Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  But other eyes were watching as well: those of Henry Luce, owner and editorial czar of both Time and Life. With the aid of his chief editorial “hit man,” Jack Jessup, Luce had been known to undercut his own art department by issuing anti-modern art blasts on the editor’s page, his personal preserve. Rosalind Constable was another force to be reckoned with. Luce had given her a broad mandate to “keep abreast of all new avant-garde movements in all areas—culture, science, literature, et cetera,” according to Seiberling, “so she would periodically write something about what was far out in the art world.” Nothing, of course, was further out than Clement Greenberg and his outrageous claim that this wild, unknown painter, Jackson Pollock, was the greatest painter in America. Finally, there was Time’s formidable Alexander Eliot, an arrogant, conservative iconoclast who “took perverse pleasure in demolishing new things,” according to Seiberling. Eliot was the man behind Time’s two previous snickering references to Jackson’s work. “He thought it was something to make fun of,” Seiberling recalls. Finally, there was Seiberling herself, who “didn’t really understand what was going on in the Abstract Expressionist world” but, as a conscientious researcher, had been to gallery openings, had accompanied Arnold Newman to Jackson’s house in Springs for a photo session, and was convinced that Pollock “had some substance.”

  The article that appeared on newsstands in the first week of August didn’t so much resolve the intra-staff dispute as air it in public. The headline, spread across the page beneath a picture of Jackson, turned Greenberg’s controversial claim into a question—“Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” Life was inviting all of America to choose sides.

  Beneath a picture of Jackson looking particularly cocky, the article opened with surprising evenhandedness:

  Recently a formidably highbrow New York critic hailed the brooding, puzzled-looking man shown above as a major artist of our time and a fine candidate to become ‘the greatest American painter of the 20th century.’ Others believe that Jackson Pollock produces nothing more than interesting, if inexplicable decoration. Still others condemn his pictures as degenerate and find them as unpalatable as yesterday’s macaroni.

  Hunt and Varga did get in their licks. “Critics have wondered why Pollock happened to stop this painting where he did,” reads the caption under a reproduction of the eighteen-foot Summertime. “The answer: his studio is only 22 feet long.” Another caption refers to Jackson “drooling” paint. A sidebar, entitled “How Pollock Paints (with enamel, sand and a trowel),” slyly questions whether “his pictures can be said to have a top, a bottom or a side.” The article quotes Jackson’s standard line—“When I am in my painting I’m not aware of what I’m doing”—then adds archly: “To find out what he has been doing he stops and contemplates the picture during what he calls his ‘get acquainted’ period. … Finally, after days of brooding and doodling, Pollock decides the painting is finished, a deduction few others are equipped to make.” “Most of [the article] was straightforward,” Seiberling recalls, “but we also had a little fun with it because we ourselves didn’t know quite what to make of it.”

  But the article was less about the art than it was about Jackson. Except for a brief, disparaging allusion to Benton, there was no mention of his training, his antecedents, his relation to European modernism, or even his place in the abstract movement. It was a profile of a man—a troubled, attractive, and lonely man (no one else is pictured, even in the background). Long after the visual jokes and sly word choices had played out, it was the image of Jackson standing in front of Summertime, arms crossed defiantly, cigarette dangling seductively, not the painting, that lingered in the public imagination. There was something quintessentially American about this anti-artist, this handsome, rough-hewn figure from the American West, living in the country not the big city, working in dungarees instead of a smock, in a barn instead of an atelier, painting with sticks and house paint instead of sable brushes and oil. “Look at him standing there,” said Willem de Kooning when he saw the article, “he looks like some guy who works at a service station pumping gas.” “He had everything,” recalls Budd Hopkins. “He was the great American painter. If you conceive of such a person, first of all, he has to be a real American, not a transplanted European. And he should have the big macho American virtues—he should be rough-and-tumble American—taciturn, ideally—and if he is a cowboy, so much the better. Certainly not an easterner, not someone who went to Harvard. He shouldn’t be influenced by the Europeans so much as he should be influenced by our own—the Mexicans, and American Indians, and so on. He should come out of the native soil, not out of Picasso and Matisse. He should be an inventor, in a funny way—a man who comes up with his own thing. And he should be allowed the great American vice, the Hemingway vice, of being a drunk. It’s no wonder that he had the popular Life magazine success, because he was so American and unique, and quirky, and he had this great American face. Everything about him was right.”

  Life magazine article on Pollock, August 1949. © Arnold Newman

  It was the image, the Hemingwayesque persona of contradictions that the Life article celebrated. “Pollock, at the age of 37,” it asserted, “has burst forth as the shining new phenomenon of American art.” Even if it hadn’t been true before, it was now.

  In Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, Ettabelle Storm Horgan, who hadn’t seen Jackson since the summer he spent in Devil’s Hole in 1933, looked up from her copy of Life and said to her husband, “Look, Jack Pollock’s famous now.” In Phoenix, Arizona, Charles Porter examined the pictures closely to see if he could see “where Jack’s fingertip was missing.” In Chico, California, Charles’s old girlfriend, Hester Grimm, couldn’t believe it was Jackson and not Charles who had become “a famous artist.” In Cody, Wyoming, skeptical townspeople launched an investigation to determine if Jackson was really a native son. In Deep River, Connecticut, Stella Pollock, when asked by a local paper for her reaction to the Life article, admitted that she didn’t “completely understand” her son’s art. In New York, Becky Tarwater (now Mrs. Mason Hicks) saw the article and “felt good for him” but didn’t dare send her congratulations for fear of opening up old wounds. Other figures from the past were less reticent. Drs. Wall and Allen wrote from Bloomingdale’s, gently inquiring about “what sort of an adjustment” Jackson had made since leaving the hospital, but adding that “the question asked at the beginning of the article can definitely be answered in the positive.” Reginald Isaacs couldn’t wait for a letter. “In my opinion,” he wired Life, “Jackson Pollock is the greatest painter in the U.S. My enthusiastic opinion is shared by my wife, mother and children.”

  From throughout the country and overseas, fan mail—there was no other name for it—arrived at the house on Fireplace Road. Utter strangers wrote to thank Jackson for his work—“You [have] mastered the ease and graciousness which is the essence of real art,” Daniel McFarland wrote from Durham, North Carolina—and to offer personal commentary: “I like your #12 the best.” Some asked for autographs—or more. “Would you please write your name on one of the enclosed cards,” asked H. M. Brehm of New London, Wisconsin, “(and maybe dribble a few drops of ink or paint or aluminium on another card) and mail them back to me?” “Would you be good enough to contribute a drawing to my collection of miniatures?” wrote Norman McGrath from Ireland. “The medium may be anything you wish … if you can give it a little title so much the better.”

  The biggest fan of all was Stella Pollock, who wrote batches of letters to family and friends proudly announcing Life’s “fabulous write-up” with the “picture that is just swell of him so be sure & get it.” For months, however, only Sande openly acknowledged Jackson’s newfound fame. Frank, Charles, and Jay remained conspicuously silent.

  In Springs, people stopped Jackson in the street to congratulate him. Friends came to the house with copies of the magazine under their arms. For weeks, the article was the touchstone of local conversation. “Everyone in town was tal
king about the article in Life,” recalls James Brooks. “They acted differently around [Jackson] after that, they were self-conscious with him.” There were, of course, more than a few Bonackers who “weren’t ready to admit to themselves that they were wrong,” according to Dan Miller. “[They] made peace with themselves by figuring that Life magazine was crazier than Pollock.”

  Publicly, Jackson squirmed becomingly in the spotlight. Visitors to the house in the weeks after the article appeared found him “self-conscious,” “nervous,” “embarrassed,” and “a little ashamed.” But privately, he reveled in the attention. “He was delighted to be in print,” John Little recalls. Dan Miller described him as “proud.” Wilfrid Zogbaum was “willing to bet that Jackson didn’t mind having his name linked to the phrase ‘greatest living painter.’” When James Brooks and Bradley Tomlin brought a copy of Life to the house, Jackson was “so embarrassed that he couldn’t read it while we were there,” Brooks recalls. But as soon as they left, he arranged to have a hundred copies delivered to his door.

  But the Life article was merely prelude. The best was yet to come.

  Jackson’s November 1949 show was both a public and a private triumph. The private one began a week before the opening when Jackson and Lee moved into Alfonso Ossorio’s house in MacDougal Alley. Ossorio had gone to the Philippines to paint a mural for a chapel his family was erecting and, in a gracious parting gesture, offered the house to the Pollocks for the winter. Ted Dragon stayed behind, but spent most of every day rehearsing for his debut in Stravinsky’s Orpheus with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet. It was a comfortable home, a former coach house for one of the mansions on Washington Square, with a brick and wood interior painted white and filled with potted plants. Upstairs, a large, sun-filled studio with a sleeping loft gave out onto a balcony that Dragon filled with flowers every spring and summer. (When Jackson visited for the first time, he exclaimed, “It’s like being in the country.”) The downstairs walls were hung with Dubuffets, Ossorio’s own sumptuous watercolors and encaustics, and works by Jean Fautrier and Wols (of which Jackson reportedly said, “I don’t know where painting is going, but it certainly isn’t going that way”). In the living room was a Giacometti sculpture. Ensconced in this casual, countrified elegance (Fritz Bultman called it “Village opulence”), Jackson immediately invited his family to visit. In the week preceding the show, Stella, Sande, and Jay all made the pilgrimage to 9 MacDougal Alley to see Jackson, offer yet another round of compliments on the Life article, and assure him that they would attend the opening.

  The public triumph was no less gratifying. The Life article had created a wave of anticipation, and on the night of November 21, it crested. The crowd filled both rooms of Parsons’s little gallery and spilled out into the hallway. Gossamer clouds of cigarette smoke filled the upper reaches of the windowless space. Glasses glinted and clinked and the babble of conversation seemed especially dense and breathless. It wasn’t the usual crowd. These were not the friends and fellow artists who normally drifted from one opening to the next in a show of solidarity. These were distinguished-looking men and women—most of them strangers—in tailored suits and designer-label dresses. Milton Resnick, who came with Willem de Kooning, remembers the odd, new feeling that permeated the Parsons gallery that night. “The first thing I noticed when I came in the door was that people all around me were shaking hands,” Resnick remembers. “Most of the time you went to an opening, all you saw were other people that you knew, but there were a lot of people there I’d never seen before. I said to Bill, ‘What’s all this shaking about?’ And he said, ‘Look around. These are the big shots. Jackson has finally broken the ice.’”

  Ted Dragon as Orpheus in a 1950 production of Stravinsky’s Orpheus

  Among the “big shots” was Roy Neuberger, the collector and financier, who stood uncertainly beside Sam Kootz all night; Burton Tremaine, a collector; and Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., the director of design at the Museum of Modern Art. Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper’s Bazaar, milled around Blake’s model of “The Ideal Exhibit,” and Dwight Ripley, a wealthy painter-poet-botanist-linguist, hovered around two paintings for a long time, unable to decide between them. (He eventually bought both.) Edward Root, a patrician friend and principal patron of Betty Parsons, spent most of the night talking with Happy and Valentine Macy, two of his social equals in the crowd. Even Alfred Barr was there—the surest sign that the ice had been broken. Only a few months before, Barr had chastised Peter Blake for his enthusiastic support of Jackson in a catalogue introduction he wrote for Bertha Schaefer. “He said he had read my piece and found it ‘interesting.’” Blake recalls. “Then he said, ‘But I don’t think Pollock’s work is something we should be supporting.’” Since then Barr had seen the Life article and softened his position. “He decided that Pollock was, after all, part of the family tree of modern art.”

  Jackson stood in the midst of the distinguished crowd, sober and sedated, dressed in a jacket and tie and shiny shoes. “He acted like a businessman,” recalls Reuben Kadish. “When a collector would walk in, Jack would pay attention to him.” With uncharacteristic aggressiveness, Betty Parsons moved through the crowd, offering special discounts under her breath to “the right names” and anyone else who seemed on the verge of buying. (Even with prodding from Kootz and a price break from Parsons, however, Roy Neuberger resisted paying $1,000 for Number 8.) Throughout the evening, Lee sat at the receptionist’s desk, handing out reprints of the Life article. “She didn’t let on she was Mrs. Pollock,” recalls one guest. “That way she could get a better sense of people’s reactions.”

  With few exceptions, the critics echoed the enthusiasm of the opening-night crowd. In the New Yorker, Robert Coates called the new works “better controlled” and “less strident,” with “a depth of feeling and a sense of stricter organization that add greatly to [their] appeal. … They seem to me the best painting he has yet done.” Amy Robinson struck the same conciliatory tone in Art News: “[Pollock] expresses a more intense emotion than ever in his newest pictures,” she wrote. “While the closely woven layers of different colored lines appear at first to represent impulsive snapping of all restrictive bonds, including form, it is apparent that there is a definite pattern and feeling in each canvas.” Coates and Robinson weren’t the only reviewers who, for the first time, felt compelled to explain the appeal of Jackson’s paintings. Carlyle Burrows, writing in the Herald Tribune, attributed their “fascination” to “the simple interplay of their color, combined with line of rhythmic intensity.” Stuart Preston argued in the Times that color was “Pollock’s forte.” Where once the critics had joked about Jackson’s drip technique, comparing it to “baked macaroni” or “a mass of tangled hair,” now they competed with each other to find the most eloquent words to describe it. “Tightly woven webs of paint handled with a sweeping movement of the arm,” wrote Robinson. Preston admired the “myriad tiny climaxes of paint and color,” each one as “elegant as a Chinese character.” Coates complimented the “overlapping swirls and skeins of brilliant color.” Since the Life article, it seemed, almost every critic had undergone a similar conversion. In his review of the Whitney’s “Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting” that began a week after Jackson’s show closed, Henry McBride had the courage to confess his reversal straight out. “Previous works by [Pollock] which I had seen looked as though the paint had been flung at the canvas from a distance, not all of it making happy landings. Even the present one has a spattered technic, but the spattering is handsome and organized and therefore I like it.”

  Not all the commentary was positive. Burrows accused the show of being “repetitious.” “Mr. Pollock,” he concluded, “is finding it difficult to extend his range in the method of painting he has so confidently developed.” Stuart Preston thought the dense webs in the largest works “fail[ed] to add up to an overall design,” and suggested that Jackson work on a smaller scale. And Henry McBride couldn’t resist compar
ing the painting in the Whitney show to a picture of “a flat, war-shattered city, possibly Hiroshima, as seen from a great height in moonlight.” But even in criticism, the tone was now respectful; suggestions were offered to be helpful, never abusive. In fact, by the end of 1949, only one publication still held out against the rising tide of Jackson’s celebrity. In the December 26 issue of Time, Alexander Eliot lashed out at Pollock, Greenberg, and the entire “fashionable and blank” world of avant-garde art. Reviewing the Whitney Annual, he labeled Jackson’s Number 14 a “nonobjective snarl of tar and confetti” and warned: “If [his] sort of painting represented the most vital force in contemporary U.S. art, as some critics had contended, art was in a bad way.”

  But Time’s lone voice was barely audible above the congratulatory din. By the time the show closed on December 10, more paintings had been sold than in any of Jackson’s previous shows. In addition to the small band of usual patrons (Tony Smith, Ossorio, Dragon, and the Macys), Parsons’s sales book recorded a number of new names: Tremaine, Kaufmann, Kimball, Root, Ripley, Price (Vincent Price, a rising star of horror movies and an avid collector). Jackson’s strategy of painting large numbers of small works for the timid first-time collector had succeeded almost too well. As one of the opening-night guests commented: “Who wouldn’t have been willing to pay a few hundred dollars to have a painting by ‘that artist who was profiled in Life’?” Even Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, under Alfred Barr’s guiding eye, bought one of the small works (Number 23, 1949) for her collection—another first. Altogether, eighteen of the twenty-seven works in the show were sold, most of them in the first week, many on the first night. “[Jack] had the best show he has ever had,” Stella wrote Frank soon after the show closed. “Eighteen paintings [sold] and prospects of others.”