Jackson Pollock Out of the Box

A lone cattle-herder sits at the base of a cactus. It is the Depression. Jackson Pollock has recently arrived in New York at age 18, come from the west to study with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Pollock’s famous drip paintings are more than a decade in the future. Right now the young artist is just trying to get up to speed, finding out what he has to say, on any surface he can find. In cash-strapped times an empty cigar box will do.

The cattle-herder rests, draws a knee up, while his horse stares and the cattle graze. High in the mountains, he sits in a depression in the earth, a vagabond of altitudes, too high and too low. Like all shepherds he is a poet—a person with time to dream. He dreams the land that drifts and circles back to him in a great emotional range drawn from Benton’s swirling rhythms, blown over from the religious fervor of his heroes Tintoretto and El Greco. Reverie rides despair in a mood that Annie Proulx would recognize. Ecstasy and sorrow, two old friends, smoke a cigar.

Photograph of Jackson Pollock (seated at right) on the steps of painter Thomas Hart Benton’s summer home with Rita Benton (sitting, in white hat) and author Coburn Gilman (standing), 1937

Jackson Pollock. Untitled (Western Scene). c. 1930–33. Oil and crayon on wooden cigar box

Maybe the box was Benton’s. He liked cigars. If so, teacher and student, father and son, became men together in smoky rituals of artistry. As artists, both rejected the boss at his desk, scorned the man with his box of havanas, plentiful and fragrant, on offer as token, as tool, to seal the deal. The Dutch Masters were one kind of artist, a very great kind, and back in 1661 Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild set the tone for what a busy group of capitalists might look like in a boardroom, rising to meet a client or a comrade. Beginning in 1912, Rembrandt’s painting appeared on boxes of Dutch Masters cigars. Maybe Pollock’s painting was made on such a box. But he is no master, and no Rembrandt, and no man in that sense. The rugged mountains in the Western scene parody the range of hats in Rembrandt’s painting. The sombrero is another such joke. The cattle-herder does not place the hat over his eyes—he is not asleep—but he hardly springs from his seat either. Art is what you do in your down time, which in a sense is all the time. Art is no job, and there is no art of the deal.

Dutch Masters packaging featuring Rembrandt’s 1662 painting Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild

There was a difference between teacher and student, however. In the early 1930s, Benton was starting to hit it big. His America Today murals, still on view at the New School, turned the Missouri artist into an American legend, a Carl Sandburg in oils, his face on the cover of Time, his scenes of steel furnaces, showgirls, and cotton-balers becoming a John Henry folk elegy. He drew appreciative crowds and the wrath of Stuart Davis and Meyer Schapiro. In short, love him or hate him, he was getting famous. Pollock, on the other hand . . . how to put it? That he would one day be famous? That is not wrong.

But the person who made the painting on the cigar box had no idea what the future would bring. The idea that the humble picture of the cattle-herder is a prelude to the drip paintings is just a latter-day invention of art history and biography. At the time he made it, Pollock had no idea of what or who he would become. He might have dreamt of one day becoming as famous as Benton, but the person who made the cigar-box painting was, as we say, “living in the present.” That itself is not remarkable. What is remarkable is that the little picture recognizes just how perilous that present is. In scumbled and scuffed oils and crayon, in a true poverty of conception, the artist does not rise above his circumstances but portrays them. And those circumstances are not a sociological quarantine, a notation of jalopies and handouts and tin cups, but something existential.

Thomas Hart Benton at Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, in 1965

Albert Pinkham Ryder. The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse). 1896–1908. Oil on canvas

A brimstone whiff of Albert Pinkham Ryder’s The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) perfumes the turgid clouds of Pollock’s mountain prairie. Like others in the early 1930s, Pollock loved the turn-of-the-century art of the eccentric hoarder and nightmarist Ryder, seeing in his snakes and skeletons swimming in seas of never-drying bitumen paint a fit emblem of life in a holding pattern, an emotional craquelure. The rider in The Race Track rides on and on, in a perpetual present, a living hell that is made not of privation and social damnation, however real those things may be, but of something demonically personal, “obsessive”: a daily cycle of fear and delusion like that of the suicidal gambler whose fate inspired the painting. But Pollock’s cattle-herder places no bets. He is not a winner or a loser. He just sits there in a present that is its own gamble. Because it may be all that there is.

An older artist who is successful can look back on their early years essentially like an art historian. The “stages” of their career, the “styles,” the “contexts” fit into an orderly progression. But in doing so this artist might forget a profound feeling of their early years. The young artist convinced of their talent worries that all that is inside of them, the best of them, may never see the light of day. The young artist of real feeling lives in a precipitancy of importance, maybe even of greatness, but understands all too well that fame and recognition may never happen. In maudlin and practical terms, the youthful romantic sees how precarious it all is.

In extreme cases of such despair, they worry that they will not live long enough to portray all that is inside them. Pollock, with his “gothic” temperament—the “violence, exasperation and stridency” that Clement Greenberg would try to weed out of his art—was apt at such visions. The cattle-herder sits like a man adrift in lofty conceptions of his own demise. This is a special kind of paranoia, narcissistic and tender, doubtful and masochistic and proud.

Jackson Pollock. Untitled (Western Scene). c. 1930–33. Oil and crayon on wooden cigar box

Maybe for that reason the cigar-box painting seems both a giveaway and a treasure, as disposable as the cigars and yet also a keepsake. At some point Pollock gave it to one of his brothers. The brother then gave it to The Museum of Modern Art, where the gift keeps on giving. But maybe equally the painting aspires to be tossed—in short, to belong to no one’s collection. In having been made, it is already smoked, expendable, good while it lasted, burned down to the butt. And maybe that honesty—this is all it is, all it may ever be—is why in the picture doubt and fear rise up, a species of spirit, whose very substance (more than oil or crayon) speaks the picture’s sad tones. If it is all a fantasy, a delirium, a neurotic obsession, that does not make the feelings unreal. The future is objectively terrifying. The cigar box painting is a young person’s work.

Do we want to open it? A clasp is there for the unlocking, and it is tempting. What could be in there that might be scary? If we have doubts, a curator or a conservator can blithely open the box to reveal that there is nothing inside, doing so with the pleasant common sense of a rationalist in a haunted house who switches on the lights to disclose a plain, cheery room. Art history likes to show that no emotional revenants lurk in the secret hiding places.

But naturally the revelation of the box’s emptiness proves nothing. For what is “there” is impossible to materialize. It is the state of mind of a person who makes a work in communion with doubt and nothingness, not least his own, who senses his own disposability as well as the heavy burden of what he imagines to be his possibilities. When we open the box now, if we have the courage to do so, what we see there, in the emptiness, is the unanswerable question posed by the work on the lid. Will I be gone? Will I remain? What will happen to me?

Alexander Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University, and the author of numerous award-winning books, including The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, and Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine.