Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Jackson also managed to lure Tony and Jane Smith to Springs that weekend (Jane’s birthday fell in early February). Since the Smiths’ return from Europe in the spring of 1955, the two men had quietly resumed their friendship, carefully avoiding any mention of past indiscretions. The reconciliation was helped along no doubt by Smith’s role in the sale of Blue Poles to Dr. Fred Olsen, for whom he was designing a house, and, in a less obvious way, by the birth of the Smiths’ twin girls in July 1955. (“[Jackson] couldn’t imagine our having them,” Smith admitted.) Also, while in Europe, Smith had designed a tent-like structure to house three mural-size paintings of Jackson’s—the last incarnation of Ossorio’s illfated chapel project. On his return, he presented the drawings to Jackson. “He thought the light under the canvas would be wonderful for the paintings,” Jane Smith recalls. Smith undoubtedly meant it, and Jackson took it, as an apology, even though this structure, like the others, was never built.

  During the birthday weekend, Smith and Newman dragged Jackson out to his studio and “threw a little paint around” in a transparent (and unsuccessful) effort to strike a creative spark. No one was more obsessed with getting Jackson back to work than Smith. Later that winter, Jackson drove—without Lee—to the Smiths’ house in South Orange, New Jersey, and spent most of the weekend in the small gymnasium that Smith used as a studio, experimenting on a larger scale with the tiny wire-and-plaster sculptures he had created for Peter Blake’s model museum. Jane Smith remembers Jackson’s sensitivity in these final encounters. “He was an exposed wire,” she recalls, “just like Tennessee Williams. He seemed detached, but he never missed a comma.”

  If old friends no longer stopped by or called, if they avoided him on the street, it was because, at times, Jackson seemed determined to drive them away; determined to abandon them, as he had tried to abandon Lee, before they abandoned him. One night at the home of Joe and Margaret Meert, who had taken him in on innumerable nights after the Cedar closed, he set fire to the mattress and, in a drunken stupor, tried to put it out by urinating on it. After that, the Meerts understandably cooled to their late-night guest. He visited Phil Guston’s studio and, admiring his recent large-scale works, helped persuade Sidney Janis to give him a show; but at the party after the opening, he tried to throw Guston out a window. When John Graham reentered his life briefly in 1954 or 1955, Jackson welcomed him “like a great-uncle he hadn’t seen for years,” recalls Nick Carone. “There is only one man who understands my pictures,” Jackson told Carone, “and that’s John Graham.” But later, at a party in Leo Castelli’s Manhattan town house, Jackson invaded Graham’s studio in the basement and, with a crowd egging him on—demanding to see “the great Jackson Pollock splash out a masterpiece”—wreaked havoc on Graham’s meticulously arranged paints and brushes. When Graham returned, he was “very irate,” recalls Ron Gorchov. “How dare you use artists’ brushes to do this frivolous thing!” he raged when Jackson came to apologize, and afterward complained bitterly that he had been “betrayed by his friend.”

  In early spring, when Harry Jackson returned to Springs after a two-year absence, arriving grandly in a friend’s Rolls-Royce, Jackson treated him “very mean and small and petty,” Harry remembers. He suspected that Pollock had still not forgiven him for taking up figurative painting again; but, more likely, it was the news that Life magazine, seizing gleefully on the story of an abstractionist who had “returned” to realism, was planning to do a long feature story on Harry. Whatever the reasons, the two men never saw each other again.

  More and more, Jackson brought to his encounters a desperate needfulness, a self-pitying vulnerability that made both tenderness and honesty impossible. He would say, “I’m a fucking phony,” and wait for someone to disagree. When he wept—as he did with increasing frequency—“they were sort of crocodile tears,” thought Patsy Southgate, “he’d be peeking through his fingers to see if you noticed him.” He would point to one of his pictures and ask in a plaintive voice, “Isn’t that a great painting?” “What could I say to that?” asks Lionel Abel. “It’s not the kind of thing that encourages you to be honest.” In March, Paul Jenkins came to pay his respects with the English painter Alan Davie and Friedel Dzubas. They found Jackson morose and paranoid—“like King Lear,” according to Jenkins. “There was an awful lot of self-condemnation because he wasn’t working. He clearly felt it was all over for him.” Later that night, he lamented to Jenkins, “If five people appreciate your painting in your lifetime, that’s really the most an artist can hope for.”

