Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  A month later, the same artists set aside their incipient rivalries to fight an old common enemy: the continuing resistance of the art establishment to American abstract art. As late as October 1947, Greenberg had noted in Horizon that avant-garde artists in America still had “no reputations that extend beyond a small circle of fanatics, art-fixated misfits who are isolated in the United States as if they were living in Paleolithic Europe.” The latest indignity was a statement by James S. Plaut, director of the Institute of Modern Art in Boston, justifying the institute’s decision to change its name from “Modern” to “Contemporary.” Plaut’s manifesto was, in fact, a broadside attack on the integrity and sincerity of “modern” art, which he accused of “obscurity and negation” as well as intentional deception. After an earlier protest in Boston, a group of New York artists led by Bradley Walker Tomlin, who also exhibited at the Parsons gallery, began to agitate for a show of support from New York artists. Out of a planning session at Stuart Davis’s studio came a demonstration at the Museum of Modern Art in May. Jackson was among the artists who marched and carried placards denouncing reactionary art critics as well as the museum itself for continuing to favor European art and artists. As far as Jackson had come in the last decade, the art world still lagged frustratingly behind.

  Since the move to Springs, summer had become the season of renewal for Jackson. In a reversal of the pattern that had ruled his life in New York—when winters were productive and summers perilous—winter was now a fallow season, filled with gallery business, trips to New York, and cold, early nights. Summer was increasingly a time to roam the countryside, see friends, and paint. The studio was partly to blame. Although he could and sometimes did use the barn in winter, the sunlight was brief and the discomfort daunting. While in summer, except on the hottest days, the barn was a shady redoubt, cooled by a high ceiling and a perpetual breeze from Accabonac Harbor. No matter what crises threatened, no matter where Jackson was in his cycle of depression, the coming of summer never failed to boost his spirits.

  The summer of 1948 began with another, more tangible boost. In mid-June, he received a letter from the Council for the Eben Demarest Trust Fund announcing he had been selected as the beneficiary of the trust income for the following year. The Demarest Trust, established in 1938 by Elizabeth B. Demarest of Pittsburgh, provided a single annual grant to an artist “who wishes to escape dependence upon the public sale of his work.” The estimated total of the award was only $1,500, not enough to replace Peggy’s stipend, but enough to forestall financial collapse for at least another year. The amount would be paid out in quarterly installments, the first due in October. Among the names listed on the council’s letterhead, only one was even vaguely familiar: John H. Sweeney, a relative, apparently, of James Johnson Sweeney, one of Jackson’s earliest champions. Exactly what role, if any, Sweeney played in arranging the council’s unlikely selection of Jackson is not certain. (According to Betty Parsons, he “pried” it out of them.) Parsons had been trying for some time without success to secure a subsidy for Jackson, but the news came as a surprise to her. Peggy Guggenheim, who was in regular contact with Sweeney from Venice, may have planted a seed, but the most likely moving force behind the award was Lee, whose indefatigable behind-the-scenes campaign on Jackson’s behalf brought her into regular contact with Sweeney.

  For Lee, summer was the campaign season, the season of strategic invitations, weekend houseguests, social arrangements, and quiet promotion. During the summer of 1948, the guest list included John Little, Betty Parsons, Fred and Janet Hauck, Barnett Newman, Wilfrid and Betsy Zogbaum, Sam and Edys Hunter, James Brooks and Charlotte Park, George Mercer, and, of course, Clement Greenberg. This may have been the summer that Lee took Bill Davis’s advice and invited Lincoln Kirstein, an intimate of Alfred Barr, for a weekend. Lee also mined the rich and growing vein of summer residents, people like Gerald Sykes, a novelist and philosopher who wrote for the New York Times, and his wife, Buffie Johnson. “It seemed to me,” says Johnson, “that Lee had her eye on my husband as a writer who would be useful to work on, to help promote Jackson.” The same was undoubtedly true of Joe Liss, a successful television writer, and his wife, Millie, who seemed to the impoverished artists both rich and famous.

