Whatever Pollock lacked in facility, however, he made up for in vision. It is rather extraordinary that in his first written appraisal of his artwork he should have faulted his drawing for lacking “freedom and rythem,” qualities he considered important, if not the essence of drawing. While most students were trying to master perspective and learn how to draw a realistic likeness of a face, a hand, or a bowl of fruit, Pollock had no patience for such details. The rules of art ran against his instincts. Already he was seeking “freedom” from formal conventions, sacrificing detail to the whole. He could not achieve what he wanted; on the other hand, he fully intended to. “i think there should be an advancement soon if it is ever to come,” he noted to Charles with characteristic self-disparagement, “and then i will send you some drawings.”
At school Pollock felt uncomfortable among his peers. People “frightened and bored” him, he wrote, forcing him to remain within his “shell.” But for all his timidity, Pollock had no difficulty befriending—and at times alienating—his fellow students in Schwankovsky’s class. Philip Goldstein, a dark, angular, intense young artist who worshiped Piero della Francesca, would later become well known as Philip Guston. He and Pollock spent many afternoons at the home of Manuel Tolegian, an affable, powerfully built youth of Armenian descent, who had converted a chicken coop behind his house into a studio for himself and his friends. Together, working in the dark, cramped, low-roofed studio, the three boys would pick out reproductions from their favorite art books and spend long hours copying the pictures. Both Guston and Tolegian had a natural talent for drawing; the studio walls, covered with pencil sketches after Uccello and Piero, offered testimony to their ability. Pollock’s work, by comparison, was noticeably undistinguished. But no matter how frustrated he may have felt, he was unwilling to admit to his classmates that he considered his work lacking. To the contrary, Pollock would criticize his friends’ work. “You think that’s original?” he used to say, eyeing his schoolmates’ copies of Renaissance masters. “What’s so original about that?” Though Guston tended to ignore these boyish displays, Tolegian would become furious, reminding Pollock in his deep, booming voice that to be a great artist one first had to master anatomy, linear perspective, and so on. Pollock apparently delighted in rousing his friend to anger. He signed Tolegian’s yearbook “For more and better arguments. Hugo Pollock.”
Pollock preferred sculpting to painting or drawing. He and his friends sometimes visited a quarry near the Los Angeles River, where they purchased blocks of limestone and sandstone for carving. Pollock, who stored his materials in Tolegian’s backyard, soon accumulated a huge pile of stones, much to the dismay of Tolegian’s mother. Whenever she spotted Pollock arriving at her house with another block of stone, she would run to the back door and scream in her native Armenian, “What has this crazy man brought to my backyard?” With a chisel and a hammer Pollock chipped away at one block after another, and on weekend afternoons the backyard studio would reverberate with the sounds of his labors—the chime of the hammer as it struck the chisel, the plink-plink-plink of the chips as they splintered from the stone. His friends felt sorry for him, thinking he was no better at sculpture than at drawing. Nonetheless they recognized the pleasure he took in carving. Tolegian described Pollock as “more at ease with a rock than a human being.”
In his groping efforts at self-understanding, Pollock looked to Schwankovsky not only for artistic guidance but spiritual guidance as well. His teacher was a friend and follower of the noted Hindu philosopher Jeddu Krishnamurti, who, in the spring of 1928, had visited Los Angeles and founded a camp in the Ojai Valley, eighty miles north of the city. Schwankovsky, immediately impressed by the Hindu’s ideas, asked him to give a talk to his students, and one Saturday afternoon, amid predictable controversy, the “world teacher” visited Manual Arts. For Pollock, who had never attended church in his youth or practiced any religion, theosophy was a virtual epiphany. With marked enthusiasm, he visited Ojai, read theosophical tracts, and shared his findings with his father, who, a month after school began, assured him, “I think your philosophy on religion is O.K.” It is not difficult to understand Pollock’s identification with Krishnamurti, a gentle, sensitive heretic who, according to his writings, had been unhappy in his youth and determined to find a goal, any goal, to which he could devote himself completely. His teachings, a paean to individual rebellion, confirmed a precept that Pollock had divined on his own: the moment you follow someone else, you cease to be your own leader. Appropriately, then, a year after starting school Pollock tired of following Krishnamurti, bluntly informing his brothers, “I have dropped religion for the present.”
