Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Two months later, Time magazine scornfully reported Greenberg’s pronouncements in a one-column article entitled “The Best?” The message was delivered subtly by juxtaposing snippets of Greenberg’s fuliginous praise with small pictures of works by each of the three artists he singled out: Pollock, Smith, and Hans Hofmann. “Is any good art being painted in the U.S.?” the article began. “Britain’s highbrow magazine Horizon scanned the U.S., and found three little sunbeams peeping through. ‘The most powerful painter in America,’ wrote Manhattan Critic Clement Greenberg, is Jackson Pollock, who painted this.” The reproduction of The Key that followed, contrary to later reports, was not printed upside down, but, reduced to a 1½-by-2½-inch, black-and-white blur, it might as well have been.

  A month before his first show at the Parsons gallery, Jackson felt stronger than ever before—physically, emotionally, and creatively. After a Thanksgiving visit to Springs, Stella wrote Frank: “Jack was busy getting his painting stretched for his show which is the 5th of January [1948] he has done a lot of swell painting this year. They both look wonderful done both of them a lot of good to be out of the City and they are very happy with their home.” Happiness at home translated into confidence in the studio. Through the summer and fall, the paintings grew steadily larger, more complex, and more daring. Soon Jackson was laying out canvases that were too big to cover from a kneeling position. Standing over and maneuvering around a canvas while pouring paint with one hand and holding a can of paint with the other involved a new set of logistics and a new repertoire of movements. He also began experimenting with the density and texture of the web, from the open skein of Reflection of the Big Dipper to the impenetrable thicket of Sea Change. He found he could loop the lines, as in Vortex, or lay them straight, like a bed of pine needles, as in Phosphorescence. He could inscribe them sharply on the matrix of paint, as in Shooting Star, or let them bleed into one another and into the canvas, as in Cathedral. He experimented with materials, adding gravel, nails, tacks, buttons, keys, combs, cigarettes, or matches to give the surface texture, and using metallic aluminum paint to enliven and enrich the painting surface. (Later Greenbergian critics would make much ado over such playful experiments, seeing in them efforts to provide realistic content without violating the ban on figuration, or to give the illusion of depth without violating the integrity of the picture plane.) He also began experimenting with enamel—regular house paint—which he could buy in the large quantities he required far more cheaply than oil paint at Dan Miller’s store down the road.

  By December, Jackson had completed all the paintings for the show and invited his neighbors, Ralph and Mary Manheim, into the studio to help name them. (At least one, Cathedral, had already been named, if not at Greenberg’s direction, then certainly with his full approval. In the Horizon article, he had equated the spirit of Jackson’s paintings to that of the great Gothic cathedrals.) Manheim, a translator of French and German literature, tended, predictably, to the romantic and the literary with names like Enchanted Forest, Lucifer, Phosphorescence, Magic Lantern, Sea Change, Full Fathom Five, and Watery Paths. According to Lee, Jackson relished their earnestness and admiration as he stood back, arms folded, quietly “vetoing or approving [suggested] titles.”

  The week before the show opened, Jackson and Lee went into the city and stayed with Lee’s sister Ruth Stein on lower Fifth Avenue. On the eve of the opening, unable to sleep, Jackson stayed up talking with Ruth. “He had a gift for making you feel like you were the chosen person,” Ruth recalls. Ruth Stein had a gift of her own; she had inherited her grandmother’s psychic powers. More than once before, she had astonished Jackson with her clairvoyant insights. This night, “he wanted to know about his future as an artist,” she remembers. “What I saw for him and whether or not he would be successful.” Ruth put Jackson’s big hand in her lap and intently traced the deep creases. “You are going to be a very famous painter one day,” she told him. Jackson laughed and said, “I should set up a booth at the show where you can read everybody’s fortune, so if my paintings don’t sell, at least I can make money from you.” “We both laughed,” Ruth remembers, “but he really believed it. God, did he believe.”

  Cathedral, 1947, oil and aluminum paint on canvas, 71 ½” × 35 1/16”

  Measured by Jackson’s expectations, the show was a disaster. No one knew what to make of these great tangled webs of paint, many of them laced with aluminum, glowing in the windowless void of Parsons’s gallery. Robert Coates, the critic for the New Yorker, lamented: “There are times when communications break down entirely.” The handful of opening night guests shuffled back and forth on the scrubbed wood floors, some brimming with hostility, (Hedda Sterne found it “all too Dionysiac”); others searching for something to say (Joe Glasco, another painter, could only repeat “radical, radical, radical”). The evening, and the show, might have been saved by Peggy’s irrepressible personality, proselytic fervor, and unabashed huckstering, but Betty Parsons was no Peggy Guggenheim. Where Peggy worked the crowd like a politician, Parsons hovered at its edge “like a protecting priestess,” aloof and slightly mortified. Where Peggy dug deep for buyers, Parsons seemed to avoid them. “Collectors were afraid to ask her the price of paintings,” recalls Herbert Ferber, one of her artists, “because it seemed that she didn’t really want to sell them.” Jackson had undoubtedly heard stories about Parsons’s laissez-faire attitude—“I give them walls,” she would say, “they do the rest”—but seeing it deflate the debut of his new paintings was, apparently, too much to bear. Although he remained sober, if tense, through the opening, as soon as the last puzzled guest left, he rushed off with family and a few friends to the bar at the Hotel Albert. After three double bourbons, he snatched Alma Pollock’s hat and tore it to pieces.

  The critics treated his show less kindly. Overnight, it seemed, the tolerance that Jackson had wrung from them in the four years since his first show vanished. “Lightweight,” said the Art News reviewer, “a perverse echo of Tobey’s fine white writing,” nothing but “crashing energy” and “monotonous intensity.” Coates’s review in the New Yorker also paid left-handed respect to Jackson’s “tremendous energy” and even complimented some of the smaller paintings, but Coates’s verdict on most of the major works, including Lucifer, Reflection of the Big Dipper, and Cathedral, was unsparing: “mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless.” In Art Digest, Alonzo Lansford even revived the snide tone that hadn’t been heard since Parker Tyler’s reference to “baked macaroni”:

  Pollock’s current method seems to be a sort of automatism; apparently, while staring steadily up into the sky, he lets go a loaded brush on the canvas. … This, with much use of aluminum paint, results in a colorful and exciting panel. Probably it also results in the severest pain in the neck since Michelangelo painted the Sistine Ceiling.

  Only Clement Greenberg stood firm, not only reaffirming his controversial support of Pollock—”[this show] signals another step forward on his part”—but even questioning the judgment and good faith of those fainthearted critics who disagreed: “[Pollock’s] new work offers a puzzle [only] to all those not sincerely in touch with contemporary painting.” It was a classic display of Greenbergian fireworks, filled with culinary metaphors (the aluminum paint produces “an oily overripeness”; this new phase in Pollock’s development needs further “digestion”), niggling criticisms (“the artist’s weakness as a colorist”), and unsupported razor-fine distinctions (Gothic is “inferior to the best of his recent work in style, harmony, and the inevitability of its logic”; Enchanted Forest “resembles Cathedral, though inferior in strength”). After sounding some familiar themes (“In this day and age the art of painting increasingly rejects the easel and yearns for the wall”), Greenberg concluded with a provocative bang: “Pollock will in time be able to compete [with John Marin] as the greatest American painter of the twentieth century—no other American artist has presented such a case.”

  But his dominan
t theme was art history on the move. More so than in any previous review, he strained to fit Pollock into the logically unfolding Zeitgeist of modern art. “Since Mondrian no one has driven the easel picture quite so far away from itself [as Pollock has].” Of Cathedral, which he considered the strongest picture in the show, Greenberg wrote, “[It] reminds one of Picasso’s and Braque’s masterpieces of the 1912–1915 phase of cubism.” By tying Jackson firmly to such pillars of modernism, Greenberg was shrewdly responding to those who criticized his championing of Pollock. No one doubted the genius of Mondrian, Picasso, or Braque; no one questioned the revolutionary importance of Analytical Cubism. Flatness was the undisputed grail of modernism, according to Greenberg, and now it had fallen into Jackson Pollock’s hands. He was, in short, Picasso’s legitimate heir.

  To make such a claim credible, however, Greenberg had to argue that Jackson’s breakthroughs were the result of his immersion in the theory and practice of Analytical Cubism, that Jackson had engaged in an artistic and ideological dialogue with Picasso, that he had been steeped in what Greenberg liked to call the “culture” of painting. “It is Pollock’s culture as a painter that has made him so sensitive and receptive to [this] tendency [toward an emphasis on surface],” Greenberg asserted.

  Even as he made it, Greenberg must have known from his frequent visits to Springs that such an assertion was false. Jackson’s primary interest in Picasso was not in the artist’s Analytical Cubist paintings, but in the cloisonnist works of the 1920s and 1930s. Those aspects of Jackson’s paintings that Greenberg attributed to the legacy of Picasso, Braque, and Mondrian—restricted palette, shallow space, and allover composition—either had come to Jackson indirectly from less “distinguished” sources (such as Tobey) or had never come at all. His “dialogue” with the giants consisted largely of a monologue delivered by Greenberg. To several friends, Jackson admitted that he neither understood nor cared for Analytical Cubism. His paintings came from a different source altogether. The only person other than Greenberg who might have sensitized Jackson to the possible Cubist implications of the drip paintings, Lee Krasner, considered them irrelevant. (According to Greenberg, Jackson later told him that Lee “didn’t agree” with his theories about Jackson’s art—especially his designation of Jackson as “a late Cubist.”)

  But Greenberg wasn’t interested in what was, only in what should be. In the service of his grand vision of the progress of modern art, facts became irrelevant. Never a stickler for historical accuracy and grateful for Greenberg’s support, Jackson gladly went along. He, too, had a vision that superseded facts.

  The reviews were bad, but the worst was yet to come. In February, the last of Peggy’s $250 checks arrived in the mail. Jackson had already signed a one-year contract with Parsons for the following year, but it included no provision for a monthly allowance. Nor was there any chance of “overage” from the January show. Sales had been dismal. Jackson’s startling new paintings had left most collectors as well as reviewers “feeling that their dog or cat could have done better.” (In galling contrast, a simultaneous showing at the Artists’ Gallery of gouaches of clowns by a former vaudevillian named Walter Phillips sold out the first day.) By the time Jackson’s show closed, only two paintings had been sold, not including the one that Bill Davis, who was traveling in Europe, had arranged for Lee to choose and set aside for him. But the exact count was academic. Under the terms of the old contract, all the proceeds went to Peggy.

  Within a month of Peggy’s last payment, the Pollocks were destitute. To save on coal, they heated only one floor of the house at a time, closing off the upstairs during the day in order to keep the downstairs tolerably warm. At $21 a cord, wood for the kitchen stove was an unaffordable luxury. When the weather turned frigid, they would abandon the house altogether and retreat to the city. On one such visit, Jackson called on Barnett Newman and his wife Annalee on East Nineteenth Street. “He and Barney went around the corner to the New Star Market so Jackson could cash a ten dollar check,” Annalee Newman remembers. “It bounced.”

  In Springs, Jackson tried other ways to make ends meet. To pay off a $56 grocery bill at the Springs General Store, he offered Dan Miller a painting. Miller, who felt everyone was entitled to some credit, accepted the offer—to the amazement of most locals, especially his wife, Audrey. When she refused to allow the painting in her house, Jackson lent three more for her to choose from. Eventually, Miller took the first one, but hung it on his office wall at the store. (After Jackson’s death, he sold the painting for $7,300.) But Dan Miller was the exception. Most of Jackson’s creditors “wouldn’t take his paintings on a bet,” according to a neighbor. Like most of the townspeople, they considered his plight pathetic but predictable—a cruelly appropriate fate for a crazy artist.

  By March, the situation was so desperate that for the first time since the end of the Project, Jackson was forced to look for a job. Lee offered to go to work instead, but Jackson’s pride wouldn’t allow it. He “made a real issue of it,” according to Lee. He went to Julien Levy, who had taught for years at the Art Students League, and asked about a teaching position at his alma mater. Levy explained sympathetically that “because of his behavior it couldn’t be considered.” When Jackson approached his old friend Peter Busa, who was teaching at Cooper Union, another traditionalist bastion, the reaction was the same. “He came to see me in class,” Busa remembers, “and he said he wanted to teach. I looked around at these students—what they were doing was nothing like Jackson’s stuff—and I said, ‘What the hell would you teach here, Jack?’ He didn’t even say anything. He knew I was right. So he just turned around and walked out.” Despairing, Jackson turned to John Little, who had made so much money designing fabrics before the war that he kept his work secret from Trotskyite friends like Lee Krasner. “Jackson came to me and said, ‘Maybe I could do some textiles,’” Little recalls. But nothing came of it. When a fabric factory opened in nearby Montauk, Jackson and Roger Wilcox walked the twelve miles to Montauk to sign up. (Wilcox’s old Ford was out of commission.) They found jobs all right, at a dollar an hour, but the employers wouldn’t advance them the money to fix Wilcox’s car. Without transportation, the job was unthinkable, so they walked back, still unemployed.

  Betty Parsons sympathized with Jackson’s plight and did what she could to generate some income from her huge store of Pollock paintings. “I tried to sell a few things by offering a discount,” she recalled, “very unprofessional—and Peggy would have been furious. I even appealed to a couple of clients on a charity basis, an even worse mistake.” But nothing seemed to work.

  In the end, it was Lee’s determined salesmanship that saved them. As part of her constant campaign to promote Jackson among her friends, she had pressured Fritz Bultman, who in turn pressured his sister, Muriel Francis, into visiting Parsons’s gallery. When Francis, a New Orleans-born impresario and agent, expressed an interest in buying Shooting Star from the January show, Parsons immediately wrote Peggy in Venice, bewailing “the terrible financial condition of the Pollocks” and asking her to forgo the proceeds from the sale so the money could go directly to them, thereby “saving them from immediate financial embarrassment.” In return, Peggy would receive some future work in place of the one sold. On April 12, a week after Parsons’s plea, Peggy wired a terse approval of the arrangement. Both Parsons and Lee were shocked that she offered no additional assistance. “[Peggy] just disappeared,” said Parsons. “Either she was childish or inhuman.” Lee didn’t see a choice. “The idea of [Peggy’s] dedication to Pollock was fanciful,” she said later. “When she was off, she left him high and dry—that was her great dedication. … [S]he said bye-bye, hope you can swim.” Two days after Peggy’s approval, Francis bought Shooting Star for several hundred dollars on an installment basis, and Parsons rushed a check to the Pollocks. She didn’t bother to deduct her commission. Jackson later told an interviewer, exaggerating only slightly, “We lived a year on that picture, and a few clams I dug out of the b
ay with my toes.”

  The same month that Shooting Star sold, Willem de Kooning’s first show at the new Egan Gallery opened to nearly unanimous raves. What Greenberg, and only Greenberg, had said about Jackson, others were suddenly saying about de Kooning: “A singular concentration of passion and technique … fierce energy … virtuosity … voluptuousness.” Within days, the Museum of Modern Art bought a painting from the show and the art world began to buzz with recognition. (Among artists themselves, de Kooning had been admired for years.) Inevitably, the to-do raised Jackson’s competitive hackles. Especially at a time when his own career was faltering, it must have seemed that the spotlight was already moving on. During a party at Jack the Oysterman’s fish restaurant on Eighth Street after the de Kooning show, Jackson “came in like a cannon,” Ethel Baziotes remembers. “He lashed out at everyone, and no one could say anything to please him. He was insulting to his good friends in a way I’d never seen before. Everyone was white with fear. I mean there was the threat of physical violence. You didn’t know if he would pick something up and throw it at you.” Breathing fire, he approached Arshile Gorky, who stood against a wall quietly whittling a long pencil to a fine point with a pocket knife he always carried. As Jackson weaved toward him, Gorky “looked at him in the eye in a way that said, ‘Be careful,’” Baziotes recalls. Jackson planted himself directly beneath Gorky’s shadowed brow and launched into a train of obscene invective, most of it directed at Gorky’s paintings. Without taking his eyes off Jackson, Gorky lifted the pencil toward him, leaned forward, and continued to whittle. At each stroke, the knife came closer to Jackson’s throat. “Pardon me, Mr. Pollock,” Gorky finally interrupted, “you and I are different kinds of artists.” For a tense moment, the two men stared at each other, eyes locked. “It was like a stage play,” says Baziotes. “They were taking each other’s measure.” The tension was broken when Bill Baziotes called out from the crowd, “Jackson, why the hell don’t you shut up?” And he did.