Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Within the year, Jackson himself would be sitting at the foot of the Master.

  Fifteen years later, in therapy, Jackson reportedly told his doctor that he “was looking as a youngster for a way of life and came under the influence of Krishnamurti and Theosophy.” More than thirty years later, his widow, Lee Krasner, would recall Jackson “often speaking of Schwankovsky and Krishnamurti.” Despite the difficulties of often impenetrable jargon and fantastical doctrines, sixteen-year-old Jackson Pollock was clearly entranced. He wrote his brother Charles several times, explaining the theories as best he could and urging him to read The Light on the Path. “Every thing it has to say seems to be contrary to the essence of modern life,” he wrote, “but after it is under stood and lived up to i think it is a very helpful guide. i wish you would get one and tell me what you think of it.” Jackson even offered to send Charles a copy if he couldn’t find one in New York.

  Charles viewed his baby brother’s new enthusiasm with characteristic sangfroid: “He tended to get hooked on fads,” Charles recalls thinking, “starting from early on.” There was, however, far more to Jackson’s strong and uncharacteristically lasting devotion than simple peer-group pressure, adolescent impressionability, or competition for a teacher’s favor. In the ideas themselves, Jackson found something that struck home.

  Krishnamurti, “the Literally Perfect” at Ojai, California

  To a boy who had been struggling his entire life to fit in—to his family, to his school, to the role of artist—Krishnamurti preached that the effort to fit in was not only futile but misguided as well. “If you make yourself into a type,” he warned, “… you have not the capacity to choose, and hence you will become an automaton, a person that is dead.” To a boy who felt alienated from the world, The Light on the Path glorified alienation: “Through all time the wise men have lived apart from the mass.” Like most cults, Theosophy allowed the sufferer to see his affliction—whether illness or loneliness or age—as a necessary stage on the road to happiness, a transitional state filled with unperceived promise. “The moment you are really struggling in sorrow,” Krishnamurti said, “and feel that sorrow in its uttermost depths … sorrow then becomes a soil through which you must grow, a soil for nourishment, not a thing to be avoided.” The outcasts became the chosen few, the alienated became the enlightened, the afflicted became the favored—like the lotus “which plows through mud and slime, pushing its way upward to the Sun, finally becoming a thing of joy and beauty.” Krishnamurti offered solace for Jackson’s inadequacy at drawing (“The appreciation of beauty is within yourself”) and for his lack of verbal facility (“I have often wondered whether it is worth while talking at all … through experience alone can you grow”). Even his chronically poor academic performance was transformed by Theosophy’s alchemy into a blessing (“It is indeed those who suffer and struggle and not necessarily those who are learned in books that understand”). Krishnamurti spoke to Jackson’s oldest and deepest anxieties. To Jack “the baby,” who longed to be talented like his brother Charles, or manly like Sande, Krishnamurti said, “Each one has to make his own path.” One can never arrive at “self-perfection,” he cautioned, by “dwelling in the shadow of another.”

  Finally, Theosophy armed Jackson against the fear that he could never live up to his brothers’ examples, that he could never prove “to myself nor anybody else that i have it in me,” as he wrote to Charles. If his desire was strong, said Krishnamurti, if his “spirit” was right, “hard work”—at least in the sense of arduous training—wasn’t necessary. The facility that Charles and Phil Goldstein had acquired through years of painstaking practice, Jackson could achieve through “the swift knowledge, which is called intuition with certainty.” Inspiration was to be cherished more than schooling, impulse more than intellect, because “intellect, left to itself, will only waste its energies in systematization and in this way will become divorced from life.” Thus the true task of the artist was to bypass the intellect and “make a living link between inner feelings and external actions.” For Krishnamurti, the test of all truth—and later, for Jackson, the test of all great art—was “Does it flow spontaneously from an inner impulse?”

  The only way to forge the link between impulse and action, said Krishnamurti, was to rebel.

