Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  A more important test of Jackson’s new policy of self-sufficiency would be the upcoming show in Paris. Parsons had played no part in it. While in Paris, Ossorio had acted as Jackson’s agent, organizing and financing the show in collaboration with Michel Tapié, a French critic who had mounted a show for Ossorio the previous year. The first signs were auspicious. In early March 1952, Jackson received an enthusiastic letter from Tapié: “I am both happy and honored to be able to expose your works in Paris. … I believe the occasion is good, as a great curiosity for American painting prevails in Paris at the moment.” Although furious at Hans Namuth for overcharging for prints of his photographs, Jackson was impressed by the elaborate catalogue, which included a fatuous forward by Tapié, Namuth’s pictures, and a translation of Ossorio’s introduction of the black-and-white show (retitled “Mon Ami, Jackson Pollock”). When Jean Dubuffet dropped by the MacDougal Alley house to return a painting, Jackson pressed him to translate Tapié‘s forward. (“[He] couldn’t do too well,” Jackson complained.) The show opened at the Studio Paul Facchetti on March 7, and the initial reports from Ossorio, who had returned to Europe, thrilled Jackson. “The exhibition has been incredibly well attended,” he wrote, “with young painters and critics coming back again and again and much animated discussion.” But the best news of all was the early report of sales: five out of fifteen works had already sold, according to Ossorio, and more were likely. Barely able to contain himself, Jackson wrote back: “The sales are out of this world—certainly not expected by me, and everything around the sales are of course satisfactory.”

  Nothing remained satisfactory for long. First the critics weighed in. “The newspapers, alas, haven’t been too cooperative,” Ossorio reported, “and the official art world is as suspicious and hostile as one might imagine.” Then the truth about sales began to emerge. In fact, Tapié had sold only two paintings: Number 14, 1951 to a Swiss collector named Pollak for $1,200; and Number 19, 1951 to the great Milanese collector, Carlo Frua de Angeli, for $750. Both were small works (due to a mix-up, there wasn’t enough space to exhibit the big paintings Jackson had sent). Tapié himself had bought two additional small paintings (including Number 17A, 1949, one of those reproduced in Life) but insisted on a discount of fifty percent. Then there were the expenses: the elegant brochure, the translation, the photographs, the publicity, transportation, crating, stretchers, and so forth. By the time the expenses and Tapié‘s standard thirty percent commission were deducted, Jackson had made, on paper, only $1,066. And that was only the beginning of the complications. Due to a change in French import laws, the show had to be packed and out of the country by the end of April, creating an enormous logistical problem and discouraging follow-up sales. In addition, the Swiss collector Pollak was interested in buying Number 27, 1950, but wanted a special, deep discount for the double purchase. For the first time, Jackson found himself, with Ossorio, buried in the mountain of paperwork and details that he had always left to Parsons. Between the difficulties of transatlantic communication and the vagaries of French law (and perhaps the chicanery of European dealers), Jackson never saw the $1,066, and the paintings were “misplaced” in transit.

  Not long after the full dimensions of the debacle in Paris became known, Grant Mark’s scheme collapsed. In typically tightlipped fashion, Jackson said only that “my experience with Dr. Mark … got more involved each week until a crisis last week.” The combined blows left Jackson in shock. “This getting settled in a new gallery isn’t easy to solve personally,” he wrote Ossorio in March. “I feel like I have been skinned alive. … I’m still a little dazed by the whole experience.” (Dazed, perhaps, but not disillusioned. Despite the embarrassment, he continued Mark’s biochemical treatments for another year.)

  When the “15 Americans” show opened at the Museum of Modern Art on April 9, 1952, Jackson was still without a dealer. With only a month left before Parsons, feeling scorned, was likely to throw his paintings on the street, he began to trawl Fifty-seventh Street in search of a replacement. Sam Kootz, who represented Dubuffet and Motherwell, would have been a likely candidate except for two problems: he didn’t like Jackson’s art and he didn’t like Jackson. During the black-and-white show, he had infuriated Lee with his snide remark: “Good show, Jackson, but could you do it in color?” Only a few weeks before the Museum of Modern Art show, Jackson had staggered into Kootz’s gallery and roared, “I’m better than all the fucking painters on these walls!” Kootz had asked him to leave then and wasn’t about to ask him back. (Kootz had turned down David Smith for the same combination of reasons, calling Smith’s art “just a lot of rusty iron,” and Smith “a drunkard.”)

