Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Nothing, however, could have frightened Lee as much as the implications of Fox’s research for the future. For Lee, the next stage would be fear: fear that Jackson would “beat her up” and “fear of [losing] her own sanity.” As his self-control deteriorated, she would assume more responsibility for the two of them and grow more self-reliant; both changes that would only aggravate Jackson’s misbehavior. Gradually, he would become “more violent, more withdrawn,” until finally, in the final stage, she would leave him, either “from some immediate and catastrophic quarrel or simply from accumulated tension.” It was a chilling scenario that Lee refused to accept.

  In June, certainly with Lee’s endorsement and probably at her insistence, Jackson informed Fox that he wasn’t coming back.

  It was Jackson’s last chance at genuine recovery. As bad as the drinking had become, neither Jackson nor Lee was ready to face the harsh truths that could have turned the decline around. Neither had the mettle to accept the confessions and compromises of rehabilitation. Instead, they turned with renewed determination to easier, less threatening solutions. Lee clung to Dr. Hubbard’s quasi-mystical potions and the delusion that she and she alone could make Jackson better. “He was headed toward disaster,” recalls Ted Dragon, “and to be of any help, Lee would have had to be tougher with him.” But to be tougher with Jackson, she first had to be tougher with herself. And for all her acid and grit, that apparently was something Lee couldn’t do. So she “watched his diet and fed him vitamin pills more assiduously than ever,” according to a friend, and hoped for yet another miraculous turnaround.

  Jackson, too, grasped at every ephemeral solution that floated by, beginning with Dr. Mark’s magic emulsion. Mysticism, with its vague etiology and magical solutions, provided an easy refuge. That summer, he began visiting the nearby summer house of N. Vashti, an Indian dance instructor, and his wife Pravina. “He spent a great deal of time with them,” recalls John Little, “or Lee would have them over for dinner. They talked a lot about mystical things.” The Hindu notion of Atman-Brahman, or pantheism, began to make its way into Jackson’s pronouncements. “You know, everything has a soul,” he told Miriam Schapiro. “Even a stone has a soul.” He talked about “the universal energy” and “the reality … in the trees.” He read all or parts of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet and Ferdinand Osindowsky’s Beast Men and Gods, a diary of the author’s mystical journey through Asia. In the latter, he was especially captivated by the story of a tribal chieftain who cut off a man’s head and then magically replaced it. He flirted with astrology, telling a neighbor, “Goddamn it, of course heavenly bodies influence our psyche!” He quizzed Tony Smith on Oriental philosophies and relived his earlier flirtations with Krishnamurti and Jung. For a while, he tantalized Smith by suggesting that he might convert to Catholicism, even telling him, erroneously, that his father’s family, the McCoys, had been Catholic.

  Jackson sought refuge in new friends as well. Profoundly suggestible and desperately in need of easy answers, he was inevitably drawn to those who offered them. In the fall of 1952, he was drawn to Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still.

  Most of Jackson’s fellow artists regarded Newman affectionately as something of a comic figure, a genial blowhard in a tailored tweed suit, Sherlock Holmes hat, and monocle. He reminded John Myers of Major Hoople, a character from the twenties comic strip “Our Boarding House”: a “bumptious guy and opulent dresser who was all bravado and brag,” according to Gerome Kamrowski. By 1952, Newman’s hulking figure, walrus mustache, pliant face, and easy laugh had won him considerable affection but little respect among artists and collectors. The artists of his generation considered him an interloper and latecomer (he didn’t begin painting seriously until 1945) and, like Motherwell, too much in love with words, especially his own, to be a true artist. (Subsequent generations of artists and collectors would substantially revise this view of Newman’s worth.) His niche in the community, such as it was, resulted from his close association with Betty Parsons, to whom he had introduced Jackson in 1947. His shows of vertical stripes (he called them “zips”) in 1950 and 1951 at the Parsons Gallery had been ridiculed by both critics and fellow artists, and his writings on “aesthetic philosophy” were dismissed by all but a few as pretentious even by the standards of the day. When, in the spring of 1952, Dorothy Miller failed to include him in her “15 Americans” show at the Museum of Modern Art, Newman was devastated. “He had this childlike expectation that with one or two shows he’d be famous and sell,” recalls Clement Greenberg. “But nothing happened. Everybody hated the shows.” Crestfallen and bitter, Newman withdrew his pictures from Parsons’s gallery and vowed never to show in New York again. He also decided that he didn’t really want to be successful after all, that “it didn’t matter if anything sold.” The only thing that mattered was the act of painting. “It was the artist’s lot to go against the world,” he told a friend. “Anonymity is the truest heroism.”

