Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  In the burst of paintings that preceded the Guggenheim show, Jackson grappled with an old dilemma: how to reconcile the real world with the world of his imagination. For years, the dilemma had focused on facility: could he draw a man that looked like a man, or a bull that looked like a bull? Or would he create a drawing that more closely corresponded to the image in his own unconscious—a man becoming a bull? Or perhaps an image that wasn’t recognizable at all but conveyed, in an iconography even Jackson couldn’t explicate, revelations from his unconscious? In the decade since Benton’s class, he had tried a number of ways to reconcile these different realities—Orozco’s psychologically charged imagery, Picasso’s transformations, Jungian symbology, and finally automatism—but none had proved adequate. None had captured both the complexity and the energy of the unconscious image. Pure abstraction had also failed him. In his few experiments, especially on ceramic bowls, the abstract passages lacked the psychological intensity that identifiable images from his past could call forth. The image of a bull—or a woman or a knife or a table—with all its childhood resonance, had the power to propel Jackson through an entire painting. Abstraction, especially the formal kind preached by Hofmann and practiced by avowed automatists like Motherwell, lacked that crucial, cathartic energy.

  But representation held its own hazards. Images resonant and powerful enough to energize a painting proved also deeply threatening. They were the very images—of devouring females, charging bulls, and ambiguous sexuality—that Jackson needed most to suppress. Throughout his life, the periods of the greatest emotional upheaval were also the periods of the most explicit imagery. For two years after Bloomingdale’s, nightmare images of grotesque women and unwanted, skeletal babies had haunted his imagination. All the darkest and most monstrous truths had roamed virtually unchecked through his conscious world—disguised as anxieties only liquor could quell—and through his art, in works like Bald Woman with Skeleton and Naked Man with Knife. With Lee’s support, he had brought these demons under control, and even begun to confront them, in paintings like Stenographic Figure and Male and Female. But the fear persisted, as did the need for abstraction and the concealment it offered.

  Unfulfilled in both worlds, Jackson played on the borderline between them, wavering back and forth between the recognizable and the obscure, between representation and abstraction. No paintings reveal his dilemma more clearly than three he painted over a period of twelve months beginning in late 1942. In all three, the basic image is one of people gathered around a table, an image drawn directly from his childhood. Sidney Janis referred to Search for a Symbol, the first of the three, as “personage[s] over and about the conference table.” The figure on the left is the female, recognizable by her flowered dress and long eyelashes; the one on the right is the male. Between them, superimposed on the table, are fragments of another figure, a figure that Jackson has chosen to obliterate. Only a pair of eyes, a few biomorphic shapes, and two arms remain. At some earlier stage, apparently, the central figure was attached to the female by an umbilical cord, and one of its arms was flung around her. The other arm, now lying disembodied on the table, appears to be connected to the penis of the male figure on the left. It is an unsettling bond, made threatening by the nearby presence of a chicken—always, for Jackson, a symbol of castration and dismemberment.

  Guardians of the Secret, 1943, 48¾” × 75”

  Only seven or eight months later, Jackson conjured the same demons in another painting, Guardians of the Secret. Again, the scene is of figures gathered around a table. In the finished painting, only two figures are apparent one at either end of the table, as in Stenographic Figure, Search for a Symbol and Male and Female. Other figures are faintly suggested, obscured beneath a profusion of shapes and colors. But a photograph taken in Jackson’s studio while Guardians was in progress, reveals not two but five people seated around the table—three on the far side and one at either end. At some point in its creation Guardians was a group portrait of the Pollock family at the dinner table. It even included Gyp, lying at the foot of the table at the bottom of the picture, with his distinctive long snout, white eye patch, and brown paw. Only the loving portrait of Gyp survived the reworkings that followed, however. The figures in back, brothers presumably, were reduced to abstract motifs unrecognizable even as human forms. The figures on either side, Stella and Roy, remained, but not as the readily identifiable figures in the photograph. By the time Jackson was finished, they had been transformed into featureless “totemic figures,” stark amalgams of lines and shapes and colors that merely suggest a human precedent.

