Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Soon, Jackson was working as a studio boy at Ben-Shmuel’s private studio at 35 Jane Street, not far from Eighth Avenue. It was an old frame building with an unpretentious door leading to an open courtyard where Ben-Shmuel kept his blocks and often worked alfresco even in the winter. Upstairs, the Cubist painter Byron Browne kept an apartment and studio. Nathan Katz, who was only fourteen when he served as Ben-Shmuel’s apprentice, recalls the job as “helping him with what he was working on and cleaning up the studio.” Katz also kept his own sculpture there and recalls his teacher as “very tough to work with. Very tough.” Like Jackson, Ben-Shmuel was an undisciplined worker and the work, haphazard. Depending on his mood, months could elapse between the first hammer blow on the pitcher, a crude chisel, to break the corners off a big block of Barre granite and the last ring of a flatter, more precise chisel on the lips of a young woman. During periods of activity, the incessant pounding of the iron hammer was accompanied by a running monologue of angry, articulate invective. “He thought everybody was pretty terrible,” Katz recalls. “If he liked you, he liked you. If he didn’t, he hated you vehemently.” But the turbulence of Ben-Shmuel’s conversation never reached his chisel. Years of carving—from tombstones to doorsills, in everything from velvety Tennessee marble to odd chunks of domestic sandstone picked out of demolition rubbish—had given him a feeling for the stone, the craftsman’s “sixth sense” he called it, which told him more about the form in the stone than his eyes ever could. Although he occasionally worked in fired clay or cast in bronze, and his style ranged from the near-abstraction of Flannagan to the rounded monumentalism of his mentor Zorach, the underlying aesthetic was always that of the carver. “He knew how to cut granite,” says Milton Resnick, a friend in later years. “He knew his tools and he knew how to keep them working. He knew all the tricks—he thought of them as secrets of a kind.”

  If Ben-Shmuel was proud and pugnacious like Tom Benton, it was partly because he, too, was fighting a war with the past. A few decades earlier, he wouldn’t have been considered a sculptor at all, or even an artist. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a “sculptor’s” work began not with a pitcher and a block of stone but with elaborate drawings and small maquettes. From these a wood-and-metal armature was built on which the sculptor worked bits of clay, slowly building up the forms: shaping, kneading, and smoothing the pliable material into mythical figures, allegorical scenes, portraits of the famous or wealthy, or one of the period’s other favorite subjects, most of them only a few feet tall. The Balzac of Auguste Rodin, the Seated Lincoln of Daniel Chester French, even Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty all took shape as lamp-size objects on an atelier tabletop. When finished, the small clay original could be transformed, via a plaster cast, into bronze—or it could first be enlarged to life-size or larger in plaster or clay, using a pointing machine, before being cast. Or it could be carved. Only at that point was a stone carver brought in and a suitable block of stone secured. The carver would take a series of precise measurements of the original with a pointing machine and transfer them to the uncut block, indicating where stone needed to be chipped away. Early carvers used a plain hammer and chisel to transfer the design to marble; their successors worked with compressed-air chisels. Either way, the result was an exact or an enlarged copy, roughed in and often finished by the carver, not the sculptor. Even Rodin typically left every hammer stroke to other hands. For the most part, hammers, gouges, and chisels were the carver’s tools, not the sculptor’s. Carving was a craft; sculpting was an art. Sculpture not done from a clay model—building decorations, monument inscriptions, and the like—was tradesmen’s work.

  The technique had deep roots and a distinguished lineage. The sculptors of the Belle Epoque who preceded Ben-Shmuel inherited it from Michelangelo, who borrowed it, in turn, from the Romans, who stole it from the late Greek sculptors, who were the first to free stone of its own weight, modeling nymphs in mid-flight and windblown tunics that defied gravity. During the first decades of the twentieth century, however, in the same revolt against academicism that produced Picasso’s Guitar and Brancusi’s Kiss, American artists like Flannagan and Zorach denounced the traditional division between sculptor and carver. The only authentic sculptor, they argued, was the sculptor who worked directly with his material. In 1921, Horace Brodsky, an American critic who championed the cause of “direct carving,” dismissed traditional sculpture as “a sea of marble patisserie.”

