Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Just after nightfall, Jackson began to paint. “I had a vision,” he told a friend years later. “It was a stampede.” Apparently the week with Sande had summoned up memories of an earlier time, of the Grand Canyon and wild horses on the run. On the right side of the canvas, in gigantic strokes of black, he caught the figures that moved like shadows between unconscious and imagination: “Red” from Provo, Lewis Jay, Cooter, Sande. Suddenly the mustang herd appeared, behind and around them, exploding through the narrow draw, a chaos of haunches and legs and unfurled manes, charging across the huge canvas in graphic black panic. No sooner were the bold outlines down, however, than the images began to change, overlap, combine, and obliterate one another. New figures appeared and old ones were transformed. Humans became horses; horses became bulls. Eventually the stampede was joined by “every animal in the American West,” according to Jackson’s own account. “Cows and horses and antelopes and buffaloes. Everything is charging across that goddamn surface.” Across this panorama, Jackson laid a frenzy of swirling lines: lines that multiplied on themselves, lines that curved around the black poles like the muscles of a Bentonesque nude, lines in teal and raspberry and yellow, lines that highlighted the obscure and obscured the obvious. Then, with white, he filled the spaces between the lines, risking mud with every broad stroke on the wet canvas. Finally, under splatters of yellow and red, the last fragments of recognizable images disappeared. Nothing remained of the original stampede except furious energy, panoramic chaos, and primal alarm. For the first time since his experiments on ceramic bowls in 1938, Jackson had pushed the image beyond representation, beyond scrutiny, behind the veil.

  By nine the next morning, fifteen tumultuous hours after he began, Jackson was finished. Lee stepped into the studio and blinked in disbelief. “When I saw her that day,” John Little remembers, “she ran up to me and said, ‘You won’t believe what happened. After you left, he went to work, and this morning the painting was finished.’ She couldn’t believe it.”

  As soon as the paint was dry to the touch, Jackson broke down the stretcher, rolled the canvas, and transported both to Peggy’s apartment building on East Sixty-first Street. When he reassembled it in the low, ground-floor elevator lobby, however, he discovered it was too long—by almost a foot. Sleepless, distraught, and close to panic, he telephoned Peggy at the gallery. “He became quite hysterical,” Peggy recalled. That was before he began to drink. Knowing that Jackson would be in her apartment that day, and “knowing his great weakness,” Peggy had hidden her liquor before leaving for the gallery. But Jackson soon found it. His calls became more and more frantic. He pleaded with her to “come home at once and help place the painting.” Finally, she called Marcel Duchamp and David Hare and persuaded them to rescue Jackson. “Peggy wanted us to tack it up,” Hare recalled, “but it missed by eight inches so we cut eight inches off from one end. Duchamp said that in this type of painting it wasn’t needed. We told Jackson, who didn’t care.” By then, Jackson was too drunk to care. Weaving and incoherent, he walked into the apartment where Connolly’s party was already under way, crossed the room, unzipped his pants, and peed in the marble fireplace.

  The demons were loose again.

  30

  FRUITS AND NUTS

  For Jackson Pollock, success was its own punishment. Every artistic peak of his career was followed, usually within months, by an emotional freefall. Some friends saw such plunges as merely cyclical, like phases of the moon, that came and went without regard to the events in his life. Others, like Lee, related his depressions to his drinking, and his drinking, in turn, to his exhibitions. “Jackson usually drank before and after the shows,” she said later. Still others, like Peter Busa, were forever being surprised. “Each time he stopped drinking, I just thought he was cured,” Busa recalls, “and I’d always congratulate him. He’d say, ‘Yeah, I don’t need that stuff anymore.’ And then he’d be just as bad as he ever was.”

  In different ways, all of them were right. There was certainly a pattern to Jackson’s depressions, or at least to the periods when he seemed most vulnerable to depression. Plotted on a graph, his emotional life would have been a wavy line with two-year intervals between crests. From his despair following Sande’s discovery of girls in 1926 to his breakdown in 1938 to the binge in 1942 preceding Stella’s arrival in New York, even-numbered years had been especially brutal. But Lee was also right. The pattern of depression and drinking was to some extent responsive to events in Jackson’s life; it could be altered—for the worse, as when Roy’s death precipitated a collapse in 1933; or for the better, as when Lee’s presence ameliorated the effects of Sande’s departure in 1942. In the same way, the pressure of preparing a show, the anxiety of an opening, even the tone of reviews could speed up or slow down the next wave.