  For the second time in Jackson’s life, the art world was being rocked by cataclysmic change. Record prices, proliferating galleries, media coverage, and postwar prosperity were producing a new generation of young collectors and reshaping the art market into something rich and strange and unrecognizable. In December 1955, Fortune magazine announced that artworks had become much more than mere status symbols; they were now first-rate investments. As a service to its readers, Fortune listed the available offerings: “gilt-edged” (old masters); “blue-chip” (Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, perhaps Picasso); and “speculative or ‘growth’ issues” (contemporary). The last of these, the works of living artists, were by far the best buy—“investments for the future,” Fortune called them. For a mere $500 to $3,500, a “tyro collector” could buy the paintings of artists like de Kooning, Rothko, and Pollock, and get in on the ground floor of the international boom.

  For the next decade, inspired by such bullish projections, the new collectors fanned out across Bohemia in search of shrewd investments as well as new, more colorful identities, while the artists tried to cope with the psychic dislocations of sudden prosperity. The success of the avant-garde “revolution” left the old Bolsheviks without direction and the new ones disinherited. Egoism and infighting followed inevitably. Artists accused one another of “selling out” even as they bargained with dealers and courted collectors. Charges of plagiarism became common currency. Mark Rothko attacked Barnett Newman for “stealing his ideas” even as he privately began referring to his own one-a-day works as “merchandise”; Clyfford Still attacked Rothko (and everybody else) for betraying “the fellowship of artists” and issued jeremiads against the exploitation of art by “crass young collectors-on-the-make” even as he backdated his paintings to prove their precedence. Clement Greenberg became a dealer, and de Kooning became a millionaire. Mercedes Matter wasn’t the only one who lamented: “The minute success entered into the art world and it became a business, everything changed. It was all ruined.”

  Although he had a hand in making this new world, Jackson would never see it or share in its unimaginable spoils. It did, however, provide him, as a kind of parting gift, with his last and most indulgent audience.

  Ben Heller, a jersey manufacturer and young collector, had known Jackson since 1953, when Paul Brach introduced them, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1955 that he really began to take a serious interest in American painting in general and Pollock in particular. Two things had happened in the interim to change his mind. First, he had been to a show at the Museum of Modern Art that included artists from the Post-Impressionists to Gorky. What impressed him most about the show wasn’t the art, however; it was the patrons. “You saw Payson, Whitney, Rockefeller, and Burden,” he recalls. “You saw who was collecting, and it became very clear: no longer were you going to have three or four houses and umpteen servants. The new chic—the real ultimate expression of a cultivated, cultured, wealthy person—was art. Crystalline clear. That was it. The handwriting was on the wall.” The other event was David Rockefeller’s purchase in 1955 of Cézanne’s Boy in the Red Vest “for $500,000.” By his own account, that sale “set the world on fire” for Ben Heller.

  When Heller first tried to reestablish contact, Jackson dismissed him as a “Johnny-come-lately” and an “operator” and left it to Lee to deal with him. By midwinter 1956, however, he desperately needed what Heller had to offer. He began calling him late Tuesday nights afte
r the Cedar had closed, and the two men would go to Ryker’s or Nedick’s for coffee and husky, intimate conversation. Despite their different backgrounds, Heller brought to this friendship with Jackson the same repressed creative longings as Jeffrey Potter. Like Potter, he considered the company of artists “more interesting than the conventional social life.” Like Potter, he had a frustrated “artistic side”—a passion for music—and later brought recordings of Schoenberg, Bartók, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Renaissance music to Fireplace Road for Jackson to listen to. (At one point, Jackson told Heller that “he would have liked to be a composer rather than a painter.”) Like Potter, Heller quickly succumbed to Jackson’s rough charms and the aura of creative energy that surrounded him even in decline. Hopelessly infatuated, he extolled Jackson’s genius, attributed to him great analytical powers and musical acumen, and even grew a beard in imitation of him. On December 20, 1955, he sent Jackson a holiday greeting:

