III.
How Two Ambitions Fought in Him—the Fight We All Have
Jackson Pollock
was born in Cody, Wyoming, one of five sons to Stella McClure and LeRoy
McCoy Pollock. The family moved early to Arizona, and then California.
It was in Arizona that Pollock saw Indian sand paintings. The method of
drawing on the land itself—having colored sand run through one's fingers—affected
him and his method of doing large works right on the floor and using tools,
trowels, sticks rather than brushes.
Jackson's father
was said to be a gentle, melancholy man, a farmer and later a land surveyor.
He did not work steadily, their farm was auctioned and two of the older
brothers worked on road gangs. In letters, Pollock worried about the coldness
between father and mother. I think he did what Aesthetic Realism explains—he
used the confusions he saw around himto build up a case against the world.
In the B.H.
Friedman biography, his wife, Lee Krasner Pollock is quoted as saying "when
he was quiet, he was quieter, and when he was angry he was angrier than
others." Pollock got a satisfaction out of breaking through what he saw
as people's false fronts—but then, feeling ashamed because his purpose
was not to have people stronger, but to glorify himself through exposing
their weaknesses, he drank to get rid of "encumbrances" and " be free."
At the same time, like two of his brothers, he went to art school in California,
studied seriously, including doing extremely careful anatomy drawings.
Pollock came to New York and in 1941 showed his first painting here. This
is the year that Lee Krasner, a young painter herself, tells how she met,
saw and fell in love with the artist and his work. This was also the year
Eli Siegel founded Aesthetic Realism. Together Pollock and Krasner could
have studied the Aesthetic Realism principle Mr. Siegel stated in 1941:
"The resolution of conflict in self is like the making one of opposites
in art." — Were it not for the killing snobbishness of the art world,
including his wife, and likely the artist, as well as the press keeping
Aesthetic Realism from reaching people, Jackson Pollock's life would have
been different—it might have lasted longer.
Jackson Pollock
got fame. He is seen now as having changed the course of painting! By the
time he was 35, in 1947 Life
and
Time had articles with headlines
like "Pollock Drools Enamel Paint on Canvas." — Is he the greatest American
painter?
In an Aesthetic
Realism lesson Eli Siegel said to me:
There
are two kinds of success. There are the outward things, the things that
get into Who's Who. These ways of judging are much in operation,
they're the way of the world. Then there's respect for integrity. Is there
a conflict in you between integrity and ambition? Is there a way of combining
a feeling of integrity with the desire for success-!
I was encouraged
to see my purpose as a painter in a way that is new in history, and to
have the same purpose in ordinary life. It is my fervent ambition always
to be true to what I have learned and am learning now.
Unfortunately,
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Pollock did not learn what they most needed
to know. He got more angry, had more contempt for people as he was lionized
and his self was unseen. He drank more, and there was fury and silence
between them as they came to New York every Monday for appointments with
his therapist, after which she would go home, and he went to the Cedar
Bar.
There was no
true criticism and finally contempt and alcohol won over painting and life
itself. Lee Krasner left Pollock; and his boredom, and then anger and a
desire to annihilate everything became more intense. In Eli Siegel's essay
"Alcoholism, or, You Got to Find the World Interesting," he explains:
The problem
of alcoholism...won't be solved until people can see in the ordinary universe
a zip, a tingle, a blandishment, a satisfaction they don't find now.
And, he writes,
When [a person]
drinks, the hesitations, immunities, enclosures, drawbridges locks, walls,
hindrances, fears and jams are felt to be unnecessary.
But as artist
Jackson Pollock loved "drawbridges ... walls," and "locks and jams" and
saw these impediments as a means of freedom. Pollock needs the hard floor
under the canvas as he kneels, uses a stick. We can see in Lucifer.
How the artist likes to have lines and colors, cross over, hit one another,
separate, weave in and out, stop, even tangle, and continue. |
| He
trails that paint, which, as black is even more dense, until it is so thin
it almost disappears and then becomes white.
When blackness
is seen as thin, and whiteness is seen as thick, heaviness and lightness
become one.
As the paint
is dropped, twirled, gently directed by a thoughtful hand, the opposites
within a substance are given form, not "annihilated." The thick
black makes for an awkwardness, but it is part of a graceful motion. The
layers do not obstruct; things are revealed, not removed. Impediment is
related to airiness, welcomed as the necessary ingredient of true freedom—that
is, liking the world with no evasions. |