Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  “American and French Paintings” opened at McMillen, Inc., on January 20, 1942. Although largely ignored by war-preoccupied New Yorkers, the show was a milestone for Jackson. His painting, Birth, a turbulent canvas of Picassoid heads transforming into Indian masks, hung in the company of works by Picasso, Rouault, Modigliani, Matisse, Braque, Bonnard, Derain, and de Chirico. The roster of American artists wasn’t as exclusive as Lee had hoped (she later misled people to believe that she and de Kooning were the only other Americans in the show). It included Stuart Davis, Virginia Diaz, Pat Collins, Walt Kuhn, and H. Leavitt Purdy, as well as two of Graham’s Russian friends, Alexander Vasilieff and David Burliuk. In such a crowd, it was unlikely that anyone, especially among the Americans, would be singled out by reviewers, but Jackson was. In a review titled “Mélange,” James Lane wrote that Jackson’s painting “resembles [Stanley William] Hayter in general whirling figures.” Hardly a rave (Lane thought Diaz “walked off with the show”), but it was at least something to show for a decade of work, and it came at a good time. A week after the exhibition opened, Jackson celebrated his thirtieth birthday.

  For Lee, the McMillen show was a milestone of a different sort; her painting, an abstraction derived from Picasso, hung between works by Matisse and Braque. “Just being in that show and being with Pollock,” she recalled, “the whole newness of it all overwhelmed me.”

  In her newfound enthusiasm, Lee rushed to show Jackson off. She took him first to meet her “uptown” friends, the Matters. A ravishingly beautiful woman, Mercedes Matter had modeled with Lee in the thirties and attended Hofmann’s school. Her husband, Herbert, a Swiss-born graphic designer and photographer, had known the Giacometti brothers in Europe, as well as Josef Albers and Fernand Léger. Inevitably, the Matter town house on East Forty-second Street became a “meeting place” for painters, sculptors, critics, curators, and designers. Léger had lived on the third floor when he first came to America in the late thirties. (“He was an incredible cook,” Herbert remembers.) Alexander Calder had kept his Circus in the basement. When the Matters entertained, their guests included Peggy Guggenheim, James Johnson Sweeney, and James Thrall Soby, the chairman of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.

  But on this night, their only guests were Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. For Lee, it was the first of many frustrating social events. “We sat in the living room and tried to talk,” she remembers, “but Jackson didn’t say a word.” Neither did the equally laconic Herbert. The two women “talked a blue streak,” until Mercedes excused herself to bathe the baby, and Lee, hoping the two men might “find their voices” if left alone, joined her. “After a while we stopped and listened for some sign of life from downstairs,” Mercedes remembers. “But there wasn’t any. Not a sound. We panicked. I said to Lee, ‘Oh, my God, you’ve got to go down.’” In fact, in the silence, the two men were laying the foundations of a close friendship. “After the women disappeared,” Herbert Matter remembers, “Jackson said, ‘It’s really a wonderful time to be living.’ That gave us plenty to think about the rest of the evening.”

  Lee’s friends from the Hofmann school were not so easily impressed. The women especially—an articulate, aggressive group—rejected the newcomer out of hand. “I can’t say that he came into my life with flags flying,” admitted Lillian Olaney. “[We] were a small group of prejudiced snobs and we had a high regard for Lee. He seemed beneath her.” Jackson suffered from being compared to the glamorous extrovert who preceded him in Lee’s life. “We were all very fond of Igor,” Olaney recalled, “and of that kind of flamboyance. So when Jackson came along, we thought that Lee was in a sense compromising herself.” Herbert Matter may have been won over by Jackson’s quiet strength, but most of Lee’s friends took it as a sign of mental deficiency. “He seemed like a drag on Lee,” said Olaney, “like she was the teacher and he was her slow pupil.” They also had grave reservations about his art. “We took our painting very seriously and we weren’t sure where all this higgledy-piggledy painting of his fit in the line of modern art.” Their suspicions were confirmed when they discovered that Jackson had studied with Benton, modernism’s archenemy.

