Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Such shortcuts were to be expected of a man who had spent the previous five years earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard. “He was a literary, intellectual sort of person,” says one former member of the club, “and at that time that was extraordinary. He wasn’t rooted in painting. All the rest of us were.” And yet he wanted to lecture them, in a tone laced with condescension, on theories of art that had been common currency for years. Not surprisingly, most American artists were deeply insulted.

  The real insult, however, had nothing to do with art. It had to do with money: Robert Motherwell was the son of a banker.

  For artists like Pollock, who had scraped through the Depression, who had resigned themselves to the indignities of the public dole, who had joined the Communist party or at least marched in its parades, whose families had been devastated by foreclosures and bankruptcies, it was the ultimate, unforgivable sin. “Motherwell was born with gold spoons sticking out of his ears, nose, mouth, and asshole,” says Harry Holtzman, expressing a view that most artists shared. “He never suffered for a moment. He never knew want.” Although he later denied it, Motherwell apparently made no effort to hide his legacy at the time. With no visible means of support, he lived in a spacious apartment on Eighth Street and summered in Mexico and other exotic locales. In his defense, he argued that his father, the president of San Francisco’s Wells Fargo Bank, had also been ruined in the crash, but to a generation convinced that bankers caused the crash, that only seemed like poetic justice. He maintained that he received only fifty dollars a week from his father, but that was twice the wage on the WPA, and friends suspected that his mother provided additional subsidies.

  Most artists, however, kept their resentments to themselves and treated Motherwell with the same diffidence, even deference, they reserved for the Europeans with whom he was increasingly identified. Many, like Jackson, were intimidated—if not by the reality of Motherwell’s intellect, then by the illusion of his power, money, and connections. “Jack had a way of making sure that he didn’t neglect someone who might be or might become an individual of importance,” recalls Reuben Kadish. “He had respect for Motherwell’s status, if not for Motherwell himself.” If, as Motherwell claimed, he introduced Jackson to Peggy Guggenheim in October 1942, it was all the more reason for Jackson to maintain cordial relations. “Alliances were beginning to be formed,” says Steve Wheeler. “Jackson knew that Motherwell was no good as an artist, but he also knew that Motherwell had power, so he wasn’t going to come out and tell Motherwell he was full of shit.” Soon after Motherwell’s first visit and probably with Lee’s help, Jackson arranged for Motherwell to meet Hofmann and de Kooning. The results were hardly encouraging. Not only was Hofmann hostile to the psychoanalytic aspects of automatism, as explained by Motherwell, but Jackson managed to drink too much jug wine during their short visit and had to be carried back to his apartment by Motherwell and the elderly Hofmann. “It was a helluva job,” Motherwell recalled. The meeting with de Kooning also misfired. Jackson had apparently forgotten to inform him of the meeting time and he was asleep when Motherwell arrived.

  In another uncharacteristically politic gesture, Jackson suggested that he and Motherwell work together in preparing their collages for Peggy Guggenheim’s show. “He had been painting much longer than I had,” Motherwell said later, “and had a much more professional set-up than mine in terms of space, light, and materials.” Given Jackson’s resistance to working in groups and his distaste for Motherwell, it seems unlikely that he would share his studio for any reason other than political expediency, combined, perhaps, with pressure from Lee. The two spent a long afternoon in the spring of 1943, during which Motherwell was shocked by Jackson’s “attack on the material.” He tore the paper, spit on it, and burned the edges with a kitchen match. “Generally, he worked with a violence I had never seen before,” said Motherwell. “I can still remember watching him with a mounting tension, fearing I don’t know what.” Such incidents only underscored the differences between Jackson and the cerebral Motherwell who had noted with disdain the T-shirt Jackson was wearing the day the two first met. (In a classic left-handed compliment, Motherwell professed admiration for Jackson’s “left-handed intelligence” and compared him to “Marlon Brando in scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire,” except that “Brando was much more controlled than Pollock.”)

