Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  On Fireplace Road, he got it. Lee Krasner’s fury mounted as she listened to Bradley Walker Tomlin read the article out loud. Tomlin, a genteel man with an intellectual bent, undoubtedly helped her through Rosenberg’s dense, elliptical, allusive argument, but Lee didn’t need an interpreter to know that Jackson was being savaged. To her, the implication of lines like “the new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life,” were all too clear: just as Jackson’s life was going to hell, so was his art. Who else could Rosenberg be talking about when he referred to “private Dark Nights,” “daily annihilation,” “megalomania,” and “easy painting”? After years of what Lee considered humiliations and slights from both Rosenberg and his wife, the article amounted to nothing less than a declaration of war—the opening salvo in a collision of epic dimensions.

  If Harold Rosenberg wanted a fight, she would give him the fight of his life.

  When Lee tried to rally her troops, however, she found the ranks distressingly thin. Tomlin, sympathetic but too sweet-tempered for combat, offered moral support but little else. Clyfford Still, who came by the house soon after the dispute erupted, wrote Rosenberg the usual blistering letter calling the article “an attack on painting,” but successfully resisted a long-term enlistment in any cause other than his own. Clement Greenberg, Lee’s most logical ally, was curiously silent at first. When she urged him to launch a quick counterattack, he balked, dismissing the whole notion of “action painting” as “a purely rhetorical fabrication.” Besides, he explained, “You get in a fight only if you respect someone, and I don’t respect Harold. He doesn’t tell the truth.” There were, of course, other reasons for Greenberg’s uncharacteristic reticence. He had already begun to feel a rumble of discontent at the Partisan Review over his strident, dogmatic advocacy of a certain brand of abstract art. James Johnson Sweeney had recently been added to the Review’s editorial board in the full knowledge that he was no admirer of Greenberg’s criticism. With his own power base threatened, Greenberg must have decided that it was hardly the time to engage Rosenberg, a well-respected and well-connected member of the same circle, in public combat. Especially over an article that, in Greenberg’s opinion, was an attack not on him but on Jackson, an artist whose work he no longer respected at a time when he was increasingly preoccupied with his talented and attractive young protégée Helen Frankenthaler, who was proving far more receptive than Jackson to his formalist prescriptions. Besides, hadn’t Jackson called him “a fool”?

  At first, even Jackson proved a reluctant ally. According to Conrad Marca-Relli, who saw him soon after the article appeared, his initial reaction was more annoyance than anger. Like Lee, he never doubted that Rosenberg had used him as a model—he later referred to the article routinely as “Rosenberg’s piece on me”—and he remembered his trainboard conversation with Rosenberg about “the act of painting.” But to Jackson’s unsubtle intellect, it appeared that Rosenberg had merely mangled his ideas. “How stupid,” he remarked to Marca-Relli. “I talked about the act of painting, exposing the act of painting, not action painting. Harold got it all wrong.” “It sounded to him completely absurd,” says Marca-Relli. But at a time when the world seemed set against him, with money short and interest in his paintings flagging, Jackson readily accepted Lee’s more paranoid view that he had, in fact, been deeply maligned, that “getting it wrong” was tantamount to being wronged. Soon his official reaction, as reported by Lee, changed from “annoyed” to “appalled,” and the article became the focus of his antagonism toward an increasingly hostile world.

  It wasn’t long before the war escalated. Several days after the article appeared, Willem de Kooning and Philip Pavia stopped by Jackson’s house and found Lee still venting her rage. Unthinkingly, de Kooning “announced his liking for the article” and proceeded to defend it and Rosenberg from Lee’s withering assaults. The discussion “reached new heights” of rancor and vituperation, according to one account, until de Kooning and Pavia beat a hasty retreat under heavy fire. It might have been just another of the hundreds of arguments that Rosenberg’s article sparked, but Lee refused to let it rest. In a hail of telephone calls, she accused de Kooning of “betraying her, betraying Jackson, betraying art.”

  In fact, Lee’s list of grievances against de Kooning, both real and imagined, went back more than a decade, to the late thirties. She had “adored” him then. Strikingly handsome, Continental, gifted, the young Dutchman was everything Lena Krassner wanted in a man. Before meeting Jackson, she had considered de Kooning “the greatest painter in the world.” Love—or at least infatuation—had followed inevitably. At a New Year’s Eve party in the late thirties, she had thrown herself at him, sitting on his lap, playing the coquette. At the climactic moment, however, just as she was about to kiss him, he opened his knees and let her drop comically to the floor, humiliating her in front of friends and fellow artists. After drowning her shame in booze, she began to rail at him, calling him “a phony” and “a shit,” until Fritz Bultman dragged her away and forced her into the shower with all her clothes on.

