Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Walter Abell, “The Limits of Abstraction,” Magazine of Art, Dec. 1935; THB, “America and/or Alfred Stieglitz,” Common Sense, Jan. 1935; “Form and the Subject,” Arts, June 1924; “Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting, Part V,” Arts, Mar. 1927; Milton Bracker, “Three New Yorkers,” NYT Magazine, Mar. 31, 1940; “Benton,” Time, Jan. 5, 1931; Thomas Craven, “THB,” Scribner’s, Oct. 1937; Axel Horn, “JP: The Hollow and the Bump,” Carleton Miscellany, Summer 1966; William A. McWhirter, “Tom Benton: At 80: Still at War with Bores and Boobs,” Life, Oct. 3, 1969; Lewis Mumford, “THB,” Creative Art, Dec. 1928; Stephen Polcari, “JP and THB,” Arts, Mar. 1979; Barbara Rose, “Arshile Gorky and John Graham,” Arts, Mar. 1976; “Painters of a Flaming Vision,” Vogue, Dec. 1981; James T. Vallière, “The El Greco Influence on JP’s Early Works,” Art Journal, Fall 1964.

  Edward Alden Jewell, “Orozco and Benton Paint Murals for New York,” NYT, Nov. 23, 1930.

  THB, “The Intimate Story” (Intimate), unpub. ms. in possession of the Benton Testamentary Trust; FVOC, “The Genesis of JP: 1912 to 1943” (Ph.D. thesis), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1965.

  THB Classbooks, 1929–30, 1930–31, 1931–32, Art Students League Archives; registration cards for James D. Brooks, Pete Busa, Herman Cherry, Whitney Darrow, Jr., Joseph Delaney, Mervin Jules, Nathan Katz, Bruce Mitchell, Archie Musick, Philip Pavia, CCP, JP, Fairfield Porter, Bernard Steffen, Manuel Tolegian, Reginald Wilson, Art Students League Archives.

  THB, int. by Kathleen Shorthall, Nov. 9, 1959, for Life, Time/Life Archives; SLM, int. by CG, c. 1956.

  Interviews

  T. P Benton; Thomas Branchick; James Brooks; Peter Busa; Lawrence Campbell; Jeremy Capillé; Blanche Carstensen; Herman Cherry; Whitney Darrow, Jr.; Joseph Delaney; Ruth Emerson; Lyman Field; Margo Henderson; Harry Holtzman; Axel Horn; Harry Jackson; Mervin Jules; Reuben Kadish; Gerome Kamrowski; Nathaniel Kaz; Stewart Klonis; Rosalind Krauss; Maria Piacenza Kron; Terence Mahon; William McKim; George McNeil; Philip Pavia; Eleanor Piacenza; Santos Piacenza; CCP; EFP; FLP; MLP; Harry Rand; Nene Schardt; Gertrude Shibley; Jim Sleeper; Marshall Sprague; Bayrd Still; Araks Tolegian; Reginald Wilson; Mark Witkin.

  NOTES

  Empire State Building: Officially opened May 1, 1931; Ellis, p. 552. New York towers: Chase, p. 151. Schist: New York Panorama, p. 24. Terms for sails: New York Panorama, p. 9. “Dynamic immobility”: Cowley, p. 210. “Amplitude”: New York Panorama, p. 15. Burlesque houses: Kazin, pp. 87–88. Fair: Keun, p. 59. Cabs: Ellis, p. 532. “Eddy and mill”: Still, p. 323. Broadway neon: Keun, p. 52; Chiang Yee, q. in Still, p. 311. “Like dried figs”: Chiang Yee, q. in Still, p. 312: Subway passengers also compared to “plaster poured into a mould.” “Licorice ribbon”: Still, p. 311. Tenements: Still, p. 310. Mindless intoxication: New York Panorama, p. 13. “Full of people”: New York Panorama, p. 17. Thomas Wolfe, speaking as Eugene Gant, q. in New York Panorama, p. 17: “Proud, cruel, everchanging and ephemeral city, to whom we came once when our hearts were high.” Sleeper, a historian of New York: “What fascinates me is the fertility of the soil here, the depth and richness of associations. … It’s very unnerving to some people and stimulating to others.” Clifford Odets, q. in Bracker, “Three New Yorkers,” p. 7: It was the center of the world, “not because of anything we’ve consciously done, but because of the ceaseless flow here of talent from elsewhere.”