  In this state of self-imposed martyrdom, Newman had much in common with Jackson Pollock. Both felt underappreciated by the public and alienated from their fellow artists. To Jackson, the forty-seven-year-old Newman was an indulgent older brother, an attentive Charles who wrestled with him, took him to movies (especially fight movies), and, like Tony Smith, beguiled him with words. Although he often retrieved Jackson from drunken binges, Newman never encouraged him to stop drinking or even to drink less. Unlike Ruth Fox, he accepted at face value, even admired, Jackson’s blustering machismo and, like many before him, mistook Jackson’s attentive silence for comprehension, calling him, in one wildly off-base observation, “more mature than any of the guys that were my age.” In turn, Jackson admired Newman’s “authentic flair for conversation,” his size, his erudition, and his amiable eccentricities. He envied Newman’s relationship with his wife, Annalee, who earned much of the money that allowed Newman to buy his fine suits and devote his time to painting and writing, but remained uncomplainingly in his shadow. Newman was also, like Jackson, an incorrigible dandy, once boasting that he and Al Capone shared the same tailor.

  Jackson was also drawn to Newman’s quasi-mystical ruminations on art. He would beam when Newman rhapsodized on “the largeness of the concept” or described an image as “a contained thing, held, sort of trembling there.” Newman told Jackson that he had reinvigorated American art in the same way Faulkner and Hemingway had reinvigorated American literature. He had led “the fight against ritual, against empty forms instead of real emotions.” He compared Jackson favorably to Mondrian, saying the Dutchman’s “geometry (perfection) swallows up his metaphysics (his exultation).” Painting wasn’t about perfection, Newman argued; it wasn’t about paint or surface or color; it was about “the taste for the infinite.” “Anyone can construct a good-English-sentence kind of picture,” he said; the true artist is interested in “painting with a capital ‘P.’”

  Like Jackson, Newman could draw only passably from life and therefore, according to Clement Greenberg, grasped at profundities to justify his simple art. “With so little on the canvas,” said Greenberg, “Barney had to generate a vast content for his art that [Thomas] Hess could write about.” His signature image, the stripe, for example, wasn’t merely a stripe, it was a representation of “his transcendental self.” The pictures themselves weren’t pictures but “experienced moment[s] of total reality.” He claimed to find “clues to the highest uses of art” in the rituals of the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest like the Kwakiutl. In Newman’s world, art wasn’t art, it was ritual—a “ceremonial performance”; painting wasn’t painting, it was metaphysics—“a mystic situation.” And, most reassuring to Jackson, failure wasn’t failure; it was heroism.

  By one account, at least, Jackson was never entirely convinced either by Newman’s ideas or by his art. “I don’t give a damn about Barney’s painting,” he told Roger Wilcox. “He’s just a nice guy, I like him.” But at a time of increasing tension and frustration in the real world, Newman’s lofty rhetoric of
fered Jackson easy, if temporary, refuge.

  Clyfford Still provided a different kind of escape. Raised in small towns in Canada and the American Northwest, he brought a combination of Presbyterian high-mindedness and evangelical zeal to what he saw as a profoundly immoral and errant art world. Stern and humorless as a frontier preacher, he considered art not merely an occupation but a moral calling of the highest order. “Any fool can put color on canvas,” he said; true painting is a “matter of conscience,” and the true artist “can make a picture out of the truth.” With his thin, bony, unsmiling face, fierce, protruding teeth, and Captain Ahab shock of black-and-white hair, he looked the part of art’s avenging angel, smiting his numerous enemies in a series of blistering letters—“terrible, cutting letters,” recalls Nicholas Carone, “letters so bad that people didn’t want to talk about them because they were so personal.” In them, Still spoke darkly of “the enemy” and battle lines and conspiracies, and lashed out with cruel superciliousness. A gifted polemicist, he reveled in the war of words, gloried in his battle scars, and took chilling pride in his readiness to sacrifice friendships over even the most minute infractions of his moral code.