  That night still ranked as one of the worst of Lee’s life. In the years since, her scorned infatuation had turned to bile. She accused de Kooning of suborning Jackson’s drinking, sabotaging his reputation, and, worst of all, “refusing to acknowledge that [Jackson] was number one.” For the same reasons, compounded by jealousy, Lee hated the woman de Kooning had married, Elaine Fried, a smart, sociable, witty, vital, unpretentious, and—most galling—attractive young artist. Over the years, the two women had successfully gilded their rivalry with a chilly cordiality that fooled no one except their husbands. Lee suspected that Elaine, a close friend of Tom Hess, had been behind the second-class treatment Jackson received in Hess’s book, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase. She had forgiven Hess (she and Jackson asked him to write a book on the black-and-white paintings), but both de Koonings had remained high on her long list of enemies. De Kooning’s defense of Rosenberg catapulted him to the top of that list.

  Elaine and Willem de Kooning with a painting from his Women series, taken at the Castellis’ house in East Hampton, August 1953

  Lee had even more trouble recruiting Jackson for this new front in her widening war. Jackson and Bill de Kooning had enjoyed a friendly, if not warm, mutual respect since Lee introduced them in the early forties. When Lionel Abel visited Springs in 1948, Jackson told him, “We’ve just had a painter here who’s better than me,” Abel remembers. “He was talking about Bill de Kooning. They were competitive, but there was a lot of generosity lurking in that competitiveness.” The same summer, Jackson “bragged” to Harry Jackson and Grace Hartigan about de Kooning and sent both young artists to see him at his studio in New York. Reuben Kadish recalls that Jackson always considered de Kooning “one of the top guys,” a sentiment he shared with Dorothy Seiberling when she interviewed him for the Life article in the summer of 1949. “Pollock’s taste in contemporary art,” she wrote in her notes, “runs to similarly obscure painters [like] de Kooning.” The Club, Jackson’s celebrity, and the rising tide of resentment it engendered among other artists had tested but not undermined the “lurking generosity” between the two men. To Lee’s great mortification, they continued to drink together occasionally—more by coincidence than planning—to enjoy each other’s company, and to admire each other’s art, even as the battle lines were being drawn around them.

  Unlike her allies, Lee’s enemies coalesced against her with dreadnought efficiency. Rosenberg and de Kooning had enjoyed a casual friendship since the Project days. During the summer of 1952, when de Kooning set up a studio in the big house that Leo Castelli rented in East Hampton, the two men saw more of each other than they had in the previous decade. Both enjoyed the gamesmanship of intellectual discourse around the dinner table; both were used to being the center of attention: Rosenberg for his towering size and intellect, de Kooning for his looks. In conversation, both liked to play agent provocateur: Rosenberg by “say
ing things just to be contrary,” de Kooning by dropping an incendiary remark then stepping back to watch others battle over it. They also shared a thoughtful, if not deep, philosophical streak. (When asked if he would rather be “a half-assed philosopher or a great painter,” de Kooning replied, “Let me think about that.”) To the subject of art, both brought what Leslie Fiedler called “a European eye” and an interest in ideas. If they differed, it was on the question of how those ideas related to painting: Rosenberg the radical ideologue; de Kooning the pragmatic, workmanlike Lowlander.

  Ironically, the catalyst that transformed this casual friendship into a formidable alliance was Lee Krasner. Over the years, her dogged, single-minded promotion of Jackson had left deep reservoirs of ill will among those she had “elbowed out of Jackson’s path.” “She built this Chinese Wall around him,” recalls Philip Pavia, “and everyone resented it.” Both de Kooning and Rosenberg had felt Lee’s protective coldness and her blazing temper. Not surprisingly, Rosenberg cast his antagonism in a political light: “Some people have been around Stalinists so long,” he quipped, “they start acting like Stalin.” Behind the enmity of both men, urging them on, lay the deeper, more bitter, and perhaps more manipulative anger of their wives, May Rosenberg and Elaine de Kooning, both of whom felt, for different reasons, that Jackson (and Lee) had monopolized the limelight for too long. At dinner parties, the two couples and their friends joked bitterly about Lee and the “life-and-death” passion she brought to her role as Jackson’s shield and right arm. They took a certain furtive pleasure in her desperate, and increasingly unsuccessful, struggle to contain his self-destructive impulses and to conceal his peccadilloes from the world. To them, she was sometimes “Lady Macbeth,” who would “gladly stab to make a king or get a lover,” sometimes Medea, ready to “stab or choke Jackson” rather than see him delivered into the hands of his detractors. Whatever their other differences may have been, they were united in their hatred of Lee.