  Jackson tried Charlie Egan’s gallery on Fifty-seventh Street where Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline had exhibited. Egan had no problem with Jackson’s drinking—he was a drinker himself—and he liked Jackson’s work, but the space was impossible. Egan’s gallery occupied a tiny fifteen-by-fifteen-foot room on the top floor of a brownstone with a storage area that had been a bathroom and an office that had been a closet. Egan was apologetic, telling Jackson, “I wish you had come in ten years earlier.” (When Harry Jackson came looking for a dealer only a few days later, Egan told him, “Come back in ten years.”)

  There were other possibilities. John Myers, who worked at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, wrote a gushing fan letter (“[Your work] hit me like a ton of bricks. … moved me tremendously. … Thank you for a gorgeous experience”) in which he hinted heavily that Jackson deserved “a much larger public.” Through Ossorio, Michel Tapié offered a contract “for all or part of [Jackson’s] work,” promising to come to New York in the fall and open a gallery. Reves Lewenthal of the Associated American Artists Gallery had been courting him since the previous summer. Catherine Viviano had made it clear through Joe Glasco that he “might be better off in her gallery.” When Grace Borgenicht opened her gallery, Jackson invited her to Springs, where he drove her around in his Model A and complained pointedly about not being adequately recognized.

  But none of these had the standing or the distinguished stable of artists that Jackson was looking for. “He felt he was the best painter in America,” recalls Leo Castelli, “and therefore deserved to be in the company of the best painters in the world.” The AAA gallery he dismissed as “a Department store of painting (most of it junk).” The debacle in Paris had soured him on Tapié, and Tibor de Nagy, although a friend, had been in business for less than two years. He thought seriously about Viviano, Pierre Matisse’s longtime assistant, and even visited her gallery with Lee. “I had heard that he would have liked showing with me,” Viviano recalls, “but he just sat there and never talked to me about it.”

  The search was growing increasingly desperate. Whether out of spite, incompetence, or circumstance, Parsons had sold virtually nothing during the second half of the season. In a last-ditch effort to prevent other artists from bolting, she had borrowed $5,000 from a childhood friend and bought three Rothkos and three Stills—but no Pollocks. At $200 a month, Dr. Mark’s emulsion was quickly depleting the meager savings Lee had managed to squirrel away in better days. For the first time since the forties, Jackson considered designing textiles to supplement his income. He talked vaguely about finding a teaching job and asked Jeffrey Potter if he needed an extra hand around the farm. For a while, he even toyed with an offer from the Armstrong Rubber Company to create designs for a new line of linoleum. The combination of uncertainty over a dealer and perilous finances left him, according to one of his few guests that spring, “exhausted and fatigued.” And obsessed. Galleries and dealers were all he could think about. Tony Smith, who still visited occasionally, complained that “Jackson spent the whole damn day talking about galleries. … ‘Which one would be the best one for me?’ and ‘What are they doing?’ and so on and so on like he was making a shopping list. … It was just a lot of ambitious, self-serving nonsense.”

  Sometime in April, fed up with Jackson’s indecision, Lee took matters into her own ha
nds. She marched into the Sidney Janis Gallery just across the hall from Betty Parsons and announced, “Pollock is available.” Janis was leery at first. “Don’t you think, Lee, that the market is rather saturated with Pollock’s work?” he asked. Lee looked at him with her sagacious squint. “Sidney,” she said, “the surface hasn’t even been scratched.” Janis respected Lee’s “sharp business sense,” but agreed only to meet with Jackson. He admired the man’s work, but, like his colleagues, was concerned about his character—“always drunk, rambunctious, and hard to handle.” For Jackson, Janis was an ideal choice. Unlike many of the new dealers, he enjoyed impeccable credentials extending back to the early forties when his book, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, first appeared. Since starting his gallery in 1948, Janis had shown “only the best”: “His collection was never less than first class,” according to John Gruen. In the early years, that meant only Europeans: Picasso, Léger, Mondrian, Giacometti. Jackson had visited Janis’s gallery in its first year, during preparations for a Léger show. “[He] came in and he sat on a chair,” Janis recalled, “and he sat, sat, and sat all afternoon. At the time he was showing with Betty Parsons, so I didn’t say anything. Finally he left.” Gradually, Janis, with Leo Castelli’s help, had taken on a few of “the best” Americans, including Kline, Gorky, Baziotes, and de Kooning, who had deserted Charlie Egan only a few months before (which may explain why Jackson didn’t approach Janis sooner). With only a few good artists, Janis could put extra thought and care into his shows, like “American Vanguard Art,” which opened in Paris to rave reviews just days before Jackson’s show at Paul Facchetti. With good artists came good collectors, a group that Janis coddled and cultivated with preternatural skill.