  No one was safe from Still’s righteous wrath. “He was mad about everything,” recalls Nicholas Carone. He denounced the public as senseless and inattentive, “the contemporary social ethic” as “a totalitarian trap.” The art world he accused of being “controlled by merchants” who cared nothing about the welfare or integrity of artists. Critics were “the butchers who make hamburger of us for the public gut,” and scholars were simply deadweight. (“The scholar will only defeat us if we allow him ascendancy.”) Dealers were either manipulative, money-grubbing hacks (like Sidney Janis) or dupes of the system (like Betty Parsons). The work of most of his fellow artists was merely “an exercise in degradation.” In Still’s gospel, artists who profaned their sacred calling were “the most contemptible enemies of man.’” He objected to the “collectivism” of group shows and, although he claimed to be the original Abstract Expressionist, decried such labels as infringements on every artist’s moral autonomy. Friends were not spared the sting of his venomous letters. When Betty Parsons complained because Still had left her gallery without informing her first, Still fired back a furiously indignant reply to the effect of “How dare you, a mere dealer, question the actions of an artist?” The two didn’t speak for years. In fact, no one lived up to Still’s dizzyingly high moral standards except Still. He was “the lonely pioneer,” alone on the moral and artistic frontier.

  What did Jackson see in the inflexible, self-regarding, and fiercely self-righteous Still? First, an ally. As vicious and relentless as he could be in opposition, Still could also be a fast and devoted friend, a lone companion against the conspiracy without. By the alchemy of words, he was able to transform Jackson’s torment into a triumph of artistic integrity. Like Newman, he showered Jackson with flattery at a time when most other sources of esteem had dried up. He told Jackson that he (along with Newman and Still) had “changed the nature of painting.” For Still, Jackson’s fall from grace since 1950 only proved his moral fiber. He hadn’t succumbed to the blandishments of commercialism; he was still his own man. The fact that he had radically altered his style at the height of his celebrity, moving from dripped abstractions to figurative black pourings, particularly impressed Still. He lavished praise on the black-and-white paintings and relished the criticism and incomprehension with which they were greeted by those of less acute moral insight. “Your show was a real blockbuster to the gutter-club vermin,” he wrote Jackson. “It was amusing to see the confusion of their swarming.”

  Still saw Jackson as a victim of all that was wrong with the art world, even more so because he was unable to defend himself. In response to an article that impugned Jackson’s work (as well as his own), Still penned a broadside to the author, Harold Rosenberg, calling him a “salon raconteur,” “an intellectual lout,” and a “front man for the mass assault on the individual,” and proudly sent a copy of the letter to Jackson. “Two paragraphs in [Rosenberg’s] article indulge in some very pointed insults to your work and mine,” he wrote in an accompanying note. “Because of the unique circumstances I have found it pleasantly relaxing to unhook my slingshot in the form of the enclosed letter copy. I hope you will also find it at least exhilerating to know that those Bloated Presumptions are being vented.” He closed by reassuring Jackson that “for the moment the air is clear.”

