Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Given how limited an effort Jackson put into it and how little new ground it broke, the April show was received with surprising kindness by the critics. “Jackson Pollock is one of the most influential young American abstractionists,” Art News concluded, “and he has reinforced his position in a recent exhibition.” One critic lodged a flattering complaint against Jackson’s “surface virtuosity,” saying it “frequently forbids him to the promised land of plastic realization.” Clement Greenberg, writing in the Nation, excused the show as “transitional.” “Pollock’s third show in as many years,” wrote Greenberg, “contains nothing to equal the large canvases, ‘Totem I’ and ‘Totem Il’ that [Pollock] exhibited last year. But it is still sufficient—for all its divagations and weaknesses, especially in the gouaches—to show him as the most original contemporary easel-painter under forty.”

  The show probably would have received far closer scrutiny, for good or ill, if the entire art world had not been preoccupied with the publication of Peggy’s Out of This Century in March. One reviewer suggested that “Out of My Head” would have been a more appropriate title, “considering the nymphomaniacal revelations and other mad doings related in the book.” Despite almost universal condemnation—the press labeled Peggy “an urge on wheels” and her world, a “Boudoir Bohemia”—the book was seen under every arm on Fifty-seventh Street.

  By the time the succès de scandale reached its peak, however, Jackson was back in Springs where he was surprised by a far more momentous event: the coming of spring.

  It came early that year. Prodded by the Gulf Stream and its warm escorting winds, the tiny pink blossoms of the dune-hugging bearberries had already begun to appear. They were only a hint of the transformation to follow. Caught unaware, local farmers quickly plowed up the green blanket of ryegrass in preparation for potato planting. Fishermen dipped their vast seines into the currents of striped bass and bluefish that passed near shore in shimmering migration. In the sky, gannets, shearwaters, and ocean gulls flew by on their way north, only to be joined in the swift invisible currents by local plovers and sandpipers on their short round-trip to arctic nesting grounds and by Canada geese bound for the great northern tundra.

  Jackson hadn’t seen a true country spring for twenty years, not since the spring harvest in the yellow fields below Janesville. According to Lee, it affected him profoundly. “He spent hours, sometimes whole days walking around the first spring we were there,” she recalls. “He was like a kid, exploring everything”—the saltwater marsh that fringed the tidal waters of Accabonac Harbor, the tall spartina grass that parted like fur in the sea breeze to reveal colonies of black ducks and terns, the grass-choked “crick” that flowed from the freshwater springs that gave the town its name. In high boots, or sometimes barefoot, Jackson tracked the intimate topography of the marshlands—the hills, or hummocks, decorated with hudsonia; the valleys, or pannes, where glasswort, pale green in the spring, thrived in the spongy, salt-saturated ground. Occasionally he would stumble on a huge boulder half buried in the teeming water and blanketed with vegetation. Geologists called them “glacial erratics”—huge rocks scooped up on the mainland and dropped here by retreating glaciers. On the landward side of the harbor were small stands of oak, red cedar, and marsh elder—most of the big trees had gone down in the 1938 hurricane; on the seaward side, the sandy marshes of Louse and Gerard points.

  Jackson never missed a chance to walk the crescent-shaped ridges that hemmed the shore near the points. “He loved to go out and look at the dunes,” Lee recalled later. He would sit on a grassy crest for hours, gazing at the mild spring sea as it slowly rebuilt the beaches that had been torn away by winter storms. In the distance, he could see the boats of the Bonac fishermen trapfishing in Gardiners Bay while, overhead, gulls and terns floated from breeze to breeze like paper kites and now and then an osprey plunged for fish. In the lee of the dunes, beach plums grew and pitch pines hunkered on the windy slopes. Around the freshwater slacks at their base, cranberries reddened in the sun, red-winged blackbirds built their nests, and muskrat and quail rustled in the blueberry-dotted brush.

  Buoyed by Lee’s attentions and the unexpected joys of the onrushing spring, Jackson began what was, probably, the happiest year of his life. Yet for all his psychological sophistication, he almost certainly failed to understand his newfound happiness. Even as he laid out and plowed an ambitious garden of vegetables and melons, even when he adopted a mongrel collie and named it Gyp after his boyhood companion, even as he proudly surveyed the land and talked about “his farm” and “what he was going to do with it,” Jackson apparently never realized that he was replaying the past.

