Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Betty Parsons

  Like so many others, Betty Parsons had experienced her epiphany at the Armory Show in 1913 when she was thirteen years old. Eight years later, after her divorce, she moved to Paris where she studied sculpture in the same class as Alberto Giacometti and joined an expatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sara Murphy, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Isamu Noguchi, Hart Crane, Max Jacob, Tristan Tzara, and Harry Crosby. With her high cheekbones, straight, short hair, slim hips, and “da Vinci forehead” she looked like a finely fashioned piece of Art Deco sculpture. Men in the streets often mistook her for another archetypal woman of the era: Greta Garbo. “If you look at Betty, you see the Sphinx, the Garbo-like quality, the remoteness,” said Saul Steinberg. When she returned to the States in 1933 and moved to California, she met and befriended the real Garbo as well as Marlene Dietrich and other movie stars. Back home in New York, she added Martha Graham and Eleanor Roosevelt to her distinguished, all-female inner circle.

  In Springs, Parsons and Pollock circled each other warily. She was intimidated by Jackson’s reputation as a ticking time bomb. “His whole rhythm was either sensitive or very wild,” she said. “You never quite knew whether he was going to kiss your hand or throw something at you.” She “loved his looks”—his vitality, his “enormous physical presence”—and thought he looked taller than he had the previous year when Barnett Newman introduced him to her at a party. The combination of Jackson’s brooding volatility and exaggerated male physicality unnerved her. “Betty would get nervous about any goddamned thing,” recalls Gerome Kamrowski. “She was a society dame.”

  It was the “society dame” in Parsons that, in turn, unnerved Jackson. Her “rapid-fire bursts of nervous laughter” and “small truthful girlish voice,” grated almost as much as her Social Register background. Jackson also knew of her lesbianism and, according to his friend Harry Jackson, felt threatened by it. In the end, however, he seemed placated by her admiration for his art which, in her romantic, literal view, reflected the great open spaces of the American West. Even when he took her to the studio to view the new “drip paintings” (he didn’t yet call them that) she flattered him with a nervous little laugh that at least appeared to indicate appreciation. “Betty worked on the principle, if you didn’t understand it, it was probably good,” recalls Hedda Sterne, a friend and investor in Parsons’s gallery, “because you very seldom like something really new.” Aware that Parsons was Peggy’s only buyer, Jackson put on his most charming face for the rest of the weekend. “He held her hand and wheeled and dealed and played for position,” recalls Harry Jackson. “He wasn’t just cultivating her, he was courting her.”

  The effort paid off. When Parsons returned to New York, she accepted Peggy’s offer. In May, Peggy had the papers drawn up—a formality that surprised Parsons, who considered verbal contracts binding—and the two women signed. No one, however, rested easier. In Springs, Jackson grumbled about Parsons being “not as tolerant” and “not as forceful a dealer” as Peggy and complained about being shut out of the process. “I’m not a slave,” he protested to Roger Wilcox. “They can’t sell me.” Parsons, too, was leery of the new arrangement and further aggravated Jackson by refusing to sign a separate contract with him. Despite her enthusiasm for his art, she couldn’t help feeling that Peggy had “dumped” him in her lap “because nobody else would risk showing him.” Peggy, in turn, was leery of both Jackson and Parsons. In a parting gesture of distrust, she asked James Johnson Sweeney to keep an eye on them for her.

  At the end of the day, Saturday, May 31, 1947, Art of This Century closed its doors for the last time. Kiesler’s revolutionary multi-use chairs were auctioned off, the curved gumwood walls of the Surrealist gallery went to the Franklin Simon department store, the collection itself was put in storage, and, with only her two Lhasa Apsos, Peggy left for Venice. She would never see Jackson or speak to him again.

  By her second summer in Springs, Lee had perfected the routine. Everything was geared to Jackson’s needs. In the morning, before he woke, she cleaned the house and tended the garden—being careful to take the phone off the hook so its ringing wouldn’t wake him. Guests, especially those who had known Lee in her Bohemian days, were astonished by the obsessively tidy house she kept. (Charlotte Park quipped, “that’s probably why Jackson drinks so much.”) After breakfast, around one o’clock, Jackson would retreat to the barn and Lee would start to work on the phone. She maintained a list of people—collectors, dealers, artists, friends—with whom she kept in constant touch. If Jackson had a question for Parsons, she added that to her list of calls. “Jackson was afraid to call his gallery,” according to a friend, “whether it was to ask for a hundred dollars or to see if there had been any sales. It was difficult for him to assert himself.” Not for Lee. She enjoyed the daily manipulations and collisions of commerce. “Trade was in [her] blood,” said May Rosenberg. On a slow day, she had enough time after telephoning to work again in the garden, shop, prepare dinner, or, later in the summer, can and preserve foods for the winter. Whatever happened, she was always ready by five or six when Jackson emerged from the barn ready for a beer and a walk to the beach. From there, the day usually drifted off into dinner and conversation with the Wilcoxes, the Matters, or the Rosenbergs, all of whom Lee considered “safe company.”

  Lee also took the precaution of loading the summer weekends as far in advance as possible with safe houseguests. The safest, of course, was Stella, who came several times during the spring and summer. She thought Jackson’s new drip paintings were “swell”—the same word she used to describe his garden. Elizabeth Wright Hubbard was another of Lee’s approved visitors. With her “heavy hocks, crusty hair, and stained black dress,” she would descend on Springs for a weekend, shepherding her restive family. Jackson, as always, enjoyed the company of children. “He took me in the barn and showed me his pictures stacked up against the wall,” recalls Merle Hubbard, who was ten at the time. When Merle asked, “Why are you spilling paint, silly?” Jackson laughed. “One of the things he loved about us,” says Hubbard’s daughter, Elizabeth, Jr., “is that we were such philistines about painting.” Another safe visitor was Ruth Stein, Lee’s sister, who came with her husband, William, and their twelve-year-old son Ronnie. The two sisters had been estranged for several years, but Jackson’s fondness for Ruth overrode family squabbles. “He was the most wonderful host at that time,” Ruth recalls. “We never wanted to go home.”

  Whenever guests came, Lee spent most of her time in the kitchen. She had taught herself to cook Stella’s way. “It was American-type cooking,” recalls Ronald Stein, “pot roast and gravy and stuffing and potatoes and salad.” To Ruth, who had been raised on a Jewish-Ukrainian diet of pahrkas, knedler, and tsimis, the midwestern fare seemed exotic. Occasionally, Jackson would invade the kitchen to bake a pie—“but only when he was in the mood,” according to Stein. “Another time, he might dry the dishes, but generally he left everything to Lee.”

  The same rule governed every aspect of their life together: Lee directed and Jackson went along, except now and then when Jackson chose to assert himself. “Lee would do everything,” recalls Stein, “and then something would come up and Jackson would say, ‘Yes, we’re going to get the plumbing fixed,’ and Lee wouldn’t argue, and the plumbing would get fixed—and then Lee would go back to running the show.” Running the show meant reshaping the world to serve Jackson’s needs, to minimize his worry and maximize his time at work. She schooled visitors in his moods, telling them when and how to approach him. “She would say, ‘Ask him this way, say this, say that,’” recalls Stein, “and she was usually right.” It was the perfect match: Jackson created and Lee made it possible for him to create. “That was what we thought we had to do in those days—be nurturing,” says Patsy Southgate. “It was masochism, all right, but for turning out a Hemingway or a Pollock, it was well worth the candle.”

  A summer afternoon in Springs, c. 1948, with Gyp and Jackson�
��s pet crow, Caw-Caw (on Lee’s head).

  Clement Greenberg was another frequent houseguest. Often with a young girlfriend in tow, he would accompany the Pollocks to the beach or ride bikes with Jackson into East Hampton. During his visit that spring, he took Jackson and Lee to see a private collection of paintings by Miró in one of the huge “cottages” near the water in an area that locals called “the city development.” On every visit, sooner or later, Greenberg and Jackson would retreat to the barn to look at paintings and talk about “the direction of Jackson’s art.” Greenberg was deferential but definitive. “I’d say a picture was good or bad, or a piece of a picture was good or bad,” Greenberg recalls. “That’s the only way I talk.” Jackson listened intently and later would lead friends through the studio proudly pointing out, “Clem likes this, Clem likes that.”

  What had begun as a political imperative was becoming, in addition, a genuine friendship. For Greenberg, Jackson’s companionship provided an antidote to the insecurity he always felt among the Partisan Review crowd. Often slow and ponderous of speech, especially in the company of articulate talkers, he found in Jackson the ideal, undemanding listener. He was attracted to Jackson’s taciturn machismo, so different from his own querulous, defensive posturing: so direct, so uncalculated—so American. Like Lee Krasner, Greenberg had spent much of his adulthood trying to escape the past. “Who in his right mind would want to be Jewish?” he would ask rhetorically. Born in Brooklyn to Lithuanian Jewish parents, he had learned Yiddish and English at the same time. His family lived briefly in Virginia and, for the rest of his life, he clung—not entirely convincingly—to the cultivated southern accent he learned there. After college, he spurned the family wholesale dry goods business and sat at home for two and a half years “in what looked like idleness,” teaching himself Latin, French, Italian, and German. When he finally capitulated and worked briefly for his austere, implacable father, he discovered that “my appetite for business did not amount to the same thing as an inclination.”

  Since then, Greenberg’s war with the past had expressed itself in macho posturing, ardent Marxism, and, after his divorce in 1936, an even more ardent misogyny. At a party at Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment shortly before her departure for Europe, Greenberg’s “sounding off” so provoked Max Ernst that he dumped a large ashtray full of ashes and cigarette butts on Greenberg’s bald pate. In her unpublished memoirs, May Rosenberg recorded the incident:

  Clem leaped up to throttle Ernst (almost half Clem’s size and much older). He might have succeeded, since Ernst was overcome with laughter at his own joke. But Niko Calas (young, long, lean, handsome, and fragile) took a roundhouse swing at Clem and—to everyone’s surprise—connected! Probably Clem lost his footing, for it is hard to believe that Niko’s punch could have knocked a baby down. Anyway, there’s Niko staring down at Clem sitting on the floor, practically under the piano. Ernst and the guests are convulsed with laughter, and Clem’s girl, overcome with horror, is pressing a couple of aspirin and a glass of water on the dazed Clem. Who swallows as he is bid, and seconds later begins yelling that he’s allergic to aspirin, that he has been poisoned!

  “Clem’s girls” were typically bright, naive, extremely young, and willing to pay a high price for admission to the New York art world. “I was awed by the man and thrilled by the company he kept,” recalls one of them. But Greenberg charged dearly for such thrills. “He was always terrorizing me,” says Phyllis Fleiss, who dated Greenberg during these years. Finding a half-dead mouse in a gutter on Park Avenue, “he picked it up by the tail and dangled it in front of my face,” Fleiss recalls. “I screamed, of course, and ran, but he chased after me with this mouse. He had a sadistic streak a mile wide.”

  The common theme, in Greenberg’s life as in his criticism, was provocation. “To be attacked universally is a favorable sign,” he said. “If you’re not against most opinion, something is off.” It was this same instinct for provocation that had attracted Greenberg to Jackson’s provocative art in the first place. “He had the whole Trotskyite syndrome,” says Fleiss. “Anything that was popular he wasn’t going to like. He had to find an art that was totally shocking, that people were totally against, and that’s what he was going to like.” In Greenberg’s eyes, he and Jackson were fellow provocateurs.

  Jackson, in turn, was flattered by Greenberg’s attentions. Clem had been to college, spoke several languages, had a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of literature, and always talked, in front of Jackson at least, with ringing conviction. As a high school dropout, Jackson’s respect for book learning, traceable perhaps to Roy Pollock’s glass-front bookcase, ran deep. Too deep, many of his friends thought. “He was a country boy in awe of the big-city, East Coast Jewish radical intellectual,” says Paul Brach. When Greenberg expressed an opinion, Jackson never challenged it in his presence and even in his absence was wary of contradicting him. Fritz Bultman recalls a conversation with Jackson about mysticism—a subject anathema to Greenberg—after which Jackson felt obliged to say, “Don’t tell Clem any of this.”