Early in 1929, during his second semester of school, Pollock joined Guston, Tolegian, and several others in his art class in the publication of a newsletter. The Journal of Liberty was flagrantly subversive, exhorting the student body to “awake and use your strength.” Though issued only twice and consisting of a single mimeographed page, the Journal acquired impressive notoriety after attacking the school’s sacrosanct department of physical education. In an unsigned editorial the students protested the school’s emphasis on athletics and proposed, rather imaginatively, that varsity letters be awarded to “our scholars, our artists, our musicians instead of animated examples of physical prowess.” Pollock, one of the founders of the newsletter, attended all the meetings and made every effort to contribute suggestions, though it was hard for him to talk in a group. As he confided to Charles about one occasion when he ventured a comment, “I was so frightened I could not think logically.”
One morning, a few hours before school began, Pollock and his friends sneaked into Manual Arts to distribute The Journal of Liberty throughout the building. They were slipping some copies under a classroom door when a janitor caught sight of them and started chasing the boys down the hall. He managed to catch Pollock, whom he reprimanded for trespassing. The following day Schwankovsky’s class was interrupted by a visit from the janitor along with the school principal. A hush fell over the classroom as the janitor pointed to Pollock, singling him out as the student responsible for distributing the Journal on school grounds, a violation of policy. As Pollock was led from the classroom, his fellow revolutionaries remained curiously silent. “I wanted to graduate!” Tolegian explained. Pollock was suspended from school for the remainder of the year.
Guston eventually confessed to being the editor in chief of The Journal of Liberty, and he too was suspended from school. Unlike Pollock, he would never return to Manual Arts. He soon found work in the movie industry; in Trilby, starring John Barrymore, he played an artist, with a beret and a pasted-on beard. He continued his studies at the Otis Art School, where, on the basis of his talent, he was awarded a full scholarship. For Pollock, by comparison, it was a discouraging, unproductive time. It did not occur to him to apply to any art schools, for he had hardly found his bearings at Manual Arts. He very much wanted to return to school, and, accompanied by his mother, visited the principal to apologize for his behavior and request that he be readmitted. His mother asked if he could at least attend Schwankovsky’s class, but to no avail. Pollock spent the remainder of the school year at home.
Pollock continued to see his friends from school, particularly Guston, who, though no longer editor of The Journal of Liberty, still managed to involve his friends in radical causes. He took Pollock to meetings at the Brooklyn Avenue Jewish Community Center, in East Los Angeles, where aging Bolsheviks, most of whom spoke only Russian and Yiddish, tried to convert the boys to communism. Although Pollock had no interest in joining the Communist party, he developed a genuine appreciation for the revolutionary art the party was promoting. Lectures were given on the Mexican mural movement, and Pollock learned of Diego Rivera. “I certainly admire his work,” Pollock wrote to his brothers, adding that he had managed to obtain a back issue of an art magazine containing pictures of Rivera’s work. Though Rivera and his compatriots Orozco and Siqueiros had not yet painted any murals in the United State
s, the triumverate was rapidly becoming known outside Mexico for having inaugurated the most dynamic revival of fresco painting since the Renaissance. Compared to Los Angeles, whose art scene was dominated by the California Watercolor Society and the Western Painters Association, Mexico seemed to Pollock and his friends like Parnassus itself. “I have thought of going to Mexico city if there is any means of making a livelihood there,” Pollock noted in a moment of daydreaming, an idea he soon abandoned for more practical plans.
