Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  With sentiments running in such contrary directions, friction was inevitable. Jackson began to question both Peggy’s ability as a dealer and her commitment to him. He complained to Putzel that she wasn’t putting enough money into promotion and advertising to earn her hefty one-third commission. Months went by without a sale while Peggy made arrangements for upcoming solo shows for “competitors” like Baziotes, Motherwell, David Hare, and Mark Rothko. The 1944 Spring Salon for young artists in May included only one small colored drawing by Jackson alongside major paintings by Baziotes, Hedda Sterne, Jimmy Ernst, and Attilio Salemme. The salon also sparked a blistering attack on Peggy’s integrity in Art Digest as well as a wave of criticism from those who “detected a decline in the level of talent that Guggenheim was exhibiting.” Rumors persisted that Peggy would close the gallery and return to Europe as soon as the war was over—a prospect that seemed suddenly less remote when the Allies invaded France in early June. Even more unsettling were hints that Howard Putzel might quit the gallery, leaving artists on their own to deal with the mercurial Miss Guggenheim. The uncertainty was enough to prompt Motherwell to write Baziotes suggesting they “look out for themselves as soon as possible since [Peggy] could guarantee nothing for the future.” Artists like Motherwell and Baziotes, of course, could go to other dealers—both, in fact, were already being wooed by Sam Kootz—but Jackson was bound by contract to Peggy, with or without Putzel.

  By May, Jackson’s anxiety had reached the critical stage. Putzel tried to reassure him: “Probably—possibly, I mean—you may be really launched by the beginning of 45,” he wrote with a hesitation that was not at all reassuring, “and much more solidly or enduringly than sales pressure and advertising could have effected, with no need for social playing up.”

  To Peggy, Jackson’s dissatisfaction seemed like outrageous ingratitude. She had put up with his “rather wild and frightening” style of painting, his huge, unwieldy canvases, his shrewish girlfriend, his surly disposition, and his drunken antics without too much complaining (for her). Compared to Motherwell, whose works she considered “much weaker” but sold “much more readily,” Jackson was a dealer’s nightmare whose turgid canvases and “devilish” behavior made a difficult job impossible. Given the obstacles he threw up, she thought, her efforts had been remarkably successful. “I did sell [Jackson’s works] all the time,” she insisted, “not very much, but a little bit. … He didn’t help me sell his pictures at all ‘cause he was so drunk all the time.” To her, the $150-per-month payment so denigrated by the Pollock family was not just a generous, unprecedented favor, it was a major sacrifice. Because of it, she complained, “I concentrated all my efforts on selling [Pollock’s] pictures and neglected all the other painters in the gallery, many of whom soon left me.”

  In fact, Jackson and his family, accustomed as they were to Stella’s misplaced notions of “only the best,” had wildly underestimated Peggy’s parsimony. In restaurants, she would ostentaciously add up the bill while suggesting under her breath that her guests should “go out and get a job and stop living off of her.” At her own dinner table, the fare was “generally spartan,” and she closely monitored her guests’ consumption. If someone failed to clean his plate, Peggy would pointedly scrape the leftovers back into the serving bowl, muttering to herself, “It’s too good to waste.” “She did not create around her an atmosphere of easy giving,” understates her biographer, “… especially if one were on the receiving end of her generosity.” (That Jackson expected “easy giving” from Peggy was only the first, ominous indication of how ill prepared he was for the financial challenges ahead. Throughout his career, he was never able to appreciate the economic constraints on others—especially his dealers—to educate his family’s expectations, or to control his own spending.)