  Jackson responded enthusiastically to the theories of Flannagan and Zorach as related by Ben-Shmuel with characteristic vehemence and vulgarity. Only a month after joining the Greenwich House workshop, he quit Sloan’s drawing class at the League and enrolled instead in a second sculpture class, Robert Laurent’s evening “modeling” class. Laurent was an Americanized Frenchman—“a native of Brittany and Brooklyn”—whose direct carvings combined the naiveté of Flannagan’s works with the Continental finesse of French modernism. “Quite delicious,” wrote critic Henry McBride of Laurent’s sculptures. “They betray all sorts of primitive touches inextricably interwoven with the present day feeling.” Although he shared the new preference for working directly in stone and wood, Laurent felt equally comfortable modeling in clay or in plaster and frequently cast his larger works from plaster originals. Such flexibility, a benign disposition, and inherited wealth exempted him somewhat from the ideological wars being waged by the other leaders in the movement toward direct carving.

  In Laurent’s class, held nightly in the basement studio, as in Benton’s, students worked from a nude model, beginning the week with a lump of clay scooped from the clay bin. “If what you did was good, you could cast it,” recalls Philip Pavia, a classmate of Jackson’s who had been sent to Italy to study sculpture by his caster-carver father. “If it wasn’t, it would go back into the bin.” The challenges were also the same as in Benton’s class—proportion and control—and Jackson encountered the same “blocs” that frustrated him in every medium. Intimidated and insecure, he clung to the few techniques of which he could claim some mastery. “He just wanted to make small figures like the ones he did for Benton’s murals,” recalls Pavia who was, like most of the other students, a full-time sculptor and accomplished modeler. “He was just imitating Benton. There we were, serious sculptors, and here he was doing these little Bentonesque figures with big arms, workmen types.” When Laurent saw these oddities on one of his twice-weekly visits, he was, as always, mildly encouraging. “He was really a fatherly type of teacher,” Pavia recalls. “Whatever you did was all right with him. He just encouraged you. He didn’t direct you too much.” (A typical comment: “Well, you might take off a little bit dere and a little bit dere.”) Behind the cultivated pleasantries, Laurent may have recognized what Pavia and the other students had seen, what Mrs. Martin had recognized four years before: “Pollock had the rhythm down,” Pavia remembers. “He really had a feeling for it.”

  But a feeling for it wasn’t enough to satisfy Jackson. Nor were the regular parties at Laurent’s nearby apartment, or the after-class “field trips” to the speakeasy on Fifty-eighth Street where, in the twilight of Prohibition, the doors were always open and beer was suddenly legal. Laurent’s class was, ultimately, another art class, rooted firmly in the same aesthetic and academic tradition as Sloan’s or even Benton’s.

  With Roy Pollock’s death in March, Jackson turned his back on that world and embraced his father’s old demands: self-sufficiency and gainful employment. Immediately after hearing of Roy’s death, he wrote Stella: “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. … I’m still lazying around with no definite indication of my earning anything thru my work.” Three weeks later, he was still obsessed and unreconciled with his dead father. “I always feel I would like to have known Dad better,” he wrote Stella, “that I would like to have done something for he and you—many words unspoken—and now he has gone in silence.” Later the same week
, Jackson finally did something for his father: he dropped out of Laurent’s modeling class, and the League, and devoted himself exclusively to “sculpture”—or as he described it in his letters home, “cutting in stone.” “It holds my interest deeply,” he wrote. “I like it better than painting.”

  For the rest of the spring, Jackson worked with Ben-Shmuel at his studio on Jane Street and at the Greenwich House Annex where he was given access to space and materials in exchange for part-time janitorial work. Starting with an iron hammer and a pitcher, then switching to a chisel, he would chip at a small block for days before even a corner of a figure would begin to emerge from the void of stone. If the angle of the chisel was too deep or the hammer blow too hard, the block could crack through; too shallow or too soft, the chisel would ricochet harmlessly off the stone in a little explosion of dust. Like Ben-Shmuel, he worked without plans or drawings, just a vision of the image in the stone. After Benton’s elaborate mural preparations, cubistic studies, and volumetric models, after Sloan’s precise crosshatching and Laurent’s “little bit dere,” Jackson must have thrilled at the manly directness of the carver’s art, at the bravery of setting a cold chisel against a blank face of stone and just beginning.

