Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  From the moment his train pulled into the East Hampton station, Lee played the charming, savvy hostess. “Lee and I would sit at the kitchen table and talk for hours,” Greenberg remembered. “We’d drink coffee and go to bed at three or four in the morning.” An alert but sad-faced man with a prematurely bald, egg-shaped head that made him look both older and more pedantic than he was, Greenberg relished these sessions with Lee and later acknowledged that “she was damn significant for me. I was learning from her all the time.” Most of what he learned was “warmed-over Hofmann,” according to a friend of Lee’s, which he then repeated back to her with the proprietary certitude that marked all his conversation.

  That certitude would soon become the watermark of his criticism, the product of both deep-rooted intellectual insecurity and a long, cold immersion in Marxism. It was, after all, the revolutionary spirit of American abstraction—fighting to overthrow both the art establishment and European hegemony—that had attracted him to the avant-garde in general and Jackson Pollock in particular. By 1946, he had retired the prewar Marxist vocabulary, but his view of art, and of art critics, was still shaped by a tenacious belief in “historical inevitability.” Like soldiers in the class struggle, artists either did or did not advance the cause; they marched either with history or against it. The art critic’s job was to define the cause and, within the limits of persuasion, rally the soldiers to it.

  Greenberg’s “cause” was the flatness of the canvas. Because a painting was nothing more than a two-dimensional surface spread with visual data (i.e., paint), he argued, its “beauty” could be judged only by reference to the formal properties of the paint on the surface, not by reference to an extraneous reality or a transcendent metaphysic. Imagery of any kind, because it suggested a third dimension and therefore violated the flatness of the picture plane, was forbidden. “Content is a morass,” he once said. Painting is painting is painting—shiny smears on a flat surface, strokes and colors interacting with one another. “Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miró, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne, derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in,” he wrote in 1939. “The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc.” Of course, as Greenberg well knew, Hofmann had said essentially the same thing years before, and Maurice Denis, Roger Fry, and several others, years before that; but, as a true intellectual, disdainful of painters, Greenberg needed a higher authority. He found it in positivism, the notion that knowledge is based only on the “positive” data of experience and therefore phenomena can be studied only in terms of their formal relationships to other phenomena. “Ours was an age of science,” wrote William Barrett in Truants. “Positivism was the scientific philosophy of our time, and [Greenberg] had, above all, to be in tune with the deeper Zeitgeist of history.” Later, Greenberg would add to the unlikely combination of Marxism and positivism an even more unlikely reliance on the German moral philosopher, Immanuel Kant. (“It was not that Greenberg ‘got Kant all wrong,’” wrote Barrett, “but that he seemed to have read only the first thirty or forty pages of Kant’s work.”) In 1946, Greenberg’s theories, like his influence, were still in their infancy, but his sense of certitude had already reached maturity. “My generation were all geniuses,” he once admitted. “We didn’t think it was right to take suggestions.”

  But it was right to give them. And when he entered Jackson’s studio in late July, that’s exactly what he did.

  Inside, Blue Unconscious stood on one wall drying, nearly finished. On the floor, Jackson had begun work on Something of the Past. Greenberg looked long, “squinting, with brow furrowed, lips pursed, and fingers pressed beneath his eyes to help them focus,” according to one account of a similar visit. “Sometimes his look was quick, sometimes long. Either way it was frequently followed by a judgment. The painting was first-rate, or second-rate, or missed altogether.” This time, Greenberg’s eye was drawn to the painting on the floor with its dense tangle of yellows. It reminded him, he would later recall, of Jackson’s mural for Peggy Guggenheim, which he had already called “Jackson’s best,” and of Gothic, another painting he admired. To him, both of those earlier works, with their deeply buried imagery, allover compositions, and exuberant surfaces, perfectly exemplified his theories: in them, paint was paint; surface was surface; and neither, apparently, aspired to more. Since 1944, Greenberg had watched with increasing disappointment as Jackson retreated from “his own manifest destiny” by reintroducing imagery. To him, Blue Unconscious was just another example of that retreat, although he did admire the fragmentation of the figures and the variously textured paint surface. But the new painting, as yet unnamed, seemed to hold real promise, not merely saving graces. Finally, according to one version of the tense enounter, he pointed to the painting on the floor and said slowly, his Brooklyn accent thinly disguised by an acquired southern drawl, “That’s interesting. Why don’t you do eight or ten of those?”