  In general, the men in Lee’s circle were less hostile, although still far from enthusiastic. Before the McMillen show, Lee took Jackson to Willem de Kooning’s studio on West Twenty-first Street and introduced him to the widely respected young Dutchman. “I don’t think either one was very impressed with the other,” Lee recalls. On the day she had arranged for him to meet John Little, who was about to leave for the navy, Jackson disappeared. “He’s probably at a bar,” Lee said, indicating that even this early in their relationship, she was aware of the hazards ahead. When Jackson showed up later that night, Little “rather liked him. He was very quiet and shy. He didn’t try to make an impression. He wasn’t a bully like some of my artist friends.” Clement Greenberg had much the same reaction when he ran into Lee and Jackson on the sidewalk outside the liquor warehouse where he worked as a customs appraiser. “There was Lee with this guy in a gray felt hat with a top coat,” Greenberg remembers. “He looked so bourgeois in it.” Taking her cue from John Graham, Lee said, “in her uncouth way, ‘This guy is going to be a great artist,’” according to Greenberg. “Jackson looked embarrassed. He had a nice open face. He didn’t say much and smiled reluctantly.”

  Undaunted by the reactions of Hofmann’s circle, Lee finally summoned the courage to introduce Jackson to Hofmann himself. After puffing up five flights of stairs, the fastidious Hofmann was “absolutely aghast” at the sight of Jackson’s unkempt studio. “The Hofmann school was immaculate,” Lee recalls. “We didn’t scrub the floors with lye but we might as well have. You could eat off them.” Jackson’s studio, in contrast, was “an incredible mess,” with hundreds of coffee cans scattered about, filled with dried and drying paint. In the middle of the devastation, Hofmann found Jackson’s palette with a brush lying on it. When he picked up the brush, the entire palette came with it. “With this you could kill a man,” Hofmann muttered. “That’s the point,” Jackson replied. From that high point, the encounter swiftly deteriorated. “Hofmann, being a teacher, spent all the time talking about art,” Lee remembered. “Finally, Pollock couldn’t stand it any longer and said, ‘Your theories don’t interest me. Put up or shut up! Let’s see your work.’” As Jackson undoubtedly knew, Hofmann rarely showed his work even to close friends, so the two men just glared at each other in silent stalemate.

  From such social debacles, both Lee and Jackson learned their lessons: Lee stopped staging elaborate introductions to her friends while Jackson practiced ignoring them. The compromise worked well, although it produced some awkward moments. When May Rosenberg visited on one of her weekend trips from Washington, D.C., where Harold had taken a job in the Office of War Information, she was surprised to find “a silent-looking man in dungarees” in Lee’s studio. “He just sat there,” Rosenberg remembers, “and Lee didn’t introduce him. She didn’t say anything about him then, or at lunch afterwards. On the way out I said good-bye to him. I though the was a janitor, or somebody who was deaf or half-witted, and she was giving him little jobs to do. When I came back the next time, I was shocked to find him there again. Then Lee told me that this was Jackson Pollock.”

  Lee and Jackson’s relationship may not have stirred much enthusiasm in Lee’s circle, but at 46 East Eighth Street, it was greeted with barely restrained joy and sighs of relief. Arloie found Lee “a very straightforward, take-charge kind of woman” when they met for the first time in mid-December. “She inspired confidence: in us, and in Jackson.” Arloie had good reason to be hopeful; no one was more anxious to be rid of Jackson. For years she had maneuvered to keep from becoming pregnant, waiting for the day when she and Sande could afford a place of their own. Finally, as a kind of ultimatum, she had borne a child, Karen, on November 9, 1941. “She got pregnant in order to break up the household,” says her son Jason McCoy. “She had been living with Jackson
for six years and that was enough.” Arloie wasted no time in taking advantage of Lee’s arrival. In early 1942, at her insistence, Jackson began spending most nights at Lee’s studio. When he returned to the Eighth Street apartment during the day, the common door was kept locked.

  In February, Jackson’s landlord summarily raised the rent for the second time in a year, citing the exigencies of war. “The gouge is on,” Sande wrote Charles, “and we’re the victims.” Jackson, who had planned to stay in the apartment even if the unthinkable happened and Sande moved out, now faced the even more unnerving prospect of looking for a new place to live—on his own for the first time in a decade. At the last minute, Sande appealed to the landlord, pleading poverty and his small baby. “I had a talk with the landlord and it seems we may have come to terms,” he wrote Charles in March. “I rather hope so as moving [would] be difficult at this time.”

