicious, aromatic haze as pipe smoke curled out through the cracks. At Don Brown’s house, the group attracted the attention of Don’s younger sister, Alma. “The guys would all pile into my brother’s bedroom and plan whatever they were planning,” she recalls. “There were never any girls, just these boys—and they would sit around for hours then suddenly light out as if they had to put out a fire.” Alma remembers Jackson as “an explosive young man. You never knew exactly what he would do next. Mother wasn’t sure she liked Don going out with him at night. She worried that Jack might lose control.” (In late 1933, Alma Brown visited Jackson’s house and met Jay Pollock. The next summer they were married.) In Don Brown’s bedroom, Jackson encountered an extensive collection of books on recent French art and artists: Cézanne, Gauguin, Re
don, Picasso, Matisse, Derain.

  Occasionally, but not often, considering its proximity to the school, the group descended on the Pollock house on West Fiftieth Street where, according to Tolegian, “Jack’s mother never said no to anything Jack did.” Stella would welcome the five boys with food and turn her head when they lit up pipes. On school nights, Philip Goldstein would sometimes sleep over to avoid the long ride home on the Venice Short Line.

  In addition to a new family, Schwankovsky offered Jackson a new way of coping with the problems of alienation and identity that he had inherited from his old family: religion.

  In the summer of 1928, alone at the work camp in Crestline, Jackson had written his father explaining his “philosophy of religion.” It was an unusual step for a boy raised in a family that never went to church by a mother who was openly areligious and a father who had flirted with atheism. The Pollocks had kept a painting of Jesus on the wall of the Phoenix house when Jackson was growing up, but their Presbyterian devotion had faded considerably over the years. Jackson’s inspiration may have been his cordial relationship with Leon Cooter, who, like all the Cooters, was a devout churchgoer, or even his fellow camp workers at Crestline, many of whom came from San Bernardino, a Mormon settlement that still retained its founding fervor. Clearly, whatever their source, Jackson’s first religious thoughts were little more than the free-floating speculations of a pensive, depressed teenager on the “meaning of it all.” “I think your philosophy on religion is O.K.,” Roy wrote in response from his road camp in the Kaibab Forest on September 19, 1928.

  I think every person should think, act & believe according to the dictates of his own conscience without to much pressure from the outside. I too think there is a higher power a supreme force, a Govenor,*2 a something that controls the universe. What it is & in what form I do not know. It may be that our intellect or spirit exists in space in some other form after it parts from this body. Nothing is impossible and we know that nothing is destroyed, it only changes chemically. We burn up a house and its contents, we change the form but the same elements exist, gas, vapor, ashes, they all are there just the same.

  In 1928, with thoughts like these taking root in the rich soil of his anxieties, Jackson arrived in “the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, [and] philosophies”—Los Angeles. Called by some the “shrine of fakers,” Los Angeles had become a haven for “every religion, freakish or orthodox, that the world ever knew.” Attracted, like everyone else, by sunshine and mild winters, and by the limitless supply of older, infirm, and simply naive newcomers, cults that offered mysterious new curative powers—allopathy, homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, faith healing, Christian Science—proved especially popular. So did the doctrines of rebirth or reincarnation: “I am told,” remarked one skeptical resident, “that the millennium has already begun in Pasadena, and that even now there are more sanctified cranks to the acre than in any other town in America.” Even mainline Christianity—which “ranked as a leading industry (just behind real estate and motion pictures)”—was touched by the cult fervor. Despite the questions surrounding her brief disappearance two years before, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson was still packing the Angelus Temple for her evangelical extravaganza.

  Through this fractious carnival of cults, Schwankovsky served as Jackson’s guide. Although raised an Episcopalian, Schwankovsky responded enthusiastically to the opportunities for religious “experimentation” that Los Angeles offered, and at various times described himself as a Buddhist, a Hindu, and a Rosicrucian. It was his love of experimentation, combined with his attraction to Eastern religions and his tendency to pick and choose desirable elements from a variety of sources, that finally led him to the Theosophical Society.

  Schwankovsky may have been involved with the society as early as his student days in New York City. According to one report, he was a personal friend of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the Ukrainian aristocrat’s daughter who founded the movement in 1875 for the purpose of “diffus[ing] information concerning those secret laws of Nature which were so familiar to the Chaldeans and Egyptians but are totally unknown by our modern science.” Although an unlikely prophetess—obese, slovenly, foul-mouthed, and penniless at the time of her “elevation”—Madame Blavatsky possessed a powerful and prolific imagination. In two decades, she managed to build the society into one of the largest of the mystical enthusiasms that swept through the middle and upper classes of Europe and America in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  Like many of these spiritual movements, Theosophy (meaning “divine wisdom”) was an attempt to rescue old religious beliefs—free will, immortality, spirituality—from the emerging threat of science, particularly Social Darwinism with its seemingly inexorable natural forces, vast time scales, and self-sustaining mechanisms. Blavatsky’s innovation was to use science, rather than reject it, in the search for higher truths. She urged “the unity between science and religion” in the quest for the “single, primitive source” of truth from which all the world’s religions flowed. The new theory of evolution, she argued, didn’t contradict old beliefs in reincarnation and life after death; it helped explain them. Just as man evolved from animals, man could evolve through various levels of spirituality toward a higher reality. The great religious figures of the past, from Buddha to Christ, had all reached the final stage of spiritual evolution, the “Universal Over-Soul.”