  Motherwell might have succeeded where Matta had failed, even without the love of his countrymen. He was by far the most eloquent and persuasive spokesman for the two galvanic ideas of the decade: automatism and an end to European domination. American artists of every stripe could agree, in the abstract at least, that painting was more important than theory and that the time had come for them to take their rightful place beside the European masters. His theory of “plastic automatism” fused Surrealist philosophy with the modernists’ plastic concerns, but it remained only a theory—text without illustrations. Like Breton and Matta before him, Motherwell still lacked the most important ingredient for a new movement: compelling art.

  Matta had been right: to steal the limelight from the Europeans and inspire American artists to their best efforts, a “manifestation” more beautiful and more compelling than anything seen before was needed. If the images were right, the movement would coalesce on its own. Despite his enthusiasm, his soirees, and his workshops, Matta had been unable to elicit the necessary creative spark. Interest in his new movement, both among artists and among dealers like Peggy Guggenheim, dissolved in frustration. Motherwell, for all his political machinations, had also failed. But their efforts left behind an unexpired impetus for change and an expectation, urgent and pervasive, that a triumphant manifestation was just around the corner; that after wandering through the decades in search of expression, Surrealist ideas, rooted in Freud and the disillusionment following World War I, would finally find appropriate images; and that those images would, like the ambient war, affirm America’s new position of leadership in the world.

  In short, the American art community was primed for a breakthrough.

  28

  EXCITING AS ALL HELL

  In the dying days of the Project, still on the government payroll, and safe in the emotional haven created by Lee, Jackson painted his first masterpieces. They appeared almost by surprise. The spring and summer of 1942 had been a total loss. Between Stella’s arrival, Lee’s attentions, the Project’s uncertainties, and Sande’s departure, Jackson had been too busy coping, or failing to cope, to manage more than a few perfunctory drawings. In September, however, Lee’s move into the Eighth Street apartment gave him the courage to confront, for the first time openly and confidently, the demons that had tormented and congested his imagination for more than a decade, while the lessons of the past few years—Graham and Picasso, Henderson and Jung, Matta and automatism, Miró, Matisse and even Siqueiros—gave him a rich new vocabulary of images. The result, in three paintings all done in the last three months of 1942, was an imagery far more original, compelling, complex, and accomplished than anything he had yet produced.

  In Stenographic Figure, a grotesque female sits across a table from a timid, emaciated male figure. She offers him something (food, perhaps), her great gray paw reaching across the canvas in a gesture that is both generous and menacing. It is a subject—the possessive, all-providing, castrating female—that has haunted Jackson’s art since the early thirties, but the imagery is startlingly new. Stella, who visited Jackson and Lee in New York several times during the months when the work was painted, has been transformed from the implacable monster of Jackson’s Orozcoesque drawings into a familiar, if still frightening, domestic harridan. Her breasts are no longer huge, limp, and empty, but round, firm, and full, like Lee’s. In fact, Stella has become Lee, recognizable by her sharp tongue, bug eye, and withering gaze, as well as her ambiguous gesture of possessiveness. The male figure, although still introverted and self-negating, is no longer a skull-headed victim, and no longer a child. Gone is the oppressive bleakness and vicious
caricature of the drawings of skeletal females. Gone, too, are the burned-out palette and furious brush strokes of Orozco. In their place are the luminous, self-confident colors of Picasso and Matisse. The vision is no longer nightmarish and claustrophobic, but suddenly spacious and brightly lit. To underscore the newfound sense of playfulness—an echo of the Miró retrospective he had seen earlier the same year—Jackson covered the canvas with a scrim of numbers, letters, lines, and doodles. Clearly an afterthought (some or all were added after the signature), these graffiti were probably a sly allusion to the automatist experiments going on in Matta’s studio at the same time. Peter Busa, who saw the paintings at several stages, recalls that Jackson had originally included whole words, but later decided they were too distracting and used instead “arbitrary scribbles” and “numbers that he considered lucky” (especially 4 and 6, both of which had appeared recurrently in his street addresses).

