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 sobriety, Cotton Pickers, was shown at the temporary galleries of the Municipal Art Committee. It most obviously shows the influence of Benton in style as well as subject matter, but in some details already showed a desire to break from that regionalism.
In his final letter to his father in 1933, Jackson called Benton “the most important Contemporary American painter.” Ironically, that was the kind of praise that would eventually be applied to Pollock himself in a few years. Even though they disagreed about styles and philosophies, Benton would remain an unwavering supporter of Pollock. Benton involved his family and friends in Monday night ensembles. He himself played the harmonica and developed an original system of musical notation for harmonica which is still used (55). He also taught Pollock the basics of playing the harmonica, which the young artist never mastered.
Benton used Pollock as a model for some of his paintings. For example, Pollock posed for the sketch used for the harmonica player in The Ballad of the Jealous Lover on Lone Green Valley (1934). The sketch and the mural are presently at the University of Kansas Museum of Art. The sketch is signed ‘Portrait of Jack Pollock as a young man. Benton.’ (It is said in some biographies nobody called the artist ‘Jack’ except his close family.) By 1934, Benton was, in effect, already part of Jack’s extended family. Pollock said, “My work with Benton was important as something against which to react very strongly, later on… Better to have worked with him than with a less resistant personality who would have provided a much less strong opposition.”[34]
Concerning major early influences of Pollock’s art, nearly all resources mention the importance of Benton, as does the Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, for example (27). Most sources also mention the importance of the Mexican muralist, Siqueiros. However, very few resources mention Siqueiros and the Navaho sand paintings. John Walker, the curator emeritus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., mentions those two major influences, but does not mention the Benton influence on Pollock’s early art (118).
Number 11A, 1948, 1948. Oil, enamel and aluminium paint on canvas, 167.6 × 83.8 cm, Private Collection.
Number 14, Gray, 1948. Enamel on gesso on paper, 57.8 × 78.8 cm, Yale University Gallery of Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
The influence of the master Benton on the early styles of Charles and Jackson is obvious in the young men’s early efforts, but in Jackson’s it became less obvious as he matured. In the Ed Harris movie, Pollock, observant viewers will notice the reproduction of a work by Charles, very much in the style of Benton. It is seen hanging on the older Pollock’s kitchen wall.
American Art
“The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.”[35]
There is a widely accepted opinion that the movement championed by the British scholar, Sir Herbert Read, and which gave American painting a new international status, did not originate in America or begin with Pollock. This theme is repeated throughout Read’s final work, Concise History of Modern Art (109). His work was written only months after Pollock’s death. Read lacked the advantage of hindsight, yet his early statements are valuable at least for that reason, as they had not yet been influenced by many other commentaries.
Read said, “It is impossible to establish national boundaries for modern painting.” He then quoted Pollock, from his famous reply in 1944 to a questionnaire published in Arts and Architecture. “The idea of an isolated American painting,” Pollock said, “seems absurd to me just as the idea of purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd… The basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any country.” (83) Even so, no less than the distinguished John Walker said, “Pollock was the most original painter America has produced.” (118)
The Need for an American Artist
In a 1991 interview with the Willem de Kooning biographers, Milton Resnick summed up the need in American art circles during Pollock’s day to have a great authentic American artist. It was the advent of
Harrison. Page 9. Letter: January 31, 1930.
to his father LeRoy, February, 1932
Adams. Page 7
Adams. Page 9
Rex Irvin. The New Yorker Magazine. January 20, 1945.
Adams. Pages 76–77
www.angelfire.com/art2/pollock
interview for a Sag Harbor radio station in the Fall of 1950; Cf. O’Connor (77) Pages 79–81