  Janis was unlike Parsons in another way. Although an art lover with a distinguished pedigree, he was in the business not just for love; he intended to make a living. Not only was he eager to sell; like any good businessman, he was willing to spend money to make money. If that meant better shows, better catalogues, even subsidies to artists, he was willing. Although Jackson never cared much for Janis’s cool formality (another reason, perhaps, for putting his gallery at the bottom of the list), after so many setbacks, he could no longer afford the luxury of being picky.

  Janis didn’t care much for Jackson either, so neither man looked forward to their meeting in late April. With so few options remaining, Jackson came as supplicant, a position he deeply resented. Why should the greatest artist in America have trouble finding a dealer? Why should he have to dress up in a gray pinstripe suit and submit to an interview? In the cab with Harry Jackson on the way to the gallery, the months of rejection and frustration—the unappreciated black-and-whites, the wrecked Cadillac, the Grant Mark fiasco, the bungled Paris show, the moribund sales, the inexplicable money bind—all the indignities caught up with him. When the cab stopped at a light alongside a limousine, he flew into a rage. “Goddamn sons of bitches, dirty sons of bitches!” he screamed out the window at the dark figures behind the limousine’s tinted glass. “Goddammit, I can wear a pinstripe suit, too.” Says Harry Jackson, “It was just a goddamn old banging-your-head-against-the-wall rage. Pollock wanted to know why these Connecticut WASPs, Harvard and Yale’s gifts to the world, these smug, well-heeled sons of bitches lost in the bowels of some corporation or bank, why they should be doing so well and be so respected by society when he, Jackson, even at his stage of notoriety, was still essentially impoverished.” “Who the fuck are they?” Jackson roared again and again. “They’re nobody, they’re nobody. I’m somebody.” Harry thought the rage was directed at Sidney Janis as “a symbol of money being the only thing that’s worth shit in this country.” More probably, like most of Jackson’s rages, it was directed at himself. He, after all, had left Parsons in search of more sales, more recognition, more money. He was too much like Janis. Even in the best of times, art had never been enough. He had enjoyed celebrity too much, missed it too desperately.

  Sidney Janis

  By the time they reached Janis’s gallery, the rage had subsided. After that, “it was a kind of cat-and-mouse game,” Harry recalls. “Pollock fancied himself a hell of a goddamn negotiator, but he couldn’t pack Janis’s socks.” Convinced, apparently, that he (and Lee) could control Jackson, Janis offered him a contract, which Jackson quickly accepted. When he returned to Springs, he boasted to Jeffrey Potter, “This is the guy, they don’t come any bigger.”

  If Jackson thought settling into a new gallery would miraculously reverse the long decline, he was wrong. The self-destructive binges continued unabated into the summer of 1952. As usual, Lee bore the brunt of the abuse. Twice during the summer, Jackson almost set the house on fire: once when he staggered in drunk and collapsed on the sofa with a cigarette in his mouth, another time when Lee awoke to flames in the bed. “I arrived and the mattress was still smoldering,” recalls Roger Wilcox, who answered Lee’s call for help. “We took it outside and turned the garden hose on it.”

  No one was safe. Neighbors like Dr. Raphael Gribitz often saw Jackson stumbling by the roadside or loading up on beer at Dan Miller’s Store (a bender usually began with at least twenty or thirty bottles). Julien Levy watched in disbelief as Jackson stormed into his studio and tore the frame off a stretcher, railing against Levy’s teaching position at the Art Students League: “Painters should paint and not teach, goddamn it!” he roared. Many followed the example of Jeffrey Potter and pretended not to be home when they heard the clatter of Jackson’s Model A in the driveway. It didn’t matter if he was sober. They dreaded his abject apologies as much as his rages. On a trip into the city, he barged into a dinner party being given by Dorothy Miller, organizer of the “15 Americans” show. When one of the guests, a psychoanalyst, heard that the Jackson Pollock was at the door, she begged Miller to let her talk to him. After nearly an hour sequestered in the front room with Jackson, she returned to the table. “Oh, God,” she sighed. “I’d give my soul to work with him.” At least once during the summer, such antics landed Jackson in the Regent Hospital again, where he was unable to pay his bills.