  An even more direct tribute to Lee is Moon Woman, a painting in which Jackson depicts the vulnerable, intimate face of female sexuality that Lee had shown him for the first time. The woman’s head is gently rounded, her features inscribed in careful, Piccasoid profile. There are no bared teeth or wild eyes. One of her hands is drawn up toward her mouth in a gesture of apprehension or maidenly reticence. The other holds a flower. Instead of claws, she has plump, round fingers. Her body is a series of sensuous black lines draped in pinks and delicate shades of blue—baby, teal, sky, and aquamarine—surrounded by a sumptuously flattering field of raspberry shading to plum. On the left side of the canvas is a line of blue ovals, each inscribed with a simple design, laid out like a jeweler’s assortment of cameos. After the bestiary of the Henderson drawings and the obscene earth mothers of earlier years, Moon Woman is an astonishingly tender and lyrical work, no doubt reflecting the sense of release and fulfillment that Jackson found in the first few months of life with Lee.

  Sexual fulfillment also allowed Jackson to confront on canvas for the first time the most sensitive topic of all: his own sexual identity, the inner struggle between masculine and feminine imperatives that had been pulling him apart since Evelyn Porter’s tea parties in Phoenix. In Male and Female, the confrontation is once again across a table. On either side, tall black figures face each other in a cubistic showdown. On the right, partially hidden behind a blackboard-like slab on which Jackson has painted more numbers, is a figure with the curvaceous breasts and pink skin of the Moon Woman as well as the grotesque Picassoid head with dangling jaw of the harpy in Stenographic Figure. But there is also a suggestion of genitals and an ejaculation. The figure on the left is equally ambiguous, with shapely breasts and luxurious lashes on its displaced Picassoid eyes, as well as testicles and an exuberantly long, flaccid penis. Only one thing is not at all ambiguous: Jackson’s elation at having finally discovered his own potency. As the figure on the right ejaculates, a white column to the left shoots a celebratory jet of yellow, red, and black into the air where it spreads out like fireworks in a multicolored burst of automatist drips and splatters that hints—for the first time—at the great drip paintings to come.

  The elation was short-lived. In December 1942, events in the outside world cut short Jackson’s productive euphoria. After more than seven years, Franklin Roosevelt gave the WPA “an honorable discharge.” The art projects had finally reached the end of the road. Within a few years, government warehouses would quietly begin auctioning off thousands of unallocated canvases by the pound, along with old copper and scrap iron. Murals were covered over with institutional green paint, lost, or in some cases indignantly destroyed, while easel paintings, according to one account, “went home with bureaucrats, to dank storerooms, or to incinerators.” When a cache of hundreds of Project paintings, including several by Jackson, turned up at a secondhand store in Manhattan two years later, the news created a sensation. A plumber had bought the whole lot at government auction for four cents a pound, intending to use the canvas as pipe insulation. He sold it only when he discovered that “pipe heat and oil paint produced an unattractive smell.” When they heard the news, artists, including Jackson, rushed to reclaim their works at three to five dollars apiece (twenty-five dollars for murals).

  Both Lee and Jackson stuck with the Project to the bitter end. After finishing the department store window displays in October, Lee was given another project in the War Services Division designing posters for navy recruiting stations. She promptly retrieved Jackson from a Project sheet-metal training job in Brooklyn where he had spent a brief but humiliating eight days (at a forty dollar cut in salary), then recruited the rest of Matta’s “workshop”—Peter Busa, Gerome Kamrowski, and Bill Baziotes—for her team. The result was “the most unregimented group of artists that you can imagine as far as carrying out a project,” Busa recalls. “We spent most of our time making automatic drawings instead of war propaganda.” Two months later, the pink slips came.

  Despite all the warning signs and years of anticipation, few artists were really prepared for the end when it arrived. Many had forgotten what it was like to find and keep a regular job. The young ones had little or no memory of an art world without government largesse. In seven years, the art community and the Project had become almost synonymous. “The question on everybody’s mind,” recalls one artist, “was ‘Is there life after the WPA?’”

  Like many artists, Lee, Busa, and Baziotes opted for one of the government-sponsored vocational training programs designed to ease the transition from government payroll to the real working world. At a “salary” of seventeen dollars a week (about half what the projects paid), they enrolled in a mechanical drafting course at the New York Trade School on East Sixty-seventh Street in Manhattan. According to Lee, they were given “hunks of machinery” to draw and pages of lettering to copy. After years of creative freedom, it may have been witless drudgery, but at least it paid the rent.

