It was straight talk and Jackson seemed, at least temporarily, sobered by it.
Not so Lee. Despite Fox’s reassuring manner and no-nonsense approach, Lee wasn’t sure the treatment would work or, even if it did, that it would work in time to save Jackson from himself. In early March, she “forced him”—her own words—to draw up a will. Not surprisingly, the three-page document left everything in Lee’s hands. She would be sole beneficiary and sole executor. When Jackson was forced to contemplate what would happen if Lee “failed to survive him,” however, old animosities began to move behind the veil of legalese. Sande, the only brother who “understood” his art, was his second choice for executor, then Greenberg, then Ossorio. Sande was also named as contingent beneficiary. If both Sande and Lee predeceased him, Charles, Frank, and Jay were to divide the estate equally—but not the paintings. Jackson knew too well what his older brothers thought of his art. In an accompanying letter of request, he instructed the executor “to dispose of my paintings rather than distribute them to my brothers. Give them the proceeds of the sale. Try to maintain the paintings as intact as possible.” The wounds reopened at the family reunion were not yet healed.
Meanwhile, the engine of celebrity rumbled ahead unattended. In Westerly, Rhode Island, listeners to station WERI heard Jackson’s flat, slightly nasal voice coming over their radios, expounding on “the meaning of modern art.” “Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we’re living in,” he said in response to a question from William Wright, an East Hampton neighbor who had recorded the interview in the last days of 1950. When asked how the public “should look at a Pollock painting,” Jackson suggested that people “look passively” and “not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for. … I think it should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed.” Most of Wright’s questions were leading (“Would it be possible to say that the classical artist expressed his world by representing the objects, whereas the modern artist expresses his world by representing the effects the objects have upon him?”), and most of Jackson’s answers were familiar (“the direction that painting seems to be taking here is away from the easel … into some kind of wall painting”). Occasionally, the exchange degenerated into blather:
WRIGHT: Well, isn’t [a stick] more difficult to control than a brush? I mean, isn’t there more a possibility of getting too much paint or splattering or any number of things? …
POLLOCK: No, I don’t think so. I don’t—ah—with experience—it seems to be possible to control the flow of the paint, to a great extent, and I don’t use—I don’t use the accident—‘cause I deny the accident.
WRIGHT: I believe it was Freud who said there’s no such thing as an accident. Is that what you mean?
POLLOCK: I suppose that’s generally what I mean.
On January 15, Nina Leen’s picture of the “Irascibles” appeared in Life. As far away as Mexico, where Robert Beverly Hale and his wife Barbara were vacationing, readers saw Jackson, looking like a “dour son of a bitch.” In the same month, Hans Namuth’s still pictures from the previous summer appeared in Portfolio. In its January issue, Art News named Jackson’s November show at Betty Parsons one of the three best shows of the year, after John Marin’s and before Alberto Giacometti’s. In March, Lavender Mist and Autumn Rhythm appeared in Vogue as backdrops for full-page pictures by Cecil Beaton of models wearing “The New Soft Look.” Breezily equivocating, the accompanying text called them “dazzling and curious paintings.” In May, the Brooklyn Museum included Jackson’s ink drawing, Number 3, 1951, in its sixteenth biennial “International Water Color Exhibition.” The same month, Namuth’s pictures appeared again in Art News, this time with an extensive article by Robert Goodnough called “Pollock Paints a Picture,” in which the drip method was described in loving detail. (“Pollock uses metallic paint much in the same sense that earlier painters applied gold leaf, to add a feeling of mystery and adornment.”) Also in May, Leo Castelli chose Number 1, 1949 to be included in the famous Ninth Street Show beside paintings by members of the Club, and plans were laid for an October show at the Arts Club of Chicago, featuring Pollock, Ben Shahn, and Willem de Kooning. Everywhere, Jackson’s paintings were being seen: from Austria, where a Viennese critic wrote Jackson for help on a book about “automatic painting”; to Japan, where two Pollock paintings were included in the Third Tokyo Independent Art Exhibition; to Mount Pleasant, Iowa, where a teacher at Iowa Wesleyan College wrote to find out more about Jackson’s technique. In Europe, nineteen of Peggy Guggenheim’s Pollocks toured Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich, while in America, the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Circulating Exhibitions took Number 31, 1949 (later replaced by Number 12A, 1948) to twenty-five cities in three and a half years, from Fargo, North Dakota, to Fort Worth, Texas. In Paris, a Pollock, chosen by Michel Tapié, was shown in the “Véhémences Confrontées” exhibition at the Galerie Nina Dausset, and a Soviet critic took news of Jackson’s “decadent bourgeois” art home from the Venice Biennale.