  May Tabak Rosenberg

  In this crossfire of personal antagonisms, ideas were the first casualty. Rosenberg liked de Kooning’s paintings well enough—although not as much as those of Hofmann, Baziotes, and Gorky—but they bore little relationship to the theory of “action painting.” Nor was de Kooning anything like the revolutionary hero portrayed in “The American Action Painters.” In addition to being neither American nor, after 1952, nonfigurative, he was a thoughtful, controlled artist whose bravura brushwork belied the hours of preparation, execution, and evaluation that went into it. According to his wife, he “would sit and look for two hours for every five minutes of painting.” Far from liberating himself from all aesthetic “Value,” he openly carried on a dialogue with the European Beaux Arts tradition in which he was trained, and admired such unrevolutionary artists as Frederic Remington.

  Fortunately, de Kooning considered Rosenberg’s ideas as irrelevant as Rosenberg considered de Kooning’s paintings. Herbert Ferber, who worked in a neighboring studio on Broadway, recalls that de Kooning dismissed Rosenberg’s theories as “a lot of nonsense.” One day he walked into de Kooning’s studio and saw why. “There were fifty or seventy-five pounds of paint on the floor that he had just scraped off,” recalls Ferber. “I said, ‘What’s that expensive stuff doing on the floor?’ and he said, ‘Well, you know, you have to think about what you do. I didn’t like it, so I try this, and I scrape it off and try that.’ That,” says Ferber, “is not ‘action painting.’”

  But ideological consistency no longer mattered—if it ever did. At cocktail parties and openings, in artists’ studios and East Hampton living rooms, at the Club and over the phone lines, the battle was joined.

  Lee spread the story that Rosenberg had stolen the idea and the phrase “action painting” from Jackson. While acknowledging their conversation, Rosenberg indignantly denied the plagiarism charge. (To Lionel Abel, he admitted that Jackson had used the term “action painting” first but only because he, Rosenberg, “had put the idea in Jackson’s mouth.” Later, under fire, Rosenberg vehemently denied that he owed the idea or the phrase to anyone, least of all Jackson.) Rosenberg not only denied the charge, he denied that the article was even about Jackson. He accused Jackson of “painting like a monkey,” invoking the stories that had been published in the wake of the Life article about a zookeeper and her precocious chimp. The comment quickly made the rounds. Lee and Jackson’s partisans accused de Kooning of “craving recognition at Jackson’s expense,” and Rosenberg of “pushing Jackson out of the way to get de Kooning in.” May Rosenberg accused Lee of “wanting to destroy everybody except for Jackson.” Lee called May “paranoid,” “psychotic,” and “a madwoman,” implying that only a madwoman could put up with Harold’s cheating. May fired back accusations that Lee had “an aggravated case of dementia,” implying that only a madwoman would put up with Jackson’s drinking. May also charged that Lee only wanted to make money and had curried favor among rich collectors for years and greedily kept other artists away.

  The dispute spread quickly. Lee launched counteroffensives not just against the Rosenbergs and the de Koonings but against anyone who defended them. She attacked the Club, as a hotbed of resistance to Jackson’s reputation. The list of maligned artists grew longer and longer and soon included even old friends like Wilfrid Zogbaum. For whatever reason—perhaps because, having conquered Jackson, she craved new, more titanic collisions—Lee was determined to turn her attack on Rosenberg into a test of faith: a referendum on Jackson Pollock. Everyone in the art world would be forced to declare loyalties, to choose sides: either you were for Jackson or against him.

  It was a disastrous miscalculation.

  In the battle for hearts and minds, Rosenberg proved a formidable adversary. At the Club and the Cedar Tavern (an unofficial annex of the Club), his towering figure, fierce visage, and glib wit “made him an instant object of adoration.” To many artists, he played the intellectual mentor who, like Breton, was among them if not of them. (At a concert of works by John Cage, Rosenberg stood up and announced to the overcrowded room: “This is for artists only. Everyone else can go home.”) The artists liked the intellectuals he gathered around him: men like Tom Hess and Edwin Denby; and the nonstop intellectual conversation they generated. It made them feel good about themselves and the importance of what they were doing. When the article on “action painting” appeared, they didn’t stop to ponder the details. As with so many of Rosenberg’s other ideas, they knew they liked the sound of it. According to Leslie Fiedler, they reveled in the sheer masculinity of it. To the generation that had come through the Project, it justified the years of barroom antics, hard drinking, misogyny, and competitive cocksmanship. To the new generation of younger artists, it exploded the stereotype of the artist as foppish, worthless, and—worst of all in the can-do, postwar culture—ineffectual. At a time when anxiety about “making it” was just beginning to be felt, they took comfort in its defiant anticommercialism. They warmed to its antihistorical and pro-American prejudices. Although they made fun of it, they even liked Rosenberg’s dense, indecipherable style. It made them feel that art was indeed a higher calling that touched on issues so profound and philosophical that it was impossible, even for an intellect as great as Rosenberg’s, to communicate them clearly to ordinary minds.

  But mostly they liked it because it wasn’t Greenberg. Finally, someone had challenged Pope Clement; a gate-crasher had confronted the “bloody concierge” of avant-garde art. Finally, someone had found a different way of looking at abstract paintings; finally, someone was offering artists an escape from what they perceived as the yoke of Greenberg’s caprice. They had had enough of his visiting their studios and “telling them what to paint” (a charge Greenberg would later vigorously deny); of his summarily dismissing young painters like Larry Rivers; of his deciding what was good, what was bad, who was great and who wasn’t. In the Cedar Tavern, Milton Resnick heard Greenberg bragging “that he juried a show and gave somebody a prize on the condition that he turn t
he picture upside down because it looked better that way.” “You son of a bitch,” Resnick hissed as he got up from the table. “I’m never going to sit with you again.” The other artists at the table followed him out the door. Everyone who heard the story applauded.

  Neither Rosenberg’s popularity nor Greenberg’s disrepute, however, proved fatal to Lee’s cause. If she had limited her attacks to Rosenberg, both she and Jackson might have emerged relatively unscathed from the usual round of name-calling and social trench warfare. It was by attacking Willem de Kooning that Lee doomed Jackson’s cause to certain failure.

  No artist was more respected or better liked. Far more convincingly than Rosenberg, de Kooning was “one of the boys.” At the Club, he volunteered to wash glasses and sweep up after meetings. Unlike Jackson, he lived in the heart of the artists’ community, a relatively small patch of New York City described by Irving Sandler as “centered in the studios on and around East Tenth Street, the Cedar Street Tavern, and the Club.” At a time when Robert Motherwell was “living his haute bourgeois life” uptown and Clyfford Still maintained a monastic isolation, de Kooning was always available to younger artists. Sensitive and self-effacing, he brought to all his conversations enormous intensity, unpretentious intelligence and a dry, almost inadvertent sense of humor. (At a reception, he told Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, “You look like a million bucks.”)

  Unlike Jackson’s celebrity, which many artists considered an invention of Clement Greenberg’s, de Kooning’s reputation derived from the only legitimate source: his fellow artists. He had worked his way up “through the ranks,” earning their respect and support long before winning gallery recognition or media attention. Young artists especially, like Grace Hartigan, found him “a devastating experience because of his brilliant articulateness.” They admired his thoughtful, persuasive art. Unlike Jackson’s work—about which even his admirers often complained, “What the hell can you do with it?”—de Kooning’s embraced them. “People could hook into the traditional in his paintings,” says Nicholas Carone. “You know, a beautiful line, a nice passage.” “De Kooning provided a language you could write your own sentences with,” said Al Held. “Pollock didn’t do that.” Jackson may have been a force of nature, but de Kooning was the embodiment of culture. In fact, despite Rosenberg’s requirement that vanguard artists break with the past, most artists stood behind de Kooning (and, by association, Rosenberg) precisely because he, in turn, stood squarely in the artiste peintre tradition. He was “in the line”: Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Hofmann, Matta, Gorky, de Kooning. “If you had a choice and you wanted to pick up on the whole grand tradition of Western art,” recalls Irving Sandler, “you were against Jackson and with Bill.” At the Club, a painter named Ari Stillman stood up and announced: “The young artists think de Kooning is Number One because he’s interested in ‘good’ painting.” Pollock he dismissed as a “primitive Breakthrough Boy,” a “freak.” “Jackson may have been the genius,” says Sandler, “but the painter was Bill.”