  And Busa was right, too: no one was more surprised than Jackson each time a wave overtook him.

  Even the equivocal acclaim that greeted his first show was enough to speed the decline of 1944. Routine money allowed him to buy liquor routinely. After a decade of Prohibition and Depression, alcohol had become a status symbol; success was measured by what one drank. “When you were broke you drank coffee,” recalls Herman Cherry. “The minute you had enough money to buy alcohol, that meant you were prosperous. If you could buy whiskey instead of beer, you had made it.” Success also brought new people into Jackson’s life: collectors, dealers, curators, and other artists. They wanted to visit his studio, to have lunch with him, to interview him. Eager to promote her new protégé, Peggy tried to accommodate them. She arranged meetings with potential buyers and lunches with museum officials, not realizing how toxic the combination of strangers and alcohol could be for Jackson. “He behaved like a pig,” recalls Peggy’s sister, Hazel, who sometimes accompanied Peggy on business lunches.

  Of course, the more notorious Jackson became, the more tolerant people were of his embarrassing lapses and the further he had to reach to elicit the same level of outrage. At one lunch in the dining room of the Chelsea Hotel, he vomited on the carpet, sending guests and waiters scattering in every direction. Even Peggy had her limits. Eventually, she stopped trying to “show Jackson off” to his public and discouraged him from coming around the gallery. Jackson was still capable of self-control—the Philadelphia collector Mrs. H. Gates Lloyd described him as “perfectly nice” after their meeting—but such politesse was quickly becoming the exception. The rule was what Charles experienced on a visit to New York in early 1944. “I took some friends out to dinner at Ticino’s on Thompson Street, and Jack was absolutely awful,” Charles recalls. “In the middle of the meal, after making a mess of it, he just got up and left.” Steve Wheeler remembers seeing Jackson sitting alone on a park bench in the middle of Washington Square early one morning. “It was a very painful sight,” Wheeler recalls. “He had very little to say, just feints and grunts. So we went over to a bar and got tanked up.”

  As Jackson stumbled closer to the edge, the successes mounted. Guardians of the Secret went to Cincinnati for the February opening of Sidney Janis’s “Abstract and Surrealist Art in the United States,” then began a five-city tour of the country; that same month, The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle and She-Wolf went to Providence, Rhode Island, where they joined a second traveling exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art’s “Twelve Contemporary Painters,” with an eleven-city itinerary; soon thereafter, a nameless “smaller work” found its way to David Porter’s G Place Gallery in Washington, D.C.; in May, Male and Female was shown at the Pinocatheca gallery; and in November, The Mad Moon-Woman appeared at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. Amid the traffic, there were a few sales: Thomas Hess bought Wounded Animal; Kadish’s friend, Jeanne Reynal bought The Magic Mirror; and Mrs. Lloyd, who had thought Jackson “perfectly nice,” bought Male and Female out from under the indecisive nose of Grace McCann Morley of the San Francisco Museum of Art.

  Like the collectors, the press appeared to be warming to Jackson. Robert Motherwell contributed
a commentary to the winter 1944 issue of Partisan Review in which he masterfully lauded Jackson while promoting himself: “[Pollock] represents one of the younger generation’s chances. There are not three other painters of whom this could be said.” Clement Greenberg saw the big mural in Peggy’s apartment building and instantly abandoned the ambivalent tone of his earlier review. “I took one look at it,” he recalls, “and I thought, ‘Now that’s great art,’ and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced.”