  When Greenberg spoke, Jackson listened. Like Lee, he knew how much Greenberg’s support had done to buoy his career over the previous three years. Paul Brach remembers him years later being “flattered and grateful that Clem spoke for him.” The same gratitude extended to any critic who ventured a flattering comment. A friend remembers seeing Jackson in the fifties, clutching a copy of a favorable review. “Even though it was full of the critical clichés of the day, Jackson was very respectful of it. He was in awe of critics or anyone who could affect your fate that much.” Of course, Jackson also had acute political instincts. “Be nice to Clem,” he once told Fritz Bultman. “If he likes your work he’ll help you.”

  Jackson couldn’t have been surprised by Greenberg’s enthusiasm for Something of the Past. He knew of the critic’s praise for the Guggenheim mural and Gothic, of his belief that pure abstraction was the only legitimate form of painting, and of his admiration for allover composition. Only a few months before, both men had attended Janet Sobel’s 1946 show at Art of This Century and come away “struck” by her small canvases of allover linear abstractions. Sobel, a self-taught, fifty-two-year-old grandmother from Brooklyn, whom Greenberg considered slightly balmy, had followed a career path much like Jackson’s, although considerably shorter. Beginning in 1939 with primitive representational images, she had developed a highly personal, quasi-Surrealist style in which “facial features and other forms evolved out of a web of seemingly totally abstract linear rhythms.” Later, Greenberg would claim that Sobel’s show, and one painting in particular—Music, with its “overall design of pine-needle strokes, with hidden faces and figures”—had a significant “influence on Pollock’s work.”

  Gothic, 1944, oil and enamel on canvas, 84⅝” × 56”

  In fact, Sobel was only the last in a long line of influences that had brought Jackson to Something of the Past. From the earliest doodles in his Benton sketchbooks to the abstract motifs that first appeared on his ceramic pieces, Jackson had been experimenting with “allover” composition—evenly distributing picture elements over the available space. One untitled painting from the period, obviously a prescient experiment, bears a startling resemblance to later, fully realized allover works. Among his drawings for Joseph Henderson, tucked between Surrealistic monsters and Picassoid profiles are sheets of abstract and semi-abstract “doodling,” sometimes confined to the center of the page, sometimes edge-to-edge. The “automatic” drawings of Matta, which Jackson so much admired, although not edge-to-edge, suggested a tangle of lines that could be expanded to cover the picture plane in an elegant, allover web. In paintings like Stenographic Figure, Jackson used the graffiti of automatism, spread evenly over the picture, both to obscure the figures and to soften the hard compositional regime of figures and background. Jackson may well have seen Sobel’s 1944 show or the illustration of Music in Sidney Janis’s book, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, but he certainly saw a showing that same year of Mark Tobey’s “white-writing
” pictures at the Willard Gallery. The dense web of white strokes, as elegant as Oriental calligraphy, impressed Jackson so much that in a letter to Louis Bunce he described Tobey, a West Coast artist, as an “exception” to the rule that New York was “the only place in America where painting (in the real sense) can come thru.”

  C. 1939–40, colored pencil on paper, 8” × 8”

  In Provincetown, the same year as Sobel’s and Tobey’s shows, Jackson and Ward Bennett worked together on an old piece of canvas they found on the beach to produce an image that, while it didn’t yet fill the picture frame, showed that Jackson was still haunted by the possibilities inherent in the Guggenheim mural. Back in New York, he began a new, more conscious set of experiments toward allover composition in his sketchbook. On several sheets, he filled the middle ground with teeming jumbles of lines and forms like whirlwinds flinging about bits of detritus. These represent the dark side of Matta’s cerebral webs, the angry side of Tobey’s congested cityscapes. They haven’t yet grown to fill the page like Sobel’s sinewy clusters of color, nor have they lost the personal imagery that served as a contact point for Jackson’s unconscious. But they do form a clear path through the stylistic missteps and retreats of the 1945 and early 1946 paintings, a lifeline connecting the great mural of 1944 with the fragmented images of the paintings Clement Greenberg saw when he walked into Jackson’s studio in 1946.