To Jackson, such delayed bursts of celebrity must have seemed unreal, as if happening in someone else’s life, or in a movie. He had become alienated from his own image. The celebrated Jackson Pollock, the one he saw pictured and read about in the magazines, was confident, creative, prolific, and sober. In early 1951, the real Jackson Pollock was none of those things. Since falling off the wagon, he had produced only a few ink drawings on Japanese paper. He thought so little of the drawings that he quickly cannibalized them to make two collages and a papier-mâché sculpture for the “Sculpture by Painters” show at Peridot Gallery in March; and so little of the sculpture that he left it outside, where it quickly disintegrated.
Nothing brought the feelings of emptiness and alienation into sharper focus than Namuth’s movie. Like everything else that winter, it moved ahead on its own, blithe to Jackson’s paralysis. Namuth and Falkenberg edited the months of film, prepared a final cut, and pasted together a script from bits and pieces of Jackson’s previously published statements. (Jackson scribbled a few editorial changes in the margins.) To give the movie “authenticity,” they asked Jackson to read it:
My home is in Springs, East Hampton, Long Island. I was born in Cody, Wyoming, thirty-nine years ago. In New York I spent two years at the Art Students League with Tom Benton. He was a strong personality to react against. This was in 1929 [sic]. I don’t work from drawings or color sketches. My painting is direct. I usually paint on the floor. I enjoy working on a large canvas.
On and on it droned in the same Dick-and-Jane style, Jackson’s wooden monotone leavened only slightly by nervous haste:
Sometimes I use a brush, but often prefer using a stick. Sometimes I pour the paint straight out of the can. … When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of the paint; there is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.
When the tape was played back, Jackson was appalled at the sound of his voice, but didn’t complain. It wasn’t his project anymore, if it ever was. Only when Falkenberg created a “music-effects” track, using recordings of Balinese folk music, did he finally balk. “But, Paul,” he said, “this is exotic music. I am an American painter.” Namuth and Falkenberg responded that there wasn’t enough money in the shoestring budget for an original score. To break the impasse, Lee, who didn’t like anything about the film but wanted to avoid an embarrassment, approached John Cage, the experimental composer. Cage was deeply immersed in the preparation of a piece for twelve randomly tuned radios but turned the job down for personal reasons: “I couldn’t abide Pollock’s work because I couldn’t stand the man.” He did, however, introduce Lee to a young composer friend, Morton Feldman, who was willing to do the job in return for an ink drawing. “[I] wrote the score as if I were writing music for choreography,” said Feldman.
By the time the film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art on June 14, Jackson had lost interest in everything ab
out it except Feldman’s music, which he thought “might be great.” As he sat in the darkened gallery, watching the familiar scenes of the previous fall being replayed in flickering light—putting on his shoes, contemplating the canvas, stirring the paint, wiping the glass—Jackson undoubtedly felt the worm of phoniness twisting inside him again. Like all the disembodied triumphs that winter, the film was both a painful reminder of his current creative block and additional proof that his brothers had been right: that his celebrity, like the film, had been a sham all along.
