Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Beginning in the spring of 1942, Lee’s supporting role in Jackson’s life extended even to the Project. Caught up in the patriotic fervor following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, WPA administrators eagerly offered the beleaguered remnants of their work force to the secretaries of war and navy. In March, the art, museum, and craft projects were reorganized under the WPA War Services Subdivision. Purely “creative” projects were scrapped and those few artists who didn’t leave the Project to enlist or take jobs in defense industries were put to work painting camouflage for tanks and ships, or designing propaganda posters. Among the projects abandoned was the mural commission at radio station WNYC that Lee had been promised for years. Furious at the last-minute betrayal, she signed a petition to President Roosevelt demanding that the project be taken out of local hands and that artists be allowed to contribute to “the culture of this country.” But when offered a position as supervisor of a War Services project, she took it without protest. The job was to design nineteen department store window displays announcing war-related training courses at local schools and colleges. As director, she not only could design the displays, she could also choose her assistants. Her first choice, of course, was Jackson. From April through September, she accompanied him to the WPA studio and watched him work—or loaf—with an indulgent eye. “It was like he was appointed by the queen to be on that project,” recalls one of Jackson’s co-workers. “Lee certainly looked out for him.”

  Jackson’s drift away from old friends, which had begun under Graham’s influence, accelerated under Lee’s. Even relatively recent friends like the Schardts and the Strautins no longer played the quotidian role that they had when Sande and Arloie shared the apartment. “She protected him,” recalls Nene Schardt. “After Lee came into the picture, we were in the shadows, all the old friends. She didn’t keep us away; he just didn’t come over as often.” When Reuben Kadish stopped by on leave from the army or Peter Busa paid a visit, Lee was courteous and correct, but even they felt the heavy curtain of her concern being drawn around Jackson. The most prominent victim of what Lee later called a “shedding” process was Jackson’s analyst, Violet de Laszlo. From her first encounter with Lee, de Laszlo sensed that her role in Jackson’s life was being preempted. “Jackson was usually drawn to women as emotional refuges,” de Laszlo recalls, “so I wasn’t surprised that he found a refuge in Lee. And I thought she was good for him. She knew what she was doing, what he needed at the time.” When de Laszlo’s sessions with Jackson ended sometime before the summer of 1942, the parting was amicable on all sides. “It was a natural development,” de Laszlo says. In gratitude, Jackson offered her any painting in his studio, but she refused, saying she didn’t want to confuse the professional relationship.

  The departure of de Laszlo and Jackson’s increasing isolation from other friends gave rise to rumors: Lee was manipulating Jackson, “systematically disengaging him from his earlier friends,” “getting rid of anybody who couldn’t help him,” grooming him for artistic success (no one yet dreamed of financial success). The rumors, chary at first, eventually grew into a full-scale legend: “She was much brighter than he was and she ran his career,” says Lionel Abel, stating it in bold outline. “She carried the ball for the enterprise. She thought the whole thing out from the beginning: how to put him over and make him a big success. How to attack rival painters and rival movements.”

  As in any good legend, almost everybody found some serviceable truth. Jackson’s friends, who found it hard to believe that he would abandon them so summarily, could blame Lee for coming between them. Lee’s friends—many of whom, like Lillian Olaney, felt that Lee had “diminished” herself by pairing with Jackson—could console themselves that she hadn’t surrendered her artistic ambitions altogether, just rechanneled them. According to some, “there would never have been a Jackson Pollock without a Lee [Krasner].” “All of Pollock’s intelligence came from Krasner,” said Ilya Bolotowsky, who had enjoyed a brief sexual encounter with Lee in the 1930s. “Jackson was guided by a definite apparition, meaning Lee,” said Isamu Noguchi. “She was the agent, be it angel or witch.”

