The Human Touch

A. L. Pollock is dead. He died in an insane asylum. C. J. Bulliet calls him a genius of paint, a genius at whom museums and collectors laughed. Van Gogh also died in an insane asylum and Mr. Bulliet, art critic and author of “Apples and Madonnas”, implies, in an article in the Chicago Daily News, that a generation hence appreciation will catch up with Pollock and put him in the class of Cezanne and Rousseau, the French painters whom their own generations also misunderstood and failed to appreciate and to whom the present world of art pays obeisance as to gods.

Pollock was a Jew. Until almost the age of sixty, according to Mr. Bulliet—who has also, I believe, written about Pollock in “Apples and Madonnas”—this mild individual made his living as a clothing salesman, but deep within him was the itch to paint. That itch has done terrible things to people and Pollock was not excepted from the consequences. He dropped his job and began painting in earnest, which meant starving in earnest. He painted pictures which, according to Mr. Bulliet, matched those of Modigliani, the great Italian Jew who died in Paris in drunkenness and poverty, after which his canvases sold for hundreds of thousands of francs and tens of thousands of dollars. He painted pictures which make him—and not Eilshemius, the New York Jew,—the great American primitive. He painted pictures which proved to Mr. Bulliet, who ought to know about such things, that he had visions as great as those of Michelangelo, although he had not the technique successfully to translate those visions onto canvas. Bulliet calls Pollock the great American original, the one authentic genius of Chicago. “Pollock’s soul was a volcano,” he writes. “It was lava he poured onto his canvases and white-hot lava doesn’t lend itself to the burnisher.”

This post-mortem comment of course didn’t help Pollock much when he was alive. A few people bought his pictures, but not enough to keep him. He became a tramp. He moved on to New York, and starved even more miserably here. One rainy night he was thrown out of a rooming house for non-payment of rent, and his canvases, thrown after him, were thus damaged. Toward the end, he made the error—still quoting Bulliet—of painting daubs over his masterpieces. He was going blind as well as insane. But his pictures—some of them, at any rate—remain. Perhaps now some gallery will give him a memorial exhibition.

From “The Joys of the Soul” by one Simchath Hanefesch, as quoted by Jacob Wassermann in “The Dark Pilgrimage”:

“A man has three good friends. One was his bosom friend, the second was also a good friend, the third he held in low esteem. One day the king suddenly sent a messenger to this man to command him to come to the king immediately. The man was much affrighted and asked himself what it had to signify that the king should send for him. Full of fear he went to his bosom friend and asked him to go with him to the king, but he would not go with him. Then he went to his second friend, and asked him to go with him to the king, but he said, ‘I will go with thee to the door of his castle, but further I will not go.’ Then he went to his third friend, whom he held in low esteem. And he said, ‘I will go with thee to the king and will protect thee.’ And he went with him to the king and protected him. Now of these three friends, the first is money, the second is wife and child, the third, whom he held in low esteem, is Thora, the commandments, the good deeds, which a man esteems not. The king, that is God, the messenger is death, whom God sends suddenly to require a man’s soul of him. The best friend, who is money, he stays home, for however much a man ha# he can take nothing with him. Th### second friend, who is wife and child, they go with him to his grave and weep and cry there, but cannot help him. The third friend, whom the man esteems not, he goes with him to the king.”