Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  It was a summer of fragments—professionally and socially—as the encroachments of celebrity fractured Jackson’s life into smaller and smaller pieces. There were still moments of genuine pleasure: working on John Little’s house, helping Jim Brooks buy a used car, walking on the beach with Roger Wilcox. In March, Jackson proudly hosted the wedding of Harry Jackson and Grace Hartigan at the house on Fireplace Road. It was an intimate affair; Jackson acted as best man, Lee as matron of honor, and the Pollocks’ neighbor, Judge William Schellinger, “did the knot tying.” But, more and more, such moments were crowded apart by obligations, introductions, and the minutiae of business. Just since the January show, there had been an exhibition at the University of Illinois and two showings of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection (in Florence and Milan). In May, Jackson shingled the studio; in June, he negotiated a new contract with Betty Parsons for another two and a half years. The same month, he prepared a submission for the “Sculpture by Painters” show that opened in August at the Museum of Modern Art: a tiny terra-cotta piece, not unlike the WPA bronze he had cast on the sly in 1935. In August, he lent Number 10, 1949, another long, scroll-like canvas mounted on wood, to Sidney Janis for his “Man and Wife” show (Lee lent her Junk Dump Fair) and in the same month shipped an untitled work to Sam Kootz’s gallery to join works by Gorky, Hofmann, Tobey, Motherwell, de Kooning, and Rothko in an ambitious show mounted by Kootz and Harold Rosenberg. The show’s goal was nothing less than to identify the dynamic but muddled state of abstract art in America, both in words and in images. Despite the impressive array of artists, the show fell far short of its ambitions, due partly to Rosenberg’s opaque catalogue essay (“When the spectator recognizes the nothingness copied by the modern painter, the latter’s work becomes just as intelligible as … earlier painting”) and partly to Kootz’s unfortunate choice of a name for the new movement: “the Intrasubjectives.”

  If there was one theme that ran through the summer, that brought some coherence to Jackson’s increasingly fragmented efforts, it was money. Whether it meant wooing potential collectors or braving the stares of Guild Hall hostesses, finding new buyers had become the summer’s overriding mandate. One reason Peggy’s Italian shows (and her failure to organize a show in Paris) had so little impact in Springs was that Jackson and Lee stood to gain nothing from the sales they generated. By not including any of Jackson’s recent works, Peggy made it clear that she was more interested in reducing her own inventory than in advancing Jackson’s career.

  Nevertheless, the possibility of foreign sales continued to intrigue Jackson and Lee. Increasing exposure—thanks to Peggy—and favorable word-of-mouth indicated that European collectors were less resistant to his revolutionary art than Americans like Chloe Scott, who were still locked into what John Little called “the Guild Hall mentality.” One person who agreed was Alfonso Ossorio, who had had some experience in buying and selling works of art abroad. After a number of conversations, Ossorio agreed to explore the possibility of mounting a show in Paris when he went to Europe in the fall. Meanwhile, Jackson searched for other new markets closer to home.

  For years, Greenberg had been saying “the easel picture [was] a dying form” that would eventually be replaced by “the wall picture or mural.” While Jackson didn’t necessarily accept Greenberg’s rhetoric as a description of commercial reality (he continued to paint scores of small, “sellable” works throughout his career), he (or Lee) did grasp its marketing implications. With Tony Smith, who was designing several homes that summer, he began to talk about doing large, commissioned paintings, like the Guggenheim mural, that would act as integral parts of a building’s design. Smith even brought several of his clients to the studio in Springs in an effort, apparently unsuccessful, to direct a mural commission Jackson’s way. The two men spent hours together, Smith reciting passages from Joyce and talking in poetic abstractions about the marriage of art and architecture, and Jackson offering the usual litany of half-truths about his western roots: milking cows, roping cattle, and learning poetry “firsthand” from southwestern Indians. “He knew the West as it really was,” said Smith, who had spent some of his sickly childhood in the Southwest, “whereas he considered that I had been there as a dude. … [H]e obviously thought that life in those areas was more authentic than life is here.” Jackson also apparently thought that collectors out west would better appreciate the western scale of the murals he wanted to paint. Sometime in June, he and Smith hatched plans to drive to California—with Lee, presumably—before the end of the year.

