Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  The sweetest victory, perhaps, was a visit from Harold Lehman the week before the opening. Jackson took his former high school classmate to Art of This Century to show off the already installed paintings and introduce him to Peggy and Putzel, whom Lehman had known at his Los Angeles gallery. “Jackson was constantly telling me, ‘See how I’m progressing in the art world,’” Lehman remembers. “‘The Museum of Modern Art is buying a painting and this is my show, and isn’t it great.’” Great for Jackson. Less so for Lehman, who had moved to Woodstock, New York, and who, despite his dazzling facility, was still virtually unknown.

  A week before the show, Jackson was in a mood to savor such ironies. He had just delivered the last of Putzel’s “small works,” including Conflict, an oil painting he gave to Sweeney; Burning Landscape, which he would sell to Peggy; and several gouaches and drawings. Putzel was pleased. “These small pictures are (on the whole) better than the other small pictures,” he wrote, ever supportive. On November 1, a public announcement of the show appeared in Art Digest, where Putzel’s friendship with editor Maude Riley ensured prominent and favorable treatment. The article included a biographical sketch of the artist—“born in Wyoming, later lived in California and in Arizona”—and a ringing endorsement from Peggy, probably penned by Putzel. “I consider this exhibition to be something of an event in the contemporary history of American Art,” she was quoted as saying. “I consider [Pollock] to be one of the strongest and most interesting American painters.”

  Perhaps if Peggy’s praise had been slightly less fulsome, slightly more detached, Jackson might have been better prepared for what followed. At Peggy’s request, James Johnson Sweeney had written a brief introduction for the exhibition catalogue. Jackson read it for the first time when the printed catalogues arrived at the gallery only a few days before the show.

  “Talent, will, genius,” as George Sand wrote of Flaubert, “are natural phenomena like the lake, the volcano, the mountain, the wind, the star, the cloud.” Pollock’s talent is volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is undisciplined. It spills itself out in a mineral prodigality not yet crystallized. It is lavish, explosive, untidy.

  But young painters, particularly Americans, tend to be too careful of opinion. Too often the dish is allowed to chill in the serving. What we need is more young men who paint from inner impulsion without an ear to what the critic or spectator may feel—painters who will risk spoiling a canvas to say something in their own way. Pollock is one.

  It is true that Pollock needs self-discipline. But to profit from pruning, a plant must have vitality. In art we are only too familiar with the application of self-discipline where deliberation would have been more profitable. Pollock can stand it. In his early work as a student of Thomas Benton he showed a conventional academic competence. Today his creed is evidently that of Hugo, “Ballast yourself with reality and throw yourself into the sea. The sea is inspiration.”

  Among young painters, Jackson Pollock offers unusual promise in his exuberance, independence, and native sensibility. If he continues to exploit these qualities with the courage and conscience he has shown so far, he will fulfill that promise.

  The further Jackson read, the more incensed he became. At the last word, he threw the catalogue down and repeated, through clenched teeth, the word that really stung: “undisciplined.” Sweeney, however well meaning, had touched a nerve. “Unpredictable,” “not yet crystallized,” “untidy,” “will risk spoiling a canvas”—for Jackson, they all meant one thing: “undisciplined”—a charge that resonated back to high school and the humiliations of Benton’s class. “He was furious,” Lee remembers, “really mad. I’d never seen him so angry.” Terrified that he would confront Sweeney, Lee—who thought it was a “fine introduction”—somehow convinced Jackson that a thank-you note would be both more appropriate and more politic. Sweeney, after all, served actively on the Junior Advisory Committee at the Museum of Modern Art, which had already expressed an interest in acquiring She-Wolf. “Dear Sweeney,” the note began, using Lee’s customary form of address, “I have read your forward to the catalogue, and I am excited. I am happy—The self-discipline you speak of will come, I think, as a natural growth of a deeper, more integrated, experience.” In closing, Jackson consciously or unconsciously betrayed Lee’s hand. “Many thanks,” he wrote, “We will fulfill that promise—”

  After writing the letter, Jackson continued to smolder. Only days before the opening, he took Search for a Symbol to the gallery for a meeting with Sweeney. It was a small, restrained picture from the same period as Stenographic Figure. According to some versions of the story, he had repainted it after reading Sweeney’s introduction to make it even more “disciplined.” As he showed it to Sweeney, he reportedly said, “I want you to see a really disciplined painting.”