  In reality, Lee didn’t plot or contrive grand schemes; she didn’t even give directions. In the beginning, she had only her passion, her fantasy, and a keen sense of how to realize both. “I couldn’t walk in and tell Jackson to do this or do that,” she said later, “even if I had wanted to.” The telling point, of course, is that she didn’t want to. Being dominated was the fantasy, not dominating. The challenge was not to work her will, but to anticipate and fulfIll Jackson’s. “Jackson and Irving were just alike in that way,” says Lee’s sister, Ruth Stein. “If Jackson wanted things a certain way, that’s the way they were.” The ruthless, manipulative Lee Krasner of later years began as an anxious housewife hurrying home to fix her husband dinner. Hans Hofmann later recalled that “she gave in all the time [to Jackson]. She was very feminine.” On matters of business, especially, she deferred to Jackson’s judgment—as she did throughout their years together. “Lee had no real business sense,” says Clement Greenberg. “In a showdown, she would go to pieces. It was Jackson who had the courage of his convictions. Lee manned the phones and did the detail work.”

  Whatever Lee did, she did out of passion, not personal ambition. If she kept Jackson from others, it was because she wanted him to need her more. If she shielded him from competition or attacked rival painters, it was because she understood his insecurity and was quick—often too quick—to see a slight. If she introduced him to “people who could be influential in getting him to the top,” it was because she genuinely believed in his talent—as seen through the magnifying glass of her infatuation. If she stopped painting, it was because she wanted to spare him the competition—not, as some claimed, because “Jackson insisted on it.” She would never have let it come to that. “Lee was completely devoted to Jackson and his work,” says Wally Strautin. “Completely. That’s why she gave up everything she had and everything she was.”

  (After Jackson’s death, Lee would cling to his paintings tenaciously, resisting pressures to sell them en masse, instead doling them out cautiously to the right museums and collectors for the right prices over a period of almost thirty years. At her death, hundreds of his works remained in her personal collection. According to some, she was simply manipulating the market, keeping the supply of Pollocks low and the price high. Friends praised her sagacity. Some went even further. “Mrs. Jackson Pollock,” wrote Harold Rosenberg in 1965, “is often credited with having almost single-handedly forced up prices for contemporary American abstract art after the death of her husband.” But Lee’s motivations were in a different sphere entirely. Prices and markets never mattered to her as much as Jackson did. Even forty years after their first meeting, her actions were based less on market savvy than on an older, more enduring calculus. “It wasn’t that she was trying to raise the prices,” says Donald McKinney, who worked with Lee in setting the prices for Jackson’s paintings during the 1960s; “it was partly that she couldn’t make up her mind, and selling a work required making up her mind. But even more it was a matter of love. It was simply that she loved him so much, she didn’t want to let go of anything, not the smallest drawing, unless she absolutely had to. She didn’t want to let go of anything that represented him.”)

  The legend also gave Jackson no role in his own “discovery.” Lee alone made it happen. More “articulate and cool-headed, as well as more aggressive and ‘political’” than Jackson, she had the connections and she made the introductions that launched his career. As for Jackson, he was at best a pawn in Lee’s grand scheme; at worst, a hindrance. To illustrate the latter, Lee delighted in telling the story of Alexander Calder’s disastrous visit to Jackson’s studio early in 1942. “After looking at the paintings, [Calder] said, ‘They’re all so dense.’ He meant that there was no space in them. Jackson answered, ‘Oh, you want to see one less dense, one with open space?’ And he went back for a painting and came out with the dens
est of all. That’s the way he could be.” The message was clear: Lee didn’t just make Jackson’s career for him, she made it in spite of him.

  In reality, of course, she had considerable help: from her own friends, especially the Matters, who had arranged Calder’s visit, from Jackson’s friends, and even from Jackson himself. John Graham, whose McMillen show had launched Jackson’s career, barely knew Lee at the time of the show, whereas Jackson had been a regular companion for two years. It was Jackson who took Lee to tea at Graham’s Greenwich Avenue apartment where, Krasner recalls, “you didn’t talk, you listened.” Another of Jackson’s friends, Reuben Kadish, helped with the most precious asset of all—buyers. On leave from the army in 1942, he brought Jeanne Reynal, the artist, and Emily Davis, the collector, to the Eighth Street studio. When he returned to San Francisco, he persuaded Dr. Grace McCann Morley, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Art, to visit Jackson on her next trip east. Eventually, all three women would buy major Pollock paintings.