  Incredibly, just as the binges began to hit new heights of intensity, just when he most needed help, Jackson stopped seeing Ruth Fox.

  Fox could not have been surprised. Jackson’s attendance at AA meetings had been brief and desultory at best. He had taken Antabuse only once or twice, and certainly never made the “commitment to a life of sobriety” that Fox considered the essential first step toward genuine recovery.

  At the time, both Lee and Jackson told friends that Fox was at fault, that she was overly dogmatic and uncooperative. They especially objected to her criticism of Grant Mark’s biochemical treatment. The truth, however, was that for the first time in his long history of psychotherapy, Jackson had met his match: an analyst whom he could not charm or manipulate.

  First, the straight-talking Fox undoubtedly insisted that Jackson was an alcoholic, a label that, with the help of indulgent friends, he had so far managed to avoid. She no doubt saw through his litany of complaints about being depressed and unappreciated to the “alcoholic arrogance” at its core. From her writings, it’s clear that she saw the rages and pouts and long, awkward silences of patients like Jackson not as the wages of genius but as “maneuvers”—tricks used by every alcoholic “to seem to deserve the care and concern and regard of others.” She understood how an alcoholic like Jackson could be one minute “ingratiating, charming, even fawning,” at the next, “hostile, grudging, even cruel,” then “withdraw into himself, becoming aloof, cold and seeming to need no one.” She saw through the manipulations to the fear of desertion, the low self-esteem, and the childlike fury that underlay so much of the alcoholic’s “egocentricity”—the intense self-involvement that, according to Fox, would prevent him from ever “loving another person in a mature sense.” The alcoholic “often has a burning desire for vengeance on a world that he feels has treated him shabbily,” Fox later wrote. “Those nearest him—the ones he needs most—are usually
the chief targets for his venom.” For Jackson, who had come to think of therapy as just another forum for exercising his ego or venting his rage, Fox’s insights cast long beams of cold, unwelcome light. Nine months of intermittent sessions had more than exhausted his capacity for truth.

  Fox’s fatal mistake, however, was implicating Lee Krasner. From the beginning, Fox had tried to include Lee in the treatment, sympathizing with her daily ordeal as the wife of an alcoholic and working through her to arrange for Jackson to attend AA meetings and therapy sessions. But Fox’s firm views on what she called “the alcoholic spouse” put the two women on a collision course. Lee may have conceded that she married Jackson “knowing he was an alcoholic,” that, like many wives of alcoholics, she “took pleasure in pain” and “chose to suffer.” She may even have accepted Fox’s description of the typical alcoholic couple’s troubled relationship: isolation from friends, resentment, endless quarreling, threats, deteriorating sexual relations, rejection, and frigidity. But Lee could never have sat still for Fox’s conclusions.

  According to Fox, the alcoholic wasn’t the only one in the relationship with “personality disturbances.” In fact, Fox’s studies of the alcoholic spouse would have led her to believe that Lee’s problems might be “even more serious” than her husband’s and that she was at least “equally in need of psychotherapy or counseling.” In addition, despite her protests, Lee didn’t really want Jackson to recover. Like most alcoholic spouses, she needed “to dominate a weaker man.” His recovery was, in fact, “a threat to her neurotic demand that he be weak, inferior, helpless, dependent.” Worst of all, Fox’s research indicated that Lee actually caused Jackson’s binges, that “she derive[d] pleasure from the pain she [was] able to inflict by precipitating the argument, the quarrel, the tension which unconsciously she [knew would] land her husband in another drinking bout.” In Jackson’s hands, such exculpating notions were lethal weapons, and in his increasingly frequent arguments with Lee, he must have used them to devastating effect: the drinking wasn’t his fault, it was her fault; she was the one with the problem; she was the one who needed help; his only problem was her.