Jackson Pollock and Jazz: Inspiration or Imitation?

Helen A. Harrison, Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Director, Pollock-Krasner

House and Study Center, East Hampton, NY

This essay examines the relationship between Jackson Pollock's "action painting"
technique, which reached its apogee in 1947-1950, and the jazz music he loved.
His spontaneous creation of free-flowing forms is often likened to jazz
improvisation, specifically the bebop that was prominent at the time, and many
people believe he listened to that music while he painted. Was Pollock responding
directly to the rhythms and energies of jazz, or was the music's influence on his art
more oblique and subtle?

When the painter Lee Krasner was asked to contribute reflections on her late
husband for a 1967 magazine article titled Who Was Jackson Pollock, she took
the opportunity to set the record straight about a few of the misconceptions that
had sprung up like weeds around Pollocks grave. By this time, eleven years after
his death, the image of him as the hard-drinking, two-fisted, self-destructive action
painter had solidified into myth.

There is so much stupid myth about Pollock, I cant stand it! Im bored with these
myths, she complained. According to Krasner, his tough-guy posture was bluff
and bluster; he was, she said, damn decent to his friends no matter what the
situation was. She also debunked his reputed inability to express himself in
words. On the contrary, she knew all to well that he could be hideously verbal
when he wanted to be. And she dismissed the contention that his death in a
drunken car crash was actually suicide. There is no truth in this, she insisted. It
was an automobile accident like many others.
 2

One myth that Krasner didnt address was the image of Pollock as an embodiment
of jazz music, creating his paintings while listening to records by the bebop
musicians who were his contemporaries. She did, however, stress his longstanding
love of jazz, which preceded by many years his breakthrough to action painting.
He would get into grooves of listening to his jazz records, she recalled, not just
for daysday and night for three days running until you thought you would climb
the roof! The house would shake. Jazz? He thought it was the only other really
creative thing happening in this country. (The other really creative thing being
abstract expressionist painting.) And Pollock wasnt the only contemporary visual
artist who felt a kinship with the music. As noted in the catalogue of the December
1946 exhibition, Homage to Jazz, at Samuel Kootzs Manhattan gallery,
featuring paintings by William Baziotes, Romare Bearden, Byron Browne, Adolph
Gottlieb and Carl Holty, jazz and abstract painting are the pre-eminent arts of this
era in this country, the provocative, the original arts. (Cassidy 151)

Although, according to Krasner, Pollock had no musical talent himself, couldnt

carry a tune, and was an awkward dancer, she maintained that he had a passion
for music. Indeed, he owned more than 150 records, mostly 78 rpm disks that date
back to the 1930s and early 1940s. His collection also includes a few small-format
long playing 33 1/3 rpm records, which were introduced in the late 40s. They are
preserved at the Pollock-Krasner House in the Springs section of East Hampton,
Long Island, where the two artists settled in 1945. Only a handful of the 78s are on
display, however. Apparently, after Pollocks death, Krasner never wanted to
seeor hearthem again. Perhaps her memories of those marathon listening
sessions had soured her on them, prompting her to relegate them to the attic, where
they sit to this day. On the shelf under them, I found a newspaper dated November
 3

15, 1956, three months after Pollock died. Roasting summers and freezing winters
have taken their toll on the fragile shellac disks, and even the playable ones are
quite worn, bearing out Krasners recollections of Pollocks incessant listening
habits.

What is this music that so captivated Pollock that he played it non-stop for days on
end? And what role, if any, did it play in his creative process? Was he consciously
seeking to emulate the free-flowing improvisational technique of such bebop
pioneers as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Kenny Clarke, Thelonious Monk and
Max Roach? Was he, in effect, imitating them? Did he listen to their music while
he painted?

The first and last questions are easy to answer. First, what did he listen to?
Pollocks jazz record collection is dominated by music that was popular in the
1920s and 1930s, when he was in his teens and twenties. It comprises primarily
traditional DixielandNew Orleans and ragtime tunes by such major stylists as
James P. Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton,
and some lesser-known names like Nappy Lemares Louisiana Levee Loungers.
There are the Chicago sounds of Jack Teagarden, George Wettling and Art Hodes,
big band music by Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Russell Bennett, Lionel
Hampton, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Eddie Condon, Teddy Wilson, Woody
Herman and Count Basie, vocals by Billie Holliday, piano standards by Eddy
Duchin, and folk songs by Mahalia Jackson, Burl Ives and Josh White.

According to his friend B.H. Friedman, Pollock was not receptive to vanguard
jazz. In the mid-1950s Friedman accompanied him to clubs like Eddie Condons
in Greenwich Village, where the fare was a mix of Dixieland and Chicago style.
 4

He loved Fats Waller, Friedman told me. He used to talk about him a lot. The
Pollock-Krasner House collection includes a recording of the boogie-woogie piano
player Jimmy Yancy, which you saw on the shelf by the turntable. It was a gift
from Friedman, who tried in vain to interest Pollock in bebop. As it happens,
theres a jacket for a bebop album on the shelf below, but the 78 rpm records inside
are standards like Tea for Two, I Got Rhythm and Embraceable You, played
by Victor Arden, Bob Crosby, and Ben Selvins Knickerbockers. Pollock evidently
discarded the missing platters featuring Clarke, Gillespie and other boppers.

