American Letters 1927-1947: Jackson Pollock & Family (review)

All but two of the nearly one hundred thirty letters in this collection were written before Jackson Pollock (1914-1956) produced his first large-scale drip paintings in 1947, which made him one of the most important figures in the history of American art. The letters are introduced by the Pollock scholar Michael Leja who discusses the early, hardscrabble lifestyle of the Pollock clan, its personalities, relationships, and culture, the Pollock wives, and most instructively, art and politics during the Great Depression. More than half of the letters were written by Charles, the oldest of the five Pollock brothers, and Sanford (Sande), the fourth in line, with whom Jackson, the youngest, shared living quarters in Manhattan in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Jackson is represented by over twenty letters, several each are by brothers Marvin Jay and Frank, with the remainder by the parents, LeRoy and Stella, the Pollock wives, and Thomas Hart Benton who taught at the Art Students League in New York and mentored Charles and Jackson. The letters were selected by Charles's daughter and edited and annotated by her mother, his second wife. The family moved to France in 1971 where the book was first published in 2009.

Less than a year after Jackson was born in Cody, Wyoming the Pollocks began shuttling back and forth between various locations in California and Phoenix as LeRoy struggled to support the family as an agricultural and construction worker, finally settling in Los Angeles in 1928. The letters begin when Charles and Frank go to New York, the former to study with Benton, the latter to study journalism and literature at Columbia University while working in its law library. Jackson followed in 1930. Some of the most colorful letters describe the coast-to-coast travels of Charles and Jackson in the early 1930s, the latter occasionally hopping freight trains, anticipating the road trips of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy in the late 1940s that were fictionalized in On the Road. Frank returned to California in 1933, and Sande arrived in New York in 1934 to become an artist. Charles left New York the following year to work in Washington, D.C. for the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal program, and moved to Michigan in 1937 to be a union organizer. Marvin Jay also became a union organizer and a Communist Party recruiter in Ohio in the late 1930s. The letters document the efforts of the family to stay in touch in trying times, the struggle to support Stella after LeRoy's death in 1933, the leftist politics with which all the brothers sympathized in varying degrees, and Sande's and Jackson's intermittent employment in the late 1930s and early 1940s on the Works Progress Administration / Federal Art Project.

Jackson, who was twice expelled from high school for disciplinary problems, wrote to Charles and Frank in New York that "The whole outfit [high school] thinks I am a rotten rebel from Russia" (16).¹ In 1933 Frank declared in a letter to Charles "that nothing short of an armed revolution will attain the desired ends" (54). Charles speculated in a 1935 letter to Frank whether "the Communist Party [can] meet the situation . . . there is a chance . . . but only if they come to maturity soon" (79). In 1936 Sande and Jackson joined the experimental workshop of the noted Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, in which they helped make a May Day float and produced other kinds of art propaganda for the Communist Party. The Moscow Trials shocked Frank and Sande, but the latter wrote to Charles in 1940 that Marvin Jay still was "hold[ing] to the Stalinist line" (169). Sande informed Charles in the same year that he and Jackson were "nervously awaiting the axe" from the Federal Art Project because they had signed a petition to put the Communist Party on the ballot the year before (170). Charles obtained a more secure situation on the Project in...