  Extremely difficult, given Sande’s job prospects. Despite repeated eulogies, the Project still clung to life, but between the draft and the boom in war-related industrial production, the end was imminent. In a national emergency, no one could justify make-work for the able-bodied. Sande had been laid off a second time in 1941 when the mural he had been working on since 1938 at the Marine Air Terminal was finally completed. Already, Project workers were being reassigned to the war effort and Project rolls were considered “shopping lists” for local draft boards. Particularly terrifying to Sande was a rumor that the army would begin drafting married men with children who were not “employed in war production.” In May, with help from Bill Hayden, Jackson’s drinking buddy from the Art Students League, Sande found a job as a carpenter for the Sperry Gyroscope Company in an old piano factory in Deep River, Connecticut, which had been hastily retooled to produce gliders for the army.

  In the midst of this upheaval and uncertainty, Stella Pollock wrote that she was coming to New York. At the age of ninety-four, Jennie McClure had finally died. As a twelve-year-old girl, she had watched her brother march off to be killed in the Civil War. Her husband had died on the eve of the First World War. Friends remarked that three wars were enough to kill even a strong-minded Iowa woman like Jennie McClure. After a brief stop in East Lansing to see Charles and Elizabeth, Stella headed east to visit the Low Steps. Although nothing was said, it was understood that she was coming to stay.

  Even with Lee’s support, the news of Stella’s impending visit proved too much for Jackson. The night before she was scheduled to arrive, he vanished. The next morning, Lee was awakened by an anxious knock at the door. It was Sande, wanting to know if Jackson had slept overnight at Lee’s. “No, why?” she asked, puzzled and distraught. “He’s at Bellevue,” said Sande gravely. He asked her to go with him to the hospital. “What the hell happened?” she demanded as she threw on clothes and rushed out the door. It was the first time for her. “I was a little shell-shocked,” she later admitted.

  When they arrived at the hospital, Jackson “looked awful,” Lee remembers. “They told us they had found him on some street someplace. He had blacked out totally.” At Jackson’s bedside, Sande ticked off instructions: “Put him to bed, feed him milk and eggs, and pull him together in time for dinner tonight with Mother.” Clearly, this wasn’t Sande’s first time. Lee listened dutifully and Sande left to be with Stella. When Jackson opened his eyes, he saw only Lee. He was her responsibility now. “Is this the best hotel you can find?” she drawled.

  Lee did as Sande instructed and the dinner came off, as dinners always did in the Pollock family, without a hint of friction. “It was my first meeting with Mother,” Lee recalls. “I was overpowered by her cooking. I had never seen such a spread as she put on. She had cooked all the dinner, baked the bread—the abundance was fabulous.” During dinner, she whispered to Jackson in disbelief, “Did you people eat this way every day?”

  Lee never understood Jackson’s battle with his mother. Having cut the ties to her own family so early, she couldn’t comprehend the power that Stella continued to exercise over her sons. “Lee was terribly suspicious of family as a reason for anything,” says Jason McCoy. “It was a blindness she had.” Jackson’s hostility only perplexed her. “It was easy for me to get along with [Stella],” she says, “[so] I thought, what the hell is wrong with Jackson? Why is he always going on about this mother of his? She’s a very nice lady.” At the time, Lee didn’t even connect the Bowery binge with Stella’s arrival.

  Not everyone who met Stella during her stay in New York was so purblind. Ethel Baziotes came to dinner at the Eighth Street apartment and vividly recalls the tension between mother and son. “Coming up the stairs, we could hear music so loud that everything was vibrating. That was a danger signal right there.” Once inside the apartment, Baziotes felt “danger in the air”:

  [Jackson] was very strange that night. You felt that anything you said might lead to something. Stella was wearing something dark. She was a handsome woman, but you couldn’t read her at all. She was like an American Indian woman. She sat like statuary the entire evening and didn’t move once, but she followed everything. The relationship between her and Jackson was very taut. Everything was understood between them without talking. She followed him perfectly and he followed her. It was like two cats sitting near each other. They had nothing to do with one another, but there was an energy going back and forth all the same. … All during dinner, I kept thinking of what Willa Cather said about the family being the enemy of art.