  The show that opened on November 8, 1943, did not rivet the eyes of the artistic world or rocket Jackson Pollock to instant notoriety. Only later, in retrospect, would it achieve mythic status. Most of those who came shared Clement Greenberg’s reaction: “I wasn’t bowled over at first. I didn’t realize what I’d seen until later.” If the show was revolutionary, it wasn’t because of Jackson’s paintings, it was because, for the first time, an American avant-garde artist was being given serious commercial and critical attention.

  It wasn’t a large crowd at Art of This Century on that unseasonably warm November night. There was plenty of room in the white-walled “Daylight Gallery” to stand back and examine the show’s sixteen paintings, ranging in size from the tiny Conflict, little more than a foot square, to the imposing Guardians of the Secret, and in price from $25 for a drawing to $750 for Guardians. The crowd was dotted with uniforms—the war had finally reached Fifty-seventh Street. Ibram Lassaw, the pioneer abstract sculptor, had come on leave from Fort Dix. Lee’s friends George McNeil and John Little came in their immaculate navy whites. Greenberg and Kamrowski also attended, along with Herbert and Mercedes Matter who had lent their untitled painting, a gift from Jackson, to the exhibition. Jackson himself stood unsteadily in the middle of the room where Peggy had placed him between herself and Sweeney. “Sweeney did so much to help me make Pollock known,” Peggy later wrote, “that I felt as though Pollock were our spiritual offspring.” Some thought he even looked a little like their child, standing stiff-legged and clean-shaven, in a suit and tie, with his hands clasped tightly in front of him and his eyes searching the turquoise floor, nervously saying hello as Peggy made her flamboyant introductions. He reminded one guest of “a little boy dressed up for Sunday school.”

  Lee wasn’t deceived by appearances. She stood at the desk near the door, answering questions, handing out catalogues, and glancing at Jackson “sixty times a minute.” She knew he was drunk. Not drunk enough to make a scene, perhaps, but drunk enough to attract unkind attention. Becky Reis, who hadn’t met Jackson until Peggy introduced them that night, was sure he had consumed “at least a quart of liquor.” Of Jackson’s friends who attended, more were disoriented by his suit and tie than by the weaving line he made on his way to and from the bathroom. Afterward, over Lee’s protest, Peggy threw a party for Jackson that ended up in Kenneth Macpherson’s apartment.

  The first reviews of the show appeared not in the papers or the magazines but in the bars and coffee shops around Greenwich Village. There, opinion was split. The European Surrealists, Peggy’s former darlings, publicly claimed Jackson as one of their own—Max Ernst called him “a wild man like Soutine”; Matta commented, “very Masson”—while privately they ridiculed him. Roger Wilcox recalls that, despite their vaunted admiration for the primitive in art, the Surrealists scorned Jackson’s “lack of cultivation”; it was one thing to travel to the American Northwest in search of primitive artists, another thing entirely to accept one as their social and artistic equal. According to Lee Krasner, the Surrealist community felt that Peggy had forsaken not only them but her standards as well: “The entire outgoing group were furious at her for taking on someone
like Pollock.”

  Jackson’s friends tended to agree with Reuben Kadish that “he had cracked the whole thing open,” but many artists were less than enthusiastic. Morris Kantor, a painter who had known Jackson on the WPA, “burst a blood vessel,” according to a friend. “He said, ‘That isn’t painting!’ He just blew his top.” More than one visitor to the show scribbled obscenities in Peggy’s guest book. Others just walked out. “Pollock unnerved me,” said one. “I had to leave. Either the guy is too sick … I just couldn’t take it.” Balcomb Greene, the first chairman of American Abstract Artists, was reminded of Stuart Davis’s definition of abstraction: “a belch from the unconscious.”

