Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Despite the theatrical enticement of Peter Blake’s model showing Jackson’s mural-size paintings in situ, only two of the show’s biggest canvases sold. In early December, however, Blake brought Marcel Breuer to Parsons’s gallery, knowing that the Hungarian architect needed a painting for the dining room of a house he was designing for Bertram Geller in Lawrence, Long Island. “Breuer was so impressed,” Blake recalls, “that he called the Gellers immediately and secured the commission for Jackson to do a mural” (on the condition that the ground be as close as possible to the commercial rust-colored ground of the 1948 painting, Arabesque). Suddenly, everything seemed to be breaking Jackson’s way.

  The show left Jackson and Lee in such a state of euphoria that they refused to return to the winter drudgery of Springs. Instead, they lingered at the MacDougal Alley house, entertaining friends, touring the gallery shows (Gorky, Buffie Johnson, Richard Pousette-Dart, Herbert Ferber, James Brooks, Mary Callery), and generally reacquainting themselves with city life. Lee wrote Ossorio: “We attended several openings, an educational reception at the museum, an insane dinner party given by a Mr. & Mrs. Lockwood, whom we didn’t know, and who weren’t there.” With Ted Dragon as a guide, Jackson saw his first opera, Tosca, his first ballet, Orpheus, and his first modern dance performance, by Nick and Merle Marsicano. With the exception of modern dance, which, curiously, he thought “had no sense of progression or style,” Jackson professed enthusiasm for everything. “If it had to do with music,” recalls Dragon, “he loved it. I got him into a rehearsal of the Stravinsky Orpheus and he adored that. He was absolutely fascinated by the opera.” Given such exaggerated, indiscriminate enthusiasm, one wonders which Jackson enjoyed more, the culture itself or the new role of culture enthousiaste. He was, after all, part of that culture now—a great painter, perhaps the greatest in America. And it became a great painter to appreciate great musicians and perhaps even great dancers. “He used to say, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re doing out there,’” Dragon remembers, “‘but you know I like it.’” He would listen for hours while Dragon played Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, and Schumann on the piano at MacDougal Alley, and loved to hear Dragon compare Schumann’s stormy life as an unappreciated genius to his own. “Schumann was a very difficult man,” says Dragon, “and his music, the later pieces, are difficult to like. It was the same with Jackson’s art, and when I talked about similarities like that, he just beamed.”

  Jackson so enjoyed the city high life that he decided to skip the ritual trip to Deep River for Christmas. Lee, who had slipped easily back into the frenetic social pace of the Village, was only too happy to oblige. Never fond of the Pollock relatives, she undoubtedly considered it something of a triumph for her that Jackson no longer needed Stella. In Deep River, Stella took the news stoically, apparently accepting Jackson’s explanation that he and Lee were “so tired from being in the City—just worn out.” But others in the family suspected a darker explanation: that after the Life article and the triumphant show, Jackson no longer had time for his family.

  The celebration went on at MacDougal Alley through the holidays and into the new year. Between the new pleasures of celebrity and the constant supply of tranquilizers, Jackson stayed relatively sober and subdued. Ted Dragon remembers the months of house-sharing as “very ordered.” “Jackson had very, very little to say,” Dragon recalls. “He would be so quiet and then every once in a while he would just come out with these very quiet statements.” So confident was Lee of Jackson’s new leaf that she didn’t seem concerned about the consequences when the news came in March that Dr. Edwin Heller had been killed in an automobile accident in East Hampton. Jackson, too, seemed strangely unmoved at the news. He was on top of the world, and from there, Dr. Heller, like Stella, no longer seemed necessary.

  Jackson had not only crossed into a new decade, he had broken through into a new dimension of success. Since the Life article, his reputation had taken on a momentum of its own, sustained less by reaction to his current work, or any work, than by the fact of past recognition. Fame had begun to feed on itself. He had become “the Life painter,” an unignorable presence in the world of avant-garde art, regardless of how or what or whether he painted at all. After years on the social margin, and only months after the debacle at Bertha Schaefer’s, invitations poured in, to dinners, parties, openings, symposia, and lectures. Within a relatively short time, he had moved from the periphery to the center of the increasingly fractious avant-garde community. Fellow artists like Robert Motherwell, who for years had dismissed Jackson as, at best, an eccentric, illiterate rustic in the high drama of modern art—the former Benton student in cowboy boots—were suddenly forced not just to acknowledge Jackson, not just to include him in their grand visions, but to seek him out to give those visions legitimacy.