The collection also includes a Charlie Parker LP that was given to Pollock by his
lover, Ruth Kligman, just a few weeks before his death in 1956. She assumed hed
go for it, since Parkers improvisational style seemed so in tune with Pollocks, but
he didnt. She may have been crazy about him, but as far as his taste in music was
concerned, she told me, I thought he was a real square.

That opinion was echoed by Larry Rivers, who was a professional jazz musician
before he became a visual artist. Even after he gained recognition as a painter,
Rivers continued to play the saxophone and organized several bandsthe first of
which, Larry Rivers and his Mudcats, was the debut of his nom de guerre. He
sometimes played at Jungle Petes, a local watering hole in Springs, where Pollock
was a regular. Hed come around in the evening from his afternoon drinking and
be there still at nine oclock, or something like that, when wed start, Rivers told
Jeffrey Potter, one of Pollocks biographers. Hed ask for cornies like I Cant
Give You Anything But Love, Baby, practically on the level of dopey songs.
An old show tune like that may have seemed dopey to a hipster like Rivers, but it
had possibilities for Louis Armstrong and his Savoy Ballroom Five, who recorded
it in 1929, and that recording is in Pollocks collection.
 5

As to the question of whether Pollock listened to jazz music while he painted, the
answer, contrary to the myth, is no. Krasner was asked about it in a 1964 television
interview, and she said emphatically that he did not. Remember her description of
Pollocks record-playing marathons: she said the house would shake. There was no
record player in the studio. Theres ample photographic documentation of the
inside of the building, a converted storage barn, showing that it contained neither a
wind-up Victrola nor an electric turntable and ampin fact, the studio had no
electricity until 1953, by which time Pollock had already painted virtually all the
dynamic poured paintings that have been likened to improvisational jazz
compositions. The image of him flinging paint while dancing to the syncopated
rhythms of Bird or Dizzy or Monklike the equally misguided notion that he
painted while drunkis a fanciful one.

This is not to say that jazz played no part in Pollocks aesthetic repertoire. It was a
well established source of inspiration for abstract artists, mindful of Walter Paters
observation that art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. Among
those cited in Donna M. Cassidys invaluable 1997 book, Painting the Musical
City, are Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, Arthur Dove, Mark Tobey, Piet
Mondrian, Franz Kline and Stuart Davis. Jazz was a theme for Bearden throughout
his career. Davis was a deeply devoted jazz fan who often incorporated musical
imagery in his abstractions, and who did have jazz playing in his studio while he
worked.

In Pollocks case, however, the music was a respite from the creative act. His
intensive work sessions would be followed by fallow periods, which became more
frequent after he resumed drinking following two years of sobriety from 1948
 6

through 1950. As Krasner once remarked, he often said: Painting is no problem;

the problem is what to do when youre not painting. One of the things he did was
listen to records. An intriguing question is whether there was a cause-and-effect
between these passive listening sessions and his return to work. His friend and
fellow artist Alfonso Ossorio witnessed an occasion in 1953 when Pollock had
apparently hit an impasse and tried to use music to re-kindle his creative spark. As
Ossorio told Jeffrey Potter, he had put large black and white canvases against the
windows in the front room, taken a bottle and gone in and turned the volume up
full. They were all early jazz classic records. He did that several times,
obviously experimenting with his psyche full blast. (186)

Was the music an effective stimulus, and if it was, how did it affect Pollocks
painting practice? Surprisingly, given the widespread assumption that his art is
analogous to jazz, little has been written on the subject. Only two art historians,
Andrew Kagan and Chad Mandeles, have published articles specifically devoted to
it, and they appeared nearly 30 years ago in Arts magazine. Kagan focuses on the
thematic and cultural parallels, while Mandeles examines the structural similarities
between Pollocks paintings and the music in question, and also looks conversely
at jazz musicians who have expressed an affinity with Pollocknotably the
soprano sax player and composer Jane Ira Bloom, whose album, Chasing Paint,
was inspired by Pollocks work, and Ornette Coleman, whose groundbreaking
1960 album, Free Jazz, reproduces a Pollock painting on the jacket.

Mandeles quotes Coleman as saying that he recognized in Pollock someone in

the same state I was indoing what I was doing. According to Mandeles, it
wasnt Colemans idea to illustrate a Pollock, but whoever made that decision,
rather surprisingly, did not choose a classic action painting like this one, with its
 7

flowing forms and interlacing linear rhythms, but opted instead for the 1954
canvas, White Light, from late in Pollocks career, when he had retreated from the
spontaneous pouring technique that made him famous. White Light is notable for
its heavy impasto and staccato strokes. Still, it could be argued that its multiple
overlays of color and texture correspond to the dense harmonics, chromatic variety,
and vibrant nervous energy of Colemans free-jazz idiom.