In the bleakest days of a bleak winter, Jackson took up pen and paper and began drawing again. During all of 1950, he had hardly touched a sketch pad. His ambitions demanded a far grander “arena” (his word). The results of these first tentative, chastened efforts after the Thanksgiving debacle must have surprised even Jackson. Nothing remained of the previous summer. The grand scale, the lyrical loops, the delicate webs, the elegant compositions, the gorgeous palette of pinks and tans—all vanished. In their place were small, spare visions in black and white, cryptic dots and stuttering lines, splatters and dashes in dry arrangements, all in relentlessly black ink. It was as if he were denying the recent past, punishing himself for the excesses of celebrity with a hardtack of imagery. Lee was shocked and baffled. The leap to canvas early in 1951 brought more surprises. Jackson did not, as Lee had expected, capitulate to color. The scale enlarged, but the imagery hardly changed—Jackson called his new paintings “drawing on canvas in black.” He began using a brush occasionally. But the biggest shock came when Lee walked into the studio in the spring of 1951 and saw, in the black-and-white painting laid out on the floor, a recognizable shape. For the first time in five years, figures were emerging from behind the veil. Jackson had abandoned abstraction. “Some of my early images [are] coming thru,” he wrote Ossorio. “[I] think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing—and the kids who think it simple to splash a Pollock out.”
Where did these images come from? Why did Jackson, over the course of a few short months in the winter of 1950–51, abandon the palette, the technique, and the theories that had made him famous? Other than Jackson, the only person who knew the answers, the only person who wasn’t surprised by these new, nightmarish visions was Tony Smith.
Smith was one of the few friends who didn’t desert Jackson after the drinking started again. Unlike most of Lee’s summer guests, who had never seen Jackson drunk, who knew only the icon, Smith found Jackson as attractive drunk as sober. During the winter, their bond, which up to then had been fond but casual, became the guiding force in Jackson’s life. Partly, it was the camaraderie of a fellow alcoholic: Smith was always ready to share “a beer and a beef.” Partly, it was Smith’s intellectual banter—even if, as Roger Wilcox claims, Jackson “didn’t know what the Sam Hill Tony was talking about.” Partly, it was Smith’s relentless flattery and the undercurrent of sexuality in his attentions. Partly, it was his sensitivity to Jackson’s volatile moods. “Tony had antennae,” says his wife, Jane. “He knew what Jackson’s problems were.” And how to respond. At times, Smith would entertain Jackson with recitations from Joyce or philosophical soliloquies; other times, the two men could sit for hours in utter silence. In many ways, Jackson’s increasingly dark vision mirrored Smith’s own Irish gloom. “Tony and Jackson were made for each other,” says Fritz Bultman. “They were both tormented souls, fellow travelers on the road to hell.”
1950, Duco on paper, 11” × 59”
Whatever the reasons, Jackson quickly developed a desperate devotion to his young admirer. “He became Tony’s biggest fan,” recalls James Brooks, whom Jackson introduced to Smith. “He was so proud of his friendship with Tony,” says Harry Jackson. “He said to me, ‘Shit, Harry, he’s got to know all kinds of stuff to be an architect.’” His letters to Ossorio in Paris brimmed with an adulation that not even Smith’s delinquency on the chapel project could shake. After Smith’s wife, Jane, left for Europe with Tennessee Williams in late 1950, Tony and Jackson became nearly inseparable. First at the house in MacDougal Alley, then on Fireplace Road, where Smith visited almost every weekend during the spring, they spent dozens of evenings together, drinking, smoking, riding through the countryside, and talking about everything from Oriental philosophy to Jackson’s latest dream. “[I had a] constructive dream,” Jackson wrote Ossorio, “([and] happily Tony was here to interpret it for me).”
Not since John Graham had anyone held such power over Jackson or his art—and Smith, unlike Graham, was eager to use it. “Tony loved to dominate you creatively,” recalls Buffie Johnson. “He loved to make suggestions, tell you how to paint. He always wanted to get into the act, and I know he did with Jackson.”
Out of these hours together, many of them in the studio, many of them in a drunken reverie, Jackson’s new imagery emerged.