  My real purpose in writing … is to do something I’ve wanted to do for some time, and that is to say “thank you” for your paintings. They are very meaningful to me. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

  To seal their bond, and to share in the art boom he sensed coming—“The Impressionists have reached their peak,” he told a friend. “The Cubists are high. What’s left? Miró? Giacometti? Dubuffet? The Americans are the most underpriced”—Heller wanted a Pollock. He had tried to buy Echo out of the Janis show, but the negotiations collapsed over price. Heller quickly apologized for the “mixup,” explaining to Jackson that he found it “rather difficult to talk to you about your paintings as I respect too much your desires concerning them and can’t really push very hard for what I want.” Undaunted, he came to Springs in early January to try again, looking through the canvases in Jackson’s studio, most of which had only recently returned from the Janis show.

  Heller knew one thing: he wanted a big one. He had seen most of the big canvases the previous spring on a trip with Paul Brach. “Wow,” he reported afterward, “they hit me in the gut.” At that time, Brach had discouraged him from buying Blue Poles, and Jackson was reluctant to sell the others. But much had changed in the intervening year.

  The big painting he wanted was Number 31, 1950, one of the four giant canvases from the summer of 1950, measuring 8‘7½” by 18’—or, as Heller calculated “twelve squares, twelve big paintings.” (To Heller, art was like real estate. He always looked at the back of a painting and counted the squares, like acres, formed by the stretcher supports. The bigger the stretcher, the more squares there were. Years later, he would be able to recall their exact number on many of the pictures he had purchased. “It was astonishing to see all those squares,” he recalls of his first sight of a big Pollock painting.) Heller asked Lee first if Jackson would sell. “I wouldn’t,” she said, “but ask him.” This time Jackson was willing to sell, but he wanted $10,000. Lee conducted the negotiations. When the dust cleared, the price had dropped to $8,000—still the highest price a Pollock had ever brought and “a gigantic price at the time,” according to Budd Hopkins. It was to be paid out over four years, and Heller would receive, in addition, a black-and-white painting “in recognition of his commitment to Pollock’s work.”

  Even after the painting was hung, with considerable difficulty, in Heller’s apartment on Riverside Drive and 100th Street (it was too tall for the room and had to be curved at the top and bottom), Heller still had a problem: he didn’t like the title. “I really don’t like number whatever-have-you,” he told Jackson bluntly. Clement Greenberg had suggested Lowering Weather, but this, too, Heller found prosaic—“I didn’t understand its relation to the painting”—and he asked Jackson to try again. Finally, after a brainstorming session in which Jackson shared with Heller his stories about riding the rails and his “oneness” with nature, the new title emerged: One. Satisfied, Heller wired Jackson on February 11:

  Have been looking at our picture for hours. It’s too late to call. It has so much to do with my life and feelings, with life itself, with painting with a capital P that I almost cried. Great God it is a thing for the ages. Whatever the struggle keep after it. Love Ben

  Heller competed for Jackson’s affections with another young collector, B. H. (Bernard Harper) Friedman. A twenty-eight-year-old executive in his family’s successful real-estate firm, Friedman described himself as “torn between the excitement of New York’s postwar building boom and a continuing desire to write.” In fact, there was never any doubt where his true allegiance lay. Like so many of the new collectors and patrons, Friedman was a gray flannel suit filled with creative yearnings, a businessman whose heroes were Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, and to whom the world of action painters seemed, in May Rosenberg’s phrase, “full of dizzying promise.” Even before Heller brought Jackson to the Friedmans’ New York apartment in the spring of 1955, Friedman considered him “a truly heroic figure … whose name was synonymous with the expression of freedom.”

  The reality proved somewhat less grand. Jackson arrived drunk and tense. “Don’t offer him anything hard,” Lee whispered while Jackson lumbered around the room looking at Friedman’s collection—“a visual history of my own search for freedom,” he called it—including Jackson’s Number 11, 1949, a four-by-four-foot dripped work from 1949. After calling Friedman’s Mondrian gouache “shit,” Jackson fell asleep on the couch, took a shower, then accompanied the group to a steak house, where he gradually worked his way back to an inebriated state. The stop-start conversation centered on an article Friedman had written for Arts Digest the previous fall, “The New Baroque,” in which he described Pollock as “one of the best and most influential” Abstract Expressionists—a “Rubens of our time.” “That [article],” Friedman recalls, “paved the way for our friendship.”

