Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Jackson had finally found what was, for him, the perfect image: an image that freed him from the lifelong consternation of pencil and paper, brush and canvas, chisel and stone, all the tools that had proved too slow, too fixed, and too explicit; an image that allowed him to attenuate the heavy, obscurantist energy of the brush into the lyrical, long-winded energy of the line; an image that could capture every spin, every transformation in his imagination’s eye, no matter how fleeting. The line of paint that he cast from the end of a stick or stiff brush could begin as the profile of a head, change into a bull, a horse, a bird, and a knife, all in the time it took the first drips of paint to reach the canvas. He would pull the art out of himself “like a magician,” in George McNeil’s phrase. The rapid unspooling of his imagination and the inherent unpredictability of the paint also produced a flow of “accidents” that he could leave or exploit in a running dialogue between automatism and control. “He painted like a machine,” said Nick Carone, “but the machine was clicking away on another level. It was a conscious, unconscious dialogue. … It was a thing in perpetual motion.” When he was “in a painting,” the images were indeed perpetual. “I don’t know where my pictures come from,” he once told Clement Greenberg. “They just come.” When the spool ran out temporarily, he would set the canvas aside and wait, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for days, for the next outpouring.

  The final breakthrough came when the long line of imagery leapt off the surface entirely and Jackson began to work in the air above the canvas, tracing the unwinding images in three-dimensional space. “Jackson told me that he wasn’t just throwing the paint,” recalls Nick Carone, “he was delineating some object, some real thing, from a distance above the canvas.” Lee called it “working in the air,” creating “aerial form[s] which then landed.” Another eyewitness described how Jackson would “take his stick or brush out of the paint can and then, in a cursive sweep, pass it over the canvas high above it, so that the viscous paint would form trailing patterns which hover over the canvas before they settle upon it, and then fall into it and then leave a trace of their own passage. He is not drawing on the canvas so much as in the air above it.”

  It was the final liberation from the frustrations that Jackson had always found on the surface—in reality. He could now work openly with the images that energized his art without risking exposure or Greenberg’s censure. No matter how explicit the “aerial forms,” when they landed they became unreadable skeins of paint—what one writer called an “alien code.” Occasionally—inevitably—an image would float down to the canvas still in recognizable form, later giving rise to speculation that other images lay buried beneath the welter of lines and that even in the densest abstraction, Jackson was a figurative painter in hiding. In fact, he never stopped being a figurative painter, according to Lee, but his figures were ephemeral creations, “airy nothings” that existed only momentarily in midair loops of paint, then disappeared, leaving behind their vacated “skins” on the canvas. Jackson hadn’t abandoned the figure; he had, like the Cubists, transformed it. Instead of fragmenting it, he wrapped it in line, then saved the wrapping, thereby “tricking the censor,” in Paul Brach’s phrase, “painting in the air and letting gravity make the picture.” The personal iconography that had obsessed his inner vision for years—the world of Stella and the dinner table, barnyard chickens and menacing bulls—was never more than a dimension away. It hovered above the surface, not beneath, its “organic intensity, energy and motion made visible” in the skein of paint below—according to Jackson’s own description. He called his new images “memories arrested in space.”

  Jackson’s new way of painting offered another, even deeper gratification. Since childhood, he had connected the act of painting with Stella and Charles: the emphasis on texture and touch, the sensuousness of color, the concern for quality, the pride in craftsmanship, the hours of solitude. Jackson always showed an appreciation for the “gorgeousness of paint,” says Budd Hopkins, “a concern with physical loveliness.” He also shared Stella’s culinary obsession with ingredients. Even in the lean years, he seldom settled for less than the best. At the slightest trickle of money, he would run off to Joseph Meyer’s to shop for a new set of brushes and the finest quality paint. “Who else ran around and found all that silver and gold and metallic paint?” asks Hopkins. “Who else worried so much about the way paint falls when it drips and runs or splatters when it’s thrown?” Even the most skeptical reviewers at the time couldn’t fail to notice Jackson’s “strong feeling for matière.” Like Stella, he took great pains in preparation, carefully unrolling a length of canvas, cutting it precisely, smoothing it flat with his big hands, straightening and patting the corners as if he were laying out the sleeves and back of a chambray shirt.

  But the new technique changed all that. It took him away from the canvas—where Stella did her close work—and back to the upright position from which Roy Pollock did his manly work, from his mother’s tight wrist movements to his father’s broad arm gestures. More than one visitor to the studio noticed that Jackson’s relationship to the canvas was like that of a farmer to his field. “The way he stood, the way he looked at the canvas, the way he worked it, always made me think of him like a farmer,” says Herbert Matter. “The paintings were his rocks, his trees, his earth. Art was his landscape.” Tony Smith also sensed that “his feeling for the land had something to do with his painting canvases on the floor … it seemed that [the canvas] was the earth, that he was distributing flowers over it.”

