Tom and Jack by Henry Adams

Author:Henry Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

Over the course of the 1930s, Pollock learned to analyze old master paintings into cubic blocks and fluid linear patterns, in a fashion modeled on the work of his teacher, Benton. (Jackson Pollock, Figure Studies, from Sketchbook I [c. 1938], page 7, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.)

Not many people outside of Kansas City have heard of Ross Braught: I first came upon the name when I worked at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. On those evenings when I didn’t leave until near midnight, I heard stories about him from the night guard, who had studied painting under him at the Kansas City Art Institute. A distinctly spooky figure, and a dead ringer for Boris Karloff, Braught generally wore a black suit with a black cape and startled the sober citizens of Kansas City by bringing a skeleton with him in the evenings on the streetcar, so that he could draw from it at home. Periodically he would disappear for months or years into some exotic locale, such as the jungles of Suriname or the Badlands of South Dakota, eventually reemerging with a rich trove of paintings and drawings. Many of Benton’s students found Braught extremely strange. Jim Gantt, for example, complained that Braught paid no attention to such mundane things as anatomical knowledge or the use of chemically sound pigments. Instead, “he lived in imaginary landscapes that resemble a tub full of pig entrails or the human brain with the skull removed. It was different.” But oddly, despite their very different temperaments—Benton was down-to-earth whereas Braught was a mystic and a visionary—Benton and Braught became good friends. It was common to see the two strolling together across the campus of the Kansas City Art Institute, lost in conversation about art.

Pollock’s bowl was clearly based on a book illustrated with twenty-two lithographs by Braught, Phaeton, which was published in 1935 in Kansas City in an edition of one hundred, one of which Benton owned. The text, drawn from Joseph Addison’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, tells of Phaeton, who foolishly persuaded his father, Phoebus Apollo, to allow him to drive the horses of the sun. Unable to control them, he drove the sun chariot recklessly close to the earth, scorching the landscape, until Apollo, knowing no other way to halt the disaster, blasted him from the chariot with a thunderbolt. For Pollock the story served as a metaphor for reckless aspiration to scale the heavens and for catastrophic failure—in other words, a metaphor for his own lofty artistic ambitions and his failure to achieve them. More generally, perhaps, it served as a metaphor for the highs and lows of manic-depressive illness.

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