Jackson Pollock (6 page)

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 States, 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.”

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.