  When the printed reviews finally began to appear in mid-November, it was clear that the show had been every bit as provocative as Putzel had predicted. Not since the gallery’s opening had there been such an outpouring of publicity. The Times, the Sun, the New Yorker, the Nation, Partisan Review, Art News, Art Digest, and View all featured reviews.

  But if Jackson was clinging to the childhood hope for unalloyed praise, he must have been deeply disappointed. None of the critics was kinder than Sweeney and some were considerably more cruel. Henry McBride, writing in the New York Sun, likened the works to “a kaleidoscope that has been insufficiently shaken. Another shake or two might bring order into the flying particles of color—but the spectator is not too sure of this.” There were, to be sure, some nuggets of extravagant praise. In his review for the New Yorker, Robert Coates called him “an authentic discovery.” “His color is always rich and daring,” wrote Coates, “his approach mature, and his design remarkably fluent.” “We like all this,” said Art Digest. The show’s smaller works drew a disproportionate share of the accolades, especially Wounded Animal and Conflict, which one reviewer pronounced “among the strongest abstract paintings ever produced by an American.”

  Most critics, however, followed Sweeney down the middle of the road—admiring Jackson’s audacity, indulging his unruliness, and expressing conditional optimism about his future. “Most of the abstractions are large and nearly all of them are extravagantly, not to say savagely romantic,” wrote Edward Alden Jewell in the Times. “Here is obscurantism indeed, though it may become resolved and clarified as the artist proceeds.” “Mr. Pollock’s forcefulness, coupled with a persistent tendency to overwork his ideas, leads him into turgidity,” said Coates. “Pollock is out a-questing,” wrote Art Digest’s reviewer, “and he goes hell-bent at each canvas … plenty of whirl and swirl.”

  No one, however, captured Sweeney’s tone of benign ambivalence more articulately than Clement Greenberg in one of his first art reviews for the Nation. “[Pollock] is the first painter I know of to have got something positive from the muddiness of color that so profoundly characterizes a great deal of American painting,” Greenberg began, insistently balancing every positive with a negative. “The mud abounds in Pollock’s larger works, and these, though the least consummated, are his most original and ambitious. Being young and full of energy, he takes orders he can’t fill … he spends himself in too many directions at once.” In Guardians of the Secret, “space tautens but does not burst into a picture,” whereas Male and Female “zigzags between the intensity of the easel picture and the blandness of the mural.” Even Greenberg’s conclusion was inconclusive. “Pollock has gone through the influences of Miró, Picasso, Mexican painting, and what not, and has come out on the other side at the age of thirty-one, painting mostly with his own brush”; but, added Greenberg ominously, “in his search for style he is liable to relapse into an influence.”

  There was only one aspect of Jackson’s show about which the critics were unambiguously enthusiastic: he was American.

  Two years after Pearl Harbor, the country was at war body and soul. Daily battle reports from Italy, Africa, Russia, and the Pacific filled the front pages. Only two weeks before the show opened, American marines had invaded the fiercely defended Tarawa atoll in the Pacific and suffered horrendous casualties. The grim details headlined the newspapers for weeks and touched off yet another tidal wave of war bond appeals, rallies, and speech-making in a city already saturated with newsreels, ration tickets, propaganda posters, and soldiers in transit. Inevitably, critics brought to Peggy’s long-awaited showing of an American avant-garde artist some of the same patriotic fervor that filled the airwaves and editorial pages. “[Jackson’s] abstractions are free of Paris,” exulted the reviewer for Art News, “and contain a disciplined American fury.” Critics especially reveled in Jackson’s all-American past and projected it into his work wherever possible. “His work is personal,” said one, “though occasionally one feels an Indian influence.” The New Yorker review referred to Jackson as “a young Western artist” in the first sentence and, while acknowledging that Picasso was an influence, noted that his influence had not detracted from “the basic force and vigor” of Jackson’s art. Greenberg’s entire essay was suffused with what Hilton Kramer later called “a sense of history on the march” never before seen in American art criticism, a sense of embracing, ineluctable optimism—an artistic Manifest Destiny.

