ironically described
WPA art as “poor art for poor people,” painted a mural for the New York World’s Fair,
as did Philip Guston. As for Pollock, he joined Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and
Ad Reinhardt on the Project’s easel division, which required them to produce about
one painting a month for allocation to schools, post offices, and other government
buildings. So basic was the experience of working on the Project that Barnett Newman,
who had a job in his family’s clothing manufacturing business at the time and couldn’t
get onto the Project, regretted it for years afterward. “I paid a severe price for
not being on the Project with the other guys,” he once said. “In their eyes I wasn’t
a painter.”
When Pollock first joined the Project he signed up for the mural division, deciding
to pursue his early interest in public art. But he quickly realized that he had no
patience for the teamwork required of mural painters. Within a few months he had switched
to the easel division—the largest of the Project’s sections—electing to work at home
and produce about one painting a month for allocation to government buildings. As
simple as it may have sounded, Pollock soon found himself subjected to a long list
of regulations that made his earliest days on the Project a rather bewildering experience.
Among the many rules enforced by the government was the one that artists on the easel
division, who all worked at home, had to report to an office on East Thirty-ninth
Street every morning and at the end of the day to punch a time clock. Failure to punch
the clock resulted in the withholding of a paycheck. Pollock, who was not an early
riser by nature, had difficulty meeting the 8:00 A.M . check-in. The artist Jacob Kainen recalls Pollock racing frantically toward the
time clock seconds before the deadline, dressed in pajamas.
Within a year the government had dropped the time-clock policy in response to complaints
from artists in Brooklyn and the Bronx, who were spending the better part of their
workday in transit. But artists remained subjected to many other regulations that
were no less confounding. For one, they were required to submit a painting to the
government every four to eight weeks, depending on the size of the canvas. They were
given four weeks for a 16″ × 20″ canvas, six weeks for a 24″ × 36″ canvas, three weeks
for a watercolor. Even more absurd, a few months after the Project began, artists
were ordered to stop signing their paintings, the rationale being that bridge builders
and bricklayers don’t sign their work, so why should painters? The basic assumption
underlying the Project was that artists were no different from any other government
employees and that paintings were just anotherform of property. It is this mentality that helps explain why almost none of Pollock’s
WPA paintings survive: the majority were destroyed by the government.
When the federal government began phasing out the Project in the early forties, it
disposed of the artwork in its possession as if it were so much scrap metal. In a
typical incident in March 1941 the government decided to clean out a storage closet
in which more than six hundred and fifty watercolors had accumulated; the paintings
were incinerated. Among the destroyed watercolors, according to government documents,
were works by Milton Avery, Jack Tworkov, Loren Maclver, I. Rice Pereira, Sande Pollock,
and Jackson Pollock. Twelve of Pollock’s watercolors were destroyed, and judging from
their titles—
Sunny Landscape, Baytime, Martha’s Vineyard
, and so on—they consisted of works he had completed during his summers in Chilmark.
In a separate incident in December 1943 the government quietly disposed of numerous
other artworks by auctioning them off at a Flushing warehouse, along with scrap iron
and other surplus property. Thousands of oil paintings, which had
WPA art as “poor art for poor people,” painted a mural for the New York World’s Fair,
as did Philip Guston. As for Pollock, he joined Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and
Ad Reinhardt on the Project’s easel division, which required them to produce about
one painting a month for allocation to schools, post offices, and other government
buildings. So basic was the experience of working on the Project that Barnett Newman,
who had a job in his family’s clothing manufacturing business at the time and couldn’t
get onto the Project, regretted it for years afterward. “I paid a severe price for
not being on the Project with the other guys,” he once said. “In their eyes I wasn’t
a painter.”
When Pollock first joined the Project he signed up for the mural division, deciding
to pursue his early interest in public art. But he quickly realized that he had no
patience for the teamwork required of mural painters. Within a few months he had switched
to the easel division—the largest of the Project’s sections—electing to work at home
and produce about one painting a month for allocation to government buildings. As
simple as it may have sounded, Pollock soon found himself subjected to a long list
of regulations that made his earliest days on the Project a rather bewildering experience.
Among the many rules enforced by the government was the one that artists on the easel
division, who all worked at home, had to report to an office on East Thirty-ninth
Street every morning and at the end of the day to punch a time clock. Failure to punch
the clock resulted in the withholding of a paycheck. Pollock, who was not an early
riser by nature, had difficulty meeting the 8:00 A.M . check-in. The artist Jacob Kainen recalls Pollock racing frantically toward the
time clock seconds before the deadline, dressed in pajamas.
Within a year the government had dropped the time-clock policy in response to complaints
from artists in Brooklyn and the Bronx, who were spending the better part of their
workday in transit. But artists remained subjected to many other regulations that
were no less confounding. For one, they were required to submit a painting to the
government every four to eight weeks, depending on the size of the canvas. They were
given four weeks for a 16″ × 20″ canvas, six weeks for a 24″ × 36″ canvas, three weeks
for a watercolor. Even more absurd, a few months after the Project began, artists
were ordered to stop signing their paintings, the rationale being that bridge builders
and bricklayers don’t sign their work, so why should painters? The basic assumption
underlying the Project was that artists were no different from any other government
employees and that paintings were just anotherform of property. It is this mentality that helps explain why almost none of Pollock’s
WPA paintings survive: the majority were destroyed by the government.
When the federal government began phasing out the Project in the early forties, it
disposed of the artwork in its possession as if it were so much scrap metal. In a
typical incident in March 1941 the government decided to clean out a storage closet
in which more than six hundred and fifty watercolors had accumulated; the paintings
were incinerated. Among the destroyed watercolors, according to government documents,
were works by Milton Avery, Jack Tworkov, Loren Maclver, I. Rice Pereira, Sande Pollock,
and Jackson Pollock. Twelve of Pollock’s watercolors were destroyed, and judging from
their titles—
Sunny Landscape, Baytime, Martha’s Vineyard
, and so on—they consisted of works he had completed during his summers in Chilmark.
In a separate incident in December 1943 the government quietly disposed of numerous
other artworks by auctioning them off at a Flushing warehouse, along with scrap iron
and other surplus property. Thousands of oil paintings, which had
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