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flowing
     blond hair, once commented, “Jack didn’t want to be mistaken for anything other than
     an artist.”
    In Schwankovsky’s class, which met five times a week in a basement studio, Pollock
     first began to draw. He felt immediately dissatisfied with his work, and his high
     school image as a cocky young artist contrasts sharply with the insecure, self-disparaging
     person who emerges from his letters. Writing to Charles, his accomplished oldest brother,
     Pollock confessed to being “doubtful of any ability.” He went on to offer a devastating
     appraisal of his earliest artwork: “my drawing i will tell you frankly is rotten it
     seems to lack freedom and rythem it is cold and lifeless, it isn’t worth the postage
     to send it.” While the asperity of these comments is surely related to Pollock’s sense
     of unworthiness in the shadow of his older brother, his harsh self-criticism was not
     entirely unjustified. None of his high school drawings survives, but it may be said
     on the basis of later work that by no means was Pollock a precocious draftsman. As
     his brother Sande once said, “If you had seen his early work you’d have said he should
     go into tennis, or plumbing.”
    Whatever Pollock lacked in facility, however, he made up for in vision. It is rather
     extraordinary that in his first written appraisal of his artwork he should have faulted
     his drawing for lacking “freedom and rythem,” qualities he considered important, if
     not the essence of drawing. While most students were trying to master perspective
     and learn how to draw a realistic likeness of a face, a hand, or a bowl of fruit,
     Pollock had no patience for such details. The rules of art ran against his instincts.
     Already he was seeking “freedom” from formal conventions, sacrificing detail to the
     whole. He could not achieve what he wanted; on the other hand, he fully intended to.
     “i think there should be an advancement soon if it is ever to come,” he noted to Charles
     with characteristic self-disparagement, “and then i will send you some drawings.”
    At school Pollock felt uncomfortable among his peers. People “frightened and bored”
     him, he wrote, forcing him to remain within his “shell.” But for all his timidity,
     Pollock had no difficulty befriending—and at times alienating—his fellow students
     in Schwankovsky’s class. Philip Goldstein, a dark, angular, intense young artist who
     worshiped Piero della Francesca, would laterbecome well known as Philip Guston. He and Pollock spent many afternoons at the home
     of Manuel Tolegian, an affable, powerfully built youth of Armenian descent, who had
     converted a chicken coop behind his house into a studio for himself and his friends.
     Together, working in the dark, cramped, low-roofed studio, the three boys would pick
     out reproductions from their favorite art books and spend long hours copying the pictures.
     Both Guston and Tolegian had a natural talent for drawing; the studio walls, covered
     with pencil sketches after Uccello and Piero, offered testimony to their ability.
     Pollock’s work, by comparison, was noticeably undistinguished. But no matter how frustrated
     he may have felt, he was unwilling to admit to his classmates that he considered his
     work lacking. To the contrary, Pollock would criticize his friends’ work. “You think
     that’s original?” he used to say, eyeing his schoolmates’ copies of Renaissance masters.
     “What’s so original about that?” Though Guston tended to ignore these boyish displays,
     Tolegian would become furious, reminding Pollock in his deep, booming voice that to
     be a great artist one first had to master anatomy, linear perspective, and so on.
     Pollock apparently delighted in rousing his friend to anger. He signed Tolegian’s
     yearbook “For more and better arguments. Hugo Pollock.”
    Pollock preferred sculpting to painting or drawing. He and his friends sometimes visited
     a quarry near