  Success was not only less profitable than Jackson had expected, it had hidden costs. By far the most unexpected and devastating of these was the transformation of his circle of friends. Some, like Balcomb Greene, simply disliked the art. Hard-line abstractionists like Fritz Bultman felt that Jackson’s imagery had been sucked into the tar pit of Surrealism that surrounded Peggy Guggenheim. “There was,” said Peter Busa, “a kind of isolation between all of us after we started to show.” John Graham was the first to break off contact altogether. According to a mutual friend, Graham felt Jackson had betrayed Picasso and the modernist tradition. Yet by 1943, Graham himself was drifting away from modernist dogma toward the alchemical and mystical imagery that would dominate his later works. Lee Krasner suspected that “Graham abandoned Jackson because he used to say that an artist lost his soul when he became famous,” but there’s no indication that Graham thought less of Picasso on account of his extensive celebrity. Bill Baziotes was another artist who distrusted success—Jackson’s or anyone else’s. As far as Baziotes was concerned, Jackson had been caught in “the web”—his term for the network of dealers and directors who were “always ready to snare an artist and devour him.” Arloie McCoy remembers that “Nene Schardt was resentful, too, because Jackson got what her husband Bernie didn’t. They wouldn’t say it, but the resentment was there.” Even Reuben Kadish, who had recently returned from India, began to cool noticeably.

  For someone who so desperately needed approval, the effect of so much withdrawal was devastating. To fill the gaps, Jackson once again turned to alcohol, the perennial comfort and penance. Since the last wave of drinking binges, however, he had found a new theme with which to torture himself and those around him. “You’d go to a party with a pretty girl,” Harry Holtzman recalls, “and he’d come up and take her hand and not let go of it and say, ‘You know, I’m a great artist.’ It was pathetic.” Beatrice Ribak remembers Jackson drunk, “going around bragging about this new thing that he had found and what he was going to do with it. Nobody took him seriously, but Jackson would just brag at the top of his lungs.” In May, drunk and belligerent, he burst into Louis Ribak’s studio on Twenty-first Street. “Jackson tried to tell him that he shouldn’t be doing that kind of representational work,” Beatrice Ribak recalls. “He should be doing what Jackson was doing. There was a lot of yelling, but when my husband wouldn’t listen, Jackson picked up a hammer and said, ‘I’m gonna kill you.’ It was really kid stuff.”

  Success also thrust Jackson into unfamiliar company. Soon after the November show, egged on by Peggy and Lee, he began appearing at the frequent parties and dinners given by prominent collectors like Bernard Reis and Jeanne Reynal as well as Peggy herself. They were giddy, garrulous events, where Matta entertained with his hilarious stories and Motherwell held forth on Mallarmé. In the midst of so many strangers and such intimidating social fluency, Jackson seemed “a lost soul,” even more painfully conspicuous for his silence. When he spoke, it was usually through Lee, although, according to a friend, “one sometimes wondered if Pollock himself would have replied in the same words.” Most of the time, he simply “smiled and sat quietly,” recalls May Rosenberg, and drank. “If someone came in and said, do you want a drink, he’d say yes—like a good little boy, or even more like a good little girl. He felt that they bought his art, so he had to be nice to them.”

  It was only a matter of time before Peggy tried to have sex with Jackson. Given her reputation, both Lee and Jackson must have been surprised that she waited as long as she did. Both had heard the stories about her bizarre sexual appetites, about her affairs with Tanguy and Penrose, about the long lists of lovers she kept, about her claims to have slept “with practically every man she had ever met,” about her ability to make love anywhere, any time, even “with the window-cleaner watching.” A sexual omnivore, Peggy pursued men, women, and even, according to one particularly lurid account, dogs, with a frankness that never lost its power to shock. Her preferred prey, of course, was “anything in pants,” but otherwise she made no distinctions, pursuing heterosexual and homosexual men with equal fervor. “She tried awfully hard to go to bed with Alfred Barr,” recalled Dorothy Miller. Some people suspected th
at she actually preferred homosexual lovers because they “were more likely to put up with a middle-aged woman” and “like[d] the idea of a woman being interested in them.” One friend thought that Peggy’s whole approach to sex was “homosexual”: “She was around them so much,” said John Richardson, “she picked up the one-night stands.”