  But where was Jackson in this family portrait? Did his failure to include himself reflect his continuing sense of alienation, ten years after Roy’s death? The answer probably lies somewhere in the maze of black-and-white calligraphy that covers the tabletop around which the Pollock family has gathered. The photograph of Guardians in progress reveals nothing about what lies under the numbers and automatist doodles added at the last minute (like those in Stenographic Figure), except that it was very different from what appears in the finished painting. As in Search for a Symbol, the central figure in Guardians is missing, blotted out at the last minute by Jackson’s compulsive need to hide and hide from the truth.

  Jackson photographed by Reuben Kadish, and Kadish photographed by Jackson, 1943; Guardians of the Secret, in progress, in the background.

  By the end of the year, he had returned to the same subject a third time. On the largest canvas of his career so far, an arena almost five by eight feet, he wrestled again with his conflicting needs for revelation and for concealment. The result is a painting of furious, exploded imagery, filled with figures caught between two worlds, figures that jerk in and out of reality—a limb here, an eye, a face, a hand, a penis, a pair of haunches—but relate to each other only as line, shape, and color. Unlike Guardians, nothing is left unjumbled by abstraction. The table is still there, a faint blue oval this time, and figures hover around it—one on the left, three on the right, perhaps more in the background. Unlike She-Wolf, here Jackson hasn’t made a last-minute effort to sharpen the primary figures by filling in the background or highlighting their outlines. Background and figures and calligraphy vie fiercely for attention. In the confusion, Jackson dares to lift the veil on the central figure that remained hidden in Guardians, but only enough to reveal tantalizing fragments. In the center of the table, an animal of some sort lies on its back, its hind legs pumping the air. Its mouth appears to be open as if crying out. It may be disemboweled. The figures gathered around could be preparing to feast on it. Beyond that, meanings are swallowed up in abstraction—as Jackson no doubt intended. The painting’s title, Pasiphaë, is, like so many of Jackson’s titles, a late graft. Even Jackson’s original title, Moby-Dick, has no discernible relation to the painting. But the implications of Pasiphaë for Jackson’s art are clear. He has wrestled his imagery up to the borderline of abstraction, with all its psychic power and personal resonance intact.

  Pasiphaë, 1943–44, 56⅛” × 96”

  Before the year is out, he will cross that line.

  While Jackson probed the imaginary world, events rushed by in the real one. Putzel came by the Eighth Street apartment often to offer encouragement, enjoy Lee’s cooking, nudge Jackson to work faster, and generally avoid the loneliness of his one-room apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street. The visits were meant to be reassuring, but as the November 9 opening approached, it was usually Putzel, a notorious worrier, who needed reassuring. Every time he appeared at the door, panting from the long climb, Lee thought he looked more tense and harried than ever. His reputation with Peggy, as well as the gallery’s reputation, depended on how Jackson’s show was received, both critically and commercially. Nervous that no collector would gamble on one of the large-scale canvases that Jackson increasingly favored, Putzel pleaded with him to drop work on the giant Pasiphaë, just begun, and concentrate on producing “small pictures” for more timid buyers. During September, Jack
son obliged with Wounded Animal, a mere thirty by thirty-eight inches, and several abstract exercises that he left untitled. By the time Art of This Century opened in early October with an exhibition of works by de Chirico, all the major paintings for the show were finished and delivered. Jackson spent the last anxious month preparing a few more small-scale works, including a number of gouaches and drawings. Meanwhile, the huge stretched canvas for the mural, covering the entire east wall of his studio, remained untouched.

  While Jackson and Putzel shared dinners, openings, and a Segovia concert in the months preceding the show, Peggy Guggenheim rarely saw her new protégé. It wasn’t the split with Ernst that distracted her—normally, emotional trauma sent her straight to the gallery to bury herself in business. This time, it was lovesickness. Soon after learning of Ernst’s infidelity the previous winter, she had met a handsome redheaded young Englishman named Kenneth Macpherson and fallen rapturously in love. “She really flipped for him,” said Lee Krasner. Despite being married and resolutely homosexual, Macpherson proved the perfect mate. “[He] came into my life when I most needed him,” Peggy later wrote. “He immediately gave me a sense of peace, and when I sat with his arm around me I was perfectly happy, happier than I had been for years.” In September, she and Macpherson moved into a duplex apartment in a double brownstone on Sixty-first Street (for which she had commissioned the mural from Jackson). Although they lived on separate floors and Peggy treated him “less as a lover than as a girl friend,” Macpherson was a source of great comfort. “You can have an affair, you know, without sex,” Peggy insisted. With his support, she even managed to survive the agonizing divorce from Ernst without the usual histrionics.

