Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Almost immediately, the trouble started. Jackson resumed the nightly forays to the bars along Thirteenth Street, Fourteenth Street, and Sixth Avenue, just as if Sande were still along. By midnight he was drunk, and by two or three he was reeling, violent, sick, and disoriented—or unconscious. Bartenders turned him away or threw him out, sometimes as soon as he appeared in the doorway. He would buy drinks without money, then move on to another bar and order drinks all around. Every evening, Sande would struggle not to notice Jackson’s absence for a few hours, then, around midnight, like clockwork, begin the search. “[Jackson] would disappear and we would go around walking, trying to find him,” remembers Reuben Kadish, who often joined the search. “We would go to the familiar haunts like the clam bar on Eighth Street.” Sometimes they would return after hours of fruitless searching only to find Jackson passed out on the couch. More often, they found him on the street, bellowing at the moon, or slumped over a bar owing money. It was a scene they had played out hundreds of times. If Jackson was violent, Sande might have to ride him down, or pacify him with a hard right to the jaw, but it always ended with Jackson falling onto Sande’s shoulders in childlike submission for the long, slow walk home. “I remember Sande really dragging Jackson up those stairs,” says a neighbor who often heard the “clump and slide” of the brothers’ late night return. Once inside the apartment, they would stagger to the kitchen where Sande would set Jackson carefully in a chair and pour him coffee. Even then, Jackson could suddenly erupt in violence or burst into tears, but whatever happened, Sande sat beside him, held him, and talked soothingly until he fell asleep.

  There was an air of ritual about these episodes. Jackson seldom ventured beyond the “familiar haunts” and Sande, according to Arloie, “always seemed to know where to go find him and bring him home.” More clear-eyed witnesses, like Reginald Wilson, saw the petulance beneath the pyrotechnics. “The most important thing for Jackson was that Sande be willing to put his relationship with Arloie on hold whenever Jackson needed him,” says Wilson. But to hold on to Sande, Jackson had to keep raising the stakes. So the binges grew more frequent, more self-destructive, and more prolonged. By Christmas time, he was disappearing for three and four days at a time and returning in an “indescribable state.”

  Arloie was both terrified by Jackson’s rages and angered by the almost nightly intrusions into her married life, by the early morning shuffling and murmuring of the affectionate ritual being played out in the next room. Unlike Elizabeth, she continued to profess the tenderest feelings for Jackson, but she recognized the challenge implicit in his nocturnal antics and responded firmly. “I told Sande I didn’t want to see [Jackson] in that state,” she remembers. Thereafter, when she heard them staggering up the stairs, she locked herself in the bedroom and refused to come out until Jackson had gone to bed. Faint, unrecognized, and later denied, the battle lines were drawn.

  Instead of retaliating directly against Arloie, Jackson turned his rage on other women. At the Saturday night dances sponsored by the Artists Union, he would accost them in reeling fits of belligerence, randomly grabbing and kissing them. “He would come on very strong,” Peter Busa remembers. “He approached women almost like a dog, bending down and smelling them. He could tell by the smell if a gal had her period, and if she did, he would tell her so.” Lurching across the dance floor, he would break into couples, belch obscenities, and, invariably, provoke fights. From these, too, Sande often rescued him. “He used to get thrown out of the Union dances almost every Saturday for starting fights,” Charles Mattox remembers. Too drunk to be daunted, he would stumble from the Union’s loft at Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue to the nearest subway and take the A train to Harlem, where he would “try to pick up whores,” recalls Busa, who didn’t dare accompany him.

  It was almost as if Jackson had embarked on a campaign to cut himself off from any possibility of a relationship. “He always did the wrong thing and said the wrong thing,” Reuben Kadish recalls. “He always got drunk at the wrong time. Women were a constant source of disappointment.” Only once during the drunken winter of 1936–37 did his offensive defenses break down. At an Artists Union party around Christmas time, he stumbled up to a dancing couple and, stepping between them, took the woman clumsily in his arms. She was slightly older with an intriguingly unattractive face—prominent nose, heavily lidded eyes, and a protruding mouth that she kept closed to hide her bad teeth—but a taut, proud body. She was, apparently, far more pliant than Jackson had expected. He pulled her closer and began rubbing his body against hers. “Do you like to fuck?” he whispered in a beer-soaked grumble. When she felt his erection, she pushed him away. “It was like when a dog gets on your leg,” recalls an eyewitness. “He was trying to have an orgasm.” Indignant, the woman slapped him hard across the face. The blow must have startled Jackson into something like instant sobriety because, according to one witness, he quickly apologized. What happened next was even more out of character. “He started to charm me,” the woman told a friend years later. “I was intrigued and liked him and we went home together.” If anything happened there, its memory quickly disappeared in the alcoholic fog that obscured much of the thirties. Four years later when the woman reappeared in his life, Jackson had forgotten both the incident and her name—Lee Krasner.