  In April 1950, Motherwell, along with Robert Goodnough, Richard Lippold, and Alfred Barr, presided over a three-day closed panel discussion at Studio 35. Jackson, who had returned to Springs in March to begin work on the mural for the Geller house, didn’t attend. At the close of the sessions, however, when Adolph Gottlieb suggested that the group protest an upcoming juried competition at the Metropolitan Museum for its anti-abstract bias, Jackson’s name quickly surfaced. “He was the only one who had gotten any real attention in the media,” recalls John Little. “It was obvious that any protest would mean more if [Jackson] was involved.” Gottlieb apparently agreed. From Gottlieb’s apartment in Brooklyn, where a meeting was held soon afterward to draft a letter of protest, Barnett Newman called Jackson and asked him to come into the city immediately to sign the letter. Jackson declined the trip but sent a supporting telegram the same day:

  I ENDORSED [sic] THE LETTER OPPOSING THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART 1950 JURIED SHOW STOP JACKSON POLLOCK

  The letter, which was sent to Roland L. Redmond, president of the Metropolitan, accused the museum’s director, Francis Henry Taylor, of “contempt for modern painting” and claimed that the choice of jurors “does not warrant any hope that a just proportion of advanced art will be included.” On May 22, the letter appeared on the front page of the Times under the headline “18 Painters Boycott Metropolitan: Charge ‘Hostility to Advanced Art.’” The next day, the Herald Tribune denounced the protest in an editorial headlined “The Irascible Eighteen.” But it wasn’t until six months later, when Life decided to cover the story, that the group—since dubbed “the Irascibles”—was immortalized. On November 24, 1950, Jackson made a special trip with James Brooks to join fourteen of the eighteen to sit for Life photographer Nina Leen at the magazine’s studio on West Forty-fourth Street. (Life had wanted them to pose, paintings in hand, on the steps of the Metropolitan, but Gottlieb refused, arguing they would look like supplicants rather than protesters. “They were very surprised at this,” said Gottlieb, “because nobody refuses anything to Life.”) It was the second time in two years Jackson had posed for Life’s cameras.

  The picture of fourteen grave-faced, well-dressed men and one woman, with Jackson roughly in the center looking angry and self-assured, appeared in Life’s January 15, 1951, issue, soon after the offending exhibition, “American Painting Today 1950,” opened at the Met. Leen’s stark, full-page group portrait followed a lavishly illustrated report on the show. The caption was noncommittal: “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight Against Show,” but the story, invoking specifics that would be familiar to readers, mentioned “the dribblings of Pollock” in the first paragraph. Even the protesters were surprised by the attention. “All we did was sign this letter,” recalls Hedda Sterne, the lone female in the photograph. “Then somebody gave us a name. It was all blown out of proportion.” At least one of the eighteen suspected that Life saw the story as just “the next installment in the continuing saga of Jackson Pollock, the cowboy painter.”

  Nina Leen’s picture of the “Irascibles,” which appeared in Life in January 1951. Left to right, front row: Theodore Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko; seco
nd row: Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin; back row: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, and Hedda Sterne.

  Everywhere the ice of skepticism was breaking up. In the March 1950 issue of Magazine of Art, five years after comparing Jackson’s work to baked macaroni, Parker Tyler publicly recanted. “[An] impregnable language of image,” Tyler now called it, “as well as beautiful and subtle patterns of pure form.” Impregnable and pretentious, Tyler’s article, “The Infinite Labyrinth,” set the tone for much of the woolly, pseudo-poetic criticism that would haunt Pollock’s puzzling new images in the years to come.

  Pollock’s paint flies through space like the elongating bodies of comets and, striking the blind alley of the flat canvas, bursts into frozen visibilities. What are his dense and spangled works but the viscera of an endless nonbeing of the universe? Something which cannot be recognized as any part of the universe is made to represent the universe in totality of being. So we reach the truly final paradox of these paintings: being in nonbeing.

  Not long after Tyler’s article appeared, another prominent skeptic, Alfred Barr, chose Jackson as one of six avant-garde artists to represent America at the twenty-fifth Venice Biennale in June. Of course, half of the U.S. Pavilion would still be reserved for John Marin (Barr’s conversion was never complete), but the honor was accompanied by a glowing tribute in the summer issue of Art News—Barr’s first public commendation of Jackson’s work. “Perhaps the most original art among the painters of his generation,” he called it, “… an energetic adventure for the eyes, a luna park full of fireworks, pitfalls, surprises, and delights.” The encomiums were accompanied by a reception in the MOMA penthouse attended by five of the chosen artists—Pollock, de Kooning, Hyman Bloom, Lee Gatch, and Rico Lebrun (Gorky, dead for two years, was the sixth)—and the eighty-year-old Marin. There, caught in a photograph amid trays of hors d’oeuvres and empty wineglasses (Jackson ostentatiously refused to drink), two artistic eras met: from the past, the cadaverous Marin in long locks and flowing cravat, looking every inch the eccentric artiste peintre; from the present, Jackson Pollock, with his square, plebeian jaw and close-cropped hair, looking professorial in tweed jacket, white shirt, black tie, gray flannel slacks, and polished loafers, indistinguishable from the gallery officials and patrons hovering around him. Far from being intimidated by Marin’s presence, Jackson seems almost disdainful, while Marin eyes the next generation with a furtive, doubtful glance.

  Marin wasn’t the only one who still harbored doubts. In a preview of the Biennale for the New York Herald Tribune, Emily Genauer lamented that, except for works by Marin, visitors would see “not one single painting by any of the artists who have been recognized by our leading museums, critics, collectors, and connoisseurs as the most creative and accomplished talents in America.” Although grossly exaggerated—works by Pollock, de Kooning, and Gorky had been in MOMA’s collection for years—such comments alerted European critics to the disarray in the American art community. At a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to deny New York’s postwar artistic eclipse of Paris, European commentators eagerly pounced on the irresolute Americans. Writing in the Listener, London critic Douglas Cooper accused the six young American painters represented in the U.S. Pavilion of “mostly imitat[ing] well-known Europeans, with a singular lack of conviction and competence though on a very large scale.” Cooper singled out Jackson for special criticism, calling him, with calculated ambiguity, “undeniably an American phenomenon.” After summarizing the drip technique, he described the result as “an elaborate if meaningless tangle of cordage and smears, abstract and shapeless,” and dismissed Barr’s description of the work (“an energetic adventure for the eyes”) as “merely silly.” Others derided Jackson’s paintings as “melted Picasso.” A month later, Time’s Alexander Eliot gleefully reported the European reaction. “U.S. Painting did not seem to be making much of a hit abroad,” he wrote in an unsigned article. “At Venice’s ‘Biennale,’ the U.S. pavilion (featuring the wild and wooly abstractions of Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock) was getting silent treatment from the critics.”

  In fact, while the critics traded obituaries, the paintings themselves touched off an explosion of interest among European painters. Catherine Viviano, a dealer, remembers that scores of young Italian painters returned again and again to the U.S. pavilion, “tremendously excited” by Jackson’s three paintings, especially Number 1, 1948, the big white canvas with lush purple accents and a row of handprints. “They loved his work,” recalls Viviano. “They recognized immediately what a great artist he was.” Touring the pavilion with several other Italian painters, Giorgio Morandi said, “They’re interesting, these Americans. They jump into the water before they learn to swim.” Looking at de Kooning’s Excavation, he commented, “A little forced. Too much will.” The Gorkys on the opposite wall elicited only the remark, “This guy is a little French. Un po’ sordo. He’s a little tone deaf.” But when Morandi turned and looked into the second gallery and saw a huge Pollock, he gasped, “Now this is new. Such vitality, such energy!” In July, while the Biennale continued nearby, Peggy Guggenheim opened an exhibition of her entire collection of Pollock paintings at the Correr Museum across from San Marco Cathedral. The same painters who had been tantalized by Number 1, 1948 now had a rare opportunity to see Jackson’s work in depth. Arrayed around the paneled walls of the Sala Napoleonica were twenty-three works—twenty oils, including Number 12, 1949 and Number 23, 1949, two gouaches, and one drawing. At night, the illuminated paintings were visible from the crowded piazza and the sight “sent all the Venetian painters mad with excitement,” according to Peggy. A commentary by Bruno Alfieri, which had appeared originally in L’Arte Moderna with an Italian translation of Jackson’s Possibilities statement, was reprinted as an introduction in the show’s catalogue. At once agitated, indignant and ambivalent, it expressed the challenge that European artists saw in abstract art in general and Pollock’s work in particular. “Jackson Pollock’s paintings represent absolutely nothing: no facts, no ideas, no geometrical forms. … No picture is more thoroughly abstract than a picture by Pollock: abstract from everything … no picture is more automatic, involuntary, surrealistic, introverted and pure.” It was that very purity, Alfieri complained, that made Jackson’s work impervious to traditional criticism. After all, what could a critic say about paintings that were marked by:

  chaos

  absolute lack of harmony

  complete lack of structural organization

  total absence of technique, however rudimentary

  once again, chaos

  What emerged from the chaos, Alfieri claimed, was not the art, but the artist. “Pollock has broken all barriers between his picture and himself: his picture is the most immediate and spontaneous painting. Each one of his pictures is part of himself.” But how is a critic supposed to judge an artist? “What is his inner world worth? Is it worth knowing, or is it totally undistinguished? Damn it, if I must judge a painting by the artist, it is no longer a painting that I am interested in, I no longer care about the formal values contained in it. … That is, I start from the picture and discover the man.”

  From this turmoil of anger and doubt, Alfieri pulled a stunning conclusion: “Jackson Pollock is the modern painter who sits at the extreme apex of the most advanced and unprejudiced avant-garde of modern art. You might say that his position is too advanced, but you may not say that his pictures are ugly. … Compared to Pollock, Picasso, poor Pablo Picasso, the little gentleman who, since a few decades, troubles the sleep of his colleagues with the everlasting nightmare of his destructive undertakings, becomes a quiet conformist, a painter of the past.”

  In Europe, at least, the whispers had begun. Picasso finally had an heir.

  Meanwhile, on Long Island, as farmers turned the green ryegrass and the dogwood threatened to bloom early in an unusually warm spring, Jackson continued to ride the tide of celebrit
y. From Switzerland, Bill Davis sent a ringing tribute: “Of the live painters still working in Europe (the well known ones and figuring Matisse as ½ dead) it has seemed to me during the past three years that very little if any of their stuff is in a class with your work.” Even more welcome was the hint of a sale in the same letter (“We’re still in the market for additions to the collection”), although Davis seemed to rule out the purchase of a major painting—increasingly the only kind of sale that stirred Jackson’s interest. Igor Pantuhoff, passing through on one of his seasonal migrations in pursuit of high society, stopped at Fireplace Road to have dinner and pay homage. In a characteristically extravagant gesture, he pulled a platinum Cartier watch from his pocket and handed it to Jackson. “I want you to have this,” he said, “because you’re the greatest painter I know.”

  Everywhere Jackson turned that spring, he heard the same message. Peter Blake, Barr’s eager young protégé, came by the studio often to check on the progress of the Geller mural and talk, always in adulatory tones, about the model museum which, since the November show, had languished in a storage room. “I felt very close to him when I was there,” Blake recalls. “I was young and naive and he was a great artist making time for me, listening to what I had to say.” Although Jackson seldom responded with more than a grunt, Blake, who felt Jackson’s work was “spatially wedded” to the Accabonac landscape, was sure those grunts indicated a profound understanding of the “pendant relationship of art to architecture.” It may have been Blake who, in an effort to spare Jackson from an awkward confrontation, suggested that he send someone else to the Geller house in Lawrence, Long Island, to install the finished mural in July. The artist who agreed to do the job, Giorgio Cavallon, recalls that Phyllis Geller was “mad as hell. She said, ‘This is such a piece of junk and I spent a lot of money.’” It took a week to iron out the creases (“It came folded up like wrapping paper”) and attach the 72-by-96-inch canvas to the back of a set of kitchen cabinets facing the dining room. (Years later, when the property was sold, the painting was worth more than the house.)