Smith urged him to “try something new.” Jackson had felt constrained by the allover composition and rigorous abstraction of his dripped images for some time and, as early as 1948, had experimented with various means—cutouts, montage, brush strokes, biomorphic shapes, and scale—to recapture the electricity of risk. He had even flirted on and off with figuration, in works like Triad and White Cockatoo, trying to tap into the psychic energy of core memories. If Smith hadn’t pushed him toward larger and larger canvases the year before, Jackson might have abandoned the familiar territory of Autumn Rhythm and One sooner.
But that was last year. Now Smith wanted to know what was next. “Tony really tortured Jackson, even if he didn’t realize it,” says Buffie Johnson, whose house on Fifty-eighth Street was designed by Smith and who often saw the two men together. “Tony said, ‘Well, what you did was great, Jackson, but what are you going to do next? What is this leading to? What is the development?’ He made Jackson very nervous by telling him he ought to change. Everybody did that to some extent, but Tony was the worst offender.” Specifically, Smith pushed Jackson toward figuration, encouraging him both by example when the two men sketched together, and by suggestion, giving him a copy of On Growth and Form, a book filled with illustrations of things: cells, shells, scales, snowflakes, and so forth. “Jackson’s return to realistic images was a result of pressure from Tony,” says Johnson flatly. “It was a classic example of Tony trying to paint through other people.”
Number 22, 1951, left; Image of Man (Number 3, 1951) and Number 15, 1951, at right; Number 32, 1950 on floor; and papier-mâché sculpture on desk.
Smith also put Jackson back in touch with the imagery of his past, the imagery of José Clemente Orozco. (The two men discovered their common admiration for Orozco when Smith asked Jackson what he thought was the greatest work of art in North America and Jackson replied without hesitation, “the Orozco fresco at Pomona College.”) The figures that Lee saw when she walked into the studio that spring were mostly refugees from Orozco: huge women with pendulous breasts, strange beasts and distorted faces bursting from the picture frame. Orozco’s jagged, tenebrous world had always attracted Jackson, especially at times of emotional turmoil, when its grotesque forms and dark palette perfectly suited his own nightmarish vision. As late as 1949, he kept that imagery alive in his drawings, as well as in the genesis of his drip paintings. Even without Smith, Jackson might have turned to that imagery during the bleak, troubled winter of 1950–51. But Smith’s enthusiasm gave Orozco’s dark world new legitimacy and new appeal. On a trip to Smith’s family home in South Orange, New Jersey, Jackson met Tony’s brother Joseph, a Greek scholar, who had helped transfer the cartoons for Orozco’s mural at Dartmouth.
Smith even gave Jackson his new medium—literally—by presenting him with a pad of rice paper and a bottle of black ink in late 1950. When Jackson emerged from his month-long binge following the November show, Smith used the gift as a way of luring his friend back to work: drawing was an easy transition; paper and ink were well suited to the confines of the MacDougal Alley house and to Jackson’s alcohol-shortened attention span. Working in a miniature version of the drip techn
ique, he followed Smith’s advice and began experimenting with the paper’s unusual texture and absorbency. The medium felt strange and clumsy at first: the ink far thinner and the paper far more absorbent than the paint and canvas he was used to. An image poured onto the top sheet would bleed through to the sheet beneath, creating a second ghost image that he would rework separately with ink, gouache, watercolor, or even paint. He used inks of various colors, but returned again and again to black. Even without Smith’s endorsement, the black and white of ink on paper undoubtedly suited his dark urges and jarring mood changes. (Violet de Laszlo called them “a very clear expression of depression.”) From his Art Students League notebooks to Number 32, he had always associated black and white with drawing, and drawing with self-doubt. Without color, he was left alone with his oldest insecurities—the artist who couldn’t draw. Black-and-white was like drinking: a form of self-abuse. (At a birthday party for Clement Greenberg on January 16, Jackson tried for the first time in years to combine the two. “It was pathetic,” Greenberg recalls. “It was the only time I saw him try to draw while he was drunk. I don’t think he ever tried it again.”)
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