Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  On the streets, sights that once elicited shock or rage or compassion had become commonplace: the “wobblies” in the parks, huddled glumly on benches carrying their belongings in paper bags; legions of men in gray clothes with gray faces leaning against the walls, blocking the sidewalks, waiting for Mr. Hearst’s coffee wagon, harvesting butts from the sidewalk and newspapers from the rubbish, lining up in every open space to sell single gardenias for fifteen cents, or apples or oranges or newspapers, or to shine shoes, or just to beg. On sunny Indian-summer days, thousands of them filtered into midtown. From under bridges and cardboard lean-tos, from subway stations and railroad terminals, from the Hooverville in Central Park’s drained reservoir, from the vast emergency shelter on the East River docks where the stench of human bodies was “less sweet than cows, less fragrant than horses,” they crawled together—first to form the “serried rows” of breadlines, then to fill the gray parks and street corners. They were not “bums” in the traditional American sense. A guard at a city shelter told Matthew Josephson, “Nowadays, we’re getting a very good class of people. Half of them aren’t bums at all.” They were mostly the unemployed, a vast and ubiquitous new class—as many as one million in New York alone during the worst years. Not all were homeless. Beyond Lexington Avenue on the east and Sixth Avenue on the west lay endless rows of “Depression shanties,” corrugated tin villages where the pavement was broken and the despair palpable, where babies died of malnutrition and men dropped dead in the streets and strangers were found frozen to death in abandoned warehouses in the winter. In more permanent neighborhoods like the Village, little girls clutched their dolls and detailed their families’ plights to other girls playing relief workers in a game called “Going on Relief.” Boys played a rougher game called “Picketing,” in which they yelled “scab” at each other and staged fierce mock street fights. In the fancier neighborhoods, conversation often turned to suicide. A popular joke concerned the hotel clerk who inquired of guests: “Do you want a room for sleeping or for jumping?”

  By the standards of a city in which one out of four workers was jobless and one out of ten jobless was also homeless, Jackson and Sande Pollock fared relatively well. The “apartment” Jackson had found south of the Village was nothing more than the top floor of an abandoned commercial building that stood by itself amid the piles of rubble and Depression shanties—sometimes indistinguishable from each other—that lined Houston Street. Probably rent-free, it was a bare, barn-like space without heat or hot water. “To get their attention, we’d have to throw rocks at the windows,” remembers Maria Piacenza, who often stopped by with her girlfriend, Madeline, on their way home from work at Klein’s department store. “We’d see their heads way up there in the sky, and they’d come down and we’d have to climb all these stairs up to the studio, which was really just a big bare place.” To discourage Arloie from joining him in New York—which she was eager to do—Sande wrote of the dismal conditions: “It’s a terrible place, a pigsty in the city!” “Sande didn’t want me to come,” Arloie remembers. “He said it wasn’t fit for a woman, and it got so cold at times they had to burn their furniture.” Pigsty or not, Piacenza and others visited often—although when they came for dinner they had to bring their own pots and pans. And if the place “wasn’t fit for a woman,” it was primarily because Sande and Jackson had painted crude “pornographic murals” on the flaking plaster walls. “They were kind of naughty,” Piacenza recalls. “There were guys peeing all over, that sort of thing. Madeline and I tried very hard not to notice them.”

  With the help of the Bentons, the brothers found a job at the City and Country School on West Thirteenth Street, a progressive school for children ages three through twelve founded on John Dewey’s principles of “learning through doing.” Tom and Rita had known the school’s founder, Caroline Pratt, and her partner, Helen Marot, for some years, having often summered with them on Martha’s Vineyard, and in all likelihood had already introduced Jackson to the two elderly women. Within a few years, Marot would be drawn into the drama of Jackson’s decline and the Pollock family’s desperate efforts to arrest it, but even as early as the winter of 1934, she and Pratt were generous, if somewhat distant benefactors. For cleaning the five-story school every night and “swabbing it down” once a week, they paid the two brothers five dollars apiece—half what a salesgirl at Klein’s like Maria Piacenza made, but enough to buy food and fuel. Jackson, whose only experience with a regular job had been on his father’s work crews, resented the demeaning routine of emptying trash cans and cleaning latrines. “He just wasn’t capable of functioning in the way you needed to for regular work,” recalls Reuben Kadish.

  Rita Benton, another of Jackson’s guardian angels during the bleakest days of the Depression, searched for ways to supplement the lean wages at the City and Country School, but found that “Jack was a very proud and sensitive young man [and] there was no way of giving him money.” Over the years she had tried various subterfuges to pass along a few extra dollars—arranging make-work odd jobs, inflating T. P.‘s babysitting hours, ordering milk delivered to Jackson’s door anonymously—but by the winter of 1934, even the Bentons had few dollars to spare. Despite Tom’s increasing visibility—he appeared on the cover of Time in December 1934—the market for his large paintings had all but evaporated. In a depressed art market filled with nervous, cash-strapped collectors, only his small and relatively inexpensive ceramic bowls and plates moved well.

  At Rita’s prompting, Jackson attended the free ceramics workshop taught by Job Goodman at the Henry Street Settlement House as part of the so-called “teachers’ project” of the 1932 New York State work relief program. With additional tutoring from Benton, Jackson was “quickly successful,” according to Tom, “producing some handsome and very salable works” that Rita displayed in her ad hoc gallery for young and unknown artists in the basement of Tom’s dealer, the Ferargil Galleries. “We opened December 1st and ran through to the Christmas holidays,” Rita recalled. “Jack Pollock, Manuel Tolegian and I cleaned up the place. Mr. Benton and I bought the paint for the walls. … By December 24th, we had sold thousands of dollars worth of paintings.” Over the next six months, she sold every bowl and plate that Jackson produced—except for six, which he presented to her as gifts. Touched but ever pragmatic, Rita insisted on paying for them.

  Sometime during the winter of 1934–35, the second winter of the New Deal, Jackson and Sande joined the four million families and seven million single people receiving direct government aid. For the million and a half of those who lived in New York City, the help came just in time. The winter was mercilessly long and brutal. After a blistering summer, the temperature plummeted to the teens and single digits and seemed to die there. Week after week, papers carried reports of “a general increase in malnutrition” and of clinics and relief agencies “so overcrowded they can offer adequate relief to no one.” Jackson and Sande could easily have encountered one of the dozens who died of starvation that winter, floating through the snow in a final, painless delirium. It was the year of William Saroyan’s story, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” about a young man starving to death, wandering the city streets feeling the giddiness of imminent death, hanging in midair, “the form without the weight,” floating back and forth between “the trivial truth of reality” and “the tiny, tangible atom of eternity,” between life and death, on a trapeze of delirium. “Starvation,” wrote Alfred Kazin in praise of Saroyan’s story, “expressed perfectly the sense of the outer world in 1934 as implacable, ungiving.”

  For Jackson and Sande, the winter was cold and grim, but not, in fact, threatening. Between the job at the City and Country School, occasional money from the sale of Jackson’s bowls, and a few dollars in relief payments, the two brothers seldom went hungry. At times, they were, by Depression standards, almost flush. Reginald Wilson came by often and accompanied them to the Restaurant dei Lavoratori, a neighborhood eatery at 92 West Houston. “It was one of our favorit
es,” Wilson recalls, “a splendid restaurant, very modest, where you could get a pretty decent dinner for under a dollar.” If, at other times, they couldn’t afford a dollar—when Jackson spent the money from the sale of a bowl on a bottle of whiskey—there were other, less splendid restaurants where a penny bought coffee or day-old bread and twenty-five cents bought a meal. If all else failed, they could have joined the 81,000 who daily endured the rudeness and degradation of the breadline for a tin bowl of vaguely vegetable stew, three slices of stale bread, and a tin cup of watery coffee—although Charles, who remained employed throughout the period, would never have permitted the Pollock family to suffer such an indignity.