  Lee neither understood the reasons for Jackson’s contentment nor cared to. It was enough that he had finally found a level spot in a life that only a year before had seemed to be nothing but peaks and valleys. “There were times when [Jackson] was happy,” Lee once reminisced about the early years in Springs. “He loved his house, he loved to fool around in his garden.” He also loved Lee. She was, after all, a crucial part of his recreation. For the first time since 1942, the delicate balance of their relationship held steady. “When I’d rant and rave about someone being a son of a bitch,” Lee recalled, “he’d calm me down considerably.” She later described it as a “cozy, domestic, and very fulfilling” time. They slept long and late, spent middays rooting in the garden—Jackson did the digging and planting, Lee the watering and weeding—and afternoons working inside—Jackson painting in the upstairs bedroom, Lee cleaning the house, shopping, and preparing dinner. (For most of the first year, her easel stood folded and unused in a corner of the living room.) Sometimes, in the late afternoon, they would bicycle together into town through the sweet, heavy smell of new-sown potato fields and roadside cherry saplings in bloom. Other times, he would gesture for her to join him on a walk to the marshes and dunes, “or we would sit on the stoop for hours gazing into the landscape without exchanging a word,” Lee remembered. For a while, at least, New York and Provincetown and the inexorable cycle of Jackson’s troubles were forgotten.

  With Jackson’s dog Gyp, c. 1946

  On the weekend of May 17, just when the pink and white dogwoods were at their height, Stella, Sande, and Arloie came to Springs to celebrate Stella’s seventy-first birthday. For a few days, as Jackson proudly showed off his house and his garden, past and present came together.

  In a burst of painting that coincided with Stella’s visit, Jackson recorded their fleeting union. In The Water Bull, he summoned up the bull that frightened his mother’s horse, the overturned wagon that spilled them onto the road, the gloved hand of the farmer who slapped him—all in the sun-bleached colors of the Arizona desert. In The Tea Cup, he relived an afternoon of “playing house” in the cool shady colors of Evelyn Porter’s porch with her little dog Trixie looking on. In Bird Effort, he captured the sharpness and confusion of bird beaks and wings and the threat of a knife blade. In Yellow Triangle and The Key, he returned to his favorite image, the family table, spread with food and flanked by still, diffident figures obscured by an obsession of brush strokes. Stylistically as well as psychologically, these paintings from the spring of 1946 are suffused with an unapologetic nostalgia. After two years of turgid, humorless colors and heavy impasto, Jackson returned to the looser limbed, more thinly painted style of 1943 paintings like Stenographic Figure and Search for a Symbol. In the afternoon light that flooded his second story studio, surrounded by spring, he rediscovered a Matisse-like palette of clear reds, lime greens, violets, peaches, pinks, and teal blues, as well as a spectrum of watercolor-like pastels unused since The Magic Mirror. In his art as well as in his life, Jackson was making an inventory of the past: rehearsing earlier styles, colors, and images even as he resurrected Roy Pollock; taking stock, both creatively and emotionally, of what he had achieved; and savoring, if only briefly, the long sought sense of resolution.

  The Key, 1946, 59” × 84”

  But Jackson, like Stella Pollock, wa
s restless. No sooner had he settled into the house, the life-style, and the art than he began to hanker for changes in all three. He began, as Stella often did, by fixing up the house. During the summer and fall, he painted the upstairs bedrooms, cleaned out the barn and tool shed (salvaging a few objects to hang on the walls), put in a crude bathroom, enclosed part of the back porch, and hired Whitey Hustek to paint the entire exterior—white over the old brown shingles, blue on the shutters. Jackson thought it looked “grand.”