  Jackson was stunned and demoralized by the probationary tone of the reviews. Outrage would have been easier to accept. During the first week, he went to the gallery often “in case a collector came in,” Lee Krasner recalls, but after the reviews began to appear, lost interest. Lee, of course, continued to arrive every morning at ten when the gallery opened (beating Peggy by an hour or more), and often stayed until after it closed at six. When she returned to the apartment, Jackson would ask if anything had sold, and every day she would have to say no. At the end of the show’s three-week run, only one drawing had been bought—by Kenneth Macpherson, who, according to Peggy, was never really enthusiastic about Jackson’s work.

  Meanwhile, the canvas for Peggy’s mural remained untouched, stretched out along the east wall of the studio, exactly where it had been since July, when Jackson had eagerly torn out the wall to Sande’s old studio to make room for it. More and more often, when Lee returned from the gallery, she found Jackson sitting in the front room, his arms folded over the back of a chair, staring at the white void, “getting more and more depressed.” He tried drawing sketches and “cartoons”—something he rarely did—but none of these small images “made the leap” to the huge canvas. In desperation, perhaps at Lee’s suggestion, he considered other possibilities. Peter Busa remembers him struggling with “studies” for a giant collage. “I told him, ‘Look, Jack, this isn’t the Project. You don’t have to get the plan approved by a committee. Treat it like an easel picture, just bigger.’” But size wasn’t the problem. The imaging process that over the previous months had produced more than a dozen canvases—all prodigal of imagery, layers and layers of imagery, fighting and obscuring each other in dense little squares—that process had suddenly and inexplicably broken down. When Bill and Ethel Baziotes came to dinner on December 23, the canvas was still untouched.

  Friends like Reuben Kadish knew that the block wasn’t on the canvas; it was in Jackson’s head. “I thought it was a gestation period,” says Kadish. “Whatever it was that was taking place was taking place inside. Other artists drew sketches, Jackson’s preparations were all internal. I felt, when it was ready to come out, it would come out.” But Peggy Guggenheim wasn’t willing to wait indefinitely. Sometime in December, she informed Lee that she expected the mural to be delivered in time for a party that Jean Connolly was giving in her apartment in January. When Lee balked, Peggy reminded her that the canvas should have been finished in time for the November show. She also apparently hinted that the monthly stipend of $150 might be withheld if Jackson didn’t come through.

  Despite the deadline, Jackson and Lee spent Christmas and the New Year in Deep River, Connecticut, with Stella, Sande, Arloie, and their daughter Karen, now two. The visit didn’t turn out to be the reunion of “Jack and Sande” that Jackson undoubtedly anticipated. The two brothers had seen each other only once or twice in the pre
vious year and a half. During that time, a huge gulf had opened between them. Sande was “enduring” life in a town he described as a “dump,” working seventy-eight hours a week to support his new family. He had little time to recapture the old days with his petulant baby brother. Everything that Jackson had known of Sande—the stocky, swaggering little troublemaker in Riverside; the pipe-smoking companion on the rim of the Grand Canyon; the daring young man in the cowboy hat on the streets of New York—had vanished without a trace. “Sande was proud of Jack,” says James Brooks, “but he gave up on him when he moved away. He decided he wanted to be a real father on his own. Jackson just didn’t fit into that.”

  Back in New York, with only a week before Connolly’s party, Jackson locked himself into the studio and Lee out. Every now and then when he emerged, she could see the canvas through the doorway, still blank. Eventually, he ordered her out of the apartment altogether. She retreated to her parents’ house on Long Island, hoping that while she was away, Jackson might find whatever it was he had lost. But when she returned the day before the deadline, he was still sitting and staring at the empty canvas. John Little found her later that day in a state of panic. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “The canvas has to be ready tomorrow morning and Jackson hasn’t even started yet.” When Little offered to go into the studio, Lee wouldn’t let him for fear of disturbing Jackson. Little remembers, “She could only wring her hands and say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.’”