  10

  A ROTTEN REBEL

  Jackson was no stranger to radical politics. As early as Phoenix, when he heard his father’s sympathetic explanation of the IWW, or saw him celebrate at news of the Bolshevik Revolution, he had been exposed to socialist sympathies. At Manual Arts, Schwankovsky urged students to pursue “an heroic idealism … which will make a new and better world,” and introduced his privileged inner circle to the magazines and writers of the intellectual left. Even Theosophy occasionally spoke in an explicitly political voice on such issues as capital punishment, prison reform, and aid to the handicapped. But it was the city of Los Angeles itself—as it reflected and magnified the nation’s rightwing paranoia—that finally pushed Jackson into the turbulent world of radical politics.

  Against a background of hysterical avarice in the last few years before the Depression, Los Angeles had embarked on a witch-hunt for “subversive” political elements, especially Communists and union organizers and the intellectuals who supported them. While preacher “Fighting” Bob Shuler broadcast his nightly KGEF crusade against books “not fit for heathen China or anarchistic Russia,” the police arrested writer Upton Sinclair for trying to read the Constitution to a rally of strikers, and the superintendent of schools removed the Nation (Roy Pollock’s favorite journal) from library shelves throughout Los Angeles. Teachers who advocated public ownership of utilities were branded Bolsheviks, and both the Better America Foundation and the Times kept an extensive network of paid spies on the boards of liberal and progressive groups. “Reds” and “pinks,” broadly defined, were prosecuted under the Criminal Syndicalism Act, and their meetings—in homes, halls, and public parks—broken up with the generous use of teargas and billy clubs. The Times routinely announced police “shove days”: “This will be ‘shove Tuesday’ for the Los Angeles police,” read a typical article. “The communists plan to stage another demonstration today, according to Capt. Wm. [“Red”] Hynes, which means that 500 police will be in readiness. If the communists demonstrate, the police men will shove and keep on shoving until the parade is disrupted.” In this charged atmosphere, even the simply unemployed were suspect. City-sponsored national advertising campaigns attracted workers to Los Angeles from around the country, but if they couldn’t find jobs when they arrived—which they often couldn’t—they were arrested for vagrancy. (“Unemployment is a crime in Sunny California,” quipped one observer.) During Jackson Pollock’s first year at Manual Arts, Los Angeles police made more than 12,000 arrests for vagrancy.

  Rabbit-hunting after school in Riverside

  It isn’t clear how soon Jackson or any of his fellow students became aware of this larger political context. Throughout the 1928–29 school year, Phil Goldstein was doing illustrations for the Manual Arts student paper, the Weekly, on subjects as distant from radical politics as proper school spirit (“Respect Upper-Classmen,” “Go Out for Athletics,” and “Join in School Activities”) while Don Brown worked on the literary magazine and contributed occasional poems to the Weekly. Like most high school students, their first concern was with high school. For some, although not for Jackson, concern for social injustice and oppression in the larger world would follow, but the teething injustices were the ones closest to home, the oppressions that weighed the heaviest, the ones that limited their own freedom.

  Of these, the weightiest by far was the pervasive obsession with sports.

  The entire country had been in the throes of a sports mania since the end of the First World War. In 1926, Knute Rockne brought his legendary fighting Irish of Notre Dame to the Coliseum to face USC for the first time. (The home team lost in an electrifyingly close game, 13–12.) The next year, just a year before Jackson
arrived, seventy thousand fans crowded into the Coliseum to see the Chicago Bears led by Red Grange prove to the skeptics that “professional” football was a viable concept. From their vantage just across the street from the Coliseum, only blocks from USC, Manual Arts students were swept up in the sports craze. Their football team, the Toilers, was always a contender for the fiercely contested city championship. During the fall, nothing else mattered. The entire week preceding a big game was dedicated to whipping up student support. At pre-game rallies, the ROTC band played, “yell leaders” led the student body in school fight songs, and coaches introduced their players to whistles and whoops and clamorous applause. Wins were reported in six-inch banner headlines on the front page of the Weekly; while losses were blamed on the failure of school spirit: “Student Body Overconfidence Kayos Manual’s Dream,” the paper headlined after an upset loss to Los Angeles High that cost the Toilers the championship in 1928.

