In 1933, separated from his third wife, Elinor, and frustrated—perhaps by his own work, which had become little more than a spirited imitation of Picasso’s cloisonnist style, perhaps by the rising anti-modernist tide in New York art circles (the tide that would sweep Thomas Hart Benton to notoriety)—he stopped painting altogether and joined a small, quasi-religious group of Russian émigrés who lived together in a crumbling brownstone that Graham called “the monastery.” Vowing to live “a suffering and spartan life,” he begged food in neighborhood markets and in winter kept a large bowl of snow on the table “to freshen the air.” A friend who saw him about this time remembers a John Graham very different from the tightly strung, charismatic man whom Jackson met five years later. “He reminded me of a Jewish tailor,” says Gerome Kamrowski, “a bit stooped, with an uncommanding voice and a mild personality.”
But Graham was a changeling. In 1935, he turned up in Paris, charming his way through the galleries, ateliers, and cafés of the avant-garde art world. David Smith, who was also in Paris that year, wrote: “[Graham’s] introduction and entry to private collections made my world there.” At home, too, Graham burst out of obscurity with a groundbreaking article, “Primitive Art and Picasso” (which caught Jackson’s attention) and an erudite, opinionated, and slightly wacky book, System and Dialectics of Art, in which he named Jan Matulka, Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Max Weber, David Smith, Willem de Kooning, Edgar Levy, Boardman Robinson, and S. Shane among the “young outstanding American painters” and added daringly that “some are just as good and some are better than the leading artists of the same generation in Europe.”
The book may have brought Graham to the attention of the Baroness Hilla Rebay, the autocratic German director of the Guggenheim collection. In 1938, unfazed by his low opinion of Kandinsky, the star of her collection, Rebay hired Graham as a secretary to arrange grand private showings at the Plaza Hotel and to help plan the transfer of the collection to a more permanent home. In 1939, after returning from a trip to Mexico, he and his fourth wife, Constance, rented an apartment at 54 Greenwich Avenue and began looking for new employment. The same fall, Jackson’s friends Nene and Bernie Schardt, who had been bunking temporarily in the Eighth Street apartment, moved to 56 Greenwich Avenue where their apartment shared a fire escape with Graham’s. Nene Schardt recalls that Jackson and Graham met soon afterward—at the Schardts’ apartment, or perhaps at the Waldorf Cafeteria on Sixth Avenue where Graham became a regular, or at one of the Saturday afternoon teas that Graham hosted in his studio.
In the many hours they subsequently spent together in Graham’s apartment, Jackson, then twenty-seven, and Graham, who had just turned fifty, forged a close, improbable bond. “Jackson had a unique place in John’s life,” one friend remembers, “over and above that occupied by Gorky or any of the other painters.” Not surprisingly, the savvy Graham was drawn to Jackson’s passion and naiveté. “He thought Jackson was a primitive, a proletarian,” recalls artist Ron Gorchov, a later Graham protégé. “He was a little bit snobbish about Jackson, but he also thought he was very deep. To him, Jackson was a kind of bumpkin—but with a profound nature.” Constance Graham remembers how her husband raved about Jackson’s work when he returned from his first visit to the Eighth Street studio: “He said that Pollock was really crazy but that he was a great painter.”
It is almost impossible to overstate the effect such accolades had on Jackson. For the first time in his ten years as an artist, he was being taken seriously, not just by a teacher or a colleague, but by a man who he believed had been to the mountaintop and met Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and the others, a man who spoke with the full authority of Western art. “Graham was the link,” says Lillian Olaney, another young artist at the time. “He was the bee spreading the honey.” Reuben Kadish remembers the surge of confidence he felt just being in Graham’s presence. “He was an individual who came from Europe, who was so far above an ordinary aesthetician. You went in there and he was the guru. You just sat at his feet and listened. And if he said something to you, like your work was exciting, it really meant something.”
Graham was the first to see what was happening in Jackson’s art, the first to express, even distantly and conditionally, the possibility that it might contain the seeds of genius. “Who the hell picked him out?” Willem de Kooning later asked rhetorically. “It was hard for other artists to see what Pollock was doing—their work was so different from his. … But Graham could see it.”