  Sleeping on couch; eating meals: CCP. “Out-Benton Benton”: Rita Benton, q. by FLP. “Very suave”: Name withheld by request. Bequeathed apartment and paintings: CCP; Cherry. Charles inherited the Benton Sychromist paintings when his teacher left them behind in the closet of the apartment that Charles also inherited. Invitations to the Vineyard: CCP. Fractious art world: Brown, p. 81: “After the war American art was in a state of chaos; not the chaos of disintegration, but of uninhibited exploration. … America was open to influence and counterinfluence, to experiment and theory, and now even current European art innovations found immediate echo here.” Civil war brewing: Stieglitz spoke for the modernists, touting an art “by the few and for the few … it would lose its subtlest, most intimate charm, if it were shared by the diffident crowd” (S[adakichi] H[artmann], “That Toulouse-Lautrec Print!” Camera Work, no. 29, pp. 36–38, q. in Brown, p. 41), while Benton, a one-time frequenter of 291, now claimed that “no place in the world ever produced more idiotic gabble” and that “the contagion of intellectual idiocy there rose to unbelievable heights”; THB, “America and/or Alfred Stieglitz,” p. 22. “The disease”: John Sloan, Gist of Art; Principles and Practice Expounded in the Classroom and Studio, recorded with the assistance of H. Farr, New York, American Artists Group (c. 1939), p. 44, q. in Brown, p. 62.

  Changes sweeping the art world: Brown, p. 196: “By 1929 the doctrine of art-for-art’s sake had already begun to lose its hold on American art. … The social realists were making social statements and Thomas Benton wanted walls upon which to paint his ‘Epic’. … The depression clarified such ideological directions.” Benton a modernist: Benton considered “the representation of objective forms and the presentation of abstract ideas of form to be of equal artistic value”; The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Paintings, n.p., q. in Brown, p. 65. “Country-wide revival”: THB, q. in McKinzie, p. 106. “Not heroics”: Q. in Allen, p. 35. “American Wave”: Baigell, pp. 87–89. The term “was coined for this drive for an art that reflected the new search for American roots and a pride in the American past.” “There can be little doubt”: Abell, “The Limits of Abstraction,” p. 735. Barr on paucity of articles: Ashton, p. 100. “The way of George”: American, p. 147. Brown, p. 192: “Modernism had dominated American art for almost two decades, during which time the long-standing American tradition of realism continued as an undercurrent. As the twenties advanced, the realist current accumulated strength until, after 1929, it burst into prominence again. An early major crystallization of the new realistic tendencies was the mural series painted by Thomas Hart Benton in the New School for Social Research in 1930.”

  Admission to the League: FLP: “Charles was instrumental in getting Jack into the Art Students League.” But admission to the League was so liberal no special influence was needed. Charles did provide the necessary example, advice, and encouragement. Greenwich House: 46 Barrow Street. Class with Ben-Shmuel: OC&T IV, p. 209. Art-related activities: CCP to FVOC, n.d.; see Simkhovitch. Greenwich House annex: 16 Jones Street. Charles’s advice: Cherry: Charles was “very quiet, very formal.” Charles admits he rarely talked to JP about his art—“I didn’t think any comments of mine would help”—or his personal life—“I wasn’t paying any attention to whom he saw.” “Youth, dimples”: EFP. “When Jackson first got”: Capillé. CCP characteristically denies any competitiveness with JP: “I don’t feel there was any conflict between Jack and me, and between my position at that moment and his.”

  Jackson’s new apartment: 240 West Fourteenth Street; EFP; FLP. There is some confusion about whether JP lived with Tolegian at this point. Frank thinks JP later moved to an apartment on Tenth Avenue with Tolegian. Jackson at the League: JP signed up for Benton’s Life Drawing, Painting and Composition course, which met five days a week from 7:00 to 10:00 P.M., ostensibly with two criticisms a week from Benton, for a tuition of $12 a month. By February 16 of the new year, Benton had arranged financial assistance for him, and JP remained in the class through May. In October 1931, JP registered in Benton’s Mural Painting class and, a year later, on October 3, 1932, in Benton’s Life Drawing, Painting, and Mural Composition class, where he served as monitor. In December, he was elected an official member of the League. In January 1933, JP joined John Sloan’s Life Drawing, Painting, and Composition class. In February or March 1933, he also registered in the sculpture class of Robert Laurent. Although classmates recall JP taking drawing classes with George Bridgman, there is no record of his enrollment; THB Classbooks, 1930–1931, 1931–1932; registration card for JP. “Wonderfully loose”: Emerson.

  Wilmarth: Landgren, p. 1
7. The founding of the League was precipitated by the National Academy’s refusal to open its doors for a season. League address in 1875: Fifth Avenue at Sixteenth Street. “Alcove” system rejected: Landgren, p. 102. “Parisian ateliers”: Landgren, p. 19. Hardenbergh: Campbell. At the time, Hardenbergh was best known for his design of the mammoth car barn at Third Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street, also a French Second Empire “palace.”