  With so much happening in her personal life, Peggy gladly left the gallery to Putzel, incuding the job of shepherding Jackson toward the November show. The few times she did meet with him, she found him intriguing “in a man/child sort of way,” although his taciturnity made her self-conscious and uncomfortable (she said he reminded her of “a trapped animal who should have stayed in his burrow”). More and more often, when Peggy had something to say to Jackson, she spoke to Lee Krasner.

  No one worked harder preparing for Jackson’s show than Lee. Using the pay phone in the nearby Waldorf Cafeteria, she scheduled Jackson’s increasingly crowded days—the comings and goings of visitors (she kept them to a minimum until he finished the paintings), inquiries about the exhibition, arrangements for transporting works—and maintained a running dialogue with Putzel. “In spite of the fact that I’m not working,” she wrote Stella, “… I seem to be kept busy every minute.” When brothers Frank and Sande came to town, Lee baby-sat their children. She kept Stella informed of “the wonderful things happening” and picked out shoes for her sixty-eighth birthday (which Jackson promptly lost). Such remarkable devotion didn’t seem odd to Stella. According to Arloie McCoy, the family had led her to believe that Lee and Jackson were already married.

  Lee seemed to thrive in her new role. Some friends thought it suited her particularly well. “As I remember her in the Artists Union,” says Axel Horn, “she had a flair for promotion, for publicity.” Ethel Baziotes thought Lee “had developed an executive temperament on the WPA. She could say very difficult things without any strain.” But May Rosenberg and other old friends saw Lee’s new role in a less flattering light. “Lee turned out to be a terrific saleswoman,” says Rosenberg. “She was very clever. She had the quality of a peasant. She operated as if everybody was looking out only for himself.” Jackson’s friends were divided on the question of whether Jackson would have fared so well without Lee’s promotional instincts. Some, like Peter Busa, thought Jackson “couldn’t sell a heater to an Eskimo” and, even if he could, “didn’t want to have anything to do with promotion.” Others, like Gerome Kamrowski, recall that Jackson understood well the importance of public relations. “For somebody so unverbal,” says Kamrowski, “he always managed to say hello to a critic or a collector.”

  Everyone agreed, however, that Lee did one job better than Jackson ever could have: managing Peggy Guggenheim.

  “In general,” writes Peggy’s biographer, “those people who found Peggy most generous or got along best with her were those who needed her the least.” Unfortunately, no one needed Peggy more than Lee Krasner did—a fact that Peggy never for a moment let her forget. After commandeering her to stuff and address twelve hundred announcements for Jackson’s show, Peggy dressed her down in front of the staff for making mistakes on three of them. “She bawled the hell out of me for the nine cents I was wasting,” Lee remembers. On a cab trip together, Peggy told the driver to stop and, while Lee watched aghast, “stood over a manhole, picked up her skirt, and peed.” Peggy had a way, said Buffie Johnson, “of making it clear to others that they really didn’t count for much.” On another occasion, Peggy invited Lee and Jackson to her house for dinner with “a few people” but asked Lee to come early and see if the meat loaf was done “the right way.” When Lee arrived, she found “two maids peeling potatoes” and “a huge amount of meat.” The party, it turned out, was for fifty people, and Peggy was waiting anxiously for Lee to prepare the meat loaf. “It was not exactly what you’d call a catered situation,” Lee recalled acidly.

  Behind the abuse, there was, undoubtedly, some kind of skewed affection between the two women. Peggy treated her sister Hazel with the same fond cruelty, and Lee had accepted Irving’s abuse with the same masochistic resignation. “They would quarrel, be friends again, then quarrel some more,” recalled David Hare, who often saw Lee keeping vigil in the gallery while Peggy took her usual three-hour lunch. “They were quite alike.” In fact, although separated in age by twelve years, they were more alike than either would admit. Both were the wayward children of large and fractious families. Both were distinctly unattractive women who relied on wit, style, and insouciance in lieu of looks. Both were proud of their bodies (Peggy so much so that, even at forty-five, she intentionally wore dresses that allowed her breasts to “pop out from under the fabric,” according to one friend). Both had a taste for homosexual men as lovers. Both were “made of alloyed steel,” according to Clement Greenberg, and “used to getting ascendancy over people.”

