The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

  He applied for a job as a deckhand on the Holland America Line, but without success. He then tried several times to get on board ships bound for America as a stowaway, but these attempts all came to nothing. Finally, a tenuous connection with a man who was planning to return to New York but needed to pay union dues he couldn’t afford gave de Kooning his chance. He paid the man’s dues (“borrowing” the money from his father) and waited for his opportunity. For months, nothing happened, and de Kooning assumed he had been conned. But finally, without any forewarning, the man reappeared and smuggled de Kooning into the engine room of the SS Shelley.

  It was July 18, 1926. Not only had de Kooning told no one, but he had taken nothing with him—not even the portfolio of artwork he planned to use to find work in America. Credentials, it turned out, would not be necessary.

  —

  DE KOONING’S ROUGH CHILDHOOD and his later, precipitous departure for America were of a piece with what Philip Roth once called “the drama that underlies America’s story, the high drama that is upping and leaving—and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands.” It left damage in its wake—though how much is hard to say. It also seemed to inflate within de Kooning a yearning for fellowship, for the magical double act of brotherhood, for the camaraderie of sharing unspoken, unaccountable things with a pilgrim on the same hard path. If he found that fellowship again and again in the early years of his career, it was because he was seeking it.

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  YEARS LATER, HIS BROTHER-IN-LAW, Conrad Fried, told Stevens and Swan the story of a teacher at de Kooning’s school in Rotterdam who had done much to encourage the young boy’s interest. “See that guy sitting over there?” the teacher had said to de Kooning during one class when the students were all drawing. “Go and see what he’s doing.”

  De Kooning did what he was told and saw that the other student was drawing freely and fluently. His own drawing was tight and controlled. The two began talking, whereupon the other student told de Kooning that the teacher had said exactly the same thing to him: “Go and see what that kid is doing.”

  A similar story played out years later, on a much bigger stage. The artist in the role of the other student was Jackson Pollock.

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  POLLOCK WAS THE YOUNGEST of five brothers. He was the most pampered—by his overbearing yet in other ways emotionally distant mother—and also the most troubled. His father, LeRoy McCoy, had grown up in Tingley, Iowa, with foster parents whose family name was Pollock. LeRoy was treated as cheap labor by these Pollocks, and by anyone they could rent their foster son out to. Later, feeling betrayed and undermined by the memory of this dismal childhood, LeRoy tried to change his name back to McCoy, but he couldn’t afford the legal fee.

  Jackson’s mother, Stella, also grew up in Tingley. Together, she and LeRoy had four sons before, on January 28, 1912, Jackson arrived—limp, blotchy, bruised, and needing to be slapped to life.

  At the time, the Pollocks were living in Cody, Wyoming. Stella later found out that the complications attending Jackson’s birth meant that he would be her last child. He was, as a consequence, coddled. She exempted him from chores, excused his misdemeanors, and indulged his various whims. But his childhood, as his biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory Smith point out in Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, was—like de Kooning’s—hobbled by poverty and poisoned by the domestic friction that so often accompanies it. In 1920, when Jackson was eight, LeRoy moved out of the family home. And so—again like de Kooning—he was essentially fatherless during his formative years. LeRoy stayed in touch intermittently, and there was an attempt to reunite the family in Arizona, where they had moved after the failure of various enterprises in Cody and California. But it didn’t last long.

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  JACKSON WAS A SENSITIVE BOY with a febrile imagination. His older brother Charles had resolved at an early age to become an artist. It was obvious to all that he had talent. But artistic ambition was the last thing expected of a boy in America’s rural West, so Charles was self-conscious about his choice of vocation, and cultivated a matching sense of style. He grew out his hair and dressed in bohemian clothes. Despite his initial insecurity, he played the part with increasing conviction, and he struck people, including his own family, as a wise, mature soul. Jackson, nine years his junior, was entranced. “When Jackson was a little boy and was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up,” recalled his mother, Stella, “he’d always say, ‘I want to be an artist like brother Charles.’ ”

  When Charles moved to Los Angeles to study art at the Otis Institute, Jackson and Sande, the brother closest to Jackson in age, both dreamed of following in his footsteps. Charles enjoyed his trailblazing role and the authority his own adventures in Los Angeles had conferred on him. He mailed home copies of The Dial, a high-minded monthly magazine sprinkled with features on modern art and writings by the likes of T. S. Eliot and Thomas Mann. Jackson and Sande devoured these issues. They not only conjured an exciting new world, but represented a spiritual connection with their absent brother.