  Nowhere was Lee’s hand more evident, according to the legend, than in Jackson’s art. Wrote one commentator: “Lee’s influence on Jackson, which everyone who witnessed it describes as profound, was to turn him away from the crude and barbaric expressionist modes that reflected primitive and archaic styles and to direct his attention to the sophisticated cosmopolitan art of the School of Paris.” In this and similar versions of the legend, Jackson invariably appears as the “bumpkin” to whom Lee revealed the wonders of modernism. “Krasner put [Jackson] in touch with the aesthetics of modernism,” writes Barbara Rose, “and a more international, sophisticated view of art than Benton’s narrow provincialism.” “She helped Pollock a great deal through her intelligence and background,” said Ilya Bolotowsky, “because he originally was a Benton student.” It was as if Jackson had walked out of Benton’s studio and into Lee Krasner’s arms. The legend ignored not only Jackson’s two years with Graham but even the art itself, which, according to one visitor to the McMillen show, “was immediately recognized by other painters as wise in the ways of School of Paris art.”

  But to Lee’s friends at the time and to purveyors of the legend ever since, an artist’s pedigree was almost as important as his art. In order for Jackson, the bumpkin student of the discredited Benton, to sire great art, his thin, Regionalist blood had to be mixed with the true blue blood of modernism. Unaware of Jackson’s extensive contacts with Graham, many modernists saw Lee Krasner as the only link between Jackson and the modernist mainstream. Her pedigree, through Hofmann, was impeccable. (Hofmann later said, “[Pollock] was never a student of mine, but he was a student of my student.”) As Jackson’s star rose, the legend-builders claimed more and more credit for Lee until, after Jackson’s death, some even argued that “any ultimate assessment of their relative roles” in Jackson’s art was “impossible.”

  Lee apparently began their relationship determined to enlighten Jackson. For two or three months, beginning with a misguided effort to recruit him for Hofmann’s school, she urged him to “convert” to modernism and repent his numerous sins. “When I first met Pollock, we disagreed on many things,” she said later. In fact, they disagreed on almost everything: She criticized his paintings for “not [being] abstract enough”; he ridiculed her for painting from life. He didn’t understand Cubism or care much for it; she pooh-poohed Jung. She was constantly revising her works; he “preferred a one-shot deal.” He didn’t appreciate Matisse or Mondrian; she reviled Siqueiros (who was rumored to have had a hand in Trotsky’s assassination). He even maintained a residue of respect for Benton; Lee wondered how anyone “could take [Benton] seriously as a painter.” Jackson didn’t think enough about painting; Lee wouldn’t “just shut up and paint.” One of the few things they had in common was an admiration for Picasso and Guernica. But even that touched off arguments: Lee distinguished the formal properties (which she admired) from the psychological properties (which she dismissed), while Jackson refused to separate the two. They were long, loud, captious months. In an unguarded moment, Lee admitted it was “a violent transition and upheaval.” Even love, apparently, couldn’t bridge the artistic gap. On Eighth Street, Jackson continued to work through Picasso and Jung while, on Ninth Street, Lee, still painting at this point, continued to labor over Hofmannesque abstractions. Once, when Jackson was visiting her studio, Steve Wheeler remembers seeing her “try to show Jackson how to make the ‘perfect picture’ that Hofmann always talked about.”

  The antagonisms finally came to a head in Jackson’s studio. “[Lee] was trying to tell Jackson what he was doing, what Cubism was,” recalls Peter Busa, who was there, “but Jackson was tuning her out as usual.” In a fit of pique, Lee grabbed a brush from Jackson’s palette and, to emphasize a point, thrust it toward the unfinished painting on Jackson’s easel. Busa couldn’t tell if she meant for the brush to make contact or not, but it did, leaving a conspicuous dark red blotch. Jackson exploded, “Go ahead, you work on the fucking thing!” and stormed out of the room.

  According to Lee, it was several months before their relationship recovered. In the interim, apparently, she had learned her lesson. “It was the last time we talked about aesthetics,” she admits laconically, “for a long time.” In fact, she never again broached the modernist agenda with Jackson. Abandoning ideological warfare, she retreated to the relative safety of what she called “shop talk”—terse, concrete comments about individual works. “[Jackson] would—speak specifically of the painting in front of him,” she said. On trips to museums and galleries, they communicated in a “shorthand” of grunts and nods and appreciative noises. Occasionally, one or the other would mutter, “Great painting!”

