Jackson Pollock Read Online Free Page B

deprived
     him of any semblance of community or continuity, his father’s departure signaled the
     complete loss of childhood security. Despite his mother’s best efforts to see that
     he received the same advantages as his older brothers, Stella was incapable of providing
     Jackson with the attention and affection he needed. A rigid woman to begin with, she
     pulled deeper into herself in her husband’s absence, internalizing her unhappiness
     and becoming a remote presence to her children. The deprivations of Jackson’s youth
     left him with a weak, uncertain image of himself and an unfathomable sense of loneliness
     that no amount of acclaim or recognition could ever help him overcome.
    Soon after LeRoy left, Stella talked with Chris Sharp, the real estate man back in
     Chico. With his stylish suits, fat cigars, and gregarious nature, Sharp struck the
     Pollock boys as the very opposite of their father. “Tell me where you want to go,”
     he used to say to Stella, “and I’ll send you.” Stella asked him to find her a California
     dairy farm, thinking that her husband would return to the family if only they lived
     on a farm. She ended up trading the inn in Janesville for a twenty-acre dairy farm
     in the nearby town of Orland. In August 1921 the
Orland Unit
, according to its masthead “The Only Absolutely Honest Newspaper in California,”
     announced on page one that “L. R. Pollock . . . will come with his family to this
     place to take possession of their Orland property about the first of next month, bringing
     his family to make their home at this place.”
    The Pollock family was considerably smaller than the newspaper item indicated. LeRoy,
     who was working as a surveyor for the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, never visited his
     family in Orland. And Charles, the oldest son, had also moved away from home, to Los
     Angeles, where he found a job in the layout department of the
Los Angeles Times
and where he would soon be joined by his brother Jay. More important, Charles had
     enrolled at the Otis Art Institute, the most prestigious art school in the West. He
     had decided, at age eighteen, that he was going to become a great artist.
    Charles’s decision to pursue a career in art is almost startling considering the cultural
     isolation of his youth. The towns in which the Pollock boys grew up offered no evidence
     of a living tradition in the fine arts. Painting and drawing, if they were practiced
     at all, were considered little more than leisure pastimes for women. As an example
     of the frivolous status accorded the arts, one can look to the Fifth Annual Glenn
     County Fair, held in Orland two months after the Pollocks’ arrival. The fair’s so-called
     art department, according to the local newspaper, offered cash prizes for “paintings
     on china . . . contestants are also invited to design a lampshade.” And it was not
     only in rural California that art was defined as painted plates and lampshades; the
     United States itself had yet to produce a self-sustaining tradition in the fine arts
     and was still dependent on Europe for its cultural identity.
    On the other hand, Charles’s decision to pursue a career in art seems almost inevitable
     given his natural talent for drawing and the reinforcement he received from his mother.
     Stella, as one might expect, was thrilled by his decision to study at a leading art
     school and harbored grand visions for his future. In 1923, when Jackson was eleven,
     the family visited Charles in Los Angeles and was immediately impressed by the suave
     and sophisticated young artist who greeted them. As Frank once exclaimed: “He was
     wearing spats, and we had never known anyone to wear spats before!” Inspired by their
     brother’s example, the two younger Pollock boys, Sande and Jackson, soon declared
     that they too were going to be artists. As Sande has said, “Charles started this whole
     damn thing. He left home damned early. Charles was the