  In the meantime, Jackson continued to reap the benefits of wartime jingoism. By 1944, American art, like American armed might, seemed to be headed toward worldwide victory, and Jackson Pollock was portrayed as leading the charge. He was not only quintessentially American (de Kooning and Gorky were too foreign; Baziotes, too recently arrived; Motherwell, too patrician; and Rothko, too Jewish), he was the breakthrough artist, the one who had established a beachhead in the European stronghold at Art of This Century. For their Februrary 1944 issue, the editors of Art & Architecture asked Jackson to submit a short essay on his view of the destiny of American art. When he balked at such a literary assignment, they suggested an interview instead. Still nervous, apparently, Jackson accepted the help of the interviewer, Robert Motherwell, in formulating his answers.

  Where were you born?

  Cody, Wyoming, in January 1912. My ancestors were Scotch and Irish.

  Have you traveled any?

  I’ve knocked around some in California, some in Arizona. Never been to Europe.

  Would you like to go abroad?

  No. I don’t see why the problems of modern painting can’t be solved as well here as elsewhere.

  Has being a Westerner affected your work?

  I have always been impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art. The Indians have the true painter’s approach in their capacity to get hold of appropriate images, and in their understanding of what constitutes painterly subject-matter. Their color is essentially Western, their vision has the basic universality of all real art …

  Why do you prefer living here in New York to your native West?

  Living is keener, more demanding, more intense and expansive in New York than in the West; the stimulating influences are more numerous and rewarding. At the same time, I have a definite feeling for the West: the vast horizontality of the land, for instance; here only the Atlantic Ocean gives you that.

  The rising strain of nationalism in art did present one problem for the avant-garde community, however: how to distinguish itself from the discredited Regionalist movement of the 1930s. Jackson (and Motherwell) addressed the issue directly.

  How did your study with Thomas Benton affect your work, which differs so radically from his?

  My work with Benton was important as something against which to react very strongly, later on; in this, it was better to have worked with him than with a less resistant personality who would have provided a much less strong opposition.

  Do you think there can be a purely American art?

  The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the ‘thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd …

  But Jackson wasn’t prepared to deflate completely the balloon of patriotism that was lofting his career. “An American is an American,” he added, conceding what would have been unthinkable among avant-garde artists in the thirties, “and his painting would naturally be qualified by that fact, whether he wills it or not.” He did not, however, join the Regionalist denunciation of European art. True to modernist gospel, he admitted that “the important painting of the last hundred years was done in France.” But the encomiums were strictly retrospective. “American painters,” he said, “have generally missed the point of modern painting from beginning to end.” The message was very clear and very popular: the days of abject submission—past, present, and future—of second billing and second-class citizenship for American art, were over. In a period of isolationism, the Regionalists had argued for a separate American art. In the midst of war, the avant-garde was laying the groundwork for a triumphant American art.

  For many of the same reasons the American press rallied to Jackson, Alfred Barr detested him. Barr, the tweedy, cultivated product of Princeton and Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum had first come to the attention of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art as a twenty-seven-year-old art teacher at a women’s college outside Boston. In the fifteen years since being appointed director, he had dedicated himself to bringing European culture to the benighted classroom of America. His heart, as well as the collection of Post-Impressionists, Cubists, and Fauvists he had assiduously gathered, was firmly rooted in European modernism. The museum’s American works, by artists such as Charles Burchfield and Marsden Hartley, had been chosen largely to document the influence of European giants like Braque and Picasso. The notion that American abstract artists, especially mavericks like Jackson Pollock, deserved a place in Barr’s temple of modernism was almost enough to unnerve the usually poised, patrician director. According to Lincoln Kirstein, a close friend and Harvard classmate, Barr’s prejudice was “more anti-abstract than anti-American,” but by the mid-1940s the two were virtually interchangeable. “I think it’s fair to say that the main support for the Abstract Expressionists came not from Barr but from Sweeney,” says Kirstein, who admits that he, too, was “very unsympathetic to Pollock.”

  In May 1944, Barr was asked to approve the museum’s purchase of She-Wolf.

  It had been eight months since James Thrall Soby first recommended the purchase and six months since the museum put the painting on reserve. In the interim, Sidney Janis, the head of the advisory acquisitions committee, and James Johnson Sweeney had been waging an intense, covert campaign to persuade Barr that She-Wolf was worth its $650 price tag. Janis had decided to substitute the work for Guardians of the Secret in his forthcoming book, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, while Sweeney had arranged to have it included in the museum’s traveling show from February through May. By May, when Barr made his decision, the painting had already been seen by a national audience and had acquired a respectable exhibition history. Janis also tried to persuade Peggy Guggenheim to lower the price. “He said they couldn’t afford more than six hundred dollars,” Lee Krasner recalled. “Would she drop the price to four hundred and fifty?” Peggy shot back, “Go tell them to tell my Aunt [Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, a prominent supporter of the museum] to make up the difference.”