  Jackson welcomed Still’s support. He admired the way Still could “handle himself” in the contentious community of artists and yet remain strangely aloof. He was intrigued, if not persuaded, by Still’s sawtoothed, encrusted abstractions. “That guy’s got something,” he told Conrad Marca-Relli. For a while, he considered himself one of a triumvirate—Pollock, Newman, and Still—that represented the last best hope of American painting. “Jackson succumbed to Still,” recalls Clement Greenberg. “It was the first time that he had ever joined up with a group. The first time he became one of the boys.” For Still’s benefit, Jackson even pretended to be a baseball fan, accompanying him to Ebbets Field to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  Another visitor to Springs in the summer of 1952 was Harry Jackson, who had his own cure for what ailed Pollock: a potent blend of alcohol and fantasy. The two men caroused from bar to bar, punching each other playfully and swapping boisterous stories of the West between beers. At Jackson’s insistence, they called Tom Benton in Kansas City late one night. When Rita answered, Jackson slurred into the phone, “Goddamn, Rita, honey, I got my friend Harry here and he and Tom have got to meet.” “Jack, I’m not gonna disturb Tom at this hour,” Rita responded, her Italian accent still perfectly intact. “Call up when you’re sober and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  One night at the Elm Tree Inn, Jackson pushed his way onto the piano bench and “started banging away with his elbows,” Harry remembers, “like a kid showing off.” When the manager yelled, “Get your goddamn drunk ass out of here or I’ll throw you out,” Jackson got up and staggered out the door. “It wasn’t because he was a good boy,” says Harry. “It was because he knew the owner had a goddamn baseball bat behind the bar.” Sitting on the porch, with a case of beer between them, Jackson begged Harry, “Tell me what it’s like in Wyoming. Do you ride all day?” Harry, in turn, begged Jackson to come with him on his next trip west—“to knock some of that New York crap out of him.” As long as he drank, Jackson was “rarin’ to go,” but when the next morning came, reality intruded, usually in the form of Lee Krasner. “She was very anti-Harry,” says Harry. “She was against him going anywhere with me. She felt threatened by that.” Even when they went down the road to Jungle Pete’s, Harry felt “like a goddamn pre-teenage kid sneaking out of the house.”

  When Jackson and Harry finally did hit the road together, late one summer night, they headed east, not west, out over the Napeague strip where the land was so narrow they could see the moonlit water on both sides of the road, past Hither Woods where startled deer peered back from the scrub, past Fort Pond and Lake Montauk and up onto the grassy plateau of Indian Field. On this treeless pasture jutting into the Atlantic, the Montauk Indians had made their last stand against the encroachments of the white man (in court, not in combat). Now it was the improbable site of the Deep Hollow Dude Ranch. The Model A rattled over the dirt tracks, in and out of hollows where, in the spring, swift brooks ran. Jackson and Harry covered the last few hundred feet on foot so as not to alarm the horses or arouse the caretaker who, everyone knew, was well armed. They sat on the fence of the round corral while the horses milled and tossed and whinnied softly in the darkness. “Pollock would get me to jump on one of those horses, bareback and without any goddamn bridle,” Harry recalls, “so I’d take the belt off my trousers and put it around the horse’s neck and just ride him.” When Harry tried to coax Jackson to join him, he refused. “He’d never been on a horse in his life,” says Harry, “and he wasn’t gonna start. … He seemed p
erfectly content just to sit there on the fence and watch me.”

  With or without Harry’s companionship, booze continued to be Jackson’s remedy of choice. In the right company, it put him into a deep, impenetrable reverie, a state that alternated between incoherent babbling and long, vacant silences. At The Creeks, to which Ossorio had given him virtually unlimited access, he listened for hours to Ted Dragon playing his beautiful, white Pleyel grand piano, a gift from a “music lover” in Paris. “When I was away, he would come and plink away at it himself,” recalls Dragon, “or just bang out the same chord over and over.” While friends like Dragon tolerated such fits of moodiness, Tony Smith outright admired them, telling Jackson that his alcohol-induced reveries were, in fact, therapeutic, perhaps even essential to his creativity.

  But the rages were a different matter. They came on unexpectedly, like summer storms. He would get “very heavy and black, like a goddamn cur dog,” according to Harry Jackson. He would start yelling, hurling insults at fellow painters—“cheap lousy fakes,” “frauds and fools”—shadowboxing with imaginary enemies, and proclaiming himself “the only giant among artists,” “the only painter alive,” “the only damn painter who has a thing to say.” Not even Ossorio and Dragon were exempt from such explosions. “Sometimes it took just one drink,” says Ted Dragon, “and you saw this monster come out.” One night he chased a terrified Rosalind Constable through the elegant rooms of The Creeks, with “a kind of vicious humor” in his eyes, according to Ossorio. Another night, Dragon found him in the ballroom pounding on the keys of the Pleyel with an ice pick.