After spending the summer in Santa Ynez, California, working beside his father on a surveying crew, Pollock returned to Manual Arts in September 1929—only to be suspended the following month. He was “ousted” from school, as he put it, after he “came to blows” with a gym teacher, presumably over his involvement with The journal of Liberty. Convinced that he had been wronged, Pollock appealed to the principal for help, but the principal reprimanded him for arguing with the gym teacher and ordered him to “get out and find another school.” Pollock didn’t bother to protest the principal’s decision, resigning himself to his hopeless reputation as “a rotten rebel from Russia.”
With Schwankovsky’s help Pollock was able to return to Manual Arts on a part-time basis the following semester. He signed up for two courses, drawing and clay modeling, only to find that he was no longer capable of summoning up enthusiasm for his studies. He felt discouraged and defeated, confiding to Charles, three days after his eighteenth birthday, that “although 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 writing style, like his art, reveals a restless imagination. He was inattentive to detail, ignoring grammar, punctuation, and spelling while managing to express himself with undeniable force. His letter to Charles continues: “This so called happy part of one’s life is to me a bit of damnable hell if i could come to some conclusion about my self and life perhaps there i could see something to work for. my mind blazes up with some illusion for a couple of weeks then it smoalters down to a bit of nothing the more i read and the more i think i am thinking the darker things become.”
On Saturday nights that winter Pollock often joined his friends from school at the home of a flutist named Ora Pacifico, a recent graduate of Manual Arts. Ora, a sociable young woman, was known at school for her “musical jams,” small, serious, high-minded affairs at which a group of young musicians performed a medley of classical pieces and Gershwin compositions for an audience consisting of “the artsy kids at school,” according to one participant. It was at one of these concerts that Pollock first met Berthe Pacifico, Ora’s younger sister, whom he immediately admired. An aspiring concert pianist, Berthe usually played the piano at the “jams” and sang as well, in a clear mezzo-soprano voice. She was an outgoing, strong-willed seventeen-year-old with a petite frame, fine, birdlike features, and radiant black hair that fell to her waist.
For all his shyness Pollock had no difficulty in winning Berthe’s affection, much to the amusement of his friends. As Tolegian once remarked, with an edge of understandable envy, “He was extremely shy, so if he smiled at a girl or was open with her, she thought it was a big thing.” Indeed, Berthe was quickly taken with Pollock’s “beautiful smile” as well as his gentle but obvious adoration of her, recalling many years later the sight of him standing by the piano listening to her play, “happy as a little kid.”
Exhilarated by Berthe’s interest in him, Pollock pursued her energetically, stopping by her house at all hours of the day. Her family lived only two blocks away, on Forty-first Street, and Pollock liked to sneak in the back door and surprise her. “Jackson!” she would exclaim as he sat down beside her on the piano bench and put his arm around her. “I didn’t even hear you come in.” Berthe usually told him to come back a few hours later, after she had finished practicing, but Pollock was insuppressible. “I’ll just sit quietly in the corner,” he’d say, though Berthe knew from experience that sitting quietly was not one of his talents. As she practiced, Pollock would horse around, waltzing about the living room by himself or singing along with the music in a voice Berthe described as “the lousiest.” Berthe’s mother thought he was charming and would sometimes dance with him in the living room. In the meantime Berthe practiced and practiced, determined to win a scholarship to music school. She considered herself artistic by nature and took great pride in the Spanish Jews from whom she was descended, including a court-appointed portrait painter for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. It never occurred to her that her boyfriend might be more talented than she was. Whenever Berthe suggested to Pollock that he show her his artwork, he was dismissive. “He felt he wasn’t doing anything worthwhile,” she recalled.
One day Pollock surprised her by asking if he could sketch her hair—not her face, not Berthe at the piano, simply her hair. Laughing at the apparent absurdity of his request, she agreed to indulge him. She sat down in a chair, and Pollock sat down behind her. He asked her to tilt her head backward and to shake her head gently so that her long black hair swirled freely. Working in pencil, Pollock sketched her swirling hair, an exercise that freed him from formal restrictions and that, unlike most other undertakings, he had no difficulty completing. After that it was always the same: Pollock would ask Berthe to make her hair swirl, and Berthe, though complaining that it made her neck hurt, would agree to do it anyway, all the while laughing and telling her boyfriend, “You’re crazy!”