  Charles’s communications were sporadic, but they carried weight. And so when, in 1928, aged sixteen, Jackson did pull out of high school, moving from Riverside, California, where his mother was based, to Los Angeles to study at the Manual Arts High School, it was very much with his brother’s example in mind.

  But Jackson was not Charles. He was inarticulate and hypersensitive, with a wild temper and a proclivity (having imbibed his first alcoholic drink at the age of fourteen) for self-destructive binge drinking. And so he struggled.

  Charles had meanwhile moved from Los Angeles to New York in 1926 to study with Thomas Hart Benton, the charismatic muralist and champion of American Regionalism. Hearing of Jackson’s plight, Charles sent a letter filled with solicitude: “I have myself gone through periods of depression and melancholy which threatened to warp all future efforts,” he wrote. “I am sorry I have seen so little of you these past years when you have matured so rapidly. Now I have the vaguest idea of your temperament and interests. It is apparent tho that you are gifted with a sensitive and perceptive intelligence and it is important that this quality should develop normally and thoroughly to its ultimate justification in some worthy endeavor and not be wasted…I am delighted that you are interested in art.”

  The letter had a galvanizing effect on Jackson. Despite lacking any obvious aptitude, he decided once and for all to follow Charles and pursue a life as an artist.

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  POLLOCK’S DETERMINATION TO BECOME an artist was unbreakable, but at Manual Arts his lack of technical ability was repeatedly exposed. His drawing, in particular, was awkward and heavy-handed. He was twice expelled from the school, and by 1930 he was reduced to attending on a part-time basis, one half-day a week. He appeared to be going nowhere.

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  EVERY TRULY MEMORABLE SUCCESS comes in spite of a handicap. But the handicap is not always a deficiency. Sometimes it’s an aptitude, an outsized talent or skill that is somehow in the way, or surplus to requirements. If Pollock’s life in art was a struggle to find a way around, or through, his own manifest shortcomings, de Kooning’s was the exact opposite: It was a prolonged effort to set aside, or pick apart, his native mastery.

  Amazingly, it was the example provided by the inept stumblebum—Pollock—that helped de Kooning, the trained virtuoso, unpick his mastery and find a way through to true originality.

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  UNLIKE POLLOCK, WHO STRUGGLED for years with his drawing, de Kooning had arrived in America as a brilliant draftsman with years of classical training, an apprenticeship in sign painting, and firsthand exposure to a key movement in modernism already behind him. But what he really wanted was to purge himself of these hard-won advantages, to somehow trip himself up. “I’m in my element when I am a little bit out of this world,” he later said. “When I’m falling, I’m doing all right; when I’m slipping, I say, hey, this is interesting!”

  After four years in the United States,
de Kooning had worked in Manhattan as a sign painter, a window dresser, and a carpenter. He was getting to know modern artists. And he had found a girlfriend—a tightrope walker from a circus family named Virginia “Nini” Diaz. The two moved to Greenwich Village together in 1932. Diaz remembers de Kooning drawing all the time. To supplement their joint earnings (he worked for a design factory called Eastman Brothers), she tried hawking the results around town. Had de Kooning not been growing more and more committed to modern art around this time, she may have had more luck. His modernist leanings made his drawings less and less salable. Over conventional refinement and finesse, modernism cherished raw immediacy, fresh ideas, personal originality, and, above all, sincerity. And so de Kooning endured a period of schizophrenic tension. Even as aspects of his academic training adhered to him—and even as he turned out virtuosic drawings like Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother—he repeatedly kicked against that training. Using traditional templates—still lifes, portraits, and posed nudes—as the basis for his experimentation, he explored the innovations of Matisse, Picasso, Miró, and de Chirico.

