Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Roger and Lucia Wilcox

  Jackson was especially impressed by Wilcox’s vast circle of acquaintances. In only six months as an artist, he had befriended almost as many artists as Jackson had in all of the thirties. In childhood, he had known Ernest Lawson and Maurice Prendergast, members of The Eight. At the gallery school in Columbus, Ohio, he met the Regionalist triumvirate: Benton, Wood, and Curry. In New York in the late thirties, he was equally welcome in the realist circle of Ben Benn and the modernist circle of Gorky and de Kooning that met every night at Stewart’s Cafeteria. His calm intelligence and straight speaking were highly regarded, especially in the anxious and polemical world of young American artists. It was this “solidity,” so rare in the volatile thirties, that had attracted the attention of Lucia Christofanetti, a Syrian-born Surrealist painter, on a trip to Key West. In 1945, Lucia was living in East Hampton with Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, and the remnants of the Surrealist community that she had known in Paris and had supported during their American exile, when Wilcox returned from war duty and married her. Only a few months later, the newlyweds were introduced to Jackson Pollock.

  Lucia welcomed her husband’s new friend with effusive Damascene hospitality. Not since Rita Benton had Jackson encountered a more reassuring maternal figure. Lee, on the other hand, fearing that Wilcox would turn out to be another Reuben Kadish—a perpetual temptation to drink—remained standoffish. She made no effort to hide her resentment of their nights out together and cast a jealous, sidelong look at every mention of Lucia.

  Even as Jackson’s career was finally regaining its momentum, the complications of the past were entwining themselves in the present. The reversal began when he suggested starting a family and Lee unexpectedly refused. “She said she wouldn’t have a child by him,” recalls May Rosenberg, “ever. He had been drinking in the past, and she didn’t want to have a child because she didn’t know when he might start drinking again.” (Years later, she would be more direct, telling a friend, “I wasn’t about to have a child with a crazy person.”) Whatever the rationale, the announcement shattered Jackson’s dreams of joining his father and brothers in creating a family. “He went berserk,” recalls May Rosenberg. “The whole thing was to be married and have children.” According to Rosenberg, Jackson suddenly felt Lee had “tricked” him into the marriage.

  In the joys and successes of the summer, however, the crisis soon passed, indicating that, at some level, despite his protests, Jackson was probably just as happy not to share this mother’s love with a family of siblings. As one friend commented, expressing the opinion of many, “He was enough child for one family.”

  It was Lee, not Jackson, who emerged from the episode scarred. Convinced that Jackson might leave her to start a family elsewhere, she began to see betrayal in every unreturned glance. Upon arriving back from a short trip to the city and discovering that Jackson had taken Maria Motherwell for a spin in Motherwell’s prized MG convertible, she erupted in a jealous rage. Maria was a beautiful woman who “would flirt with anybody,” according to Roger Wilcox. Over Jackson’s protestations of innocence (probably valid), Lee banished the Motherwells from Jackson’s life. Motherwell recalled that the next time he stopped by the house, Jackson came out to the car and told him apologetically, “Lee forbid me to see you anymore.” Although hardly affected by the estrangement—Jackson never liked Motherwell’s work and later called him a “son of a bitch” and a “phony”—Jackson was duly chastised. For the rest of the summer and fall, whenever women came to the house when Lee was away, he received them coolly—on the porch.

  The momentum of the spring and summer carried Jackson through the storms of fall. Working regularly in the lowering sky and waning light, he completed all the paintings for the January show by the end of November. To maximize the number of works in the show, he sent both the earlier, representational paintings from the spring and the allover canvases he had painted since Greenberg’s visit in July. To justify what looked like a gross stylistic discontinuity, he gave each group its own name: “Accabonac Creek” for the paintings done in the upstairs bedroom; “Sounds in the Grass” for those finished in the barn (including The Blue Unconscious).

  After riding in to New York from Springs with the Rosenbergs, Jackson and Lee spent Thanksgiving with Jay, Alma, Sande, Arloie, Karen, and Stella in Deep River. “[Jack and Lee] both look so well since they have been out of the city,” Stella boasted to Frank, “he has done some swell painting this year.” On Saturday, however, after proudly inviting the family to come to Springs for Christmas, Jackson cut the holiday short. He was anxious to return to Springs and the barn.