  The three months of Stella’s visit were a test for Jackson. Mother and son never spent a night under the same roof. Every night, one or the other stayed at Lee’s. “My grandmother had to be protected from the terrors of my uncle,” says Arloie’s daughter Karen. During the day, Stella shopped and “held audience,” usually at Lee’s apartment. She pressed both Jackson and Lee to bring their artist friends around for her to meet. Not once during her stay did she offer a comment about Jackson’s art, although she did, according to Lee, “seem proud of Jackson’s artistic friends.” It was only the first hint of how Stella would revel in Jackson’s later success. His was the world she had driven her family across the American West in pursuit of.

  In August, Arloie, Karen, and Stella joined Sande in Deep River. The “eccentric cowboy,” who had come to New York eight years before to be an artist, moved into a small apartment with his new family—and Stella. In so doing, he merely traded burdens. He left the Eighth Street apartment and his artistic aspirations to Jackson, and Jackson to Lee. “[Sande] had devoted a hell of a lot of time and energy to taking care of Jack,” says a family member. “In some ways his life was blighted as a result. I don’t think that’s too strong a word to use.” Now it was Lee’s turn.

  The minute Sande moved out of the Eighth Street apartment, Lee moved in and, like Sande, was almost immediately “swallowed up” in Jackson’s needs. “She totally negated herself,” Fritz Bultman recalls. “It was such a shock that a woman so strong could subordinate herself to that extent.” Everything other than Jackson seemed suddenly “irrelevant,” Lee recalled. “He was the important thing. I couldn’t do enough for him. He was not easy. But at the very beginning, he was accepting of my encouragement, attention, and love.” Just as Arloie and Sande had done for six years, she ran the household: buying groceries, washing clothes, “keeping house,” even doing Jackson’s personal errands like shopping for family presents. She had “a wonderful sense of the mechanics of living,” says Ethel Baziotes, that “meshed well with Jackson’s inadequacies.” “He couldn’t do anything for himself,” Clement Greenberg recalls. “If he went to the train station to buy himself a ticket, he’d get drunk along the way.” According to Wally Strautin, “[Lee] had to remind him to eat.”

  But for Jackson to eat, Lee had to cook—something she had never done. Almost overnight, she went from bare cabinets to collecting recipes, planning menus, and baking bread. She labored for hours in her tiny kitchen, preparing elaborate meals for two. “I wanted that role,” she said later. “I couldn’t suddenly
not be a woman, not be in love.” Peter Busa ran into her at the Waldorf Cafeteria one morning. “She was in a terrible rush,” Busa recalls. “She said, ‘If I don’t get upstairs, Jackson will be furious that his breakfast isn’t ready.’” She dressed to suit Jackson, just as she had dressed to suit Igor, swapping Continental chic for domestic propriety. In just a few months, she transformed herself from a “Bohemian vamp” to a “Peck & Peck girl.” She also became Jackson’s voice, corresponding with his relatives, making his phone calls, even speaking his thoughts. “She was always saying, ‘Pollock thinks this, Pollock thinks that,’” May Rosenberg remembers.

  Finally, Lee performed what was for her the ultimate act of self-negation. For the second time in her life, she virtually stopped painting. “She was so busy with Jack that she didn’t have any time for herself at all,” recalls Wally Strautin. Although she kept her studio on Ninth Street, she returned there rarely. The same paintings remained on the easels for more than a year. “I guess it was never a complete stop,” says Fritz Bultman, “but what is a complete stop? Death? The lapses were so long that there couldn’t have been any artistic relationship between one spurt and the next.” For the next three years, Lee would not complete a single painting. Later, she would refer to this as her “blackout” period, as though she had lost all consciousness of herself and seen only Jackson and Jackson’s art. “She never missed an occasion to talk about Jack’s work,” Strautin recalls, “but she never mentioned her own.” For a long time, only Jackson’s paintings hung in the Eighth Street apartment. “In that household,” says Reuben Kadish, “there was one painter and that was Jackson.” Some of Lee’s friends thought Jackson was to blame for the work stoppage—“He made her give up painting,” says Milton Resnick, “like a lot of artists who made their wives give up.” Mercedes Matter remembers Lee complaining that her painting “was a problem for Jackson.” But Lee had reasons of her own to quit. “Her painting had driven Igor away,” says May Rosenberg. “She was careful that the same thing didn’t happen to her again with Jackson.”