Pollock. Donald Wigal

      Stranger Than Fiction

      While biographies don’t often include fiction in their resources, there are novels, plays, and movies about Pollock which do, with the usual caveats, help weave over certain holes in the veils that partly cover the subject.

      A reviewer for Time Magazine felt the Updike novel was lovely and wise (63). In fact, Updike’s very imaginative portrait of Pollock not only reveals some details more clearly than most serious biographies, but, unfortunately, also collates facts with tabloid rumours concerning alleged homosexuality, affairs and illegitimate children of the artist. More than a few Pollock fans believe the novel, like sensational tabloid headlines, perpetuates unsubstantiated myths unnecessarily. Some feel there is really enough violence, shock and dissipation in the facts, without exaggerating them.

      There is also another highly imaginative novel of Pollock’s life: Top of the World, Ma!, by Michael Guinzburg. The novel presents several of the same events from Pollock’s life as Updike’s novel (30). The title refers to a line spoken by actor Jimmy Cagney in the 1949 movie White Heat. The original line is, “Look at me now, Ma! Top of the world!” The line would certainly have been appropriate for a successful Pollock to say to his own mother at the height of his career.

      The Pollock Family

      Jackson was the youngest of five boys in the family of LeRoy McClure Pollock (1876–1933) and Stella May (1875–1958). His brothers were Charles Cecil (1902–1988), Marvin Jay (1904–1986), Frank Leslie (1907–1994), and Sanford ‘Sande’ LeRoy (1909–1963). An abbreviated family tree is provided.

      According to Jackson’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth, Jackson’s mother wanted all five of her sons to be artists of some kind. She considered them potential geniuses. However, in a letter to Charles, Sanford said he thought the emotional problems their brother Jackson had “date back to his childhood, to his relations with the family and our mother.”[14]

      The facts about the Pollock family and its origins tell something about their youngest son, ‘the cowboy’. He continued the mythology of his roots. His brothers – who experienced Cody and the Western culture longer than Jackson – seemed to have moved on, more able than Jackson to adopt and adapt to their new environments. Because of Jackson’s rebellious temperament and drive for individual and independent expression, it is possible he might not have cared to retain the urban cowboy tendency had any of his brothers continued the cowboy role.

      Throughout his life Pollock would mention growing up in Cody; however, he actually spent less than his first ten months in the town before the family moved to National City, near San Diego, California. The move would be the first of several during Jackson’s youth. For example, after only eight months in National City the Pollock family moved. In 1913, at age thirty-seven, LeRoy bought a truck farm in Phoenix, Arizona. He sold it only four years later, and then moved the family to Chico, California, where he bought and sold another farm, and then bought a hotel in Janesville.

      During his first decade, Jackson lived in six different houses as his father tried job after job, without much success, in three states. In California alone the Pollock family lived in eight different places.

      Religion

      Pollock’s parents were originally from Iowa, the state just West of Jackson’s birth state of Wyoming. They were Presbyterians of Scottish and Irish origin, their ancestors had been Quakers, but they did not indoctrinate their children into any religion. Apparently none of the Pollock boys could remember whether Jackson had been baptised. Updike reminded his readers that Quakers don’t baptise.

      In a 1929 letter to Charles and Frank, Jackson confessed he had “dropped religion for the present,” even though the year before he had been deeply impressed with Theosophy. Stories from the Christian Gospels would appear in only a few of Jackson’s drawings, which mainly reflected his studies of classic artists, including El Greco.

      The fact that Jackson had not been baptised would become an issue at the time of his marriage. However, it was he, not his wife, Lee Krasner, who wanted to have a church wedding. Lee had been raised in the Jewish faith.

      Pollock the Cowboy

      A 1927 photo of fifteen-year-old Jackson taken by Lee Ewing is the only one showing him posing in Western garb. It contributes significantly to the myth of Pollock as a cowboy. But there are also photos showing he would occasionally wear formal attire and pose like a young European royal, with a jaunty walking cane in hand. In fact, the translator of a German biography referred to these quaint photos, commenting on the young man at the time, “…cultivates dandyish attire.” (123)

      After filming his movie Pollock, director Ed Harris regretted the famous ‘cowboy’ photo wasn’t shown more clearly in the film. (45) The photo is seen only briefly, and off to the side of an early scene showing Pollock’s Eighth Street apartment in Greenwich Village, Manhattan.

      Easter and the Totem, 1953. Oil on canvas, 208.6 × 147.3 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

      The Flame, 1934–1938. Oil on canvas, mounted on fibreboard, 51.1 × 76.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

      “I’m just more at ease in a big area than I am on some thing 2 × 2; I feel more at home in a big area.”[15]

Age 38

      Perhaps because of America’s admiration for the pioneers of the country’s West and the mythology of the American cowboy, Pollock often seemed to be forgiven for his crude behaviour. Some observers might even say this tolerance extended to his reckless drunken driving, if not also to its ultimate consequences. Minutes before his death while driving drunk, a policeman who knew Pollock would unfortunately overlook his drunken state.

      Like some of the rough-edged characters of Western fiction, Pollock would live out a boisterous and often crude Wild West spirit, especially in the bars of lower Manhattan. Meanwhile his brilliant art would intoxicate sophisticated viewers in the world’s most civilised museums[16]. In fact, the art world would be influenced forever by Pollock’s unique, important and indelible contribution. Even during his lifetime, Pollock had become the new benchmark to which the art world would refer, as they began to consider modern art as ‘before,’ ‘contemporary with,’ or ‘after’ Pollock.

      Pollock’s influence is still notable fifty years later. In a review of the first showing of the early efforts of Italian painter Carla Accardi, in Manhattan in 2005, Roberta Smith of The New York Times notes the paintings of Accardi include impressive works from the mid-1950s. Her fields of scattered and overlapping circles and signs, rendered in white or yellow and black, “…suggest a controlled response to the work of Jackson Pollock.”[17]

      Not all references back to Pollock reflect an understanding of what his method was about. During the 2004 U. S. presidential election campaign, Daniel Okrent, the public editor of The New York Times spoke of what he saw as poor management of the paper’s coverage of the campaign. He compared its chaos to a “…pattern adapted from Jackson Pollock.” The title of his article was How would Jackson

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