  It was, in fact, much more than a simple friendship. Although more of a genuine connoisseur than most of the new collectors—he and his wife Abby had “trained” under Curt Valentin, the legendary dealer—Friedman approached Jackson not with a collector’s eye for value, but with a novelist’s eye for character and dilemma. Over the year and a half of their relationship, he gave Jackson the most unalloyed approval, the most ungrudging attention, that he had experienced since the early years with Lee. “I felt how much everyone … loved him,” Friedman later wrote in Almost a Life, a thinly veiled novelization of his year with Jackson. “There were times when I felt jealous of those who knew him better and longer than I had.” Eager to make up for the lost time, Friedman wrote Jackson, only a few months after meeting him, about “the necessity of doing a full length biography.” He offered to spend “two years” on a book that would “relate [Jackson] not only to the history of modern art, but to the American generation which matured immediately during and after the Depression. … If I were successful, the book would have something like the texture of Boswell’s Johnson,” he reassured Jackson. By December 1955, Friedman had settled for a biographical article (not until fifteen years later, after he had left the family business and begun writing full-time, would he complete the biography). Jackson allowed himself to be interviewed at length on the condition that Friedman use no direct quotes and reveal nothing about the Pollocks’ calamitous private life. More so than previous admirers, Friedman was realistic about his subject’s intellectual limitations—“I doubt that he ever read more than just bits of Moby-Dick”—but Jackson’s larger-than-life angst proved irresistible to Friedman’s empathetic nature. He noted the way Jackson stared at the surf, studied the interplay of sand and water on the beach, or sifted sand through his fingers. Two years after their first meeting, Friedman named his son Jackson.

  With B. H. Friedman, 1956

  From the start, Pollock treated Friedman more like a friend than a collector, introducing him and Abby to other friends, cavorting in the surf on Coast Guard Beach, proudly taking them to The Creeks to view Lavender Mist. Although he occasionally referred to his new protégé as a “young dilettante,” he treasured Friedman’s comments in “The N
ew Baroque”—“he treated it like it was bordered in gold,” recalls a friend—and increasingly sought his company on trips into New York. By the spring of 1956, the two men were seeing each other every week, escaping to bars and jazz clubs together, Jackson leading, performing, Friedman following with Boswellian ardor.

  Nothing betrayed Jackson’s endgame desperation more clearly or more ominously than his “love affair” with Ralph Klein. “He adored his shrink,” recalls Patsy Southgate, who rode the train with him into the city. (It was her job to keep him from detouring into the bar at Pennsylvania Station.) “On the train he kept talking about how much he loved Ralph Klein. There was a lot of transference going on. He thought Klein was the only person who understood him.” All winter long, Jackson never missed a Tuesday appointment, taking the long train ride in and then a subway to Klein’s office-apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street. During the rest of the week, he called at least once a day to ask a question or rehash the last session. In conversation, he attributed to Klein “god-like powers” and, when asked what form he would want to take if reincarnated, responded without hesitation: “a psychiatrist.” When Clement Greenberg, who had recommended Klein in the first place (and still saw him), asked Jackson how he liked therapy, Jackson responded, “I’m overjoyed.”

  As well he might have been, considering what Klein was telling him.

  Klein belonged to the Barnes Landing Group, a small circle of analysts well known for their unconventional notions of “therapy,” who summered in the South Fork. The group looked to Jane Pearce and Saul Newton for theoretical guidance—as well as referrals like Jackson. Pearce and Newton were still two years away from founding the Sullivan Institute for Research and Psychoanalysis, but the theories that led to their break with traditional Freudian analysis were already well-developed and deeply ingrained in disciples like Ralph Klein. Pearce and Newton claimed that their ideas were based on the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, an important psychoanalytic theoretician with whom Pearce had worked before his death in 1949 (although, according to one of Klein’s associates, “Sullivan would have been horrified at the uses to which they put his name.”)