  True sculptors, Ben-Shmuel argued, were engaged in a process of discovery, “persistently searching in their own minds, [bringing] forth in three dimensions their personal and peculiar mental entrails.” But while Ben-Shmuel could pick the image from his “mental entrails,” project it into the stone, and hold it there for the weeks, or sometimes months, required to free it, Jackson’s mind was in constant turmoil. The images rising out of his unconscious changed too quickly, the stone responded too slowly, each chip proved too conclusive. In drawing and painting, he had been able to work and rework his images, trying to fix them by recording their changes, often in different media, forcing the variations into a single furious image. The chisel, however, was both too slow and too final. The image would change from hammer stroke to hammer stroke, shifting in the void and sometimes fleeing altogether, forcing Jackson to abandon stones in various stages of incompletion. Axel Horn, who visited the Jones Street Annex, remembers Jackson’s frustration. “Jack showed me some of the stones he was working on. They were incomplete and showed the evidence of a tremendous struggle. The material was resisting him horribly.” Although he continued “cutting” for some time, Jackson must have realized early that sculpture—or at least Ben-Shmuel’s kind of sculpture—wasn’t suited to his imagination or his disposition. His “mental entrails” were too chaotic, too unsettled, too layered, too protean, for such a resistant, brittle, unforgiving medium.

  Of the pieces Jackson did produce, only one reached completion; only one image remained fixed in his mind long enough for him to hammer it out of the void. Strangely for Jackson, who avoided painting or drawing faces whenever possible, it was a small stone head, a mere four inches tall. Only the face has fully emerged from the stone. It is the face of a dead man—sad but resigned. It is a death mask for Roy Pollock.

  C. 1933, stone, height 4”

  Late in the spring, Jackson accompanied Ben-Shmuel to his summer place near Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, an old house at the end of miles of double-rut country roads in rural Bucks County northeast of Philadelphia. The house was surrounded by a huge stone yard, an unkempt garden of Ben-Shmuel’s favorite materials: limestone, sandstone, Tennessee marble, and a geography of granites: Westerly, Barre, Scotch, and Coopersburg. The yard served also as a stockade to protect Ben-Shmuel from hostile neighbors. “The natives hated him because of his vile mouth,” recalls Isidore Grossman, a Ben-Shmuel apprentice who later assisted Jacques Lipchitz. “He was always cursing and getting into fistfights with the locals and I would have to defend him.” While in Bucks County that spring, Jackson met a lesser-known sculptor named Richard Davis, a slight, delicate man in his late twenties who considered himself another of Ben-Shmuel’s “students.” The scion of a wealthy New York family, Davis was also an avid collector of his teacher’s work and frequently made the hundred-mile pilgrimage to Upper Black Eddy from his own summer house near Cresco in the Poconos. Jackson undoubtedly looked forward to such visits as a release from the tyranny of Ben-Shmuel’s moodiness and as a chance to break the unaccustomed dry spells with his teetotaling teacher by sampling the local beer with the cosmopolitan Davis.

  Despite Ben-Shmuel’s volatile temper and dark moods, however, despite the prospects of three months without alcohol, Jackson decided to spend the summer in Upper Black Eddy as a studio boy rather than cross the country with Frank or Manuel Tolegian in order to visit his mother—as he had promised he would. “[The apprenticeship] will afford [Jack] an opportunity to acquire some practical experience,” Frank wrote Marie, struggling to explain Jackson’s change of heart, “and the summer in the open will do him good. He regrets not coming home, but money there is scarce, and he doesn’t want to tax the family.”