Graham’s neighbor Nene Schardt remembers hearing “many great discussions about art” lasting late into the night when Jackson came to visit. Although usually subdued, Graham became animated when talking about art. One account pictures him pacing his dark, art-filled apartment, his bald head shining in the yellow light from the antique Franklin stove, pausing to explain a Gabonese nail fetish, “theorizing, speculating, speaking in rapid-fire declarations, [filling] friends’ ears with artists’ talk and intimate anecdotes about the giants of the twentieth century. Thus, that Mondrian ate only one egg a day became intermingled in the minds of his listeners with the idea that it was the ‘edge of the paint’ that mattered. [To Graham] art was a way of life as well as a way of seeing.”
For the next two years, Jackson would see the world through Graham’s eyes.
He would see African art. As early as the 1920s, Graham had spoken of African art as “the greatest of all arts.” By the late 1930s, his Greenwich Street apartment bristled with exotic artifacts, including a Yoruba mask-helmet, a Gouro war mask, and a Gabonese sorcerer’s mask, many of which he had acquired while assembling an even more distinguished collection for Frank Crowninshield, the publisher of Vanity Fair. Proudly, lovingly, Graham displayed his collection to Jackson and other visitors. In the middle of a conversation, he would pick up a favorite piece and stroke it appreciatively as he talked, describing it as “lyric,” “majestic,” or “awesome,” explaining how it was based on “wholly different principles” from the art of the West—on what Graham called “spiritual emotions.”
He would see the link between art and the unconscious. Graham’s admiration of primitive art, like Henderson’s, reflected his belief that “Primitive races … have readier access to their unconscious mind than so-called civilized people.” But Graham’s belief in the power and importance of the unconscious went far beyond Henderson’s timid symbology. “It should be understood,” Graham proclaimed in his landmark 1937 article, “that the unconscious mind is the creative factor and the source and storehouse of power and all knowledge, past and future.” The challenge to the artist, he believed, was to plunge “into the canyons of the past back to the first cell formation” and “bring to our consciousness the clarities of the unconscious mind.” No one, of course, had done more plunging into the canyons of the past than Jackson Pollock. For more than a decade, under the guidance of thinkers as diverse as Krishnamurti and Helen Marot, Jackson had been playing with the unconscious at the margins of his art, tantalizing his anxious analysts with drawings and plaques that were neither fish nor fowl, neither pure art nor valid psychological insight. He seemed to be waiting for a signal, a sign of approval—from the world of art, not the world of psychoanalysis—that an imagery pulled from “inside” was worthy of being called art. John Graham gave him that signal.
He would see line. Unlike some other European modernists who believed that color was the essence of painting or composition, Graham argued the preeminence of line. “Gesture, like voice, reflects different emotions,” he wrote in System and Dialectics. “The gesture of the artist is his line, it falls and rises and vibrates differently whenever it speaks of different matter.” Among Western masters, Graham especially admired the great draftsmen: Paolo Uccello, Ingres, Cézanne, and Picasso. He also introduced Jackson to a whole new way of thinking about the link between art and the unconscious: écriture automatique or “automatic writing.” In the effort to tap the unconscious, Graham believed, line was the most sensitive seismograph: especiall
y when freed from the dictates of conscious manipulation and allowed to be “automatic.” The handwriting must be “authentic and not faked … [not] conscientious but honest and free.” No lines, of course, were more honest and free than Jackson’s. The more he tried to discipline his hand, in fact, the more it seemed to exercise a will of its own, responding to signals coming from someplace beneath consciousness, someplace where images bore only a passing resemblance to objects in the real world. Even before meeting Graham, he had forsaken the old struggle for the “correct” line, as Benton defined it, and embarked on a search for the line that reflected his inner vision. But it was Graham who gave that line a name.