  Jackson’s antagonism toward sports and the mania it generated had been set as early as Riverside. At Manual Arts, he was joined in his rebellion by Manuel Tolegian and Phil Goldstein who, like Jackson, avoided the school’s phys. ed. requirement by hiding under the gymnasium bleachers. On October 10, 1928, a program in the auditorium that was billed as a “musical assembly” featuring a recital by Schwankovsky and a local soprano was disrupted by the yell leaders who jumped onto the stage and, to thunderous cheering, led the audience through the standard round of fight songs. A month later, following a disastrous loss to Los Angeles High, the entire assembly was given over to a rally highlighted by a skit lampooning “high school slackers”—students who refused to support the team—and their leader, “a high school fairy,” whose appearance on stage triggered gales of derisive laughter from the audience.

  Sometime in February or March, Jackson and the others struck back. They wrote and printed a small brochure and, early one morning, with Manuel Tolegian’s help, slipped copies into student lockers and faculty mailboxes. Beneath a drawing of a dog wagging its tail contributed by Goldstein and titled “Shall the Tail Wag the Dog?” it read:

  STUDENTS OF MANUAL ARTS:

  We present for your consideration the serious problem of good judgment in relative values in this high school. We deplore most heartily the unreasonable elevation of athletic ability and the consequent degradation of scholarship. Instead of yelling, “hit that line,” we should cry, “make that grade.” Give those letters to our scholars, our artists, and our musicians instead of animated examples of physical prowess. Give our offices to executives instead of varsity men. Our last president was a living example of the system we advocate. There have been such men elected but they have been few and far between. It will mean a great change in our present policies. If the change is not made, Manual, the school we know and love is doomed. It is all very good to win victories but what good are they if we have nothing behind them? School success depends first upon administrative reputation. Interscholastic victories are matters of secondary importance. We must have victory at home before we are worthy of victory abroad. Too much emphasis have [sic] been placed on the physical end of school life; too little on the mental. We have before us a difficult task. Let us face it bravely. STUDENTS, MANUAL NEEDS REFORM. ARE YOU MEN ENOUGH TO GIVE IT?

  The exact nature of Jackson’s role in this experiment with rebellion isn’t known. Though he may have helped print the brochure, most accounts agree that he had little to do with the actual writing—variously attributing the contents to Goldstein, Don Brown, or even Schwankovsky.

  Wherever the responsibility fell, the consequences fell on Jackson alone. The next day, the vice principal appeared in Schwankovsky’s class accompanied by a janitor who had seen a boy distributing the leaflets the previous morning. When asked to identify the culprit, the janitor surveyed the anxious classroom and pointed at Jackson, who was led away to the principal’s office.

  Not long afterward, another broadside appeared, this time a vague lashing-out against the faculty and the penalties imposed on dissent—presumably Jackson’s.

  STUDENTS OF MANUAL ARTS

  There is in this high school a certain group, that has, for a long time looked with extreme disfavor on the oppressive and tyrannical methods in vouge [sic] with the present faculty. We feel that we can no longer remain silent. We make no rash statements, but we hold and defend tenaciously those principles of personal liberty for which our forefathers gave their lives. We wish to ask the following questions.

  1. Why is it that inefficient or unjust teachers and heads of departments are placed over us?

  2. Why is it that the honerable [sic] ward of students, inrespect to injustice, is mocked at, and disbelieved?

  3. Why can not a student express his or her opinion of teachers or office officials without being in danger of direct or indirect punishment?

  Any student with a brain above the mental age of twelve, and with the experience of a term in this highschool knows the anwsers [sic] to these questions. We ask you first to think, then organize, and finally to act. We do not wish a revolution, but rather a peaceful change, we want fair treatment. WHICH WE ARE NOT GETTING.