  One of those “one-night stands” was Jackson Pollock. Sometime in early 1944, on a night when Lee was out of town and Jackson was too drunk to make excuses, Peggy managed to lure him into her bedroom. According to Lee, she had been trying for some time, insinuating that if Jackson was truly grateful for her patronage, there was only one way to prove it.

  But it wasn’t fidelity or sobriety that had kept him out of Peggy’s bedroom for so long. Even after two years with Lee, Jackson continued to be plagued by sexual anxieties. The resolution that Lee had brought was fragile, and nothing threatened to shatter it like Peggy’s nymphomaniacal demands. The evening climaxed in fiasco—although the exact details varied in the telling. At different times, Peggy claimed that Jackson fell asleep, that he vomited in her bed, that he urinated in her bed, and that “he threw his drawers out the window,” all of which could have happened. As for the sexual event, Peggy said only that it was “very unsuccessful,” which, given Peggy’s indiscriminate appetite and willingness to fabricate sexual triumphs, must have meant it was truly humiliating. When asked about the incident years later, Jackson responded as he always did to questions about his rumored sexual exploits: a knowing smile, a crude joke, and an enigmatic grunt to leave the impression that “he probably did, but if he didn’t, it was because she wasn’t worth it.” Several friends recall him saying, “To fuck Peggy you’d have to put a towel over her head first.”

  But Peggy’s unrestrained sexuality wasn’t nearly as threatening as the forbidden sexuality of those around her.

  With the departure of the puritanical Breton, who disapproved of any sex outside marriage, and the arrival of Macpherson and his entourage of “Athenians” (Macpherson’s preferred term), Peggy’s apartment quickly filled with a “pandemonium” of homosexuals from both inside and outside the New York art community. Most had been exempted from war duty as “undesirables.” They “were around because no one else was around,” recalled Peggy’s son, Sindbad, who served in the army; “most everyone else was drafted.”

  Not quite everyone. Caught like a clam in this teeming, exotic, evanescent tidal pool of gay New York was Jackson Pollock.

  The war had already wreaked havoc on Jackson’s shaky sexual self-confidence. The deferment that was supposed to spare him the trauma of military service had inflicted a different kind of trauma as he watched friends like Kadish, James Brooks, George McNeil, John Little, Burgoyne Diller, Ilya Bolotowsky, Wilfrid Zogbaum, George Mercer, Ibram Lassaw, and even brother Frank go off in uniform. Although few of them crossed the ocean and fewer still saw combat, they at least were “in it,” taking part in the great endeavor. They were not among the dross of manhood that remained behind in mufti, described by Sindbad as “those that were too old, or queens, or 4F.” Between these categories, neither Sindbad nor the American public drew fine distinctions. A young, able, unmarried, apparently healthy male like Jackson who was not on his way to war was presumed to be defective in some dark, unspeakable way. The fact that Jackson was an artist suggested the darkest explanation of all. When Robert Motherwell appeared before his draft board, the first question was, “Are you a homosexual?” When Motherwell answered no, the board didn’t believe him, insisting that anyone who lived in Greenwich Village and was an artist had to be a homosexual. Motherwell called their attention to his marriage, but the board granted him an “undesirable” exemption regardless. In Selective Service announcements, artists were routinely lumped with “hairdressers, dress and millinery makers, designers, and interior decorators,” in a group whose bravery, patriotism, and manhood were all suspect.

  The gay courtesans who reveled every night in Peggy’s apartment fit the unflattering stereotype perfectly. Like their hostess, they were utterly oblivious to the war. According to Sindbad, who visited his mother on leave, “If they hadn’t seen me in uniform, they wouldn’t have known I was in the army. All those people behaved as if there were no war.” They drank, played games, staged skits, and drank some more. No one talked of the battle for Monte Cassino, the relief of Leningrad, or the race riots in Detroit. The only clues to the conflict engulfing the rest of the world were the occasional bewildered young sailors dragged in by Parker Tyler or sometimes by Peggy herself. When tempers flared, the bone was usually artistic or amorous, seldom political.