He would see new possibilities. “Imitation of nature, technique or trained skill have nothing to do with art,” Graham declared in System and Dialectics. “No technical perfection or elegance can produce a work of art.” No one, of course, felt the lack of technical perfection and elegance more acutely than Jackson. Surrounded by draftsmen like Goldstein, Tolegian, Lehman, Meert, and Schardt, he continued to be plagued by doubts about his “natural abilities” as late as 1940. That summer, he wrote Charles that he was still waiting for his work to “clear up.” Graham’s words calmed those doubts.
Emboldened by Graham’s support and liberated by his ideas, Jackson finally began to pursue the truly personal imagery that was, for Graham, the ultimate test of genius. “A work of art is neither the faithful nor distorted representation,” Graham wrote in System and Dialectics, “it is the immediate, unadorned record of an authentic intellecto-emotional REACTION of the artist set in space.” No artist’s “intellecto-emotional” experiences were more immediate, more unadorned, or more authentic than Jackson’s. “It wasn’t something he was conscious of,” says Wally Strautin. “It was never ‘I want to do this because I want to get there.’ That was not him at all. Jackson painted from an inner compulsion.”
And he would see Picasso.
Jackson had first encountered Picasso in 1922 when he saw reproductions of his sketches in the copies of the Dial that Charles sent to Orland. By the time Jackson reached the Art Students League, Picasso had become the focus of intense controversy among American artists. Upstairs in Studio 9, Benton reviled him and his followers, while downstairs in the cafeteria, Arshile Gorky (who was already in contact with Graham) extolled him as the world’s greatest living painter. At least once during his summers in Los Angeles, Jackson had gone with Kadish, Goldstein, and Lehman to the home of Walter Arensberg where several of Picasso’s Cubist paintings were on display. In 1934, he and Sande had gazed at Picasso’s Three Musicians through the windows of the New York University library. During his Benton years, he had seen reproductions of Picasso works in Cahiers d’art and an occasional Picasso show at one of the commercial galleries in Midtown, but their impact was still muted by Benton’s old antipathy.
Then, in January 1939, he saw Guernica.
Unfortunately, Jackson never recorded his impressions of the momentous event, but he did return again and again to the Valentine Dudensing Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, where, to raise funds for refugees of the Spanish Civil War, the Artists’ Congress exhibited Picasso’s huge masterpiece painted to protest the saturation bombing by Axis planes of a small, undefended Spanish town. Sometimes Jackson came alone, sometimes with others, to make sketches, to exchange hushed comments, or just to stand and be overwhelmed by the great, gray monolith of it. Eleven feet high and twenty-five feet long, it loomed in the modest gallery space like a ship run aground, its images enlarged to supernatural proportions: a hand with fingers the size of limbs, a severed head as big as a boulder, a horse rearing up to the ceiling, a woman screaming with a tongue like a sword, another clutching her dead baby, another standing at her window gasping in recognition, another running to the scene of devastation in frantic bewilderment. Everywhere, the world has turned to spikes and shadows and shattered limbs. Not since his pilgrimage with Charles to Orozco’s Prometheus had Jackson responded so viscerally to a painting. When, on one of his many visits, he overheard a fellow artist make a disparaging remark, Jackson challenged him to “step outside and fight it out.”
Guernica was Jackson’s real introduction to Picasso. Almost immediately, its stark imagery began to appear in the drawings he took to his sessions with Joseph Henderson: drawings of misshapen, screaming figures with their heads thrown back, their teeth bared, mouths open revealing sword-like tongues. In November, Alfred Barr’s mammoth Picasso retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art with the fanfare and reverence of a coronation. In Art News Alfred Frankfurter crowned Picasso “the master of the modern age,” “the painter who … has influenced the art of his time more than any other man,” “the most fertile and most advanced artist of the twentieth century,” “an accepted classic almost unto the academies.” Meanwhile, in Graham’s dark, sculpture-filled apartment on Greenwich Avenue, away from the public hoopla, Jackson’s private confrontation with the artist whom Graham referred to as “Le Maître” had already begun.