  To Lee’s astonishment, even with the show packed off to New York and the winter settling in, Jackson continued to paint. On the coldest mornings, he would fix himself a mug of “hobo coffee,” wrap himself in every piece of clothing he owned, and fight his way to the barn. Inside, condensation would coat the old boards with frost and little drifts of snow would build up in the open spaces between. But the light! According to Lee, on days when it snowed, “there was this incredible white light and Jackson would indulge in the experience of light then because of the luminescence of the snow.” But the light was fleeting. Between the late start, the bitter cold, the relentless drafts, and the numbness in his hands, he was lucky to last an hour or two. “But what he managed to do in those few hours,” said Lee, “was incredible.”

  The Christmas reunion was snowed out, but on December 30, Stella arrived for a two-week stay. The next day, New Year’s Eve, huge gray clouds swept down from Canada and burst with snow. For days, the white of the sky and the white of the ground were indistinguishable; the white creek disappeared into the white harbor and the white ocean beyond. On one of these brief days of pure light, bundled against the cold, with only a cigarette for warmth, his hands so numb he could barely hold a brush, Jackson Pollock altered the course of Western art.

  33

  MEMORIES ARRESTED IN SPACE

  It was a simple gesture. In one hand he held a can of oil paint, thinned to the consistency of honey. In the other, a stick—probably the one he used to mix the paint with turpentine. On his knees beside a small canvas, he dipped the long stick in the can of paint then waved it over the canvas. From the end of the stick, held at a downward angle, a fine line of paint dribbled onto the canvas below. It formed a tiny stream. As the paint on the stick ran out, the line thinned, then choked to drops. He repeated the gesture. Each time, he learned something new: if he slowed his movement, the stream would puddle; speed up and it narrowed; move closer to the canvas and it smoothed; farther away and it rippled. Pass followed pass. The strands began to overlap and interweave. A sweep of his arm produced a rough circle while a flick of the wrist launched an extravagant ellipse. By adding more thinner to the paint, he could fling the line even farther. He learned about tools: a stiff brush held more paint than a stick, a full circuit or two, but it always threatened to flood the line. When he shook it, the stream turned to rain. That, too, he could control by thinning the paint, loading less paint on the brush, or holding the brush higher above the canvas. A stick required more reloadings but produced a finer, more consistent line and, when the paint was especially thin, a dewlike wash. Each discovery was woven into the densening web.

  Why did Jackson Pollock begin to drip paint? What was the source of his inspiration? The question has preoccupied artists, critics, and art historians since the drip paintings first appeared in 1947. Stories of his “discovery” are legion. According to one, he was working on paper when a recalcitrant pen began to “dribble and blob.” Most of the stories involve an accident of some sort: thinning the paint too much, spilling paint, throwing a brush in anger. One specifically suggests that he kicked a pot of paint over one of Lee’s pictures. Whitey Hustek, the local housepainter, believed that Jackson had been inspired by looking at the board on which Whitey cleaned his brushes. But most Bonackers tended to credit the far simpler explanation that Jackson discovered the drip when
he was drunk.

  Pollock at work, 1950

  Fellow artists were less kind. Many denied there had been a “discovery” at all. With the rigor of hindsight, they found precedents for Jackson’s drip technique everywhere: the Surrealists had thrown paint over their shoulders; Max Ernst had dripped paint from a bucket; Masson had dribbled glue. “It was Wolfgang Paalen who started it all,” argues Fritz Bultman. Others credited Onslow-Ford or Picabia; still others Miró. Jackson’s success had many American fathers as well: Baziotes had dripped long before Pollock; so had de Kooning and Resnick and Kamrowski and Gorky. “All that dripping came from Gorky,” insists Philip Pavia. An obscure artist, Misha Reznikoff, claimed he was throwing paint at the canvas as early as the mid-thirties. “Everybody was doing drips,” says Bultman. Even the sculptor David Smith returned from the first showing of Jackson’s drips muttering, “I did drip paintings too.” Hans Hofmann claimed to have done drip paintings as early as the 1920s while still in Munich. Miz Hofmann, infuriated at Jackson’s success, spread the rumor that Jackson had seen Hofmann’s drip technique in the early forties and had deliberately stolen it.