  But the big project of the summer was moving the barn. Ever since the closing, Jackson had been eyeing the old structure restlessly. Standing halfway between house and harbor, it was too far away for a studio—especially in the winter—and too close to the harbor for a garage. Lee also complained that it blocked her view of the water. The solution was to move it up, toward the house, and over, out of the line of sight. Roger Wilcox, a recently arrived neighbor with an acute mechanical sense, offered to help. His plan was simple enough: they would tie the four walls together with beams to keep them from spreading, jack the building up off its rock foundations (there was no floor), set logs underneath and simply roll it into place. It would be a slow process—the new site was five feet higher than the old and fifty feet to the north—but, even after Jackson pulled a ligament in his right arm while laying the cement foundation, they figured they could do it themselves.

  Pollock’s studio in Springs

  When moving day, June 10, arrived, progress was excruciatingly slow. “Every time we leveraged it up and pushed it along,” recalls Wilcox, “it only moved about five inches.” Wilcox suggested that Jackson find a local fisherman with a seine-hauling winch on the back of his truck, but Jackson “didn’t want to bother those guys.” By the end of the day, however, when the barn had budged only about “four or five feet,” Jackson had run out of patience. “Shit,” he said, “we’re never going to get it up there.” The next day, he recruited a local fisherman who deftly fitted the building with wooden skids, hooked it to his truck, and hauled it up onto the concrete base. Within a few days, Jackson had removed the temporary supporting beams and knocked a huge hole for a window high up on the north wall. When Lee suggested that he put in another window lower down, Jackson replied, “No, no, I don’t want to be disturbed by the outside view when I’m working.” For all his love of the harbor view and the country spring, Lee remembered, “he wanted his studio completely closed off.”

  It was an impossible request, as Jackson must have known. The turn-of-the-century structure had never been more than a partial shelter from the elements—abused in summer, abandoned in winter. Scores of freezes and thaws had shrunk and curled the old boards till broad slits of daylight showed between them. Knotholes sent lasers of sunlight through the perpetually dusty interior. In the main “room,” an eighteen-by-twenty-four-foot space porportioned for tractors and wagons, the walls rose twelve feet and the gable another six. On the west wall, two big sliding doors hung on rusty tracks and rattled at every breeze. On the south side, underneath the hay trap, someone had added a storage room with a small door up off the ground, windows, and two big access doors of its own. Everywhere inside, the gray-brown water-stained walls were studded with shelves and hooks and makeshift storage. Overhead, chunks of mortar fell from the roof lathing, and old rags plugged the joints. The height of the ceiling made the space look bigger than it was, so that even after Jackson filled the shelves and the floor near the walls with a confusion of paint cans, brushes, thinners, easels, canvases, stretchers, tools, and a few pieces of old furniture, the place still looked empty and echoed like an abandoned mine.

  Inside this lofty, dilapidated space, Jackson’s art proved even more intractable than the barn. The paintings he had done in the spring, like The Tea Cup and The Key, were certainly accomplished—an achievement that must have brought him some pleasure—but they explored no new ground. He had used the same Matisse-like colors and compositions with more energy and insight three years earlier in Moon Woman. Stylistically, he seemed to be moving backwards. Restless, but unsure of a direction, he continued to retrace his path. In The Bue Unconscious, a big canvas begun before the move to the barn but finished afterward, familiar images—a table flanked by totemic figures with the family dog underneath—began to break up into more obscure fragments, just as in Guardians of the Secret three years before. In Something of the Past, the images almost disappear completely (except for the faint trace of the family dog, hunkering down, as in Guardians, asleep or afraid, at the very bottom of the picture). Just as in late 1943, Jackson was playing at the boundary between abstraction and representation. In Something of the Past, as in Pasiphaë, he struggles to sustain the emotional urgency of the unconscious imagery even as it flirts from behind a veil of abstraction. Two and a half years after the Guggenheim mural, riding another crest of emotional resolution and professional success, Jackson was again poised for a breakthrough. Psychologically and artistically, he had spent two years retreating from, then recovering, the pitch of creative intensity that produced the Guggenheim mural and Gothic, his first true nonfigurative masterpieces. Like the manic-depressive cycles of his drinking, the cycle of his art was giving Jackson a second chance. This time, he grasped it.