  Peggy’s “rich fruits” (May Rosenberg’s term) included a small contingent from the Museum of Modern Art. If the party began to sag, the friskiest of them would remove his clothes, dart through the crowd naked, and ascend the sweeping stairs to the delighted laughter of the regulars. In such flights of Dionysian excess, nothing was forbidden and no one in the room was off limits. Among the blushing bystanders who attracted his share of amorous attentions was Jackson Pollock.

  It’s impossible to know just how far Jackson was drawn into the circle of homosexuality that surrounded Peggy Guggenheim. According to one account, Jackson and the MOMA streaker “used to frolic together,” and sometimes, when Jackson was drunk enough, would disappear into Peggy’s guest room or Macpherson’s apartment upstairs where sexual “free-for-alls” were common. Given Jackson’s paralyzing anxieties, however, it’s unlikely that he could engage in any sexual activity, especially homosexual activity, so blithely—even with the help of alcohol. Yet homosexuality was clearly on his mind in the year following the first Guggenheim show. Despite the threat it posed to his own sexual identity, he immersed himself in the gay subculture of the New York art community, frequently visiting George’s Tavern on Seventh Avenue, a block south of Sheridan Square, where a group of homosexuals and others from the New Bauhaus in Chicago often congregated. “It wasn’t really a homosexual hangout,” recalls one regular patron, “because it wasn’t very open then. They didn’t make you proclaim what you were at the door, but that’s what it amounted to.” Fritz Bultman’s old family friend, Tennessee Williams, often joined the group at George’s, offering tart, black commentary on what he called “the big lie.” “I was sitting at a bar with Fritz and Tennessee Williams,” Peter Busa remembers, “and Tennessee said, ‘You know, Peter, the world is divided into fruits and nuts.’”

  Jackson was also a frequent guest at the Gramercy Park apartment of John Little, who returned from navy duty in 1944, where he often saw Little’s friend, Ward Bennett. Jackson may have been confused about his sexual identity, but Bennett—a “sandy-haired,” athletic-looking, twenty-five-year-old former Hofmann student—picked up very clear signals. “I didn’t go to bed with him,” Bennett says, “but he was definitely interested in me. I mean I would have gone to bed with him, but I was not interested in Jackson. I liked him very much—he was so sweet and such a dear when he was sober and so crazy when he was drunk. I’m sure it would have been possible if I was interested but I really wasn’t.”

  Others were. One of the young artists who frequented George’s “was very attracted to people like policemen and truck drivers and big rugged characters like that,” according to Peter Busa. “So he doted on Jackson, who could have picked this guy up and thrown him across the room.” Busa recalls hearing the same person brag about how he waited until Jackson was “loaded” and “defenseless,” then led him to the house that he shared with Tennessee Williams on Eleventh Street. “What could Jackson do if [this guy] wanted to screw him in the ass? I know it happened,” Busa insists. “Friends of mine talked about it and laughed about it at times.” Contacted years later, the man Busa named would only admit coyly that he had “kissed” Jackson once or twice. But, says Busa, “he has these elegant terms he uses now.”

  If Jackson’s anxieties ever permitted a homosexual act, it probably followed the scenario described by Busa: a drinking binge to the brink
of oblivion, a passive role (to avoid the demands and implications of taking the initiative), and a smaller man who, in some deep recess of Jackson’s subconscious, may have recalled Sande and a childhood of shared beds. (A decade later, when the issue of homosexuality would surface again in Jackson’s life, the reported encounters were almost identical to the one described by Busa.) As early as 1944, at least one person took accounts like Busa’s seriously: Lee Krasner. “Lee knew that he was interested in me,” recalls Ward Bennett, “and it drove her up the wall.” Years later, she confided to several close friends that “[Jackson] liked men. He always had this tremendous thing about homosexuality. He was rather anxious about it, you know, wondering whether …” Later, Reuben Kadish would tell an interviewer, “I know Jackson had sex with men as well as women,” and confirmed that Sande “worried terribly” that his younger brother was gay.