  Inevitably, Jackson’s roiling emotional life spilled into his art.

  The 300-mile trip to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, with Sande, Bernie Steffen, Phil Goldstein, and Reginald Wilson to view Orozco’s mural cycle, Epic of American Civilization, had rekindled Jackson’s long-standing obsession with the painter of Prometheus. According to Peter Busa, Jackson kept a large reproduction of the Pomona mural prominently displayed in his studio, and, when asked, readily offered the opinion that it was “the greatest painting done in modern times.” His hyperbole was, at least in part, an echo of the enthusiasm Kadish and Goldstein had brought back from Mexico the previous winter. Although generally disdainful of the “much heralded Mexican Renaissance”—Rivera’s stylistic “crudities” and Siqueiros’s “shitty” painting—they had come away with a new, more complex appreciation of Orozco. Goldstein, whose own paintings at the time were, if anything, too deftly calculated, faulted Orozco for being “dominated by emotion,” but praised the plasticity of his forms. For Jackson, however, expressionism and emotion were the keys to Orozco’s power. The vast mural cycle in the basement reading room of Dartmouth’s Baker Library was more than a tour de force of composition and plastic form, it was a landscape of images that struck Jackson with galvanizing force.

  On seventeen panels of overlapping scenes, shifting moods, and assaultive imagery, Orozco had exposed the errant path of Mexican “civilization,” from Aztec human sacrifices to the coming of Cortez to twentieth-century militarism. Out of this kaleidoscopic procession, Jackson’s eyes were drawn to two images in particular. One was a nightmarish vision of modern education in a panel called Gods of the Modern World. In what appears to be a satanic ritual, five skull-faced “academics” preside as a grotesque skeletal figure—half human, half animal—gives birth on a bed of books and specimen bell jars. Another skull-faced figure in mortarboard acts as midwife, holding the tiny skeletal fetus while the mother kicks her bony leg high in the air in a reflex of pain. The other image—at the far end of the cycle, near a doorway—was a huge Prometheus-like figure, striding out from the shadows into sun-like yellows, oranges, and reds, a titanic Christ straining at the edges of the panel, looming at the threshold of the picture plane as if the next step forward would be onto the reading room floor. On the ground between his legs lies the massive cross from which he has descended; in his hand, the ax he used to chop it down. He is surrounded by the ruins of the corrupt “civilization” he came to destroy—discarded armaments, religious icons, cultural fragments. Like Prometheus, he has suffered: his hands and feet are stigmatized with gaping holes, his legs are flayed, exposing the bloodless muscle tissue beneath, his face is scarred with pain. If the Pomona
Prometheus showed suffering, Orozco’s avenging Christ described volcanic agony.

  Gods of the Modern World, José Clemente Orozco, 1932–34, fresco, 120” × 119”

  Jackson made sketches of the mural while in Hanover, then returned to New York and put them aside. On the trip to the Vineyard with Sande after the wedding, he sketched a few placid landscapes and watercolor seascapes, just as he always had. It wasn’t until he returned to New York in November and was forced to confront his own demons that Orozco’s demonic imagery began to reverberate in his imagination.

  Throughout the winter, when not drunk or recovering from a binge, Jackson explored the dark landscape that Orozco had shown him. His sketchbooks are filled with skeletal, half-human beasts, pregnant women—some of them carrying skeletal animals in their wombs—crosses and chains, skulls, and flayed bodies. In several drawings, figures spring from the womb already nailed or chained to crosses, some already reduced to skeletal carcasses. In one painting done that winter, Jackson depicted Orozco’s skull-faced academicians towering over a prostrate figure. In another, he borrowed the entire nightmare tableau of Gods of the Modern World to explore his own vision of hell: a skeletal “mother beast” lies prone, surrounded by a crowd of leering skull faces as she gives birth to an unseen infant. Bending over her in an almost fetal position is a faceless female figure that could be mother, infant, midwife, or all three.

