be artists of some kind. She considered them potential geniuses. However, in a letter to Charles, Sanford said he thought the emotional problems their brother Jackson had “date back to his childhood, to his relations with the family and our mother.”[14]
The facts about the Pollock family and its origins tell something about their youngest son, ‘the cowboy’. He continued the mythology of his roots. His brothers – who experienced Cody and the Western culture longer than Jackson – seemed to have moved on, more able than Jackson to adopt and adapt to their new environments. Because of Jackson’s rebellious temperament and drive for individual and independent expression, it is possible he might not have cared to retain the urban cowboy tendency had any of his brothers continued the cowboy role.
Throughout his life Pollock would mention growing up in Cody; however, he actually spent less than his first ten months in the town before the family moved to National City, near San Diego, California. The move would be the first of several during Jackson’s youth. For example, after only eight months in National City the Pollock family moved. In 1913, at age thirty-seven, LeRoy bought a truck farm in Phoenix, Arizona. He sold it only four years later, and then moved the family to Chico, California, where he bought and sold another farm, and then bought a hotel in Janesville.
During his first decade, Jackson lived in six different houses as his father tried job after job, without much success, in three states. In California alone the Pollock family lived in eight different places.
Religion
Pollock’s parents were originally from Iowa, the state just West of Jackson’s birth state of Wyoming. They were Presbyterians of Scottish and Irish origin, their ancestors had been Quakers, but they did not indoctrinate their children into any religion. Apparently none of the Pollock boys could remember whether Jackson had been baptised. Updike reminded his readers that Quakers don’t baptise.
In a 1929 letter to Charles and Frank, Jackson confessed he had “dropped religion for the present,” even though the year before he had been deeply impressed with Theosophy. Stories from the Christian Gospels would appear in only a few of Jackson’s drawings, which mainly reflected his studies of classic artists, including El Greco.
The fact that Jackson had not been baptised would become an issue at the time of his marriage. However, it was he, not his wife, Lee Krasner, who wanted to have a church wedding. Lee had been raised in the Jewish faith.
Pollock the Cowboy
A 1927 photo of fifteen-year-old Jackson taken by Lee Ewing is the only one showing him posing in Western garb. It contributes significantly to the myth of Pollock as a cowboy. But there are also photos showing he would occasionally wear formal attire and pose like a young European royal, with a jaunty walking cane in hand. In fact, the translator of a German biography referred to these quaint photos, commenting on the young man at the time, “…cultivates dandyish attire.” (123)
After filming his movie Pollock, director Ed Harris regretted the famous ‘cowboy’ photo wasn’t shown more clearly in the film. (45) The photo is seen only briefly, and off to the side of an early scene showing Pollock’s Eighth Street apartment in Greenwich Village, Manhattan.
Easter and the Totem, 1953. Oil on canvas, 208.6 × 147.3 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Flame, 1934–1938. Oil on canvas, mounted on fibreboard, 51.1 × 76.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
“I’m just more at ease in a big area than I am on some thing 2 × 2; I feel more at home in a big area.”[15]
Perhaps because of America’s admiration for the pioneers of the country’s West and the mythology of the American cowboy, Pollock often seemed to be forgiven for his crude behaviour. Some observers might even say this tolerance extended to his reckless drunken driving, if not also to its ultimate consequences. Minutes before his death while driving drunk, a policeman who knew Pollock would unfortunately overlook his drunken state.
Like some of the rough-edged characters of Western fiction, Pollock would live out a boisterous and often crude Wild West spirit, especially in the bars of lower Manhattan. Meanwhile his brilliant art would intoxicate sophisticated viewers in the world’s most civilised museums[16]. In fact, the art world would be influenced forever by Pollock’s unique, important and indelible contribution. Even during his lifetime, Pollock had become the new benchmark to which the art world would refer, as they began to consider modern art as ‘before,’ ‘contemporary with,’ or ‘after’ Pollock.
Pollock’s influence is still notable fifty years later. In a review of the first showing of the early efforts of Italian painter Carla Accardi, in Manhattan in 2005, Roberta Smith of The New York Times notes the paintings of Accardi include impressive works from the mid-1950s. Her fields of scattered and overlapping circles and signs, rendered in white or yellow and black, “…suggest a controlled response to the work of Jackson Pollock.”[17]
Not all references back to Pollock reflect an understanding of what his method was about. During the 2004 U. S. presidential election campaign, Daniel Okrent, the public editor of The New York Times spoke of what he saw as poor management of the paper’s coverage of the campaign. He compared its chaos to a “…pattern adapted from Jackson Pollock.” The title of his article was How would Jackson Pollock Cover this Campaign?[18].
Family Politics
Walsh noted Pollock’s father, LeRoy, had been a socialist and his son became one too. As Pollock’s biographers also note, LeRoy supported socialist labour leaders and “celebrated at the news that the workers of Russia had taken control of their government.” Of his five sons, two would become active in the labour movement and one would join the Communist party. The other two became artists and had less strong political interests[19].
Early Veils
The distinction between the authentic and the fabricated Pollock began even in the artist’s lifetime. Pollock himself kept the myth alive that he was an unsophisticated cowboy.
The country was eager to hear about cowboy legends. The popularity of the image was seen in pop culture through many movies and novels containing Western themes, as well as ‘country and western’ songs which were accepted into the mainstream parade of hits. It is likely most Americans can trace their images of the Old West back to movies, especially those made by John Ford (Sean Aloysius O’Feeny), who was born in Maine in 1895. He devoted about half of his prolific output to the American Western genre. According to his friend, Ted Dragon, Pollock enjoyed going to weekly Western or science-fiction movies, for which their affluent friend, Alfonso Ossorio, would pay[20]. It is very likely Ford directed most of those Westerns. These movies probably played at least as big a role in Pollock’s image of the Old West as did his few early years living in Western states.
Western themes even appeared in classical music, including Aaron Copeland’s music for ballets in the 1940s. In the 1940s, several Broadway musicals and, in the 1950s, many television programs, were based on Western themes. Of course these programs were rarely documentaries and did not reflect much of the reality of the pioneering days of the Western states. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 twelve-hour series, Into the West, is a remarkable exception. The eastern, or Big City, version of the cowboy evolved into the rebellious young men of the 1950s, not unlike Pollock’s real personality. Even fellow painters compared Pollock to Marlon Brando’s brooding character, Stanley Kowalski, in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Commentators saw in the artist what might have been the playwright’s inspiration. Tennessee Williams and Pollock had become friends in 1944, several years before the 1951 play. Benton painted a portrait