  The canvas may have been Jackson’s field, but it wasn’t flowers he was distributing. He told several friends that when he stood back and looked at one of the first drip paintings, a memory suddenly “popped into his head.” “He saw himself standing beside his father on a flat rock,” recalls Patsy Southgate, a neighbor in Springs, “watching his father pissing, making patterns on the surface of the stone … and he wanted to do the same thing when he grew up.” To Jackson, who even as an adult urinated from a sitting position, the sight of his father urinating on a rock or in the field had become an archetype of masculine potency, an archetype worked even deeper into his unconscious by years of “peeing competitions” with his brothers. By the time he was an adult, pissing—especially in public—had become the ultimate assertion of masculinity—sometimes the closest he could come to sexual potency. “We’d be in a bar drinking,” Roger Wilcox recalls, “and instead of going to the men’s room, he’d go outside and take a leak just outside the door. We’d be out driving and he’d stop by the side of the road in broad daylight and take a leak. He’d just get out and not take any precautions, keep the door open, not watch out to see if anybody was coming. He’d just do it.” Peter Busa remembers Jackson’s obsession with urination. “He was always unbuttoning his fly and taking a piss,” says Busa. “One of his brothers told him that in Europe, if you were on a date and you couldn’t find a public pissoir, you could just go up against a building, with your date right there. He was fascinated by that.” At home, he seldom used the bathroom, telling visitors, “I’m from the West and you always go to piss in the backyard.” Not only did he urinate in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace—and perhaps her bed—he did the same thing in the guestroom beds of friends like May Rosenberg, Lucia Wilcox, and Margaret Meert—and often in the bed he shared with Lee.

  Standing over the canvas, flinging a stream of paint from the end of a stick, Jackson found the potency that had eluded him in real life. When a woman asked him, “How do you know when you’re finished [with a painting]?” Jackson replied, “How do you know when you’re finished making love?” For all his problems with impotence and bedwetting, Jackson could “control the flow” in the studio. Creative potency, like sexual potency, came down to a peeing contest. “Tchelitchew had it,” he would say, “but he pissed it away.” Inevitably, a rumor began to circulate that Jackson did urinate on his canvases. John Graham, who had by now rejected abstract art—calling it “slapdash art”—said, “When a child
pees on the street, it’s charming, but when an adult does, it is not charming.” But Jackson was still a child, flinging his belated assertion of manhood across the canvas the way he had seen his father do it. By pouring paint, whether dribbling it in slow curves or flinging it in thin, taut loops, Jackson could play Roy Pollock—even though in the intricacies of the built-up image and the gorgeousness of the paint, he would always be Stella.

  Years later, Max Kozloff wrote: “When, finally, [Jackson] lifted the instrument off the canvas, and skeins of liquid, shaken and jolted by their flight through space, came raining and splattering upon the surface, the turgid, ham-fisted Pollock kicked up his heels in the most gracile pirouettes American art had ever known. Dripping, that aerial sphincter of his consciousness, literally enabled him to change identity in midstream.”

  34

  A PERFECT MATCH

  By early 1947, Lee was nervous. She had inherited both her mother’s superstitiousness and her father’s grim fatalism: the better things were, the more uneasy she became—and things had never been better. Despite the cold, Jackson was working more diligently than ever. “He was a hundred percent work at that time,” recalls Roger Wilcox, who visited the studio almost daily. Lee didn’t know quite what to think of the new paintings, but she trusted Jackson’s instincts. “Everything I saw in his studio interested me,” she said. Due largely to Stella’s frequent visits, he was drinking less and sleeping more—as much as twelve hours a night. Lee spent the first few hours of every day tiptoeing around the house to avoid waking him.

  The success of his show in January 1947 only added to her anxiety. No one seemed to notice the strange disjointedness of the paintings: eight big, colorful figurative works and seven small, busy abstractions. The reviews, although few, were generally positive. Greenberg came through, as expected, with praise for the allover paintings, calling them “a major step in [Pollock’s] development.” More surprising was his kind treatment of the earlier “ideographs” like The Tea Cup and The Key, which he had snubbed in the studio. He especially liked their Matisse-like colors, which, he maintained, were responsible for “the consistency and power of surface of [Pollock’s] pictures.” Greenberg used the opportunity to strike another of his favorite themes: “As is the case with almost all post-Cubist painting of any real originality, it is the tension inherent in the constructed, recreated flatness of the surface that produces the strength of [Pollock’s] art.” Jackson’s new palette also caught the eye of Ben Wolf at Art Digest. Citing the “thoughtfully related pastel colors” of Shimmering Substance and the “controlled yellows” of Something from the Past, he promised that the show was “bound to intrigue the color-conscious gallery gazer.” At Art News, there was an almost audible sigh of relief that Jackson’s “latest pictures such as The Key, being broader and more colorful, make it easier to assimilate the basic energy which flows through all his canvases.”