  Modern Migration of the Spirit, José Clemente Orozco, 1932–34, fresco, 120” × 126”

  Not since the dark, Ryderesque “family portraits” that he painted after his father’s death—the brutal images of a naked mother with huge, pendulous breasts, surrounded by her brood of skeletons—had Jackson entered so unblinkingly the underworld of his unconscious. For almost two years after Arloie’s arrival, the problems that tormented him in the outer world were played out, with wrenching candor, in his art. And once again, the central figure was Stella Pollock. In the real world, Stella may have been unassailable, but on canvas or Masonite or paper, she became his nemesis: a grotesque figure, naked, faceless, bloated, and brutalized. In the real world, Jackson could express his rage only indirectly, in endless barroom binges and dance-hall scenes, in self-abusive brawling and public humiliation. In his art, however, using Orozco’s grim vocabulary, he learned to express the inexpressible. Through the brutality he inflicted on perpetually faceless female figures, he found a way to enact his ancient fantasies of retribution. Through his obsessive mixing of images of birth and suffering—fetuses nailed to crosses, crucifixes springing from the womb—he could portray his misery and at the same time vent his rage at Stella for delivering him into that misery. She became the skull-faced midwife and executioner of Orozco’s mural as well as the pregnant skeleton bearing her skeletal baby into a world of suffering.

  Both 1936–37, pencil and crayon on paper, 14” × 10”

  To Orozco’s ghoulish images, Jackson added one from the deep recesses of his own past. Since watching Stella control the horses hitched to her buggy—just as she controlled her husband and sons—Jackson had seen horses not just as symbols of masculinity but as reminders of sexual ambiguity. The pregnant carcass in Orozco’s mural, with its huge skeleton and beastlike skull, may have triggered this old association. As a succession of women—Rita, Arloie, Sylvia, and soon Becky—raised tormenting doubts about Jackson’s own sexuality, horses began appearing in his art, sometimes as skeletons, sometimes attached to human bodies, often in mid-transformation, becoming birds or bulls—other animals connected with masculinity that had obsessed him since childhood.

  Even in the midst of this winter-long Walpurgisnacht, Jackson somehow managed to resurface in the real world often enough to paint a series of placid landscapes and anecdotal Bentonesque scenes. Like all Project artists, he was aware that the FAP paid for supplies by selling submitted works and that agreeable representational images were more likely to be accepted because they were more likely to be sold. After 1936, however, such paintings had become mere exercises, thinly and quickly painted as if he were impatient with the ruse. His real artistic energy was directed elsewhere. From the imminent wreck of his emotional life, his imagination had salvaged new subject matter and a new style perfectly suited to record his descent. Just as Siqueiros had begun the process of liberating Jackson from traditional materials—“the stick with hairs on the end”—Orozco had cracked open the Pandora’s box of Jackson’s unconscious and, in so doing, begun the liberation of his imagination.

  The Christmas celebrations, including a turkey from Rita Benton, only pushed Jackson deeper into despair. Drinking binges and recovery days had begun to consume so much work time that even the “exercises” he did to meet the FAP’s lax requirements had become a burden. “Not having much luck with painting,” he wrote Charles in a tone of hopelessness reminiscent of the worst days at Manual Arts. “Got my last painting turned back for more time—they didn’t like the form in the water—if it had been a good picture I wouldn’t have consented.”

  Just at this time, several parties to honor Siqueiros were held on the eve of his departure for the Spanish Civil War. When asked to suggest names for the guest lists, the Mexican artist singled Jackson out from among all the assistants in his former workshop: “‘You’ve got to get Jackson. You’ve got to get Jackson!’” Reuben Kadish remembers him insisting. The first noisy celebration took place at a Basque restaurant on the West Side; the second at an artist’s loft. Siqueiros sported a huge ivory-handled revolver given to him by Mexican well-wishers. At one point, just as the drunken guests were set to toast the departing warrior, they discovered he had disappeared. Pollock, “whose scatalogical bellowing was usually much in evidence on such occasions,” according to Axel Horn, was also missing. Both men were soon found under a table—wrestling. Still recovering from too much drink at the first Siqueiros send-off, Jackson had gotten roaring drunk at the second, and lunged at the guest of honor. The two men had often “horsed around” together, but this time Jackson wasn’t playing. “He was killing him,” recalled Horn, who watched in horrified silence as the two men rolled around clutching each other’s throats, each “silently attempting to choke the other into unconsciousness. Jack in a wild exhilarated effort and Siqueiros in a desperate attempt to save himself.” The deadlock was broken only when Sande rushed to the scene and knocked Jackson unconscious “with a deft right to the jaw.” Four of the guests carried Jackson to the Model A and Sande took him home.

