Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  But it was ultimately a love of attrition, and the costs on both sides could not be sustained forever.

  In the meantime, Jackson transformed the steady flow of emotional support into a cascade of paintings. The summer and fall of 1948 were the most productive seasons of his life so far. In two years, he had refined the drip technique into a tool of astonishing power and range: from the ascetic, Miró-like elegance of The Wooden Horse, one of the last paintings from 1948, in which he attached the wooden head of a rocking horse (excavated from the rubble under John Little’s new house) to a canvas of red-brown cotton duck mounted on board, and added only a few shapes in ochre and a tracing of fine, halting lines in red, white, and black; to the starburst of Number 1, 1948, a dazzling 5½-by-8½-foot canvas of phosphorescent white interlaced with Jackson’s finest black web and proudly inprinted across the top with his repeated handprints, an echo perhaps of the Indian ruins he had explored with his father in Arizona, and certainly a sign of his growing confidence.

  Another sign of confidence, misguided perhaps, was his decision to abandon traditional names and number his paintings instead. The theory (on which more than a few of Jackson’s friends detected Greenberg’s handprint) was that numbers would distance the images even further from outdated notions of content. Paintings were, after all, just color on canvas, and evocative names, like Cathedral and Night Sounds, with their suggestions of subjective or emotional content, only biased the viewer’s true perception. In practice, however, the numbers created greater confusion all around: for artist, dealer, and collectors. Since numbers were assigned more or less randomly, not chronologically, not even Jackson could keep numbers and images straight. Inevitably, he resorted to informal designations, usually relating to a work’s dominant colors (Number 4, 1948: Gray and Red; Number 12A, 1948: Yellow, Gray, Black) or primary feature (The Wooden Horse, White Cockatoo), some of which became attached to the paintings permanently. Numbers also implied a homogeneity that was belied by the images themselves. Number 26, 1948, for example, is a grisaille vision in which ribbons of black and gray, some loosely brushed, some poured, weave around ghost-like ribbons of silver on a white ground. Over their soft interplay is dribbled a latticework of fine black lines. Number 5, 1948, on the other hand, is dense with life and color. Beneath a pulverized skein of aluminum lie layers of gray-blue, turquoise, teal green, almost obscured, and beneath them, showing only at the edges, a sumptuous rust ground. Across the aluminum nebula Jackson has flung streaks of brilliant yellow and red and sprays of white.

  To preserve the edge of accident that was jeopardized by his improved control, Jackson varied not only color but size, shape, and materials as well. He worked on composition board, metal, and cardboard. During the first half of the year, when money was desperately short, he often replaced canvas with paper, stiffened with gesso, tacked to Masonite or mounted on board. He varied the density of the web, from the gorgeous multicolored coat of Number 5, 1948, to the transparent arabesques of Black, White and Grey. He could stretch the paint to the thinness of thread and swirl it into vast tangles, or pool it in great reservoirs of color, or do both at once, as in Silver over Black, White, Yellow and Red, where thick floats of white are overtracked by darting and looping silver lines. He worked in dark colors on light ground and, to arresting effect, in light colors on dark ground. In Arabesque, a dark rust ground, complicated by an open skein of black and green-gray, provides the backdrop for a stunning display of bravura white, spinning and curling across the big reddish canvas like tracings of sparks against a fire. Arabesque was also one of several works in which Jackson experimented with extravagant sizes and shapes. In addition to a tondo (the second and last round canvas he painted), there were several long, horizontal scrolls: from White Cockatoo, a playful 3-by-9½-foot dark-ground canvas with fragments of red, white, and blue caught in a black web, to the exuberant Summertime, a sliver of canvas less than three feet wide and eighteen feet long, in which black lines tumble from end to end like Mardi Gras revelers, decked in festive bits of red, blue, and yellow and surrounded by the silver hiss of sparklers.

  The Wooden Horse (Number 10A, 1948), 35½” × 75”

  As he approached his second show at the Parsons gallery in January 1949, Jackson had every reason to feel festive and exuberant. The jagged fragments of his life were finally fitting together. For the first time, key relationships—with Lee, Stella, Greenberg, and a handful of surrogate brothers—seemed to satisfy his vast needs for attention and approval. Lee’s continuing devotion had quelled, for the moment at least, the fears of sexual inadequacy, and every day in the studio, little by little, the great tangled knot of his past was unwinding onto canvas.

  Even in the midst of success, however, there were warning signs. Professionally, Greenberg’s praise had made Jackson more enemies than friends, while at the Parsons gallery, sales continued to lag. Whatever confidence Jackson managed to generate in the studio was quickly dissipated in unpaid bills and bounced checks. Meanwhile, old colleagues were moving ahead. Nineteen forty-eight was not only the year of Willem de Kooning’s first show, it was also the year Bill Baziotes won Alfred Barr’s Abstract Surrealist Purchase Prize at the Museum of Modern Art.

  But most galling of all was the continuing—and, to Jackson, inexplicable—success of Philip Guston. Only one year after Jackson’s application for a Guggenheim Fellowship was rejected, Guston was awarded a Prix de Rome for a year of study in Italy. Since their V-E Day confrontation in 1945, Guston had won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Carnegie competition, a position at Washington University, and an adulatory article in Life magazine. He had also begun to abandon the saccharine, illusionistic style that had made him the darling of traditionalists. While in Italy, he would embrace abstraction “as if he was being reborn,” recalls Milton Resnick. It was a late and, to some, unconvincing conversion, but even as an abstractionist, Guston continued to attract the kind of establishment approval that had always been denied Jackson. H. W. Janson, a colleague of Guston’s at Washington University, called the new paintings “[what] Mondrian would have done if he had been looking at the Impressionists instead of the Cubists.”

  Closer to home, Jackson was also being denied more and more of Stella’s attentions. On January 26, 1948, two days before Jackson’s thirty-sixth birthday, Arloie gave birth to a boy, Jay Conaway McCoy (later Jason). He was a beautiful baby, everyone agreed, and Stella immediately claimed him. “A darling little boy,” she wrote Frank, “… [he] favors Jack a lot.” Between babysitting and bouts of chicken pox, months separated Stella’s visits to Springs. Sande, working overtime to support his enlarged family, was lucky to make one trip a year.

  Without Stella’s stabilizing influence, the “creative tension” between Jackson and Lee was more likely to run amok. Lee was already brooding over rumors (baseless) that Jackson was having an affair with Mercedes Matter or Vita Peterson, or both, during the summer of 1948. “The very idea of an affair made her crazy,” says Harry Jackson. “She hated my guts because I took so much of Jackson’s attention and we weren’t embracing in bed for chrissake.” There was fodder aplenty for Lee’s paranoia. Both Peter Peterson and Herbert Matter were gone much of the summer, and Lee spent at least one day every week in town visiting Dr. Hubbard. Lee also knew her old friend Mercedes’s reputation for “wanting to taste everything, smell everything, try everything.” Besides, says Fritz Bultman, “Vita and Mercedes were glorious, gorgeous young women—which you certainly couldn’t say about Lee at the time.” Flattered by Lee’s suspicions, Jackson took a perverse pleasure in encouraging them. At a dinner party, in Lee’s view, he would grab a woman and proclaim loudly, “I love all women,” May Rosenberg recalls. “It was like he was playing a game with Lee, only she didn’t see it was a game.” Other times, late at night, he would stand outside neighbors’ windows—when the husbands were away—and scream sexual threats. Reports of every such incident, of course, made their way back to Lee.

  Stella with grandson Jay (Jason) McCo
y

  Toward the end of the summer, at a dinner party, the “game” turned vicious. “We were playing cards,” Ruth Stein recalls, “and this one woman there liked Jackson very much and did not mind letting Lee know it. And Lee and this woman really went at each other. Jackson got up and staggered out on the porch and sat down. Then Lee came out and sat down next to him. He was flailing his arms, saying, ‘Get out of here, you bitch. I hate your guts.’ But she sat there with her arms around him, kissing him until all that anger dissipated.”

  The summer of 1948 did arouse dormant passions in Jackson, but they had nothing to do with either Mercedes Matter or Vita Peterson.

  Another guest at the Pollocks’ house that summer was Igor Pantuhoff, who arrived unannounced after several years on the society circuit in California. Time had not been kind to Igor’s eccentricities. What in the thirties had seemed smart and urbane now seemed fatuous and dissipated. Far from being charmed by Igor’s grand manner, Vita Peterson found him “enormously effeminate, foppish, and physically incapable. We thought he was homosexual but Lee said not.” The Petersons weren’t the only ones who were unmoved by Igor’s “Oriental charm.” May Rosenberg remembers that Jackson greeted his arrival “like a stone.” “The longer he was there,” May recalls, “the darker Jackson’s mood got.” Other guests observed that Igor could “drive Jackson into an absolute frenzy” without even saying a word. One evening on the beach, Vita Peterson noticed that Jackson “was building up a rage all evening long.” Suddenly, without warning, he lunged at Pantuhoff. The two men grappled in the sand for a moment until Peter Peterson pulled them apart. Igor emerged from the melee with a split lip but, strangely, remained at the Pollock house.

  A few days later, at a dinner party with John Little and Ward Bennett, Jackson went on a drunken rampage, throwing plates and furniture and toppling a tall cupboard filled with dishes. (“When the dishes crashed,” Bennett recalls, “that’s when John said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’”) While Lee watched in horror, Jackson chased Igor through the house and out into the front yard where a day-long pouring rain had turned the lawn to mud. There Igor turned and confronted Jackson. “They started rolling in the mud,” Bennett remembers, “but it was very bizarre. They weren’t really fighting, they were sort of wrestling and sort of kissing each other at the same time.”

  The summer of 1948 also marked Lee’s return to painting. For the first two years in Springs, she had virtually stopped, allowing months to go by between brief periods of work. At first there were practical reasons: only enough heat for one room and Jackson had a show to prepare; too much fixing-up to do around the house. When old excuses gave out, Lee made up new ones: she couldn’t paint in the living room because “it was open … you know, no privacy, you can’t close the door.” When Jackson moved his studio to the barn, Lee didn’t take over the larger and ideally lighted southwest bedroom where he had worked. She made that their bedroom and took for her studio a smaller, poorly lit room on the northeast side. In the summers, there were guests to be entertained, collectors and dealers to be wooed. It was a rare visitor in the summers of 1946 and 1947 who caught Lee at her easel and none of her paintings hung on the walls. (During the financially dire months of early 1948, Jackson painted over many of the works that she had brought from New York.) As late as the summer of 1948, Vita Peterson recalls, “Lee had given up painting altogether for [Jackson’s] sake to avoid the possible competition.”

  As long as Lee showed no interest in returning to work, Jackson felt free to encourage her. Roger Wilcox remembers him saying, “Hey, I put together three canvases for you. I cut off the ends of this big roll; I don’t want it that big. And so I had the stretcher bars, so I made them your size.” According to Wilcox, Lee thanked him and took the canvases up to her studio, but later, when Jackson asked, “Are you working on any of those paintings?” she replied listlessly, “Nah, maybe I’ll start next week, I don’t know.” It was Jackson who suggested that Lee “try a mosaic” and helped her assemble two tabletops—the house was short of furniture—using tesserae left over from one of his WPA projects: pieces of broken glass and tile with keys, coins, shells, pebbles, and jewelry thrown in, set in concrete. “He practically had to force her to do it,” according to one friend. “He found the wagon wheel, provided the pieces, showed her how to lay the tile upside down, and poured the concrete.”

  Once Lee did begin to paint again in earnest, sometime in the spring or summer of 1948, Jackson’s enthusiasm evaporated. Lee liked to say that she and Jackson visited each other’s studios “by polite invitation.” In fact, while Lee always responded to Jackson’s invitations instantly, she had to invite him “three or four times” before he responded to hers. “My enthusiasm for his work,” she once admitted, “was far greater than his for mine.” When he did come, he did so “grudgingly,” friends noticed, and usually confined himself to a few terse Greenbergian comments: “That works” or “That doesn’t work” or “Just continue painting and stop hanging yourself up.” “He encouraged her, but he was disdainful,” recalls Harry Jackson. “He had that ‘little woman’ attitude toward her. He took me up to look at her paintings and said something like ‘That’s Lee’s little painting.’ He wasted almost no time with her and considered almost everything he did in that area as sort of encouraging the little lady.” According to Lisa Fonssagrives, wife of photographer Irving Penn and a friend of Lee’s, “His attitude was almost as debilitating as outright criticism.”

  Lee, apparently, got the message. To avoid a confrontation, she worked only in the morning while Jackson was asleep. “She had to get up terribly early in order to work at all,” says Fonssagrives. “The slightest change in her husband’s mood could change her work.”

  Late in the summer, Lee invited Bertha Schaefer, an interior decorator and gallery owner, to visit the house in Springs. Schaefer was particularly impressed by one of the mosaic tables (Lee had given the other to Valentine and Happy Macy to thank them for a much-needed truckload of furniture) and asked to include it in an exhibition she was planning on room decorations based on modern painting and sculpture. When “The Modern House Comes Alive” opened at Schaefer’s gallery in September, Lee’s table was singled out for special praise by reviewers in the World-Telegram, the Herald Tribune, the New York Times, and the magazine Architectural Forum. Only the Times referred to Lee as the “wife of the painter J. Pollack [sic].”’ To celebrate Lee’s triumph, Schaefer invited the Pollocks to dinner at her elegant, antique-filled New York apartment.

  The result was disaster. Over Schaefer’s objection, Jackson opened a third bottle of wine and gulped it down. When Schaefer, a prim, proud southern lady in her fifties, protested and tried to take the bottle from him, Jackson lashed back, demanding, “What does an old lady like you do for sex?” Then he turned his fury on the furniture, demolishing every precious antique within reach, including a rare Chinese screen. By the time Schaefer went to call the police, Jackson had passed out.

  Incidents like the fight with Igor and the rampage at Bertha Schaefer’s house signaled the most ominous development of all. Even in the midst of success, Jackson was drinking too much again.

  In the summers, preoccupied with guests and work, he tended to drink less; in the winters, cold and bored, more; but, except during Stella’s visits, hardly a week went by without a high of some kind. During the day, it was beer—Lee often bought several cases herself to ensure that he drank under her watchful eye. At night, it was whiskey with Roger Wilcox at Jungle Pete’s. “He would start very fast,” Wilcox remembers. “He’d have three drinks to my one, then five to my three. At a certain point, there was no stopping him. He’d just keep going until he fell down.” Lee had learned to endure these passing storms stoically: to invent an explanation when Jackson missed an in-town appointment after a particularly debilitating binge, or to withdraw a weekend invitation at the last minute because “Jackson wasn’t feeling well.” On arriving at a party or dinner, she would routinely slip to the ba
r, cast a worried glance over the line of bottles, and whisper “Go slow” in the host’s ear. And when Jackson stormed out of the room or passed out on a couch, she made the apologies. Such incidents may have been inconvenient and sometimes embarrassing, but they were nothing like the wild, weeklong binges she had witnessed in New York.

  By the fall of 1948, however, that edge of self-destruction had returned. Jackson’s new car was partly to blame. With ninety dollars of Demarest money, he had bought a run-down Model A Ford like the one he and Sande drove in Riverside. It ran rough—when it ran at all—but it gave him mobility. For the first time since moving to Springs, he didn’t need to rely on friends for a ride to the East Hampton bars or to walk to Jungle Pete’s on a frigid night. Suddenly Lee had to worry about his safety as well as his sobriety. When he was gone all night, it was no longer just a question of where he had passed out or who was taking care of him. “[Jack] has a Ford Coupe,” Stella announced darkly in a letter to Frank, “and he should not drive & drink [or] he will kill himself or someone.”