  A rigorously instilled discipline that is so powerfully aligned with native talent is not an easy thing to unpick. In the self-consciously modern-looking paintings de Kooning made in the late 1930s and early ’40s, you can see him struggling with his own disassembled technical arsenal, wanting to find a way forward that was instinctive and free but never fudged. Spatial relations among parts of the body, and in particular the challenge of foreshortening, became immensely difficult in the new, modernist idiom that emphasized flatness and shunned detail. Hands—which are tremendously complex three-dimensional forms, but of course small in relation to the rest of the body—bothered him enormously. Knees—which push forward in space from the rest of the seated body—he found even more troublesome. All these challenges were so absorbing that he couldn’t even begin to address the problem of hair: His portraits showed bareheaded men with fudged or simply erased hands and boneless legs that don’t seem to know where to be. His friend, the dance critic Edwin Denby, was one of the first people to acquire his work during this period. He noticed a beauty in these knotty pictures—“the beauty that instinctive behavior in a complex situation can have.” But there was also a quality of bug-eyed madness, an immense and building pressure in them. “I often heard him say that he was beating his brains out about connecting a figure and a background,” wrote Denby.

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  WHEN IT CAME TO drawing, Pollock suffered deeply from his lack of aptitude—in comparison not only with Charles and with his brother Sande (who sketched away almost as ceaselessly and fluently as Charles) but also with his classmates at art school. Proximity to more gifted students only reinforced Pollock’s frustration. His efforts in life-drawing classes were ham-fisted and clunky. Many of his classmates were precociously gifted, and had enhanced those gifts with years of dedicated practice. Instinctively competitive, Pollock tried to match their dedication. He hoped for signs of improvement.

  He took inspiration, in part, from a music student named Berthe Pacifico, a junior at Manual Arts. They had met at a party. Pollock watched her playing the piano and was mesmerized by her composure. He began coming over to her house every afternoon after school to watch her practice. She played five hours a day. Pollock would sit there sketching her, over and over. “All the time I was playing, that darn old pencil never stopped,” she recalled. And yet Pollock never showed her what he had done—presumably because, no matter how hard he tried, he never seemed to get it right. “My drawing I will tell you frankly,” he wrote to Charles from LA in 1930, “is rotten it seems to lack freedom and rhythem [sic] it is cold and lifeless. it isn’t worth the postage to send it…the truth of it is i have never really gotten down to real work and finish a piece i usually get disgusted with it and lose interest…altho i feel i will make an artist of some kind i have never proven to myself nor any body else that i have it in me.”

  Pollock’s problem, in other words, was not just confidence—although that was certainly part of it (“this so called happy part of one’s life youth to me is a bit of damnable hell,” he wrote to Charles). It was talent: “If you had seen his early work,” said Sande, “you’d have said he should go into tennis, or plumbing.”

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  IN THE SUMMER OF 1930, a time of economic upheaval and political unrest right across the country (the Wall Street crash had occurred barely six months earlier), Charles and Frank—another Pollock brother who was studying literature at Columbia University—returned to LA. Charles took Jackson to see Prometheus, a new mural by the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco at Pomona College, in Claremont, east of Los Angeles. The work’s full-throated embrace of epic drama, its heroic figure outlined against a furnace of dancing flames, and its sheer ambition all impressed Jackson deeply. As they talked about the Mexican muralists, about leftist politics and art, the brothers bonded. Jackson seemed ready to leave his life in the West behind. And so in the fall, Charles and Frank took their eighteen-year-old brother back to New York.