In June 1930 the three older Pollock boys returned from New York for the summer, and for Jackson it was an eventful time. Frank, who was studying literature at Columbia and working part time in the school’s law library, had lots of stories about life in the city. The previous October, Frank had been standing in the hall of his dormitory, with a towel around his waist, when someone ran down the corridor shouting that the market had crashed. “What market?” Frank asked. “The stock market!” the boy exclaimed. “Where’s that?” Frank asked. “On Wall Street!” the boy said. “Where the hell is Wall Street?”
Charles, who was still studying at the Art Students League, would sit around the house making charcoal portraits of his brothers. His presence lent the household an air of purposefulness and encouraged Jackson to take himself more seriously. One day he and Charles visited Pomona College, in Claremont, to see a new mural by José Orozco, an experience of lasting consequence. On the far wall of the college’s dining room was the twenty-foot-high figure of Prometheus, his massive arms plunged into flames. Orozco’s Prometheus, rendered in a style based on the ancient cubism of the Aztecs and Toltecs, offered Pollock his first intimations of the power inherent in mural painting, if not in painting itself. He returned to the college several times that summer and was very interested in hearing his brother’s stories about Orozco, whom Charles had actually met. That summer, Jackson learned, Orozco was painting frescoes at a college in New York along with a second muralist whose name Jackson also knew—Thomas Hart Benton, a Missouri painter, who, by coincidence, was Charles’s teacher at the Art Students League. For Pollock, to see the work of Orozco and hear his brother’s firsthand accounts of the New York art scene was to be initiated into a world much larger than the one he had known, and Manual Arts and his high school experiences suddenly seemed much less interesting.
One afternoon that summer Charles told Jackson that there was no point in his returning to Manual Arts in the fall. He’d be better off, Charles thought, accompanying his brothers back to New York and enrolling at the Art Students League. Pollock didn’t have to be persuaded. He ran over to Berthe’s house and announced to his girlfriend that, one, he was going to New York to become an artist, and, two, Berthe was coming with him. He had it all planned. They could live in Greenwich Village and Berthe could go to music school. “You’re so naïve,” Berthe said, reminding him that he was eighteen years old, had not yet graduated from high school, and had no means of support other than his parents. Berthe fully intended to stay in Los Angeles and continue with her music. Pollock, disappointed by her answer
, suddenly reconsidered the idea of moving. “I don’t know which way to go,” he told Berthe, a lament he repeated to her many times that summer. In his imagination, however, he was far less uncertain. As he later told his friend Tony Smith, he went to New York “to sculpt like Michelangelo.”
3
Art Students League
1930–33
In September 1930 Pollock enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, a prestigious but unorthodox school sharing little in spirit with its palatial Renaissance-style building on West Fifty-seventh Street. The League in the thirties was a willfully informal institution; it issued no grades, kept no attendance records, and prescribed no course of study. Students were allowed to pick their own teachers, and for Pollock the choice was easy. Following the example of his brother Charles, he signed up to study under Thomas Hart Benton, a short, pugnacious, tobacco-chewing Missourian known as a leader of American Scene painting. His class met weekday nights from seven to ten, on the top floor of the school in a spacious studio with wood plank floors and a high pressed-tin ceiling. Among the few rules the League observed was that teachers give criticisms of their students’ work twice a week. On Tuesday and Thursday nights Benton would run up the five flights, stick his head in the doorway, and shout in a gruff voice, “Anyone need me? Anyone need criticism?” If no one answered, he ran down the stairs. Althought Benton wasn’t much of a teacher, Pollock conceived an immense admiration for him the moment he started school, and Benton, for his part, felt an “immediate sympathy” for Charles’s kid brother. Many years later Pollock told an interviewer, “I’m damn grateful to Tom. He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.” It was a peculiar tribute to a man who in fact dominated the next eight years of Pollock’s life.
Jackson Pollock Page 4