  Where the artists left off bickering, the critics and art historians began, spilling gallons of ink in disputations over the true “origin” of dripping. Some found it in the shamanistic rituals of primitive tribes, some in the techniques of Navajo sand painters, some in the “fundamental rhythms” and “improvisatory” riffs of jazz. Clement Greenberg, predictably, found it in the cool imperatives of form and paint. “[Pollock] wanted to get a different edge,” Greenberg hypothesized. “A brush stroke can have a cutting edge that goes into deep space when you don’t want it to.” Decades later, admirers of Lee Krasner found it in the “divisionist preoccupation with splintering, fracturing, and dispersing” in Lee’s paintings at the time. Commentators turned somersaults to link Jackson’s drip technique to the grand tradition of European modernism. “I do not think it exaggerated to say,” Greenberg wrote, “that Pollock’s 1946–50 [drip] manner really took up Analytical Cubism from the point at which Picasso and Braque had left it.” It remained to subsequent scholars to fill the gaps in Greenberg’s grand vision or, as Hilton Kramer said, “to turn the history of recent art into Wagner’s Ring.”

  In fact, Jackson was not the first artist to drip, pour, spill, splatter, or throw paint at a canvas. As early as 1877, the art critic John Ruskin accused James McNeill Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” for splattering specks of red and gold to suggest fireworks in The Falling Rocket. As Jackson’s fellow artists were quick to point out, many of them had, at one time or another, applied paint to the canvas without touching it. All of them were surrounded every day by multicolored splatters, drips, and flecks on the floor, on the easel, on their clothes. Some, like Hofmann, had used splatters for “marginal or ‘coloristic’ effect.” Some, like Ernst and Masson, had devised new ways of applying paint in search of the “accidental” image (Ernst poked holes in the bottom of a paint-filled bucket, then swung the bucket back and forth over a canvas). Some, like Baziotes and Kamrowski, squeezed paint from a tube and let it fall in “automatic” patterns. (Paint from a tube was too thick to drip or pour.) Jackson both knew of Ernst’s experiment and had taken part in Baziotes’s. In fact, the “revolutionary” drip paintings that appeared in 1947 were not even Jackson’s first drip paintings. Eleven years earlier, he had poured paint in Siqueiros’s workshop and seven years before that, dripped paint onto a plate of glass covered with water in Schwankovsky’s classroom. As early as 1934, he had spattered paint on the bottom of a ceramic bowl for Rita Benton. In 1943, for iconographic reasons, he dripped and looped paint onto parts of Male and Female. The following year, for the first time, he poured paint onto a canvas for essentially formal reasons. As recently as 1946, he had experimented with dripping only to retreat to more conventional techniques.

  What happened in Jackson’s barn in the first few days of 1947 was not the discovery of a new technique. There was no need for him to thin his paint too much, throw a brush in anger, accidentally dribble ink, or kick over a pot of paint. The technique was already at hand. What it lacked was a vision—a way of seeing that would bring its delicate, evocative lines to life, an imagination fecund and vivid enough to keep those lines suspended through a thousand loops, making each new loop as tensile and expressive as the last. In early 1947, Jackson found that vision in himself. Like all his discoveries, it was the result of going backwards, not forward: an epiphany of the past. “Painting is self-discovery,” Jackson once said. “Every good artist paints what he is.”

  In some ways, the drip paintings were a logical next step. As soon as Jackson began to paint on the floor in the summer of 1946, it was virtually inevitable that he would return, if only briefly, to his experiments with dripping. From Schwankovsky to Siqueiros to Baziotes, those experiments had always taken place on the floor. To lay a canvas on the floor was to invite dripping, intended or not. But this time around, the technique had new resonance. For years he had been using a variety of techniques to conceal, or at least obscure, his imagery—more out of personal reticence than artistic conviction. That summer, however, Clement Greenberg conferred on this old imperative a new legitimacy. The purpose of art, he argued, is to “continue the flattening-out, abstracting, ‘purifying’ process of cubism.” Because “purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art,” imagery of any kind defiles that purity. In his review of the 1946 show, he had praised Pollock for “submit[ting] to a habit of discipline derived from cubism.” It was clear from Greenberg’s reaction to The Blue Unconscious that, in his opinion, merely fragmenting the image wasn’t enough. It had to be obliterated. (“If there is anything Pollock was set against in his poured pictures,” Greenberg later said, “it was iconography.”) Yet Jackson relied on the emotional power of unconscious imagery to energize his paintings. Only in the Guggenheim mural and Gothic had he been able to maintain that same level of energy and unconscious “truth” over a large canvas without evoking overt imagery. To reconcile his own need for urgent images with Greenberg’s call for an end to iconography, Jackson returned to the solution of the mural, only on a far smaller scale. In the series of allover works that immediately preceded the first drip paintings, he laid down literal images—described by Lee as “heads, parts of the body, fantastic creatures”—then covered them with layers of overpainting.

