Free Jackson Pollock by Deborah Solomon Page A

Davis had recently pioneered an Americanized version of
     Cubism in his
Egg Beater
series, four works based on fragmented images of a rotary egg beater, a rubber glove,
     and an electric fan, which he had nailed to a table in his studio and had used as
     his sole subject matter for an entire year. “That lunchroom was crazy,” the sculptor
     Philip Pavia once said. “On one side you had Gorky and Stuart Davis, and on the other
     side you had the Jackson and the Benton crowd.”
    One day in the lunchroom Pollock overheard Gorky bragging to a group of students that
     he could probably convince Matisse to give a lecture at the League during his next
     visit to the United States. As other students listened in awe, Pollock walkedover to the table and angrily blurted out, “What do we need those Europeans for?”
     Gorky became furious and started screaming at him, “Where do you think the Renaissance
     came from?” Pollock sided with Benton on every issue, no matter how narrow his teacher’s
     ideas. A major controversy erupted at the League after Benton learned that the school
     planned to hire the well-known German painters Hans Hofmann and George Grosz. Benton
     believed that a Depression-ravaged country should not be offering jobs to foreigners,
     an opinion Pollock adopted as his own and was more than willing to defend. “Pollock
     was posing as an artist,” said his classmate Whitney Darrow, Jr., later a cartoonist
     for
The New Yorker
, “not with a beret, goatee, and flowing tie, but as an antieffete type, a rough American
     artist, based on what he had learned from Benton.”
    Pollock defended Benton’s ideas not only in the lunchroom but privately as well. In
     long, rambling letters to his parents, invariably mailed after weeks of delay, he
     spoke proudly of his teacher and offered unequivocal endorsement of his ideas. Writing
     to his mother during his second year at school, Pollock asked her whether his brother
     Sande, who was still living in Los Angeles, had “heard Thomas Craven lecture there
     or not—he should have. I meant to write him about it, he is one critic who has intelligence
     and a thorough knowledge of the history of art. I heard that he was made quite a joke
     there which is not unlikely for the element of painters found out there.” Thomas Craven,
     a tall, natty, acerbic art critic, was a close friend of Benton’s and the leading
     champion of American Scene painting. He hated the French avant-garde, arguing in articles
     and books that such artists as Matisse and Brancusi produced meaningless decoration
     that was destined for obscurity since no one could understand it. Pollock could not
     have picked a more small-minded critic to admire. Many years later Craven would say
     of his onetime supporter: “All Pollock does is drink a gallon of paint, stand on a
     ladder and urinate.”
    In spite of his allegiance to Benton, Pollock’s aspirations were not nearly as clear-cut
     as many of his schoolmates believed. In moments of daydreaming he still thought about
     becoming asculptor. Then again, he was also interested in mural painting. Either way, he had
     made a crucial decision: somehow he was going to become a great artist, willing himself
     into what he knew he already was. “And when I say artist,” he wrote to his father,
     “I don’t mean it in the narrow sense of the word—but the man who is building things—creating
     molding the earth—whether it be the plains of the west—or the iron ore of Penn. Its
     all a big game of construction—some with a brush—some with a shovel—some choose a
     pen . . . Sculptoring I think tho 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.”
     (At the time, sculptor Gutzon Borglum was carving his famous memorial on the face
     of Mount Rushmore, a project that received wide coverage in the New York newspapers
     and that Pollock must have been