  “They were sort of living hand to mouth in the city,” recalls Axel Horn. “There were just no holds barred. At least that’s the impression one got.” It was an impression the Pollock brothers relished. Jackson liked to tell the story of his encounter with a well-dressed man walking his dog on lower Fifth Avenue. “I started petting it, saying ‘nice dog,’” he told T. P. Benton and others. “Then I jumped up and said to the man, ‘You son of a bitch, you feed that dog when I’m starving,’ and I slugged him. And then the cops came. They gave me a terrible beating, and I wound up in the hospital.” (In fact, it was the dog owner, not the cops, who gave Jackson the beating, according to Rita Benton, who was called by the police after they took Jackson to St. Vincent’s Hospital for head injuries and charged him with assault and battery. The charges, like so many others against Jackson, were later dropped.)

  Sande also bragged and railed about the hardships of the Depression, about how he and Jackson were reduced, like millions of their fellow workers, to stealing food to stay alive. “Trying to wring a bare existence out of this goddamned city,” he wrote Reuben Kadish in the depths of their poverty, “takes most of ones time. The rest of the time is spent holding ones nuts in one hand to keep them from freezing and stealing potatoes with the other. The suffering of thousands of people in this city alone is appaling.”

  If Jackson and Sande did steal food from the streets that winter, they were moved, not by the delirium of starvation, but by the bad-boy spirit of the Gold Dust Twins, thinly veiled in political rhetoric. “Sometimes people stole as a badge of honor,” recalls another artist who lived through the Depression in New York and saw fellow students at the League eating out of garbage cans. “They wanted to show people that they weren’t taking things lying down.” In fact, Jackson and Sande always had enough money for liquor, occasionally enough for restaurant dining, and even a little extra to send home to Frank on his wedding day. When they had money to spend, they spent it as they always had—as their mother had—on the best. “Even during the Depression, with very little money,” recalls Elizabeth Pollock, “there was a kind of strange dandiness about them, that to a New Yorker like me seemed queer at times. … Compared to my instincts, which were always bargain-basement, they went to the top floors for the best, even if it meant going without other things.”

  Together again for the first time since Riverside, away from Stella and Arloie, “Jack and Sande” quickly reverted to the old games of cowboy machismo they had played in the orange groves and sagebrush gullies of Southern California. On the gray streets of Manhattan, however, the effect was altogether different. Short and stocky even in his tall cowboy hat and boots, drawling out country phrases like “tighter than a gnat’s ass,” Sande cut an unintentionally comic figure that only Jackson found convincing. “Sande was like a folly,” recalls Gerome Kamrowski, a fellow artist. “The only time you saw a cowboy in Manhattan was when the rodeo was in town—except for Sande. And Jackson was right there beside him wearing jeans and boots. They were the Wyoming kids.” Instead of roaming the San Gabriel Mountains in a stripped-down Model T, they explored the bars and nightclubs of the Village. There, among the remnants of Prohibition-era seediness and Depression-era despair, they continued the old search for manhood and belonging that had begun around a campfire on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

  “They were both drinking,” recalls Axel Horn, who witnessed their drunken antics often, “but it only had a marked effect on Jack. Sande would drink a lot, but he would never go wild the way Jack did.” Now, as then, Jackson stumbled and reeled and took the falls. “He would erupt in every direction at once. He would start chasing women, he would throw things around, yelling, and challenging everybody.” Now, as then, Sande picked him up and put him to bed. He “was always there to see that, when Jack was going out of bounds, he was controlled,” says Horn, “even if that meant he had to come in and knock Jackson out cold—I saw that happen several times.” “Sande took care of him,” recalls Reginald Wilson, “got him out of jams, got him home safely from bars. Jack would never have survived without him.”

  But there was also something deeply provocative in Sande’s solicitude, a license to “screw up” that Jackson understood only too well. “The real problem started when Sande arrived and began making all of Jack’s decisions for him,” Manuel Tolegian said later. “He should have let him alone.” But “Sande’s job was Jack,” as Reginald Wilson recalls, and without Jackson’s excesses, without the drinking and the self-abuse, Sande would have been without a job. At a benefit for the Art Students League held at the Palm Garden in 1935, an argument between Jackson and Harold Anton, a fellow artist, boiled over into the first pushing stages of a fight. Instead of pulling Jackson away, Sande leapt onto his shoulders and began flailing at the taller Anton. “They were like the James brothers,” recalls Peter Busa, who watched in astonishment. “It was like fighting a giant with four hands.” When Anton backed away, Jackson started reeling through the startled crowd, hugging Sande’s legs while Sande “looked for the tallest people he could find and hit them in the mouth.” According to Busa, “They nearly caused a riot.”