  Not long afterward, Jackson’s mural plans were given an unexpected boost by another architect eager to explore the common ground of architecture and art. At the remarkably early age of twenty-six, Peter Blake had gone almost directly from the Pratt Institute, where he studied with Louis Kahn, to a position as curator of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. Bright, personable, and ambitious, Blake made a point of meeting Jackson at an East Hampton party that summer and eagerly accepted an invitation to his studio. He found the experience “absolutely overwhelming.” “It was a very sunny day,” Blake recalls, “and the sun was shining in on the paintings. I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. It was a dazzling, incredible sight.”

  The analogy to Versailles suggested to Blake an idea for a museum using glass and mirrors to “create a sense of paintings defining the space, not the other way around.” The design that began to take shape in his mind was based on a plan by Mies van der Rohe for an “ideal museum” that had appeared in an issue of Architectural Forum. Mies’s plan was characteristically simple: a floor plane, a roof plane, and a few columns to suggest supporting structure. The paintings wouldn’t hang on walls, they would be the walls, freestanding or simply hanging in space without visible support. Blake proposed building a model of the museum and filling it with miniature reproductions of Jackson’s big paintings. The idea thrilled Jackson, who undoubtedly saw it as yet another way to promote mural commissions. When Blake suggested that “it would be nice to have some pieces of [miniature] sculpture to provide contrast,” however, Jackson balked. “What do you think I am,” he sputtered, “just a decorator?” But he did eventually produce the sculptures, bending and looping metal wire, then dipping it into wet plaster. “It was as if he took a painting from that period,” says Blake, “and turned it into three dimensions.” Sometime in July, Jackson and Lee persuaded Alfonso Ossorio to provide $1,000 for materials, and Blake began work on the model. Jackson wanted to have it ready in time for the November show.

  Inevitably, Jackson’s preoccupation with new buyers and marketing strategies followed him into the studio. There, despite Greenberg’s rhetoric and Tony Smith’s encouragement, he eschewed mural-size projects like Pasiphaë (5’ by 8’) and Lucifer (3½’ by 9’) and concentrated instead on producing a number of smaller, more accessible works. It was a marketing lesson first learned from Howard Putzel, who had constantly badgered his artists to produce “smaller works for timid collectors.” Peggy herself had often complained about the difficulty of selling Jackson’s giant canvases. In 1949, Jackson produced only one painting on that scale, the 5-by-8½-foot Number 1, 1949, an impenetrable tangle of black, yellow, white, aluminum, and pink with a strand or two of blue caught in a vortex so dense and furious that it seems to suck the paint inward, away from the edges of the canvas. There were other canvases that equalled Number 1 in density and impact, if not in scale: Number 8, 1949, with its turbulent, open subweb of black and gray-green overlaid with heavy pourings of aluminum—by now a signature feature of Jackson’s work; Number 13, 1949, with its jumble of matchstick brush strokes caught in an exquisitely fine tracery of eggshell white; and Number 3, 1949, with its fathomless layers of earthy green, yellow, and orange and its remarkable “whisks” of white—hundreds of tiny lines speeding in close rank through and around the twists of color. Beyond this handful of full-throated, symphonic works, Jackson focused his efforts on producing a number of smaller, simpler, and more af
fordable pieces, most of them on paper mounted on composition board. Even within these self-imposed constraints, however, he was capable of producing gorgeous images. In Number 31, 1949, he turned the icy hardness of the unabsorbent paper to his advantage, showering it with incandescent blues and reds and a flash of yellow. In places, he allowed the wet colors to mix, forming clouds of lavender, orange, and green. Elsewhere, wet colors fell on dry, creating rivers of cerulean blue on glacial whites, blood-red rivulets on blue-black fields, and yellow veins crisscrossed by threads of white as fine as silk. It was a ravishing—and accessible—display of color, no less so because Jackson may have painted it with a price tag in mind.

  With Peter Blake, viewing model for the “ideal museum”

  As the show approached, he produced a third set of paintings, even smaller and simpler than the first two. On canvases no bigger than one by two feet, mounted on Masonite to avoid the expense and trouble of stretching, he painted a series of bold, calligraphic images using a limited palette—seldom more than three colors—and a minimum of motion. Instead of piling paint in layers, he stripped the web to its fundamental forms—loops, puddles, and spatters—and isolated them like tiny unicellular organisms fixed on microscope slides.

  The need to produce a quantity of identifiable and sellable works quickly—often with just a flick or two of the wrist—forced him to explore an entirely new dimension of the drip technique. For the first time, he ventured out from behind the veils of size and complexity and, in a series of bravely simple and exquisitely assured little canvases, confronted directly the fundamentals of form and line that in the past had always unnerved him.

  Even as he explored the boundaries of the drip technique, however, Jackson showed signs of restlessness. It had become, perhaps, a little too easy, too predictable, too mechanical. New materials and commercial imperatives offered some fresh challenges, but he seemed to be quickly approaching the limits. More and more, new paintings evoked old ones: the viscous, string-like ridges of Number 9, 1949; the pebbles that punctuate the yellow, black, and aluminum maze of Number 4, 1949. In some paintings, even brush strokes reappeared. In one small composition from 1949 (untitled) he experimented with a pouring technique that produced a radically different, sharper image than the nebulae of colors in Number 31, 1949. The surest sign of his borning frustration, however, was Out of the Web, a large drip painting of black, white, gray, red, and yellow underlain by heavy brush strokes on the rough side of a Masonite panel. After letting the many layers of paint dry, he took a knife and cut Miró-like biomorphic shapes into the image and peeled away the paint within the cutouts to reveal the Masonite beneath. Even as his abstract skeins were about to achieve their fullest expression, somewhere in Jackson’s subconscious, familiar figures struggled to break out of the web.

  Number 28, 1949, 12” × 13”

  Untitled, 1949, 12⅛” × 13”

  When, in July, Life magazine proposed doing a feature story on Jackson and his art, marketing imperatives again carried the day. “We went back and forth on the decision to ‘chance’ the Life article,” Lee Krasner recalled later. “We discussed the advantages and the disadvantages.” The primary advantage was obvious: “A favorable piece would help sell some paintings.” The disadvantages were more complicated. The previous December, Life had run an article on the French artist Jean Dubuffet, including a full-page reproduction of Smoky Black (Lili) and a commentary that turned out to be a blistering pan. Entitled “Dead End Art: A Frenchman’s Mud-and-Rubble Paintings Reduce Modernism to a Joke,” it accused Dubuffet’s work of “feebly mixed” intentions and “low” technical skill, and compared its “amusement value” to that of “juvenile finger painting.” “There is more dignity in Al Capp’s Dogpatch,” it concluded, “than in the whole of Dubuffet’s gaga cosmos.” Lee, who drolly dubbed the Dubuffet review the ultimate “thumbs down,” worried that Jackson might fare as badly. “You didn’t know in advance what Life would do,” she complained. On the other hand, the day after the article appeared, Dubuffet’s dealer, Pierre Matisse, offered to buy back Smoky Black (Lili) for twice the amount he had sold it for only days before. The lesson was clear: publicity, good or bad, had a value all its own. It may have been as a reminder of that lesson that Lee kept a copy of the Life reproduction of Smoky Black tacked to the back of the bathroom door on Fireplace Road.

  A little of the terror still showed when Jackson and Lee arrived at the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center on July 18, 1949. Dorothy Seiberling, the young writer who had been assigned to interview them, remembers Jackson dressed in his tweed coat and shiny loafers and “all kind of knotted up inside.” Lee, on the other hand, was self-possessed and articulate. “She would step forward and speak for him,” Seiberling recalls, “kind of amplify what he said. She didn’t try to dominate or talk for him, just to make it easier for him and sometimes to explain. They were a very good combination.” The story they told (it’s impossible to tell from Seiberling’s notes who is speaking) was a curious mix of personal fantasy, promotional hype, and political gesture that touched on the truth only coincidentally. Jackson claimed to be the first artist in his family. Charles and Sande, he said, followed in his footsteps. The years of study with Benton had been a “complete loss.” He claimed that before coming to New York, while still out west, he had worked extensively with abstract forms, “both in sculpture and in painting”—referring, perhaps, to the experiments in Schwankovsky’s class. The troubled years between 1935 and 1944, the years of Bloomingdale’s, Henderson, and Bellevue, he referred to obliquely as “a kind of seclusion.”

  On the subject of his paintings, Jackson was equally elusive, often repeating, almost verbatim, previous recorded statements. On technique: “A real painter has to come through with something of his own—to say something individual. … A student should pay less attention to technique and concentrate on saying something. … If an artist is interested in a typewriter, he should be able to draw it.” On his working habits: “When Pollock starts a picture he ‘goes through’ it completely,” Seiberling noted, “carrying it as far as he can at one session. While he is painting, he knows when a picture is ‘working,’ but afterwards, when the inspiration is somewhat remote, he has to get [re]acquainted with his pictures.” On the subject of abstraction, Greenberg would have been pleased with Jackson’s statement: “I try to stay away from any recognizable image; if it creeps in, I try to do away with it to let the painting come through. I don’t let the image carry the painting. … It’s extra cargo—and unnecessary.” Greenberg would not have been pleased, however, with Jackson’s admission that “Recognizable images are always there in the end.”

  When asked to name his favorite artists, Jackson offered only de Kooning and Kandinsky among twentieth-century painters—not Picasso or Matisse—and El Greco, Goya, and Rembrandt among the old masters. His mention of Goya, the first on record, was to some degree a bone to his patron Alfonso Ossorio, who had just given him a book on Goya. The bone to Greenberg was an unelaborated reference to his most recent reviews: “Pollock feels that he is a natural development from the Cubists,” Seiberling wrote in her notes. Finally, when asked how he would respond to his many critics, Jackson offered: “If they’d leave most of their stuff (preconceived notions) at home and just look at the painting, they’d have no trouble enjoying it. It’s just like looking at a bed of flowers. You don’t tear your hair out over what it means.”

  On the way out of the Time-Life Building that day, it was Lee and Jackson’s turn to tear their hair. They wouldn’t know until the article appeared in August if it was thumbs up or thumbs down.

  Not long afterward, Jackson finally accepted Dan Miller’s invitation to take a ride in his tiny single-engine plane. From a grassy strip off Daniels Hole Road they lifted into the summer sky, and within seconds the curved shoulder of the Atlantic filled the horizon. On the right, across the shrinking expanse of Gardiners Bay, Jackson could see the North Fork, Plum Island, and, beyond, the Connecticut s
hore; to the right, a fine white line of sand stretching from Montauk Point back toward New York, separating the green island from the sail-specked sea. Jackson had never flown before, and he trembled with a mix of thrill and dread. “I could feel his knee banging against mine,” Miller later recalled. They flew all the way to Block Island, a biomorphic cutout of land in the allover ocean, before turning around. It was a view of the world that Jackson had never seen before, a view both terrifying and exhilarating.

  Before the end of the year, he would soar to heights of a different kind, but the mix of feelings would always be the same.

  36

  BREAKING THE ICE

  Is Jackson Pollock a threat to the American way of life? That was the question percolating through the offices of Life magazine as the deadline for the August 8 issue approached. Margit Varga, the longtime editor of the art department, responded with an emphatic yes. George Hunt, who had joined the staff only the year before as assistant editor, was inclined to agree. A painter himself who had studied with Guy Pène duBois, Hunt viewed the color proof of Jackson’s Number 12, 1948 with a disdainfully arched eyebrow. “He was a deeply conservative man,” recalls a co-worker, “so of course he didn’t really understand it.” In fact, the only person at Life who did understand it, or thought he did, was Daniel Longwell, chairman of the magazine’s Board of Editors. A “very enthusiastic, exuberant, curious person,” Longwell had been to Jackson’s January show and walked away with a painting. “It had a fly in it and [Dan] thought that was adventurous,” Dorothy Seiberling recalls. Not too long afterward, Longwell ignited the furor in Life’s art department by suggesting: “Maybe we should do a piece on this fella Pollock.” It was Longwell’s editorial eye, looking over their shoulders, that kept Varga and Hunt’s disdain in check as the article on Pollock took shape in early drafts.