  For the rest of the summer and fall, Jackson pursued the path marked out by Something of the Past. In paintings like Eyes in the Heat, Croaking Movement, Earth Worms, and Shimmering Substance, he covered the canvas from edge to edge in thick, “suffocatingly packed” swirls of paint. Imagery that had been poised on the edge of abstraction in The Blue Unconscious disappears completely beneath a turbulent sea of small brush strokes and heavy impasto that all but ignores the edges of the canvas. Would Jackson have pursued these allover images without Greenberg’s encouragement? Did Greenberg redirect him down a path from which he had retreated once before, after the Guggenheim mural, or merely legitimize a path on which he was already embarked? Paintings like Earth Worms and Shimmering Substance can easily be seen as Jackson’s reponse to Greenberg’s request to “do eight or ten of those.” And despite the elbow room in the new studio, all the paintings from this period are, by Jackson’s standards, small and tentative: the largest, Croaking Movement, only 4½ by 3½ feet; the smallest, Shimmering Substance, a mere 2½ by 2 feet. Clearly, even as he painted them, Jackson felt the critic peering over his shoulder. When he finished Eyes in the Heat, he told Lee, “That’s for Clem.”

  1944, ink on paper, 19” × 24”

  Such responsiveness paid off. In his review of the same paintings (and a Dubuffet show) the following February, Greenberg proved predictably enthusiastic. After beginning with a statement of principles—“It is the tension inherent in the constructed, recreated flatness of the surface that produces the strength of [Pollock’s] art”—he compared Jackson and Dubuffet:

  Pollock, again like Dubuffet, tends to handle his canvas with an overall evenness; but at this moment he seems capable of more variety than the French artist; and able to work with riskier elements—silhouettes and invented ornamental motifs—which he integrates in the plane surface with astounding force.

  Finally, Greenberg pointedly applauded the disappearance of explicit imagery from Jackson’s work. “Pollock has gone beyond the stage where he needs to make his poetry explicit in ideographs,” he wrote. “What he invents instead has perhaps, in its very abstractness and absence of assignable definition, a more reverberating meaning.”

  If it bothered Jackson or Greenberg that the latter was reviewing paintings he had had a hand in shaping, neither complained. Both had gotten what they wanted: Jackson, a favorable review; Greenberg, substantiation of his theories. It was a fortuitous beginning for a symbiosis that, in the coming decade, would prove first highly beneficial, then disastrous for Jackson and his art.

  Through the rest of the summer and fall, Jackson coasted on an unprecedented tide of support. Every weekend in July and August a new set of houseguests caught George Schaefer’s taxi at the East Hampton station and asked for “the Pollocks’ place.” Bill Davis—next to Peggy, Jackson’s most ardent collector—and his wife Emily; Herbert and Mercedes Matter, who had just returned from California; Fred and Janet Hauck. Lee even let Jackson invite Ed and Wally Strautin, his bluecollar neighbors from Eighth Street, for Labor Day weekend. Springs was particularly beautiful in the late summer when mallow roses and sea lavender crept into the marsh grass, and goldenrod filled the margins of the fields.

  The scene was so breathtaking that Jackson hated to miss even a day of it. During the entire summer, he took only two brief trips into New York—one in June, another in September when Peggy finally announced what had been rumored for years: she was closing the gallery. Howard Putzel’s death the year before had proved to be the fatal blow, although Peggy, still furious at his ingratitude, would never admit it. Since then, deprived of his unerring eye, the shows had steadily declined in quality and many of her earlier discoveries had defected to other galleries. “Everything got to be too much,” she complained. The 1946–47 season, she had decided, would be her last.