  At a lunch meeting with the earnest, proper Barr, Jackson was on his best behavior. “He didn’t say a word,” recalled Dorothy Miller, wife of the WPA’s Federal One director Holger Cahill, who was assistant curator of painting and sculpture at the time. “[He] just sat there listening to Alfred talk all through the meal. When finally Alfred asked some questions, [Pollock’s] answers were to the point. And it wasn’t a strain either—in fact, a very pleasant lunch, and I thought him very touching.” If Barr needed further convincing, he found it when he opened the April issue of Harper’s Bazaar and saw an article by Sweeney entitled “Five American Painters.” One of the “five” was Jackson Pollock and one of the few paintings reproduced, in color, was She-Wolf. According to Lee Krasner, it was the Harper’s article that “clinched the deal.”

  At their meeting on May 2, the acquisitions committee voted to purchase She-Wolf and Robert Motherwell’s collage, Pancho Villa Dead and Alive. (The pairing of Jackson’s painting with a work by Motherwell, who was more closely identified with the Europeans, may have been yet another effort to placate Barr.) Although still “not particularly enthusiastic” about Jackson’s work, according to Sweeney, Barr reluctantly accepted the committee’s recommendation, and two days later the purchase order was issued. Only six months after Jackson’s show at Art of This Century, another bastion of European hegemony had fallen. When she heard the news, Peggy wired Jackson and Lee:

  VERY HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE THE MUSEUM BOUGHT SHE
WOLF FOR $600 TODAY. LOVE PEGGY GUGGENHEIM.

  Peggy had good reason to be elated. Only three weeks before the MOMA sale, at Putzel’s urging, she had renewed Jackson’s contract for another year on almost identical terms. The sale of She-Wolf brought the total proceeds from sales of his paintings to almost $1,500, or $150 more than she had paid Jackson in the nine months since the original contract was signed. In addition, she now owned a twenty-foot mural that had drawn critical raves. Suddenly alert to the possibility that she might actually make money by sponsoring him, Peggy, for the first time, “dedicated” herself to the task of promoting Pollock with all her manic energies. “I worked hard to interest people in his work,” she wrote proudly, “and never tired of doing so. … One day Mrs. Harry Winston, the famous Detroit collector, came to the gallery to buy a Masson. I persuaded her to buy a Pollock instead.” Intrigued by the notion of creating a reputation, Peggy made a point of selling Jackson’s works to the right buyers—she called it “getting him into the right hands”—and often gave drawings as presents to collectors and rich friends, hoping to lure them into making larger purchases.

  The sale of She-Wolf was a turning point for Jackson as well, but in the opposite direction. For the same reason the contract looked better and better to Peggy, it looked worse and worse to Jackson. It forced him to confront the near impossibility of selling more than $2,800 worth of paintings in any one year and thereby “earning out” his yearly advance. After all, the November show had represented the best of two years’ work and the next show at Art of This Century was not scheduled until April of 1945. At that rate, he would be living on $150 a month—less than the combined income he and Lee had made on the Project—for the foreseeable future. Only a month after proudly informing Charles of the contract renewal, he wrote with more than a touch of bitterness, “I am getting $150 a month from the gallery, which just about doesn’t meet the bills. I will have to sell alot of work thru the year to get it above $150.” While Charles may have been sympathetic, the rest of the family was dumbfounded. How could an artist who had received so much attention, including a picture in Harper’s Bazaar, earn so little money? Privately, they huffed about “slight recognition” and disparaged “the same low figure” of $150 a month. Soon after She-Wolf was sold, Stella complained to Charles that “of course [Jackson] didn’t get any cash out of it,” then added, in obvious bewilderment, “I guess he thinks he is lucky to have his contract renewed for another year.”