sketch, Pollock
stated that he was born in Cody, had studied under Benton, and, with notable bravura,
went on to claim that he was represented by the Ferargil Gallery. He also stated that
he worked in fresco, another instance of wishful thinking.
By now Pollock was working at a new job, having just been transferred by the city
from Home Relief to Work Relief, a program established the previous spring to put
the unemployed to work. He was hired as a “stone cutter,” presumably having indicated
on his application that he had studied stone carving under Ben-Shmuel and possessed
certain skills. However promising the job may have sounded, it turned out to be no
more challenging than his previous job as a janitor. As a so-called stone cutter,
Pollock joined a crew of laborers who were sent around the city to clean public monuments.
Not long after he started he was demoted without explanation to a “stone carver helper.”
Thus Jackson Pollock, who dreamed about painting frescoes and exhibiting at the Ferargil,
spent his twenty-third year cleaning bird droppings from public statuary for sixty-five
cents an hour.
That spring Benton decided after twenty-three years in New York to return to his native
Missouri. Disheartened and depressed by recent attacks on American Scene painting,
he had come to believe that the East Coast art establishment was dominated by Communist
sympathizers unwilling to tolerate anyone who didn’t share their ideas. Already he
had been hooted down at the John Reed Club, where, he wrote, “an enraged Commie threw
a chair at me and turned the meeting into a yelling shambles.” For the past few months
he had been sparring with Stuart Davis in the magazine
Art Front
, with Davis arguing that Benton’s belligerent “nationalism” was only one step removed
from fascism. According to Davis, Benton was a “petty opportunist . . . whoshould have no trouble selling his wares to any fascist government.”
Establishment art critics came to Benton’s defense, but no amount of favorable publicity
could convince him to remain in New York. In farewell interviews in the local newspapers
Benton railed against New York intellectuals and their uncritical embrace of communism.
“They want to take the Marxist slant at everything,” Benton told the
Herald Tribune
. “Why, gol ding it, the Marxian idea was built up in 1848. How can it be valid in
every gol dinged detail today? Communism is a joke everywhere in the United States
except New York.”
With those parting words Benton left New York in April 1935 and settled in Kansas
City, where he continued to paint in the Regionalist style until his death in 1975.
It does not diminish his accomplishments to note that although he strove for half
a century to free American art from European influence, he did not achieve this goal.
He traveled the country more extensively than any artist before or after him, visiting
the steel mills of the Northeast and the cotton plantations of the South and the corn
fields of the Midwest, as if subject matter alone could define an American painting
style. But for all his talk about being a Regionalist, Benton was essentially a Mannerist;
he draped the figures of El Greco in farmers’ overalls and continued the stylistic
conventions of sixteenth-century Florence. Among the many ironies of his career is
the fact that the student whose talents Benton described as “most minimal” and who
worked in the abstract vein that Benton abhorred would one day accomplish exactly
what Benton had sought for himself: Pollock would invent an American painting style.
And among the many ironies of Pollock’s career is that he no more thought about creating
a national art movement than he imagined that he, a painfully shy person incapable
of talking in public, would become its internationally known leader.
But in the spring of 1935 Pollock was devastated by the departure
stated that he was born in Cody, had studied under Benton, and, with notable bravura,
went on to claim that he was represented by the Ferargil Gallery. He also stated that
he worked in fresco, another instance of wishful thinking.
By now Pollock was working at a new job, having just been transferred by the city
from Home Relief to Work Relief, a program established the previous spring to put
the unemployed to work. He was hired as a “stone cutter,” presumably having indicated
on his application that he had studied stone carving under Ben-Shmuel and possessed
certain skills. However promising the job may have sounded, it turned out to be no
more challenging than his previous job as a janitor. As a so-called stone cutter,
Pollock joined a crew of laborers who were sent around the city to clean public monuments.
Not long after he started he was demoted without explanation to a “stone carver helper.”
Thus Jackson Pollock, who dreamed about painting frescoes and exhibiting at the Ferargil,
spent his twenty-third year cleaning bird droppings from public statuary for sixty-five
cents an hour.
That spring Benton decided after twenty-three years in New York to return to his native
Missouri. Disheartened and depressed by recent attacks on American Scene painting,
he had come to believe that the East Coast art establishment was dominated by Communist
sympathizers unwilling to tolerate anyone who didn’t share their ideas. Already he
had been hooted down at the John Reed Club, where, he wrote, “an enraged Commie threw
a chair at me and turned the meeting into a yelling shambles.” For the past few months
he had been sparring with Stuart Davis in the magazine
Art Front
, with Davis arguing that Benton’s belligerent “nationalism” was only one step removed
from fascism. According to Davis, Benton was a “petty opportunist . . . whoshould have no trouble selling his wares to any fascist government.”
Establishment art critics came to Benton’s defense, but no amount of favorable publicity
could convince him to remain in New York. In farewell interviews in the local newspapers
Benton railed against New York intellectuals and their uncritical embrace of communism.
“They want to take the Marxist slant at everything,” Benton told the
Herald Tribune
. “Why, gol ding it, the Marxian idea was built up in 1848. How can it be valid in
every gol dinged detail today? Communism is a joke everywhere in the United States
except New York.”
With those parting words Benton left New York in April 1935 and settled in Kansas
City, where he continued to paint in the Regionalist style until his death in 1975.
It does not diminish his accomplishments to note that although he strove for half
a century to free American art from European influence, he did not achieve this goal.
He traveled the country more extensively than any artist before or after him, visiting
the steel mills of the Northeast and the cotton plantations of the South and the corn
fields of the Midwest, as if subject matter alone could define an American painting
style. But for all his talk about being a Regionalist, Benton was essentially a Mannerist;
he draped the figures of El Greco in farmers’ overalls and continued the stylistic
conventions of sixteenth-century Florence. Among the many ironies of his career is
the fact that the student whose talents Benton described as “most minimal” and who
worked in the abstract vein that Benton abhorred would one day accomplish exactly
what Benton had sought for himself: Pollock would invent an American painting style.
And among the many ironies of Pollock’s career is that he no more thought about creating
a national art movement than he imagined that he, a painfully shy person incapable
of talking in public, would become its internationally known leader.
But in the spring of 1935 Pollock was devastated by the departure
Similar Books