  By now, Sande had run out of excuses. When, in the late fall, Charles wrote to broach the possibility of Stella moving to New York and living with Sande and Arloie, Sande rejected the idea out of hand. For family consumption, he cited financial constraints and the uncertain future of Project funding, but privately he confessed to Charles that such a move “would be fatal for Jack.” It had finally sunk in that Stella was part of the problem, not the solution, and that Jackson’s “episodes” were not the transient adolescent phenomena the family had always hoped.

  In January 1937, Sande took the final step. Based on “a succession of periods of emotional instability … usually expressed by a complete loss of responsibility both to himself and to us,” Sande concluded that Jackson was “mentally sick” and should see a psychiatrist. It was an unprecedented and undoubtedly agonizing admission in a family that routinely protected itself with repression and denial: Jackson needed help not just for his drinking but for his past. “As you know,” Sande wrote Charles, “troubles such as his are very deep-rooted, in childhood usually, and it takes a long while to get them ironed out.” In his search for a psychiatrist who would “help [Jackson] find himself,” Sande turned to Caroline Pratt and Helen Marot at the City and Country School. Marot, with her connections in the city’s small community of Jungian analysts, was especially interested in Jackson’s troubles. The psychiatrist whom she recommended to Sande was undoubtedly drawn from among fellow Jungians like Cary Baynes, a woman who had known Jung and translated several of his books. Although Sande was clearly im
pressed by the analysts’s credentials and even optimistic about the results, most of the family shared Jay’s wife, Alma’s, early skepticism. “Jackson didn’t really want to be helped,” she said, “he wanted to be taken care of.”

  About the same time he began therapy, Jackson set out with fresh determination to follow his brothers’ lead and find himself a woman. An opportunity presented itself in early February when Tom and Rita Benton came to town and Rita organized a party at the Pollocks’ Eighth Street apartment. The occasion was an exhibition at the Municipal Art Galleries that included works by many of Benton’s former students who had since graduated to the Project. Inevitably, the old Harmonica Rascals played: Bernard Steffen on dulcimer; Sande, Manuel Tolegian, and Benton himself on harmonica. But Jackson’s attention was elsewhere. Throughout the evening he stared at a “slim and pretty” young woman with shoulder-length brown hair who sat on a high stool at one side of the big front room, her back against a window, playing a banjo and singing Tennessee ballads in a high, sweet voice. She was “a lovely girl with a perfect voice and a sweet face,” and Jackson, according to Reuben Kadish, “went absolutely gaga.”

  Her name was Becky Tarwater. Her voice was clear and poignant, her accent was marked by the pleasant, rolling cadences of the hill country, and the name was her own, not a manager’s invention. Yet at twenty-nine Becky was not quite the backwater ingenue she appeared to Jackson. Born “Rebecca” to a well-to-do family in the eastern Tennessee town of Rockwood, she had been destined for Wellesley College via a prestigious Philadelphia girls’ school when “the theater bug bit.” Along with her equally talented sister Penelope, she had enrolled in the Kingsmith Studio School in Washington, D.C., where she studied and taught music and dance for more than eight years.

  Despite her extensive training, including a year in Paris, Becky had never ventured far from her roots. “We were hillbillies,” she says, “and in our family, everybody sang. … My grandmother taught me the most beautiful songs, like ‘Bonnie Annie Laurie’ and ‘Barbara Allen.’” In fact, when she arrived at Jackson’s doorstep, she had just come from recording “Barbara Allen” as part of Charles Seeger’s folk music project at the Library of Congress. While in Washington, she had met Charles Pollock who introduced her to Bernard Steffen, an old Art Students League classmate. It was Steffen who had brought her to the Pollock’s crowded apartment that night.