  On Coast Guard Beach in East Hampton

  The only commotion during the show’s short, two-week run, was caused by Peggy Guggenheim herself. With only four months left before the gallery was scheduled to close, she was desperate to sell anything she could. In addition to the sixteen paintings in the current show—all of which, under the terms of Jackson’s contract, she owned—she had dozens of unsold paintings from previous shows. In a last-ditch effort to sell the giant mural, she opened the lobby of her apartment building yet again to gallery visitors. “Peggy was desperate toward the end,” says Sidney Janis. “She was begging people to buy a Pollock.”

  Peggy’s pitch, shameless as it was, worked. The show sold well, beginning with Bill Davis’s purchase of The Tea Cup and Shimmering Substance even before the opening. Although Jackson saw none of the money, the favorable response buoyed him through the winter. It did just the opposite to Lee. By spring, she had “become subject to an unreasonable dread,” according to May Rosenberg. Whenever she was alone in the house while Jackson was asleep, “she would suddenly become convinced that it was much too quiet, that [Jackson] had stopped breathing. Each time this happened she told herself that it was all nonsense, but soon she would become uncontrollably frightened again and no logic could reassure her.”

  Briefly, in early spring, Lee’s anxiety appeared justified. Only weeks before Peggy’s scheduled departure, Jackson was still without a new gallery. For months, Peggy had been peddling him up and down Fifty-seventh Street, looking for someone, anyone, on whom she could unload her $300-a-month burden. Not only did she have another year to pay on Jackson’s contract—an obligation she now considered outrageously onerous—she also had dozens of unsold Pollock paintings, the future value of which would depend largely on the shrewdness and diligence of her successor. For the same reasons that she wanted to sell, however, no one wanted to buy. The high-rent dealers in European modernism, Pierre Matisse and Curt Valentin, “wouldn’t touch” Peggy’s stable of young American painters. “I must be going blind,” Valentin scoffed. “I can’t see them at all.” Matisse dismissed their work with a mangled cliché: “It isn’t my fish.” Julien Levy was closing his gallery. Sam Kootz, who two years before had offered to take Jackson on, had since acquired Robert Motherwell and Bill Baziotes from Peggy and was no longer desperate enough to put up with a drunk. Betty Parsons, a former socialite who had opened a new gallery the previous October in part of Mortimer Brandt’s old space, admired Jackson’s work—“I’m crazy about him,” she said—but couldn’t afford his contract. She took three of Peggy’s other artists—Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still—but passed on Pollock when Peggy insisted that Jackson and the contract were a package deal. With time running out, Peggy tried even more unlikely possibilities such as Marian Willard, galleries that handled realists like Edward Hopper and Jackson’s mentor, Tom Benton. But still no takers.

  Finally, at her wit’s end, she returned to Parsons and offered a compromise. If Parsons would promise to give Jackson a show the following season (1947–48) and act as Peggy’s agent in regard to the Pollock paintings she already owned, then Peggy would continue to pay Jackson’s $300 monthly allowance until the contract expired on February 15, 1948. Of course, as long as Peggy was providing the subsidy, she insisted on sticking to the original arrangement whereby all of Jackson’s new work would belong to her, with one exception of Jackson’s choosing. To sweeten the offer and to encourage Parsons to work hard on Jackson’s behalf, Peggy offered to let her sell the new works as she saw fit and retain a full commission. On sales of earlier paintings, however, Peggy would set the prices and receive all the proceeds. It was, by Peggy’s standards at least, an extraordinarily generous offer. Parsons could show Jackson for an entire year, risk-free, for the cost of a single show.

  But Parsons balked. Like Kootz, she was concerned about Jackson’s reputation as a violent drunk. Twenty years before, she had divorced her first and only husband on account of his drinking and had fled golden-era Hollywood because “there was such heavy drinking all the time.” Twice burned, she apparently thought it prudent to visit Springs and see for herself if, as Lee claimed, Jackson had “settled down.”

  It was the meeting of two worlds: Parsons, the high-strung graduate of Miss Randall McKeever’s Finishing School, former Newport and Palm Beach debutante; Pollock, the son of an Arizona dirt farmer. Born in the family house at 17 West Forty-ninth Street—later demolished to make way for Rockefeller Center—Parsons was an unstable mix of New England aristocratic asceticism and southern dissipation. Her father, a Wall Street broker ruined by the crash of 1929, was the descendant of Yale’s first rector; her mother, a New Orleans belle with effervescent French blood in her veins—“Thank God for the French!” Parsons would exclaim—who read voraciously and drank juleps with breakfast. Elizabeth Pierson Parsons inherited both her father’s reserve and her mother’s longings. After an adolescence of society balls and finishing school, she wangled her way into a class with Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. Her early marriage to Schuyler Livingston Parsons ended
three years later in a divorce, the first in family history. (Infuriated by the scandal, her grandfather cut her out of his will.) To Parsons, the breakup was a godsend. It not only rid her of the alcoholic, homosexual Parsons but also allowed her to pursue freely the two great passions of her life: art and other women.