  It’s impossible to know exactly what events, in what combination, led Jackson from his halfhearted restatement of earlier styles in 1945 and 1946 to the astonishingly original “dripped” images that began to appear only six months later. Surely, Lee’s lavish support brought a degree of psychological stability and sexual fulfillment that made it possible for him to concentrate on work. (The next four years would be the longest uninterrupted period of productivity in his life.) The steadying influence of home ownership and a rural life-style no doubt contributed to the feeling of domestic security—a feeling that must have been incalculably gratifying to a boy whose childhood home had begun to disintegrate almost as soon as he entered it.

  In the shorter term, however, there were at least two events, both of which seemed relatively insignificant at the time, that nudged the angle of Jackson’s trajectory just enough to alter his ultimate destination.

  The first was the decision, made sometime in the spring when he was still working in the house, to lay a canvas flat on the floor. At the time, it was merely a practical solution to a practical problem: the five-by-seven-foot canvas for The Key, attached to a curtain stretcher, was too big to stand upright in the small, low-ceilinged upstairs bedroom. Even on the floor “[it] took up the whole space,” Lee recalled. “He could barely walk around it.” For years Jackson had been turning paintings around on the easel, propping them on their sides or upside down in order to solve a problem or just to see them from a different perspective. Occasionally, he had even worked on a canvas while it was askew. But the new arrangement allowed unlimited access to any side at any time. Perhaps because of the cramped conditions in the bedroom, the change had little effect on The Key. But as soon as Jackson moved to the converted barn, where any picture, no matter how big, could be propped on an easel, he began to experiment with the new technique, working mostly on his knees, moving from one side to another, creating and revising the image from every angle.

  The effects of the change began to show immediately. In The Blue Unconscious, probably the first painting produced in the new studio, he was able to achieve the same kind of fragmentation of the image as he had in Pasiphaë without resorting to heavy overpainting. Painting parts of the image from all four sides, he discovered, automatically fragmented the overall image as seen from any one side. It also reflected more accurately his own way of seeing, in which objects had to be rotated and absorbed from a variety of angles before they were truly seen. Finally, he discovered a strange new satisfaction in working on a canvas placed on the floor, in walking around it, standing over it, and bending down beside it. Something about this new way of working satisfied a deep, inarticulate need, a need that, once aroused, would begin to seek fuller, more direct gratification.

  The second deci
sive event was the arrival of Clement Greenberg for a weekend visit in July.

  Despite Greenberg’s unfaltering support of Jackson’s art, the two men had had little personal contact in the four years since they were introduced. For most of that time, Greenberg had pointedly avoided the company of artists, whom he considered, as a rule, “dumb and boring.” “The art world was not the center of gravity for me,” he recalls. “I was more like a tourist in it.” Actually, more like an exile. He had tried and failed to make a place for himself in the literary circle at the Partisan Review, where he briefly served as an editor from 1938 to 1940. Considered both pompous and intellectually mediocre by some of his colleagues, including Philip Rahv and Delmore Schwartz, he soon began casting his critical eye in other directions. “As for [Greenberg] becoming an art critic in the first place,” wrote William Barrett, recounting a theory of Rahv’s, “the reason for that was quite simple: the fact was there were too many literary critics around, and Clem thought it would be easier to avoid the competition by going into the field of art.” He was right. After nothing more than a summer session at the Art Students League, several lectures at the Hofmann school, and some gallery-going with Lee Krasner and Igor Pantuhoff, he handily won a post as art critic for the Nation, where one of his first reviews covered the opening of a show by a young, unknown artist named Jackson Pollock.

  With Clement Greenberg and Helen Frankenthaler

  From their joint debut, artist and critic seemed ideally matched: Jackson’s energetic, uncouth, ambitious paintings and Greenberg’s masculine, earnest, ambitious prose. Still, it wasn’t until almost three years later, at Lee’s prodding, that the two men began a friendship. Although contemptuous of art critics in general and skeptical of Greenberg’s intelligence in particular, Lee was resigned to his importance. “He’s helping us get on our feet,” she told John Bernard Myers. “It’s important to get in print, to be written about.” “She thought of him as a necessary evil,” says her nephew Ronald Stein, “a person to be used and manipulated to get exposure for Jackson.” Thinking, perhaps, that Jackson needed a champion more than ever now that he had moved out of New York, she put Greenberg high on the short list of people who were invited to enjoy a weekend in Springs that first summer.