In 1925, Picasso showed Three Dancers. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published. The New Yorker magazine began. In 1926, Claude Monet (b.1840) died. At age twenty-two, Willem de Kooning came to the United States from Rotterdam. Chicago-style jazz invaded Europe.
Teenage Years
Pollock’s difficulty with social communication during adolescence was displayed early, for example after he enrolled at Riverside High School in 1927. Letters from his father expressed concern about his son’s inability to get along in school. In March 1928 Jackson stopped attending Riverside, where he was apparently expelled for fighting.
Jackson, while still a teenager, moved with his mother and brothers Charles, Jay, and Sanford to Los Angeles in 1929. His father remained in Riverside and his brother Frank moved to New York.
The rebellious teenager was expelled twice from yet another school, Manual Arts High School. One of these times it was not for physical fighting, but for participating in a student protest against school policies. He would later also be let go from his school’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps after an altercation with an ROTC officer.
The overall effect of these frequent moves possibly contributed to the future artist’s life-long sense of unrest, instability, and difficulties in social groups. On the other hand, he might also have learned something about adaptability.
Early Vision of Career
Before being expelled in 1929, Jackson met young men who would become his companions: Donald Brown, Reuben Kadish, Jules Langsner, Harold Lehman, Leonard Stark, Manuel Tolegian, and especially Philip Guston. Kadish would prove to be a very important link to the artist’s future fame. Kadish’s later friendship with Howard Putzel was to be a seminal link to the most influential figures of the art world, specifically Peggy Guggenheim.
At an age when most American high school seniors were still considering college or several possible careers after years of education, Pollock already knew classes in art, especially in drawing and sculpture, were preparing him for his career. However, he admitted in letters to his brothers that he was filled with doubt and lacked self-confidence. In one letter the young Pollock notes, “As to what I would like to be, it is difficult to say. An artist of some kind. If nothing else I shall always study the Arts…” He was aware, however, that his drawing skills were rather minimal[26]. While some of his letters to his brothers during these years are available, none of his drawings from high school appear to have survived.
Roots of Alcoholic Behaviour
LeRoy found work in Riverside, California. During the summer of 1927 and the three years which followed, Jackson and his brother, Sanford, also worked there with their father, doing topographical surveys of the Grand Canyon. Later Jackson would note the vast landscape of the West influenced his artistic vision. When he finally obtained his own property, one of the first changes he made was to move a barn so he could see more of the distant horizon. His sense of the ‘all over’ quality of a view was evolving.
Although he was only fifteen, Pollock began working with men for whom drinking alcohol was a daily routine. His experience with excessive drinking began at that time. Addiction to alcohol would last the rest of his short life, with only a few sober periods. Even at very inappropriate times and places, Pollock would act out the rugged and often anti-social brawling he learned in his early days with the older cowboys, while working with his father and the Grand Canyon crew. Pollock would always remain, as Guggenheim biographer Mary V. Dearborn expressed it, “…a raw, uncouth, barely socialised child of the hardscrabble American West, yet possessed of an explosive talent.”[27] As Guggenheim remembered, Pollock “became one might say devilish”, on social occasions (42).
Bird, 1938–1941. Oil and sand on canvas, 70.5 × 61.6 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Number 13A, 1948, (also called Arabesque), 1948. Oil and enamel on canvas, 94.6 × 295.9 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.
Untitled (Naked Man), c.1938–1941. Oil on plywood, 217 × 60.9 cm, Private Collection.
Later in letters to his sons, LeRoy expressed regret he had not been a more positive influence on his five sons. On the negative side, his alcoholism influenced the boys, Jackson in particular. While drinking with the older men during these years, Jackson displayed early symptoms of his alcoholism.
In 1930, Pollock wrote to his brother Charles, describing youth as “this so-called happy part of one’s life,” stating it was to him “a bit of damnable hell.”[28]
In 1927, Edward Hopper (1882–1967) showed Manhattan Bridge. Sound began to be added to commercial movies.
Benton
“Sculpturing I think is my medium, I’ll never be satisfied until I’m able to mould a mountain of stone, with the aid of a jack-hammer, to fit my will.”[29]
The great Thomas Hart Benton was most famous for his distinctive style and large mural paintings. However, in his essay for a Benton exhibition in 2004 at Hammer Galleries, Dr. Henry Adams reminded viewers that Benton also, “…produced abstractions in every decade of his career and was teacher and life-long friend and supporter of the Abstract Expressionist painter, Jack Pollock.”[30]
Benton’s important series of articles for Arts Magazine in the 1920s about abstract design was titled, The Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting. Adams pointed out that while Benton’s regionalism fell out of favour in America to Abstract Expressionism, his principles as laid out in those essays were, ironically, followed by the foremost Abstract Expressionist painter, his beloved student, Jackson Pollock[31].
Benton’s distinctive regionalist style of mural was an easy target for parody. A New Yorker cartoonist in 1945 spoofed the notion of showing some ordinary act of labour as a grand and heroic pose. In his cartoon a farmer complains no real work will get done if all the men do is stand around in heroic poses as they admire the tobacco leaves[32].
It was probably in the wake of his politically-focused work that Benton was sometimes called a social realist, but his artistic style would be more properly and often called regionalism, not realism in any sense like that which preceded Impressionism abroad.
In 1926, Jackson’s brother Charles moved to Manhattan and began classes, five days a week, at the Art Students League with Benton. Four years later Jackson moved to New York and also studied under Benton. So began one of the major influences on the young artist. Pollock fell under the close tutelage of Benton, and over the years they gradually formed a love-hate relationship regarding their art. Benton was a leading proponent of American regionalism, but also introduced Pollock to the Italian masters. Pollock caught the itch about which Benton spoke in his best-selling memoir. After the death of his father, Pollock said he was “moved by a desire to pick up again the threads of my childhood. To my itch for going places there was injected a thread of purpose which, however slight as a far-reaching philosophy, was to make the next ten years of my life a rich texture of varied experience.”[33]
Police records document that once while staying with the Bentons, Pollock was arrested for drunkenness and disturbing the peace. However, a Pollock work from an earlier time of comparative