  In the spirit of eclecticism that appealed to Schwankovsky, Blavatsky borrowed liberally from Eastern religions and the occult to flesh out her theory of spiritual evolution. The seven levels of evolutionary development, called the “cycle of incarnation,” were borrowed from Hinduism, while those who had reached the final stage of spiritual evolution were called “Masters” or “Adepts,” a term common in Western occultism. Adepts existed on the “astral” plane—a dimension that could not be fully perceived with the physical senses—although Adepts could take physical form in order to communicate their wisdom to mortals (Blavatsky in particular) and select followers could take “Astral” form to visit the Adepts.

  Despite Madame Blavatsky’s involvement in an embarrassing séance hoax and several schisms within the movement, the Theosophical Society grew into a worldwide organization with headquarters in Benares, India, and Ommen, Holland. Under the guidance of her successors—an attractive British feminist and member of the Fabian Society named Annie Besant, and an unsavory English colonel, William Leadbeater, whose irrepressible pederastic enthusiasms caused more than one scandal for the society—it reached its peak membership, 45,000, the year Jackson Pollock moved to Los Angeles.

  The real explosion in the movement came in the 1920s when a magazine article predicted that the next step in mankind’s spiritual evolution would take place in Southern California. Based on Madame Blavatsky’s theory that races, as well as individuals, pass through stages of spiritual development on the path to perfection, the article cited psychological tests administered to California schoolchildren that revealed a surprising number of prodigies and predicted that “a new sixth sub-race” would arise in the Ojai area. The news was a lighted match on the dry California landscape. According to the biographer of Annie Besant, “theosophists all over the world turned their eyes toward California as the Atlantis of the Western Sea.” Besant herself came and, acting on the orders of a “Master” speaking to her from the Astral world, purchased 465 acres of farmland as a home for the new race in the Ojai valley, a scenic spot about 70 miles north of Los Angeles already well-known as an occult refuge, thanks largely to Edgar Holloway, a famous eccentric who claimed to have come to Ojai in the form of “a great flying fish.”

  In time, Besant would also bring to Ojai a young man she called “the new Messiah”—“the incarnation of God,” “the Divine Spirit,” “the Literally Perfect”—Krishnamurti.

  As early as 1889, Madame Blavatsky had predicted that the world was ready to receive a new “World Teacher” in the line of Christ and Buddha. Twenty years late
r, in 1909, Annie Besant revived the prediction before an audience in Chicago. “We look for Him to come in the Western world this time,” she said, “not in the East as did Christ two thousand years ago.” When Colonel Leadbeater discovered him bathing near the society’s headquarters in Adyar, India, however, the “new Messiah” was indeed an Easterner, a slight, dark, fourteen-year-old Indian boy with delicate features and mesmerizing eyes named Jiddu Krishna. The eighth child of an impoverished Brahmin who was himself a Theosophist, Krishna had, according to Leadbeater’s report, “the most wonderful aura [I] had ever seen, without a particle of selfishness in it.” After the boy’s extensive training in India and England, Besant was ready to announce to the world “the definite consecration of the chosen vehicle.” In May 1929, Jiddu Krishna, now called Krishnamurti, “beloved Krishna,” arrived in Southern California and before a capacity crowd of enraptured followers in the Hollywood Bowl gave his first American lecture on the subject of “Happiness through Liberation.”

  Frederick Schwankovsky was among the sixteen thousand who heard Krishnamurti’s message of liberation, individualism, and happiness that day. He may also have joined the thousand followers who attended the Ojai camp in May 1928, at which Krishnamurti spoke daily. Eventually, Schwankovsky would become a personal friend of the Messiah, hosting dinners for him at his Laguna Beach studio. But even as early as the fall of 1928 when Jackson Pollock joined his small circle of disciples, Schwankovsky burned with missionary zeal, proclaiming Krishnamurti “the mouthpiece of the new age and the new art.” He introduced his students to a key Theosophical tract, The Light on the Path by Mabel Collins, as well as Krishnamurti’s own Life in Freedom, a small volume of addresses from the 1928 Star Camps at Benares, Ommen, and Ojai. They were difficult books, and Jackson, never a good reader, probably relied heavily on conversations he heard between Schwankovsky and students with more agile intellects like Goldstein or Brown for his knowledge of Theosophical ideas.