  Nothing had changed since the day in the Phoenix barnyard when Jackson offered up his fingertip. The two brothers were still locked in their mutual, self-destructive embrace. Despite months of drunken binges, late night searches, barroom fights, and long walks home, Sande never tried to prevent Jackson from drinking, and Jackson never tried to quit. Instead, surrounded by deprivation and starvation, he escaped on the familiar trapeze of drunkenness to an atom of the past where he had been briefly happy. It was his private delirium, less final than starvation and, behind the histrionics, deeply satisfying. With Sande close by again, he had no fear of falling.

  18

  A GREAT HOPE FOR AMERICAN PAINTING

  On the morning of August 1, 1935, Jackson and Sande Pollock awoke to startling news: “They’re hiring artists.” People dashed through the streets of the Village, clutching paintings under their arms, spreading the news from door to door. May Tabak Rosenberg, whose husband Harold would become a leading art critic in the 1950s, was one of those who heard the alarm. “They were shouting with the excitement of children at a zoo,” she later wrote, “‘Hurry. Grab some paintings. Hurry! Grab anything you’ve got framed and come along. Hurry.’”

  In the “exhilarating madness” that followed, details were hard to come by. Fragments of explanation flew back and forth on street corners and in cafeterias: the government had set up an “Art Project,” they would pay painters to paint, “one had to sign up that very day,” the pay was more than twenty dollars a week. After years of destitution, of languishing in cold-water flats and empty galleries, most of the Village’s two hundred artists and art students could hardly believe their ears. “It was like winning a lottery for ten million dollars,” recalls one of them. “We couldn’t believe that you got paid steady, twenty-three dollars a week, just to paint. It was the craziest thing we ever heard of.”

  The rescue had come just in time.

  In the six years since the crash, the American art world had virtually ceased to exist. Prices had dropped to one-third of their 1929 levels, imports had plummeted over 80 percent, and the production of artists’ materials was off by almost half. Artists who moonlighted in commercial illustration suffered a higher rat
io of unemployment than either the Kentucky coal miners or the Okie farmers whom Jackson had seen on his last trip west. The success of radio had devastated the market for magazine and newspaper illustrators, leaving only a residue of movie-and travel-poster artists like Charles Pollock. Sculptors were prohibited from working on billions of dollars’ worth of public construction—virtually the only construction being done—under the government’s cost-cutting prohibition on decorative stone work. Even scarce private dollars—lured by special cooperative galleries like Rita Benton’s—had largely evaporated. A group of New York artists approached European buyers offering to trade their works for “anything reasonable.” Those artists who continued to paint did so only “out of habit,” according to one account, “[standing] before their easels painting pictures they knew no one would buy.” They didn’t need a presidential commission to tell them in 1933 that “for the overwhelming majority of the American people the fine arts of painting and sculpture, in their noncommercial, non-industrial forms, do not exist.”

  So it wasn’t surprising that the initial jubilation that greeted the government announcement was followed by suspicion and disbelief. Even after the artists who had signed up on August 1 returned the following week and received their first check for $23.86, doubts lingered. Some wondered out loud if banks would cash the checks; few had bank accounts. “Then a scout appeared with good news,” May Rosenberg recounted. “The liquor department at Hearns Department Store on 14th Street would cash the checks of all customers. The artists trouped down in a body. Drink and be merry; for tomorrow, you’re fired, was the mood. Nobody believed it would last a month, if that.” During those first weeks, artists spent every new penny as quickly as possible, on the theory that “the government couldn’t get money out of a rolling stone.” They had dental work done—many for the first time since 1929; bought concert and theater tickets, fancy meals, and lots of liquor—anything that a vacillating government couldn’t repossess.