  Given their similarities, their antagonism was inevitable. To Lee, Peggy was a “kookie,” nymphomaniacal, manipulative “bitch” with “too much money and not enough taste.” To Peggy, Lee was a shrill, overreaching klafte, a perfect example of the grasping, lower-class Russian Jew that her German-Jewish relatives had tried to keep out of America, a woman who “should have been out holding a job” to support Jackson rather than sponging off Peggy. More than one mutual friend, however, suspected that the real bone of contention between the two women was Jackson. “He was grateful for the chance to do the mural,” Lee later said, “he was appreciative, but she wanted him in her bed every night to prove it.”

  Lee suffered the many indignities of her new role in uncharacteristic silence. In a thank-you note to Jackson after one of his many dinners at the Eighth Street apartment, Putzel referred to Lee as “your cordon bleu chef.” After twenty years on her own in New York, after countless classes, the Hofmann school, WPA battles, and one delirious evening with Mondrian, Lee had given up her studio, moved in with an emotionally troubled alcoholic, gone back to modeling for money, relegated most of her paintings to storage or the trash heap, taught herself to cook, indentured herself to Peggy Guggenheim, and for what? If, at this point in her relationship with Jackson, she allowed herself to ask that question, she undoubtedly looked to the coming show, now only weeks away, to answer it.

  As the day approached, Jackson allowed himself a cautious confidence. Putzel had done his job well, informing Jackson of every faint breeze of enthusiasm that passed through the gallery prior to the show. “Mrs. Goodspeed wants your show for Chicago [Arts Club],” he wrote in early October, “and Caresse Crosby wants it for her gallery in Washington, D.C. Hope there won’t be enough [paintings] left.” “[James Thrall] Soby dropped in thi
s afternoon,” went another Putzel confidence-builder, “and is mad about your work. … [He] predicts you will be THE new sensation this season and, moreover, that unlike past seasons’ sensations that you will last.” Putzel was by no means the only source of encouragement. In three months of preparing for the show, Jackson had entertained a number of guests in his studio and enjoyed an embarrassment of praise. Reuben Kadish had come through New York in the summer of 1943, on his way to India and China as an artist-correspondent, and reported being “overwhelmed.” “I knew I was seeing something important,” he said later, “a new volcano had erupted on the American scene.” During the same visit, Kadish’s friend Jeanne Raynal had been captivated by The Magic Mirror. When she returned to San Francisco in August, she wrote and bought it for $500. It was Jackson’s first major sale. Soon afterward, Dr. Grace McCann Morley of the San Francisco Museum offered Jackson an exhibition of drawings and eyed Guardians of the Secret longingly (she would eventually purchase it). Reginald Wilson, who had witnessed Jackson’s earlier struggles, came by the studio while on leave and was dumbstruck by the changes in his art and in his life. “My God, the place was filled with paintings, and Jackson was on top of the world,” recalls Wilson, who found She-Wolf particularly “overwhelming.” “And I had been worrying what would become of him.” Sidney Janis, a collector and writer who had visited Jackson the year before at Lee’s urging and selected a painting for his coming exhibition “Abstract and Surrealist Art in the United States,” visited again in September and was also startled by the metamorphosis in Jackson’s art in only a year. “I enjoyed very much the visit to your studio,” he wrote soon afterward. “I think [Search for a Symbol] the most provocative painting by an American I’ve seen yet.” (Janis eventually reproduced Guardians of the Secret in his exhibition catalogue and She-Wolf in his book.) Lee’s friend, Clement Greenberg, his aspirations now turned from creating art to criticizing it, also climbed the steps to the studio, as did James Johnson Sweeney, who came several times, once to buy a drawing and once to offer Jackson a job teaching art in Buffalo, New York. “I don’t think he’ll take it,” Lee wrote Stella, “but it certainly gave him a lift to get the offer.” In fact, of all the visitors to the studio that summer and fall, only Jackson’s family withheld judgment on the new works—a failure of generosity that Lee would never forgive. Frank took one look at the new works and clearly thought his baby brother had gone off the deep end. “I think my painting had him worried,” Jackson wrote Charles.