  League policies: Campbell; FVOC, “The Genesis of JP,” p. 38. Inviting artists to the League: Emerson. Artists on the faculty: Landgren, pp. 112–14. “One reason”: Q. in Landgren, pp. 90–91. In 1907 some conservative teachers gained control of the school’s governing board and forced the League to adopt more academic methods, but their initiatives were soon reversed; Landren, p. 102. Studio 9: Klonis; but Landgren (p. 63) notes four studios on the fifth floor. “They were all”; “monitor”: Horn, “JP,” p. 80. Benton appearing on Tuesday: Holtzman. “Anybody want criticism”: Friedman, p. 20. “He wouldn’t go near”: Horn. Artist p. 333: “I never gave direct criticisms unless they were asked for and even then only when the asker specified what was occasioning difficulty.” Weeks without word: Cherry. “The rhythm”; “the nature”: CCP. “Correction”: Jules. Lectures: FVOC, “The Genesis of JP,” p. 37. “To be able”; “the hollow”: Horn, “JP,” p. 81. “Baroque rhythms”: American, p. 37. Models: Emerson. “To identify”: Horn, “JP,” p. 80. Ticklish models: Friedman, p. 25.

  Michelangelo: Friedman, p. 21. Tintoretto: Horn, “JP,” p. 84; Friedman, p. 21; Cherry. Rubens: Friedman, p. 21. Rembrandt: Friedman, p. 21; Busa; Jules. Dürer, Schön, Cambiaso: Artist, p. 333. Signorelli, Massacio, Mantegna, Brueghel, Assyrian bas-reliefs; El Greco: Horn, “JP,” p. 84; FVOC, “The Genesis of JP,” p. 136; Busa; Cherry. Sketchbooks: Vallière, p. 6: Fifty-two pages of sketches include over sixty compositions after El Greco, twenty after Rubens, three after Michelangelo, and one after Rembrandt’s Night Watch. Three principal sketchbooks still exist. Vallière (p. 6) dates the first two “between 1936 and 1938,” arguing that the sketchbooks, Grumbacher “Leonardo,” were in production only from 1936 to 1951. But FVOC says the sketchbooks were “probably on the market as early as 1932”; OC&T III, p. 13, citing Grumbacher to FVOC, Nov. 26, 1975.

  Despite this new information, and despite the reasonable assumption that the first two sketchbooks and their Bentonesque formal analyses were made during JP’s tenure in Benton’s class at the League, O’Connor (OC&T III, pp. 13–14) argues for a later date. Benton, on seeing reproductions of the sketchbooks in October 1973, wrote that the works showed two or three years’ experience, that his students did not use fine sketchbooks in the classroom, and that in his opinion the drawings, especially those from life, were not done until Benton had stopped teaching at the League, sometime in 1933. O’Connor also writes that the life drawings seem to have been done during JP’s visits to the League after he was no longer formally associated with it and that internal evidence suggests that the drawings from El Greco were done from a copy of the Hyperion edition of that artist’s works, published in 1937, still in JP’s library in 1956. He equivocates by dating the sketchbook c. 1933–38, but writes that the drawings from El Greco, in particular, could not have been done until “1937 or after.”

  Benton, however, was never a terribly good source on his students’ work. He wrote (THB to FVOC, May 31, 1964) that JP never made clay models when in fact he did, both in Laurent’s class (Pavia) and on Martha’s Vineyard (Emerson). As to the quality of the paper, JP could easily have “borrowed” one of Charles’s sketchbooks, or even been given it. The drawings could have been done outside of class—either at the League itself, since students were encouraged by Benton to visit the small library to make copies from the masters, or at home, since students at the time were permitted to borrow League books; Jules. Too much has been made of the books in JP’s library at the time of his death. Most were given to him, not purchased; moreover, he had access to other books.

  O’Connor is clearer on the dating of the second sketchbook, c. 1937–38, but again, these dates seem too late. Although the second sketchbook shows a more mature grasp of Benton’s methods, we would argue that the drawings were done no later than 1935–36, certainly well before JP’s admission to Bloomingdale’s. O’Connor’s dates for the third sketchbook, c. 1938–39, seem more plausible, since the drawings have similarities in subject with the drawings that JP made for Dr. Henderson during this period.