  Although he “listened intently to everything Clem had to say,” as one friend recalls, Jackson never really understood Greenberg’s theories—the theories that would eventually secure his place in the hierarchy of twentieth-century art. Milton Resnick was only one of many friends who saw that Greenberg’s ideas “were always a mystery to Jackson.” “He couldn’t get a hold of them,” says Resnick. “Surfaceness, Cubist space, and all of the things that Greenberg was saying, it just didn’t take. And if he felt honest with you, if he felt he could open up, he made it clear how little he really understood.” Ultimately, of course, neither Greenberg nor Jackson cared if Jackson understood. Enlightenment wasn’t really the point. Their mutual needs were met regardless of words. “Jackson was never a bore,” Greenberg once said. “He didn’t have to talk in order to be interesting.”

  Jackson wasted no time in taking advantage of his new friendship.

  Infuriated by the news in 1947 that Phil Guston had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, he wrote John Myers for information on how he could apply for one. During September and October, he labored over a statement for the application. Even if Greenberg didn’t actually write the two short paragraphs, his ideas and critical technique permeate them. In his review of the January show, Greenberg had announced the “historical death of ‘easel painting.’” (“Pollock points a way beyond the easel, beyond the mobile, framed picture, to the mural, perhaps—or perhaps not.”) In the very first line of his statement, Jackson picks up where Greenberg left off: “I intend to paint large movable pictures which will function between the easel and mural.” Echoing Greenberg’s praise of the Guggenheim mural, Jackson boasts, “I have set a precedent in this genre in a large painting for Miss Peggy Guggenheim which was installed in her house.” Like Greenberg’s reviews, Jackson’s statement is imbued with a sense of art history on the march. “I believe the easel picture to be a dying form and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural.” In order not to appear too radical, however, the statement closes on a modest note. “I believe the time is not yet ripe for a full transition from easel to mural. The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, and an attempt to point out the direction of the future, without arriving there completely.”

  At about the same time, Harold Rosenberg helped Jackson with another statement, this one for the premier issue of Possibilities, a magazine of commentary edited by Rosenberg and Robert Motherwell. The article sounds more like Jackson than the Guggenheim application does, but Greenberg’s influence is still detectable.

  My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method
of the Indian sand painters of the West.

  The Guggenheim application was rejected, and Possibilities folded after the first issue. But in the process, Jackson had acquired, through his contact with Greenberg, a basic vocabulary of ideas which, half understood and highly simplified, would fill his public statements over the next ten years.

  In the October issue of the prestigious British publication Horizon, Greenberg finally spoke out in his own voice. It was a clarion call, outrageously arrogant and dismissive even by Greenberg’s standards: Matisse wasn’t as “hard-headed” as Cézanne—despite the latter’s “paranoia”; American art had been obsessed with “the aberrated and deranged”; only Picasso’s Cubist works were great; Kandinsky lost it when he “discovered the Spiritual.” All the great themes are unfurled. “Pollock’s strength lies in the emphatic surfaces of his pictures … that thick, fuliginous flatness which began—but only began—to be the strong point of late Cubism.” “It is its materialism, or positivism … that made painting the most advanced and hopeful art in the West.” But in art as in people, Greenberg’s ultimate obsession was America and Americanness. After dismissing Morris Graves and Mark Tobey as “so narrow as to cease even being interesting,” he pronounced the ultimate judgment: “The most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one … [is] Jackson Pollock.” Why? Because “the feeling [his art] contains [is] radically American. Faulkner and Melville can be called in as witnesses to the nativeness of such violence, exasperation and stridency.” Finally, after naming David Smith the American sculptor whose art, “like Pollock’s, might justify the term major,” Greenberg concludes that Pollock “relieves us somewhat of the necessity of being apologetic about American art.”