  That wasn’t enough, however, to assuage Jackson’s pride. Although assigned to a similar course in Brooklyn, he either never went, was fired, or quit after just a few days. When Stella came to visit in February, she found him unemployed and only planning “to take a course of some sort” at some future date. Still, Lee’s seventeen dollars a week wasn’t nearly enough to pay for rent, clothes, food, and materials. Although Jackson, like many artists, had liberated as much canvas and paint as he could from the WPA store before it closed (wrapping his legs with canvas and striding out with stiff-legged nonchalance), artists’ supplies were becoming increasingly expensive as the war interrupted and diverted lines of supply. When he was reduced to shoplifting tubes of paint, even Jackson had to acknowledge that they were “dead broke” and that the only solution, however unpleasant, was to find a paying job.

  Through his old Art Students League friend, Joe Meert, he landed a night job as a “squeegee man” silk-screening designs on lipstick tubes, neckties, scarves, and plates at Creative Printmakers, a breezeless back-room sweatshop on Eighteenth Street. Between financial need and affection for Meert, Jackson managed to struggle through two months of ink and noise while his consumption of alcohol soared and his productivity sank.

  It was becoming increasingly clear that if Jackson was ever to be productive again, he had to find a reliable means of support. For a while, Lee hoped that she could provide it, but she lost her first drafting job after only five days and, according to her, “that was the end of that career.” Besides, Jackson didn’t want her to work. “Other artists were being supported by their wives,” said Lee, “but Jackson didn’t want me out working. He wanted me home.” With Jackson unable to hold a job and paint at the same time, and Lee unemployed, there was only one solution: “Jackson was totally determined to live from the sale of his paintings,” Lee recalled.

  It was a preposterous notion. Apart from the Project, no American avant-garde artist had ever lived entirely on proceeds from the sale of his art. None had even tried. Most had other jobs—as dentists (Herbert Ferber, Seymour Lipton) or designers (Willem de Kooning, John Little)—o
r had wives with jobs (Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman). A few, like Motherwell and Bultman, had family money. But no one had dared throw himself on the mercy of a “market” for contemporary American art that, in reality, didn’t yet exist. The Project’s stated aim of integrating the work of creative artists into America’s daily life had failed miserably. In 1940, after five years of “education,” the American public still spent less than $500,000 on contemporary art. The entire market—including the vast traditionalist establishment—supported only 150 American artists at a level of $2,000 a year or better. To make matters worse, by 1942, the influx of European masters had siphoned off what little interest there was in modern art. New York dealers, mostly Europeans themselves, fought for the privilege of representing the visitors. American museums like the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art courted them. American collectors like the Reises and the Murphys threw parties for them, put them up, and bought their paintings. When Gypsy Rose Lee, the stripper-turned national icon, began to collect modern art in the early forties, a friend recalls, “she wouldn’t look at anything except Max Ernst.”

  In fact, for a young, avant-garde American artist looking to make a living from painting, there was only one place to turn. Only one person was a prominent collector and gallery owner with both the money and the bravery (or eccentricity) to buy paintings from relatively unknown artists—even American artists. That person was Peggy Guggenheim.

  The role of savior of American avant-garde art was a new one for Peggy Guggenheim. Like many of the American elite at the time, she had spent most of her life in the thrall of European art—and European artists. The sole joy in a childhood otherwise “filled with torments” had been the trips that she and her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, had taken to Europe every summer. When Benjamin died on the Titanic in 1912, Peggy began a lifelong search, on the Continent they had shared, for a man to replace him. As soon as she could, she fled her family—“those stupid, staid, bourgeois people”—and her country to join the wave of expatriates who filled the cafés and nightclubs of Paris in the twenties. She frequented chic Montparnasse watering holes like the Dôme and the Rotonde, conspicuous in her long lamé dresses, with her shaved eyebrows, bobbed hair, and twenty-inch cigarette holder. Enchanted by her visits to the great salons of the day, she began holding her own salons at a Montparnasse studio. Julien Levy, who arrived one evening with Marcel Duchamp, found “the place was crowded. Hemingway, Pound, Cocteau, Gide … I don’t know who all was there.”