In his 1979 Arts magazine article, Andrew Kagan points to the indigenous
American character of jazz as a potent source of its appeal for Pollock, and
theorizes that its ascent into the cultural mainstream, both at home and abroad,
paved the way for Pollocks art to be ratified. According to Kagan, ambitious
improvisation was precisely what made jazz such a significant novelty in Europe,
where it came to symbolize the wildness and freedom associated with the new
world, and gained widespread popularity decades before American visual art was
taken seriously. After World War Two, Pollock benefited from perfect timing. As
Kagan puts it: To Europeans who recognized a lapse in their own artistic
innovation and leadership, he appeared as a new prophet to revitalize and save the
western tradition in art. I think Kagan is right in supposing that the fact that
Pollock was wilder, more passionate, and his art more electric, more immediate,
and more improvisatory in character than that of his contemporaries, surely aided
him in becoming the first American painter to win that type of acceptance. (99)

The most frequent analogy between Pollock and jazz musiciansexplicitly cited
by Kagan and Mandeles, and alluded to by Coleman when he spoke of the painter
doing what he was doingis the improvisational nature of their creativity. Indeed,
spontaneous invention is the hallmark of both free jazz and Pollocks working
method. But of course Pollock was dead before Coleman came on the scene.
 8

Obviously in Colemans case, the influence was one-way in the direction of the
musician. Whether classic jazz provided a formal model for Pollock is debatable,
since it typically begins with an established melody, the basic tune from which the
players take off. Pollock, who subscribed to Carl Gustav Jungs theory of the
creative unconscious, began with a blank canvashe had no framework, other
than his imagination, on which to hang his inventions. In effect, he built the
framework intuitively as he went along. As the critic Harold Rosenberg
summarized the process in his famous 1952 essay, The American Action
Painters, the image was not preconceived, but evolved as a result of the artists
encounter with his materials. Each stroke had to be a decision, and was answered
by a new question, Rosenberg wrote. (81)

The likelihood is that however much Pollock admired jazz as an art form, enjoyed
listening to it, and even looked to it as a stimulus to work, he didnt want his art to
be too closely identified with it. On the only occasion when he had the opportunity
to pair music with his painting, jazz was not the genre he chose.

In 1950 the photographer Hans Namuth, who had taken hundreds of still
photographs of Pollock at work, decided to make a movie of the painter in action.
After experimenting with black and white film inside the studio, he shot color
footage outdoors, where Pollock painted a long canvas on the ground and made a
collage painting on glass. Working with cinematographer Paul Falkenberg,
Namuth edited the film and added a short narration read by Pollock. In his
description of the project, Falkenberg explained: We felt that this film was
Jacksons, and that if any voice were to accompany the picture it should be his.
They also gave him the say regarding music. To Falkenbereg, the swirling
elements in Pollocks paintings suggested the loose-structured sound sequences of
 9

a gamelan orchestra, so he created a sound track using excerpts from records of

Indonesian music. When I ran the film with it for Jackson, Falkenberg recalled,
he said, But, Paul, this is exotic music. I am an American painter! Yet he didnt
recommend using jazz, the music most readily identified as American.

Back to square one, the film makers approached John Cage to compose an original
score, but Cage declined on the grounds that he didnt like the artist or his art.
Cage advised them to ask his young protg, Morton Feldman, with whom Pollock
soon formed an intense friendship. Feldman, who saw Pollock paint in person in
addition to watching the footage, told Jeffrey Potter that he scored for the film as I
would for choreography, with two interwoven tracks of cello music written
specifically in response to Pollocks rhythmic movements. It may have been true,
as Krasner maintained, that he was a lousy social dancer, but when he painted, he
was grace itself.

According to Daniel Stern, who played both cello parts, Feldman really adapted
the sounds to what was happening on the screen. Obviously no pre-existing piece
of music, jazz or any other form, would correspond so directly. In his essay for my
anthology, Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock, Stern describes the
piece as intentional fragments that come together as a coherent whole, similar to
the way Pollocks work is made. What Morty was looking for, and found, says
Stern, was an objective correlative for Pollocks act of painting. (305-06)
If there is a direct correspondence between Pollocks work and jazz, I believe its
to be found on the technical level, in the mastery of the artists medium. Those
who accused both Pollocks paintings and vanguard jazz of being chaotic failed to
appreciate what Feldman realizedthat there was form and structure in Pollocks
presumed randomness, in the same way that jazz improvisation is based on
 10

rhythmic and harmonic underpinnings. Moreover, just as a dancer works for years
to make the most taxing performance seem effortless, years of practice lie behind
Pollocks spontaneous gestures and the jazz musicians inventive artistry. In an
effort to answer critics who saw him as undisciplined, Pollock insisted, I can
control the flow of the paint, and there is no accident. Like the jazz giants
whose music he loved, he relied on consummate skill to realize his expressive
potential.

And theres a correlation on an even deeper level. The emotion he uses liberates
the rhythms and the meters. That quote is from Ornette Coleman, and although
hes referring to Ed Blackwells drumming on Free Jazz, he might as well have
been describing Pollock painting Autumn Rhythm.

END