THE REVOLUTIONARY NEW YORK WORKSHOP WHERE POLLOCK MADE ANTI-FASCIST ART

BY JON MANN

George Cox (left), David Alfaro Siqueiros (center) and Jackson Pollock (right) outside the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, New York, 1936. Courtesy of the Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

In 1936, as the tide of fascism swelled in Europe, a group of artists in New York set about formulating a response that would both promote the cause of art and counter the rise of politically oppressive regimes.

The first session of the American Artists’ Congress—as the organization they developed was known—took place in February 1936, and featured a presentation from the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, a staunch Communist whose art carried a message of social justice. The organization’s slogan was “Against War and Fascism.”

During his speech titled “The Mexican Experience in Art,” however, the political firebrand Siqueiros spoke out against more than just fascism. Since the early 1930s, the artist had been evolving some of the most radical techniques in mural painting, preferring quick-drying cement and automobile lacquer shot from a commercial spray-gun to the traditional pigment-and-plaster fresco methods adopted by his compatriots.

For Siqueiros, revolutionary ideas required revolutionary techniques and materials; you simply couldn’t make a moving work of political art in the modern era with the same techniques used by religious practitioners in 13th-century monasteries.

The artists present listened to Siqueiros’s speech with great interest and excitement. So much so that, not long after, they helped him to establish the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop in a studio space in Union Square—which the artist referred to as a “Laboratory of Modern Techniques in Art”—whose mission was to teach would-be anti-fascist artists about radical new methods and materials. There, he would find an unlikely student: the future Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock.

Before he was “Jack the Dripper,” the Western-“cowboy”-turned-New-York-intellectual, or Life magazine’s proposed “Greatest Living Painter in the United States,” the young Pollock was a follower of the Mexican muralists who were working in the United States during that decade. Growing up in California, he saw Diego Rivera’s murals in San Francisco and traveled to see José Clemente Orozco’s Prometheus mural at Pomona College in 1930.

In New York, he would have seen Orozco’s work at the New School for Social Research, and he certainly couldn’t have missed the fiasco surrounding the destruction of Rivera’s mural Man at the Crossroads at the Rockefeller Center in 1934, where he witnessed it being painted a year earlier………………………………….

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