  Despite the lack of funds, Lee always found the few dollars necessary for weekend entertaining (just as Jackson always found money for beer). For truly special occasions—when Greenberg came—she would take a few precious dollars and buy steaks at Dreesen’s Market, the “society” butcher in East Hampton. While Jackson barbecued in the backyard, Lee remained inside, doing the real business of the evening—showing her folders full of photographs, reviews, and announcements. During the week, she was careful not to invite overnight guests for fear of disrupting Jackson’s work, but there were always visitors. Herbert and Mercedes Matter and Gustaf and Vita Peterson had rented a spacious house on Fireplace Road for June and July, and almost every day, the women would stop to pick up Lee on their way into town. Later in the afternoon, when he was finished in the studio, Jackson would seek out Herbert, who was filming a movie on Alexander Calder in the area, or walk to the Matters’ house and join the women and children for a few hours on the beach nearby before the sun set. On weekends, when Gustaf (Peter) Peterson came out from the city, the three couples would drive to one of the ocean beaches in East Hampton, where the men would play poker or twenty-one while the women watched the children and swam. Peterson, who had fled Germany in the late thirties to avoid Hitler’s draft, found Jackson “immensely American.”

  These were idyllic times for Jackson. “He played with our kids like he was one of them,” says Vita Peterson.

  One day, the same kids came racing into Jackson’s studio in bare feet and ran onto a half-finished canvas, tracking little footprints of paint. “Mercedes and I cringed,” recalls Peterson, “but Jackson only laughed. He said, ‘Oh, no, no, never mind. Let them come in,’ and the footprints just became part of the painting.” On the beach, Jackson and the children would play in the sand or collect pebbles together. “He had that gentleness himself,” Peterson recalls, “a childlike quality that children were attracted to.” On weekday afternoons, when the other men were away, he would sit in the dune grass and tell stories about his own youth, about milking cows, hunting in the desert, jumping trains, riding the rails, and seeing the country. Both the children and their mothers were particularly fascinated by the adventures of a wondrous dog named Gyp.

  Each day in the studio, the same images from the past unspooled from his imagination and took shape in the air.

  The same needs that drove Jackson to turn women into mothers and children into siblings also shaped his friendships with men. Gradually, just as in the thirties, he began to gather around him a family of surrogate brothers. There was John Little, the courteous, handsome southerner with whom Jackson often fished but seldom talked. After Little bought a dilapidated old saltbox house nearby, Jackson took a day-to-day interest in the arduous, year-long renovation efforts. There was Roger Wilcox, a more approachable companion who shared Jackson’s habit of spending long hours in a bar, sipping beer in absolute silence. Wilcox was also a source of whiskey, which, by 1948, Lee had banned from the house in the belief that it would take Jackson longer to get drunk if he drank only beer. There was Herbert Matter, whose quiet, reassuring company Jackson sought out eagerly in the lazy summer afternoons. Matter was only thirty-nine at the time, but his European sangfroid and Swiss taciturnity, so much like Charles’s, made him seem older, almost paternal. On trips to beaches in Montauk and East Hampton where Matter shot the ocean sequences for his documentary on Calder, Jackson sometimes acted as guide and bearer, carrying the heavy boxes and tripods, asking occasional questions, but mostly just following Matter through the dunes in silence.

  Around Harold Rosenberg, on the other hand, there was rarely silence. “Never have I known anyone who could talk with such unflagging, manic brilliance,” said Irving Howe. “I used to think, when v
isiting his studio, suppose I were suddenly to drop dead, would he stop talking?” The huge, affable Rosenberg mesmerized Jackson with his jokes and dazzlingly erudite commentary. That Jackson understood little of what was being said came as no surprise to Rosenberg who, according to Roger Wilcox, believed that most Americans, “especially Gentiles,” were “intellectually sloppy almost to the point of illiteracy.” But his relationship with Jackson never approached an intellectual level. According to May Rosenberg, the two men enjoyed “doing boy things” together, like playing poker, fishing, and throwing stones. Despite his game leg, Harold would indulge Jackson’s childhood fondness for wrestling. “They were like puppies or kittens at play,” recalls May. It was an odd and never entirely convincing friendship, the cerebral Rosenberg and the impulsive, physical Pollock, but it served reparative fantasies on both sides. “Harold had a younger brother about Jackson’s age who died,” says May, “and he would tell Jackson what to do. If Jackson was being difficult, Harold would say, ‘That’s enough, Jackson. Sit down and behave yourself.’ And Jackson would do it. He just beamed when Harold treated him like a little brother.”

  Also in the summer of 1948, Jackson added two new “brothers” to his surrogate family. One was Tony Smith, the charming Irish storyteller and drinking companion whom Jackson had known distantly in the early forties. (At that time, Smith considered Pollock a boor and his art “pure chaos.” He later described their first meeting as a “disaster,” saying Pollock was “so sullen and intense, so miserable” that he said to himself, “I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t stand this guy.”) Smith was just one of a number of people—Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Gerome Kamrowski—who reentered Jackson’s life through the Betty Parsons Gallery. Jackson had been impressed by the “floating” panels Smith designed for an exhibition of Kamrowski’s works at the gallery in February and soon afterward invited Smith and Parsons to Springs to explore the possibility of doing something similar for his next show. Ultimately, Smith rejected the panel idea—he felt Jackson’s paintings were too big—but this time the chemistry between the two men was more favorable and the encounter produced an almost instantaneous intimacy. Smith even reversed his opinion of Jackson’s art, calling it “great” and “thrilling.” Although the two men saw each other only once or twice that first summer, they laid the foundations for a friendship that would profoundly affect Jackson’s creative and emotional life.

  The other new brother that summer was Harry Jackson, a twenty-four-year-old former marine who had first encountered Pollock’s work in the pages of Dyn while recuperating from combat wounds suffered in the assault on Tarawa—only days before Pollock’s first show at Art of This Century. By that time, the war had worn Harry “down to the very goddamn nub,” and he found in Pollock’s She-Wolf something “totally authentic, honest, down to earth and real.” “This man felt deep and straight,” Harry said later. “He painted tough, not from the fingertips. Pollock’s painting had what I felt in combat. It was visceral.” Five years later, as a young art student studying with Rufino Tamayo at the Brooklyn Museum and living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Harry experienced a similar epiphany at Pollock’s first showing of drip paintings at Betty Parsons in January 1948. He and his girlfriend, the painter Grace Hartigan, were among the few who found Pollock’s controversial new style “fascinating,” and they returned to the show again and again. Again, Pollock’s art seemed to satisfy Harry’s search for “something very profound and very straight.” When he heard from Sonja Sekula, a gallery-mate of Pollock’s, that “Peggy Guggenheim had abandoned him and he was very unhappy and lonely and no younger artists had ever said that they like his work because it’s so controversial,” Harry called Springs. Pollock’s response was “Well, shit, come on out, goddamn it. What the fuck are you waiting for?” Harry left immediately, hitchhiked through the night and arrived at the Pollocks’ doorstep at seven the next morning. Undoubtedly aroused from sleep, Pollock came to the screen door “wearing bib overalls and a kind of farmer’s blue-jean jacket.” Harry recalls. “I looked at him, he looked at me, and we just ‘howdied.’ We walked outside and hunkered down in the grass outside the back door like two yokels scratching the dirt … We had a love affair immediately.”

  Harry Jackson

  For a man who insisted on authenticity in his art, Harry Jackson had shown remarkably little of it in his life. Born Harry Shapiro to a Jewish father who left home before Harry was born, and a midwestern farm woman who ran a diner near the Chicago stockyards, Harry had gone to extravagant lengths to deny his own past. Like Stella Pollock, Harry’s doting Aunt Doris harbored strong cultural aspirations for her nephew, taking him on frequent trips to the Chicago Art Institute. But little Harry was also captivated by the “cowboys” who frequented his mother’s diner after delivering their cattle to the stockyards.

  Harry spent his first few teenage years trying to reconcile his aunt’s artistic longings with his own cowboy fantasies. For a while he worked in a Chicago riding stable, taking care of saddle horses. But he yearned for the real West. Not long after seeing a photo-essay in Life magazine on the 300,000-acre Pitchfork Ranch in Wyoming, he left Chicago and headed west. At the age of fourteen, he signed on as a hand at the Pitchfork Ranch and learned to “ride and rope.” By the time he turned twenty and volunteered for the marines, Harry’s “personality transference” (as Paul Brach called it) was complete. A “nice Jewish boy” had become “a son of the plains.” Years later, he brought his mother to Wyoming and instructed her: “This is where you gave birth to me.”

  Harry wore his new identity well. Square-jawed, ruggedly built, and darkly handsome, he looked and talked like a dime-store novel come to life. Describing his first encounter with Pollock, he slips easily into the loping rhythms, casual profanity, and bunkhouse hyperbole of his adopted identity: “[Pollock] was the old man. I treated him with great respect, gave him lots of goddamn space to move around in. ‘Take all the room you want, it’s your place.’ He was like, ‘If you want to fuck with me I’ll knock the shit out of you.’ But that’s friendly, you see. That was the dance. That was Pollock’s and my dance when we first met. It was just exactly like I was out in cow country. We just did it exactly like that. It’s a ritual.”

  Not surprisingly, Pollock was instantly won. With his cowboy posturing and stocky good looks, Harry was the spitting image of brother Sande. For almost a week, the two men “scratched in the dirt,” reinforcing each other’s fantasies. Pollock regaled his young admirer with all the old untruths about his western past—a childhood in Wyoming and the drudgery of milking cows—to which Harry responded with his own backdated nostalgia. During the days, they sat in the yard chewing grass and pulling the legs off grasshoppers. Once or twice they tackled odd jobs around the house, like replacing an old toilet (jobs at which Pollock proved only “half-handy”). In the evenings, they would head to Dan Miller’s store to stock up on beer, then stay up all night drinking and “analyzing works of art in magazines and old books.” Inevitably, Pollock invoked the spirit of Tom Benton, the model on which Harry, knowingly or not, had fashioned himself. “He talked my goddamn ear off,” Harry recalled. “[He] brought out Cahiers d’art and analyzed Tintoretto in great detail, explaining the composition of this and that; what he was doing was bringing me pure Tom Benton: Venetian Renaissance to Tom Benton. Tom to Jack, Jack to Harry.”

  Lee, who undoubtedly saw the farcical side to their exaggerated camaraderie, “got fed up early,” Harry recalls. “She didn’t like to have [Pollock] fiddle-fucking around with me. … She tried to be civil, but if looks could kill, I would have been dead many times over.” To impress Harry, however, Pollock made a show of chaffing under her bridle. “When Lee came down late at night to suggest going to bed,” Harry remembers, “he would say, ‘Ah, shut up, you goddamn cunt, go fix some coffee.’ He was very vulgar with her.” It was a Tom Benton show of misogyny and abuse staged for Harry’s benefit. “But she fucks like a mink,” Pollock would say by way
of apology when Harry commented on Lee’s homeliness. He called her “you goddamn slut” and “you fuckin’ slut.” “You ain’t good for nothing but fuckin’,” he would say with a sidelong glance at Harry. “She’s good stickin’, Harry, I’ll tell you that.’” The two men would laugh and, according to Harry, “Lee loved all that in her own kind of half-assed masochistic way. She liked being knocked around by Pollock.”

  In her own way, Lee probably did. She had, after all, been weaned on abuse and humiliation. But there was another side to the Pollocks’ relationship, a side that Pollock tried to hide from friends like Harry. Other visitors saw Lee as the abuser and Jackson as the victim. “She was always picking on him,” recalls Janet Hauck, “telling him what to do and what not to do. She’d say, ‘You haven’t taken the garbage out yet, Jackson.’” Whether it was the garbage, his behavior around company, the importance of keeping a schedule, how much money he spent, or how loudly he played the phonograph, “she was always riding him tough,” Charlotte Park remembers. When Sam and Edys Hunter visited that summer, Lee appeared to them “like a lion tamer,” shouting “Jackson!” when she wanted to bring him to heel.

  These were the two faces of their relationship. One day, Lee would take command—“She couldn’t not give directions,” according to Ernestine Lassaw—and Jackson would submit; the next day, Jackson would explode and Lee would submit. One day at the dinner table she would press him hard to clarify his ideas; the next day she would “cover” for his ignorance, supplying names and definitions to save him from embarassment. One day he would plot with Harry to travel to Wyoming; the next day he would admit, “Lee probably won’t let me go.” One day Lee was “a mouse,” Sam Hunter recalls, and Jackson “was a big bear,” and they “played scenes from ‘The Honeymooners’”; the next day “she dominated him completely in a matriarchal way.” “It was almost like a game,” says Harry Jackson, describing the daily give-and-take. “He’d needle the hell out of her and she’d love it; then she’d needle the hell out of him and he’d love it.” Gone was the one-sided adulation that had marked the first years of their relationship. In its place was a creative tension, a mutually beneficial back-and-forth over the vast no-man’s-land of everyday living that seemed to satisfy both Lee’s need to possess and Jackson’s need to be possessed without seeming so. It was love, of a kind, and even those who witnessed their collisions sensed the devotion behind the histrionics. “Jackson and Lee were completely bound together,” says Harry Jackson. “They were definitely in love.”