  This curious, back-and-fill process puzzled Lee. “I asked Jackson why he didn’t stop painting when a given image was exposed,” she later recounted. “He said, ‘I choose to veil the imagery.’”

  Galaxy, 1947, oil, aluminum, and gravel on canvas, 43½” × 34”

  At first, Jackson’s experiments with pouring had little effect on this procedure (an indication that they were, indeed, experiments). In Galaxy, one of his first drip paintings, brushed-in images are still discernible beneath the layers of poured paint. Only the “veil” has changed. Instead of a heavy brocade of tight curvilinear strokes, it is now a lacy, translucent curtain flecked with aluminum. Jackson was clearly pleased with this new use for an old technique (it also saved him from the backbreaking, knee-numbing job of covering every inch of a big canvas with heavy impasto). In the paintings that followed, like Watery Paths and Magic Lantern, he reveled in the new possibilities of density and complexity. In The Nest and Vortex, he evoked his early experiments with Baziotes and Kamrowski. Almost immediately, the brushed images began to disappear completely behind ever more complicated, exuberant latticework. The lines and flecks of paint took on a new importance; dripping became no longer just another way of obscuring images, but a new way of creating them.

  From the beginning, Jackson’s overactive imagination had seen the world in a special way. Sande recalled the flights of fantasy in which he rearranged actual events to suit his emotional needs. He would sit for hours staring at objects, fingering them “as if he would crawl inside them.” “When
Jackson looked at something,” recalls Nick Carone, a close friend in later life, “it was as if he were getting into the pores of it, the most minute molecular structure of it, the level at which even the most insignificant thing, like an ashtray, has life and is constantly moving.” What was static to most people was, to Jackson’s hyperactive imagination, a blur of perspectives and potentials. That had always been Jackson’s problem with reality, both in life and on canvas: it changed too much, too often; it vibrated with too many possibilities to be put down with clarity or precision. In his sketches for Benton, he had tried furiously to freeze the images. But even as he put them down they shifted in his mind’s eye, rotated to another position, or transformed into something else entirely, leaving behind a trace of hairy lines and frustrated crosshatchings. His brief experiment with sculpture had been even more of a failure. As he slowly chipped away on the outside of a block, figures and faces spun like dervishes on the inside. Primitive art and Picasso had shown him a way to begin to capture the transformations he saw, and Jung had provided an appealing conceptual framework, but even as late as 1947, he was still searching for a way to make the world see the world his way.

  Vortex, c. 1947, oil and enamel on canvas, 20⅝” × 18¼

  There was more to Jackson’s vision than a vivid imagination, however. If he saw movement where no one else did, if objects seemed to rotate and transmute in space, it was partly because, in his eyes, they sometimes did. For as long as he could remember, Jackson had been afflicted with hallucinatory spells. They came without warning and could be as short as an instant or as long as several minutes. In the late 1940s, after years of silence, even with Lee, he described the affliction to Roger Wilcox. “With his eyes wide open, in a normal situation, he would suddenly begin to see all these swirling images,” Wilcox remembers Jackson telling him, “a swirling of lines and images, swirling tangles of lines. It was like real. … He wanted to know if there was something wrong with his eyes or with his sanity.” Having done some research on visual phenomena in connection with an invention, Wilcox reassured him, “It’s just a temporary malfunction in the optic nerve. It’s inside your head, not in your eyes.” Jackson was relieved. “At least there’s nothing wrong with my eyes,” he said. (Later, Wilcox researched the problem in medical and optical journals and concluded on the basis of Jackson’s description that “it was just a temporary malfunction in the optic chiasm, triggered by a malfunction of the perceptual circuits in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex and projected onto the retina.” The generally accepted medical term for this painless visual disturbance is an ocular migraine.) At first, according to Wilcox, Jackson didn’t recognize the connection between his dripped images and the swirling visions. “He said when he did the first drip painting, he knew it was something familiar, but he didn’t know what.” Not until after he had painted several more did the full recognition come. “Then he realized he had seen those images before he painted them,” says Wilcox. “He told me that.”