  JP’s sketches from this early period show an anxious attempt to master Benton’s methods. An interesting sheet contains studies of four works by Signorelli. Although Benton had prescribed an orderly progression of study—“It is advisable to seek, in analysis, first the main linear and then the main cubic movements and to go into the minor rhythms of the details only after these have been satisfactorily determined” (THB, “Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting,” p. 145)—JP impatiently darts from one style to another, as from one Signorelli painting to another. At the top, he draws the “main linear movements” of a leg from Martyrdom of St. Catherine. At the bottom, he makes a crude assessment of the cubic movements in Lamentation over Christ. In the middle of the sheet, he makes a more careful study of the angels from Crowning of the Elects. To simplify the composition, and to stress the pyramidal structure, he eliminates one of the five angels in the original and the wings from the two principal angels. Although intending a cubistic analysis, in drawing the leg of the angel on the right JP drifts into a linear analysis and, from this, to a rough chiaroscuro sketch of that figure. He then shifts back to a straightforward cubistic analysis of the foreshortened heads of some of the elects in Signorelli’s painting, who are straining to see the vision of the angels. At top center, JP draws a turbaned head from yet another Signorelli painting, Feast in the House of Simon, a drawing so crude it might have been made back in Los Angeles or even in Riverside. Perhaps in frustration, JP fills some of the empty spaces left on the paper with abstract designs of interlocked swirls resembling the contour lines on a geological map; OC&T 402, III, p. 17; see FVOC, “The Genesis of JP,” pp. 135–36.

  There are some direct copies of paintings, notably an exaggerated copy of the figure of Jonah from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Although proportionally crude, these copies are more exact than JP’s drawings from the live model, which are strained to the point of distortion. In a series of drawings of a nude woman, JP fails to connect the woman’s arms to her torso in a plausible way, he tacks the breasts onto the chest and provides so little sense of bone structure and musculature that the folded arms in one drawing twist like ropes of raw dough; OC&T 426–27, III, pp. 37–39. Although the lines are forceful—OC&T (III, p. 14) note that JP has pressed the pencil down so hard that he leaves an indentation in the paper and creates a graphite sheen—they are extremely rough. The strength of these early drawings is in their forcefulness and intensity, not in their assurance or verisimilitude.

  From the second sketchbook, it is clear that JP did make some progress; that even for this artist who drew his strength from spontaneity, conscientious effort and study produced results. The copies from the old masters are more accomplished, as can be seen in the study of Michelangelo’s Adam from the Creation of Man; OC&T 428, III, p. 20. His grasp of compositional space is surer, as can be seen in the cubistic analysis of a complex group of equestrian and pedestrian figures in Rubens’s Christ Entering Jerusalem; OC&T 446, III, p. 50. Even at this relatively late date, JP is engaging in some of Benton’s most basic exercises, including a study of the recession of forms in space (OC&T 445, III, p. 49) and the disposition of volumes in space around a central axis; OC&T 434, III, p. 44. But perhaps the most interesting development in this second sketchbook is the concentration of patterned lights and darks that achieve, in their prescient abstraction, something of his mature force; see especially OC&T 432, III, p. 42, in which he isolates the drapery of the figure of Christ in El Greco’s Coronation of the Virgin and develops it with remarkable strength.


  Block forms: Benton later called this form of figure analysis, based on Cambiosi, “spiralic countering” and defined it as the “arrangement of cubic forms about an axis [in such a way that] forms counter one another”; THB to FVOC, Apr. 4, 1964. “Benton demanded”: Jules. “[Jackson] was out”: THB, int. by Shorthall, Nov. 9, 1959. Tracing; “horror”: Busa. “Hairy scribble-scrabble”: Horn, “JP,” p. 83. Hip or thigh: OC&T 450, III, p. 52. Drapery; faces and hands: OC&T 421, III, p. 33. “Jackson’s drawings”: Horn, “JP,” p. 83: “with the possible exception of those of Deyo Jacobs.” League a touchstone: Campbell, Holtzman, and many others say it was the center. “Just going along”: Kaz. “We were all”: Cherry.

  Porter and Trotsky: Kramer, p. 162. He made the trip in 1927, during his junior year at college; Witkin. Holtzman: Holtzman. Brooks; “too much rolly”: Brooks. “Missouri gang”: Cherry; Sprague; Musick had lived for some time in Colorado Springs and would retire there from New York. Meert close to Charles: Busa; Wilson. Meert gentle, reticent: Cherry. “A dreamer”: Shibley. “Poetic”: Schardt. Meert and Charles favorites: Cherry; Wilson. Cherry: Meert and Benton would later break up “because of politics. Meert was inclined towards the left—may have been a Communist—and by this time, Benton had become very reactionary.” Katz: Kaz: “They used to take bets on whether I was a midget or just a young kid. It was a standing joke, especially when I was the monitor of a class.”