  In time, Lee would vehemently deny that she and Jackson had ever had any artistic discussions—or, by implication, any disagreements. “I practically had to hit him to make him say anything at all,” she told one interviewer. “We never discussed our work.” “We didn’t talk art,” she said on another occasion. “We didn’t have that kind of relationship at all.” It was as if the first few rancorous months had never happened.

  Gradually, Lee’s artistic ideals, like everything else, were caught in the undertow of infatuation. She abandoned Hofmann’s method of working from “nature”—still lifes, models, landscapes—and tried to work “from inside”—“the way Jackson did.” She consciously tried to “lose Cubism,” “to jettison all objectivity, and reach inside herself for imagery.” She had set out to convert Jackson and ended up being converted by him. “Pollock was too demanding,” says a friend. “He was too powerful for Lee. He just obliterated her artistically. She didn’t know where he drew his power from, and she never came close to that source herself.”

  To her credit, Lee never claimed that she did. That part of the lore was largely the product of other mouths and other agendas. “I daresay that the only possible influence that I might have had,” she once said, “was to bring Pollock an awareness of Matisse”—a claim corroborated by Jackson’s shift in 1942 from the turgid browns and reds of Orozco to the incandescent pinks and purples and turquoises of Matisse. She also could have claimed, but didn’t, the substantial cumulative impact of her “shop talk”: that slight but persistent current of offhand comments, appreciative nods, and puzzled looks that, over time, undoubtedly affected Jackson’s artistic course. “Lee was crucial to Jackson, no doubt about it,” says Clement Greenberg, “but not in introducing him to new art, which he already knew, or even in training his eye, which was his own. Her real contribution was in telling him what was good and what was bad in his own work, in being his editor.”

  Ultimately, Lee’s real contribution wasn’t artistic at all, at least not directly; it was emotional. She gave Jackson what Stella had always refused to give: total devotion, exclusion of all others, complete primacy—even over her own career—and sexual fulfillment. It was the resolution Jackson had sought unsuccessfully for thirty years. “Jackson was a person waiting to be born,” recalls a friend, “and Lee saw right away what t
o do to make him happy. He was her artwork.” She created, for the first time since 1934, when Sande came to New York, an emotional open space where, for a while at least, Jackson could wrestle the demons inside without being overwhelmed by them. “Her impact was beyond words,” says Ethel Baziotes. “She kept a deep sense of his needs and the needs of his art. Both would have been quite different without her.”

  With her, and with the order she brought to his emotional life, Jackson could finally focus his tumultuous psychic energy on painting. At almost the same moment, the tides of war were changing the face of the art world, bringing new people and new ideas into his orbit. It would prove a fateful coincidence. Contrary to legend, Lee didn’t drag Jackson into the mainstream of Western art. She didn’t have to. It came to him.

  27

  A WELLSPRING OF INSPIRATION

  Shoppers who looked in the windows of Bonwit Teller at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street on the morning of Thursday, March 16, 1939, were shocked by what they saw. Many stopped and stared. Some exchanged bemused smiles. A few rushed straight to the manager’s office to complain: they had seen many “screwy” window displays before, but nothing like this—nothing so “risqué” or “extreme.” The manager tried to explain that the store had hired “the World’s No. I Surrealist” to design a window, but it didn’t help. “It’s not art,” said one customer, “it’s perversity.”

  No one would have enjoyed the brouhaha more than the artist responsible for it, Salvador Dali. Only two weeks after arriving from Paris, he had been asked to create a Surrealist “folly” for two of Bonwit’s windows. He had labored all through the previous night with the store’s bewildered window crew bringing his vision to life. In one window, entitled “Day/Narcissus,” a mannequin, clad only in long red hair and a few green feathers, stepped into a bathtub lined in black Persian lamb and filled with water. Three disembodied hands floated eerily on the water, each holding a mirror. The walls were tufted in purple leather and studded with mirrors. In the other window, “Night/Sleep,” a mannequin lay naked on a bed of what appeared to be red-hot coals. Above her was the head of an animal, described by one reporter as “a stuffed trophy” and by another as “a water buffalo headboard.” Dali helpfully identified it as “the decapitated head and the savage hoofs of a great somnambulist buffalo extenuated by a thousand years of sleep.”