Transfixed, Jackson listened to Graham’s glistening—perhaps fictionalized, undoubtedly embellished—accounts of meeting Picasso, sharing a bottle of wine with him, discussing Western art, watching him paint. Every personal anecdote came festooned with accolades: “Picasso drops a casual remark,” Graham said, “and a score of artists make a life’s work out of it.” For the rest of the winter and all the following year, Jackson came often to Graham’s apartment and “communed” with Le Maître.
The Picasso Graham most admired was the Picasso of Girl before a Mirror, the “cloisonnist” Picasso who assembled fragments of pure color, like enameled shards, and set them in heavy black outlines. Graham admired such works both for their power and for their honesty. Stripped of modeling and perspective, they made no attempt to create the illusion of depth. The Renaissance, Graham claimed, with its naive insistence on the third dimension, was “the period of the greatest decadence in art.” It was Picasso’s genius to “refute modeling or three-dimensional painting as a make-believe art.” (Only a few years later, Clement Greenberg would take up Graham’s argument under the banner of “flatness.”) One day he would assail the puritanical Anglo-Saxon obsession with hygiene—on which he blamed the American disdain for accident and personal touch—the next day expound on the inherent limitations of different mediums.
Like Graham’s theories, Picasso’s art enthralled Jackson not because it was new but because it was so unexpectedly familiar. In it, all the threads, all the vague notions that had been lurking in his own paintings, struggling toward expression for more than a decade, came together. He saw the influence of primitive art, as in Picasso’s seminal work of 1907, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (a work that Jackson later told Lee Krasner had been “terribly important to him”), in which the artist borrowed the image of an elongated mask from the Dan tribe of West Africa. He saw an affirmation of the relationship between art and the unconscious. “Picasso’s painting has the same ease of access to the unconscious as have primitive artists,” Graham wrote, “plus a conscious intelligence.” He saw a rejection of facility. Here was an artist of dazzling technical skill who, in order to achieve an authentic image, had rejected facility.
C. 1939–40, colored pencil on paper, 9” × 8”
Using Picasso’s preparatory sketches for Guernica as models, Jackson began to make drawings that, for the first time, create their own reality rather than wrestle with the more familiar one. Gone are the errant Benton lines and the tentative doodles. These are sure, lyrical, expressive works in which the lines loop and curl, widen and narrow with near flawless confidence. A woman throws back her head, opens her wide-oval mouth and screams. Horses rear in terror, a bull paws the ground: each one defined precisely, sparely, by a few fluid lines.
Jackson also recognized in Picasso’s art the mutating images of his own unconscious. In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso transformed prostitutes into half-human creatures with the faces of African masks. In Girl before a Mirror, h
e caught the body of a young woman with breasts like ripe fruit in the middle of a transformation into some luxuriant vegetal form. These and other of Picasso’s images, like Sleeping Nude, fascinated Jackson throughout this period, and he began to experiment with transformations of his own. In one series of paintings, human heads transform into the Eskimo masks he saw illustrated in Graham’s article, “Primitive Art and Picasso.” In Reclining Woman, a female figure stretches out languorously on a long horizontal canvas. Despite her voluptuous breasts, there is something dissipated and barren about her, betrayed by the bony hand, the savage mouth, and the stunted, dog-like legs. She is the ghoulish female figure from Jackson’s Orozcoesque drawings, only now he captures her in mid-transformation, between skeleton and odalisque, between life-threatening and life-affirming, beckoning from a bed that is at once menacingly barbed and lushly inviting.
Eskimo mask, Hooper Bay region, Alaska
Birth, c. 1938–41, 46” × 21¾”
In other works, Picasso drew unknowingly on Jackson’s most personal imagery, his childhood bestiary. In ink drawings and gouaches from the Guernica period, the same archetypal menagerie of chickens, horses, and bulls appears in ever more bizarre combinations and transformations: a bird-headed man carries a dying bull; a chicken transforms into a feathered horse; a man with the head of a bull lugs a dead mare; a single figure combines man, woman, and horse in an explosion of limbs and hooves and faces and flaring nostrils. Like Guernica, these drawings spoke to Jackson in a language of the unconscious that few other artists could have understood as well.
Jackson Pollock Page 49