  The power and might of a school lies in its student body. You are as a gaint [sic] sleeping. AWAKE AND USE YOUR STRENGTH.

  Jackson seems to have had more of a hand in this second broadside. In addition to the characteristic spelling errors and Krishnamurti-like closing, there is a new, more desperate tone, reflecting perhaps Jackson’s panic as he stood on the verge of yet another incomplete semester, his third in just two years of high school.

  If the second brochure was intended to soften the resolve of his prosecutors (hence the apologetic “We do not wish a revolution” and the patriotic allusion to “forefathers”), it had just the opposite effect. While both students and faculty had openly debated the impact of the sports craze on the school’s academic standing, accusations that teachers were “tyrannical” “inefficient” and “unjust” were more serious, although not, by themselves, cause for dismissal. (About the same time, a Weekly editorial accused the faculty of being “biased and unjust” and the school’s “worst enemies.”) When Jackson was expelled sometime in March, it was probably for accumulating too many total demerits under the school’s complicated disciplinary code rather than for his involvement with the “inflammatory” brochures alone.

  Apparently, despite some accounts to the contrary, Jackson was the only one punished so severely. Goldstein may have been suspended briefly, but he continued to contribute to the Weekly illustrations of football heroes, Uncle Sam, and “Senior Hat Day,” which belied his involvement in any anti-establishment plot. Don Brown retained his position as editor of the Spectator until his family’s departure for Alhambra in June, and Manuel Tolegian submitted a series of woodcuts of famous personalities—Charles Lindbergh, von Hindenburg, Herbert Hoover—that appeared in the Weekly. “I wanted to graduate!” he later said in defense of his failure to admit his role in the protest.

  Whether Jackson intended it or not, his expulsion had at least one desirable and entirely foreseeable effect: it attracted his father’s attention. In fact, Roy or Stella, or both, felt the crisis was so urgent that, sometime in late March or early April, Roy made an unprecedented, midseason trip from his road camp at Santa Ynez about ninety miles northwest of Los Angeles. No record exists of their confrontation in the little bungalow on West Fiftieth Street—if indeed it was a confrontation—but Roy’s attitude toward school was well known: “Either you go to school or you go to work. He’d give you the choice,” Frank Pollock recalls, “but he’d say you’ve got a better chance if you go to school.” Only a few months before, Roy had written Jackson: “The secret of success is concentrated interest, interest in life, interest in sports, and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students. … Write and tell me about your schoolwork.” Jackson’s antics had forced him to leave work and deliver the same message in person. His mere presence under such circumstances was tantamount to
a fit of rage in the emotional lexicon of Roy Pollock, even if harsh words were never spoken.

  On one point, at least, Roy seems to have been explicit: he would not tolerate idleness. A year before, when Jackson was contemplating leaving school in Riverside, Roy had written him: “If you are well satisfied that [staying in school] is impossible at present I suppose the thing to do is to go to work at something where you can gain knowledge and training by practical experience.” Although Jackson would have preferred to stay in Los Angeles with his friends, Roy insisted that he spend the summer working at the road camp instead.

  Phil Goldstein [Guston] cartoon for the Manual Arts Weekly; Sid Foster, center.

  As soon as Roy returned to Santa Ynez, however, Jackson plunged back into the world of radical politics. The spirit of rebellion, freed from the constraints of high school, carried him into the broader underworld of union organizers and genuine Communists, the world that was being genuinely oppressed by Captain Hynes’s Red Squad, police “shove days,” and syndicalism indictments. He attended Communist meetings at the Brooklyn Avenue Jewish Community Center in East Los Angeles where Communists and union organizers often met. How frequently he attended these meetings, who else attended, and how actively he participated is not known—although strangers always frightened him and, even among friends at Manual Arts, he tended to avoid group discussions. It was during these nighttime forays that Jackson must have learned something about the nexus between radical avant-garde art and radical politics. He certainly learned of the Mexican muralists, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who were agitating for a revolution in Mexican politics as well as a renaissance in Mexican art.