  New York was the only city in America at that time where contemporary art was seen through a truly international lens. The city’s diverse population, with its many immigrants, had helped to spread an awareness of modernist movements coming out of Europe, and also out of Mexico. These different styles and approaches to art—some politically charged, others, such as Surrealism, aligned with different philosophical worldviews—were met with skepticism and even outright hostility by the public at large. But the issues around modernism were at least debated in New York, which was not the case in most of the rest of the country.

  At the end of September, Jackson enrolled at the Art Students League in Thomas Hart Benton’s class. Benton had already had a big impact on Charles. He and his students were on a mission. Employing dynamic but legible figurative imagery—related in style to Soviet Socialist Realism but inflected by strong nationalist flavors, and in frank opposition to abstract modernism—they wanted art to play a role in opening eyes and effecting political change. That meant getting their pictures seen by as many people as possible. Against the idea that art was associated with the stuffy decadence of Europe—that it was a pastime for dilettantes and aesthetes—they were determined that it be regarded as a manly pursuit, something virile and active that implied potentially world-altering agency. For Jackson, whose ego was fragile and whose sense of purpose was always teetering on the brink of an abyss, Benton’s rhetoric was not just stirring, it was medicinal. It gave him a ready-made sense of purpose. He joined the cause, and before long he had adopted Benton and his Italian wife, Rita, as a surrogate family—in the process supplanting Charles as Benton’s favored protégé.

  At the Art Students League, Pollock met threats to his ambition with calculated aggression. He was on guard against anyone who was obviously more talented than he was—which meant most of his fellow students. He could be charismatic, and enormously sweet and considerate to those he liked; Benton and Rita were not the only ones seduced by this side of him. But people sensed in him a dangerous volatility. According to one classmate, “He’d look you over real quick, almost as if he was deciding whether to punch you in the nose or not.” The worst of his behavior was reserved for women, who represented another zone of frustration. Unable or unwilling to find girlfriends, he sublimated his sexual confusion in misogynistic outbursts that were frightening—and often physical.

  During this early period in New York, Pollock stayed with Charles and his wife, Elizabeth. Elizabeth had little tolerance for Jackson’s outbursts. But it was Charles—urbane, talented, married, and still in many ways his mentor—who caught some of the worst of Pollock’s behavior. At one end-of-winter party attended by the Pollock brothers in Charles and Elizabeth’s 10th Street apartment, Jackson quickly drank himself into a raging state. He became abusive with one of the guests, a single girl named Rose, first verbally, then in a pushy, physical way. When Rose’s friend Marie tried to intervene and pull him away, he erup
ted. He picked up an ax he had earlier used to chop wood for the stove, and held it over Marie’s head. “You’re a nice girl, Marie, and I like you,” he sneered. “I would hate to have to chop your head off.” Several seconds of silence ensued. And then, suddenly, Pollock turned and brought the ax down on one of Charles’s paintings, splitting it apart, and leaving the ax embedded in the wall.

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  DE KOONING FORMED ONE of the closest bonds of his life with Arshile Gorky, an Armenian refugee he met in 1929. During the Depression years in New York—a time when, as Denby put it, “everyone drank coffee and nobody had shows”—the two men shared a studio, talked, looked, painted together, and were generally inseparable. They were both penniless for much of the decade, but they were perversely proud to be so. “I’m not poor. I’m broke,” de Kooning liked to announce. They discussed modern art endlessly. They braved long, cold winters together and, like an impregnable club of two, simply disregarded public indifference to their efforts. In the late 1930s, they even collaborated on a mural for a New Jersey restaurant. Gorky would be quiet when others gathered in the studio to talk with de Kooning. One day, the talk was all about the injustice of the situation faced by painters in America. “People had a great deal to say on the subject, and they said it,” recalled Denby, “but the talk ended in a gloomy silence. In the pause, Gorky’s deep voice came from under a table. ‘Nineteen miserable years have I lived in America.’ Everybody burst out laughing. There was no whine left. Gorky had not spoken of justice, but of fate, and everybody laughed open-hearted.”