  Richard Davis

  In fact, Jackson’s failure to visit his mother in the months following Roy’s death was part of a pattern. During the same months, he avoided Charles and Frank as well, spending great stretches of time with Ben-Shmuel on Jane Street or in Bucks County. In early April, he moved with Charles and Elizabeth from Carmine Street to a larger apartment at 46 East Eighth Street—an entire floor for $35 a month—but stayed only a short time. Within weeks, he left for Ben-Shmuel’s Pennsylvania house to spend the summer.

  There is no record of what happened when Jackson arrived in Upper Black Eddy in May of 1933 or why he suddenly departed soon afterward. It may have been loneliness—he was, for the first time, completely on his own, without a family member within hundreds of miles. It may have been the discovery of some previously unknown aspect of Ben-Shmuel’s eccentric character. He was capable, for example, of flashes of extreme violence as well as bizarre personal habits. “He had a pathological hatred of butter,” Grossman remembers. “If he saw it on the table, he would throw it off, like he saw the devil, and say, ‘You get syphilis from butter.’” Or it may have been that the lack of alcohol overtaxed Jackson’s limited powers of abstinence and self-control. Whatever the reasons, he waited only until Richard Davis’s first visit of the season to desert. It was not, apparently, an amicable parting. He never returned to the studio on Jane Street or to the Greenwich workshop, and seldom mentioned Ben-Shmuel’s name again.

  The remaining months of the summer Jackson spent at Davis’s even more isolated cabin on the slopes of Seven Pine Mountain in the Poconos. Hidden in a dark, thickly wooded hollow known locally as the Devil’s Hole, the house was spare and rustic, with big fireplaces in the living room and bedroom and a potbellied stove in the kitchen. Even on the brightest summer days, leaves obscured the sunlight almost completely and the silence was broken only by the rustle of squirrels and deer, the murmur of pheasant, and, occasionally, the glottal call of a wild turkey. “Going into that hollow was like going into Count Dracula’s castle,” recalls a local resident who often hunted in the area. “It got real foggy in there and you had to be careful not to shoot somebody by accident or get lost.”

  How Jackson spent the long summer days in Devil’s Hole is not known. Davis told his part-time maid, Ettabelle Storm, that Jackson was his “houseboy,” although she continued to perform her usual housekeeping chores. The two men apparently sketched together in the outlying studio, which was connected to a second small room by a covered breezeway. Occasionally, Davis would arrange for models to come from New York and pose for a weekend of sketching and sometimes modeling in clay. When he felt a clay sculpture was particularly successful, he would take it to the city and have it cast. The two men quickly established a domestic routine. They would come to Storm’s house in the morning for milk from her cow and vegetables from her garden; later, they would cook the evening meal together—often Davis’s favorite, lamb stew, which Jackson learned to prepare. When there was a square dance at the fire hall in nearby Cresco, Davis and Jackson would accompany Storm and her
new husband. “We’d have them to our house first,” Storm remembers. “We’d play cards and drink beer. We made our own beer. Then we’d go dancing. I was only seventeen or eighteen and Jack was just a kid like me.” More than a few attractive young girls at the fire hall dances admired the “good-looking” older man and his “tall, husky” younger companion, Storm recalls, but “there were never any girlfriends. No, no, no. No girls at all.” Several times during the summer, Jackson and Davis made the two-hour journey into New York and stayed at Davis’s penthouse on Central Park West.

  Beyond these bare outlines, nothing is known of the three months that Jackson and Davis lived together. Although Jackson continued to visit the Pocono cabin frequently throughout the fall and winter, he never spoke of the summer or of Davis to his family or friends. Instead, he used Davis’s support to distance himself even further from his mother and brothers. With summer earnings—or perhaps with Davis’s direct subsidy—he rented a room in a brownstone on East Fifty-eighth Street and tried for the first time to live on his own. Despite Benton’s return from Indiana and the proximity of his rooming house, he failed to register for classes at the League. He still visited now and then—fellow students recall seeing him occasionally in George Bridgman’s drawing class and once in the lunchroom arguing with Arshile Gorky—but many of the old friendships languished. He stopped writing letters home and, in conversation, no longer mentioned his family or bragged of Charles’s accomplishments.