  Desperate to exceed his minimum for the year and generate some extra money for the new house, Jackson begged for one more show before the final closing. Peggy joylessly obliged, thinking no doubt that, despite the short time since his last show, Jackson’s works were more likely to sell than those of some of the other painters she had been showing. The best she could do at this late date, however, was to squeeze him in from January 14 to February 1—a graveyard slot, too soon after Christmas and too long before spring.

  On their trips into the city, Jackson and Lee stayed with Jay, Alma, James Brooks, and Charlotte Park in the apartment on Eighth Street, in the little room beside the studio where Jackson had lived briefly in the mid-thirties. The familiar surroundings conjured old ghosts. “He was up and down,” Charlotte Park recalls, “fine for a while, and then, with a drink or two, as bad, as wild as he ever was. We worried because Sande wasn’t there to protect him from himself.”

  Once back in Springs, however, Jackson appeared to be in control for the first time in years. When he drank—which was often—it was in search of companionship, not oblivion. By fall, he had even begun to earn acceptance among his fellow drinkers at Jungle Pete’s. Gradually, they introduced him to the other Bonacker hangouts: the bar at the Nursery View Cabins; Frank Eck’s Elm Tree Inn near the firehouse in Amagansett, and, farther still, Cavagnaro’s—“the only bar in East Hampton where the Bonackers would go,” according to one customer, “because nobody put on any airs.” Before long, the Springs police had added Jackson’s name to the list of local drinkers who were likely to need a ride home. “In the first years Jackson was here,” recalls a Pollock neighbor, “the police could afford to be protective. His drinking was still just a joke.”

  Along with new places to drink, Jackson discovered a new drinking companion that summer. Tall and gaunt with an amiable hound-dog face, Roger Wilcox was “the kind of man you want to tell your life’s story to,” according to one friend. The two men had actually met twice before, once in the late thirties through John Graham and again at a Guggenheim opening. But it wasn’t until they were introduced again at Ralph Manheim’s house in April of 1946 that the friendship took hold. Wilcox, like Jackson, had just bought an old house in Amagansett and needed some escape from a powerful, possessive wife (one friend described Lucia Wilcox as “a powerhouse like Lee”). But it was drinking that sealed their bond.

  Wilcox was a man of some mystery. He didn’t have a job and never seemed to work, yet was obviously better off than the Pollocks. He claimed to live well on the royalty payments from obscure inventions: a machine that sculpted wall-to-wall carpet, another that counted threads in textile manufacturing. “I just go to the mailbox every month and get a check,” he would say offhandedly when people inquired. Then there were the qu
estions about his mysterious military service. (Later, he would admit that he worked in “intelligence operations.”) He was even evasive about his age, although he was clearly older than Jackson, perhaps by a decade.

  Not that Wilcox refused all talk of the past. Over beer in the booths at Jungle Pete’s, he would entertain Jackson for hours with stories from his astonishingly dense and variegated life: his troubled childhood in south Florida when Miami was still “a wilderness around a bay”; killing his first rattlesnake with a hoe at the age of three; jumping from job to job and state to state—sign painter in Florida, electrical engineer in New York, architect in Texas, designer in Ohio, artist in New York (after only a few months, he decided he didn’t have the “compulsion” to be an artist). At each stop along the way, Wilcox would “use his brain instead of his back,” inventing some new device to make the work easier and himself richer. By the time he turned twenty, he had made and lost a fortune in the booming neon light business. Ten years later, on the verge of a second fortune, he decided to quit the world altogether and turn “primitive” on a deserted island off the coast of Florida. That lasted about four months, he recalls, “long enough to build a cabin.” He was just too restless and sociable to lead a hermit’s life.

  The next stop was Key West, a curious cross between a navy town and an artists’ enclave. With his dry humor and amiable manner, Wilcox soon planted a foot on both sides of the line: consulting for the navy during the day and mixing with writers like Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Bishop by night. He became a regular crew member on Lester Hemingway’s boat, where he often encountered Lester’s infamous older brother, Ernest. “He was a pretentious ass,” Wilcox remembers, “a big, macho pretender. When it came to a showdown he had someone else do his fighting for him. He was always trying to write what he wished he was for real. Physically, he was a big guy, but he wasn’t worth a damn.”