Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  “He’s at Bellevue”; “what the hell”; “put him”; “is this”: LK. “It was my first meeting”: See LK, q. in Friedman, JP, pp. 56–57. “Did you people”: LK. Not connecting binge with Stella’s arrival: DP&G, “Who Was JP?” p. 50: “It took a long time for me to realize why there was a problem between Jackson and his mother.” Jackson and Stella staying at Lee’s: SMP to CCP, May 5, 1942: JP staying at Lee’s: Bultman: Stella was staying there. It’s possible they switched off. “Held audience”: Bultman. Friends brought to meet Stella: Bultman; Wheeler. “Eccentric cowboy”: Kamrowski. “[Sande] had devoted”: McCoy. Sande “blighted”: Del Pilar: “Jackson and my father [Sande] were neurotically attached.”

  “Swallowed up”: Kiesler. Lee subordinating herself: See Greer, especially p. 103. “Irrelevant”; “he was the important thing”: Q. in Gruen, p. 230. “Keeping house”: LK. Shopping for presents: JP to SMP, Summer 1943. “A wonderful sense”: Int. by Landau, Feb. 21, 1980, q. in Landau, p. 201. “Meshed well”: Baziotes. Learning to cook: LK. “I wanted that role”: Q. in Wallach, “Krasner’s Triumph,” p. 501. Dressing for Jackson: Stein. “Bohemian vamp”: Rosenberg. “Peck & Peck girl”: Zogbaum. Corresponding with Jackson’s relatives: E.g., LK to SMP, Summer 1943. Making Jackson’s phone calls: See, e.g., Sidney Janis to JP, Sept. 1943. “She was always saying”: Rosenberg; see also Rosenberg, int. by Landau, Feb. 22, 1980, q. in Landau, p. 223.

  Lee stopping work: Bultman; Busa; Hartigan; Holtzman; Kadish; Mercedes Matter; Resnick; Rosenberg; Strautin. Not a single work completed: Some paintings listed in Rose, LK (figs. 29, p. 32; 37, p. 42; 43, p. 49; 44, p. 51), supposedly were painted during this period, but we strongly suspect backdating or forward-dating. Her paintings throughout this period were nothing but “Gray Slabs”; see Landau, p. 211. “Blackout” period: Q. in Nemser, p. 86. Only Jackson’s works hung: Holtzman; Rosenberg. Jackson held to blame: Rosenberg: “Jackson said he didn’t want her painting.” Later critics have denied that Lee ever stopped painting; see, e.g., Rose, LK, p. 49: “Although it is popularly supposed that Krasner stopped painting and devoted herself solely to her relationship with Pollock, we find ample evidence that she continued to work and to exhibit in the early forties.” Rose, Krasner/Pollock, n.p.: “One misconception this exhibition should correct is the idea that Krasner ever stopped painting.” Wallach, “Krasner’s Triumph,” p. 445: “But what Lee Krasner, the artist, never did was stop painting.”

  WPA workers offered to War and Navy departments; War Services: McKinzie, p. 169. “Creative” projects scrapped: Dorothy Miller, “The United States Government Art Projects, A Brief Summary,” prepared by the Museum of Modern Art from articles prepared for Collier’s Yearbook, 1935–43, pp. 17–18, q. in FVOC, “The Genesis of JP,” p. 80. Camouflage and propaganda posters: Audrey McMahon, q. in FVOC, ed., pp. 74–75. Lee’s mural abandoned: Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne, q. in FVOC, ed., p. 238. “The culture of this country”: Q. in FVOC, “The Genesis of JP,” p. 81. Lee choosing Jackson for project: The team also included Ben Benn, Ray Klein (Eames), Jean Xceron, Frederick Hauck, Agostine, Frank Greco, and Ernest Truback. Description of project: FVOC, “The Genesis of JP,” pp. 81–82, citing Pearl Bernstein, administrator, Board of Higher Education, City of New York, to Miss Audrey McMahon, general supervisor, City War Services Program, Oct. 1, 1942, and NYT, Sept. 28, 1942, and Sept. 29, 1942. Jackson coming to work with Lee: LK, int. by Landau, May 1, 1979, q. in Landau, p. 212. Jackson loafing; “it was like”: Busa.

  “Shedding” process: LK. De Laszlo sensing her role preempted: De Laszlo, q. in Potter, p. 75; see De Laszlo. “Systematically disengaging”: Cherry. “Getting rid of anybody”: Rosenberg. Bultman: “We wouldn’t see Jackson for long periods, but we saw Lee often, so we just assumed she was running things—she usually did.” Legend of the woman behind the man: Peretz: “There is a paradox. Even though artists very often have a feeling that making art is women’s work, women themselves were not emotionally free to do it. They were doing real women’s work, housework, instead. Wasn’t Lee in all likelihood giving Jackson the care she wished someone would have given her? That is common in the psychology of the Woman behind the Man.” Greer, pp. 103, 133: “When art appears to a woman in the person of a loved male, her attitude to it necessarily partakes of the nature of her relationship to men. If male relatives exercise dominion over the hearts and minds of their womenfolk, unrelated males who are love objects exercise more destructive power still. Many women escaped the family pitfall only to be betrayed by sexual love. … Generally speaking, artistic women tend to marry not for support and comfort but for esteem. They marry ‘upward.’ A female artist almost always seeks love where she feels admiration.”

  “There would never have been”: Myers, int. by Rose, n.d., AAA, q. in Landau, p. 227. “All of Pollock’s”: Int. by Landau, Oct. 30, 1979, q. in Landau, p. 227. “Guided by an apparition”: Q. in Potter, p. 79. It was a view that not only elevated LK but also, indirectly, brought JP into Hofmann’s modernist fold. Hurrying home to fix dinner: Busa. “She gave in”: Q. in “Mrs. JP,” p. 64. Wanting Jackson to need her: De Laszlo: “I don’t think she discouraged him from seeing me. I think that his relationship with her became the paramount relationship in both their lives and she just absorbed his interests and energies. She was no more possessive or jealous than anyone in love might be.” “People who could be influential”: Schardt. “Jackson insisted”: Kadish. Lee clinging to paintings: McKinney. “Mrs. Jackson Pollock”: Rosenberg, “The Art Establishment,” p. 114.

  “Articulate and cool-headed”: Landau, p. 201. “After looking”: LK, q. in DP&G, “Who Was JP,” p. 51. Matters arranging Calder visit: Herbert Matter. “You didn’t talk”: Int. by Landau, Feb. 28, 1979, q. in Landau, p. 186. Kadish bringing collectors: Kadish. Despite Kadish’s help, Lee continued to treat him with cold cordiality. Within a few years, she would cut him out of JP’s life entirely. Clearly, careerism wasn’t her only motivator. Kamrowski: “At some point, Jackson realized that here was an extremely good mouthpiece for him, a good storm trooper, a great salesman. He realized she could be extremely useful to him, and he used her.”

  “Lee’s influence on Jackson”: Rose, Krasner/Pollock, n.p. “Krasner put [Jackson] in touch”: Rose, LK, pp. 98, 100. “She helped Pollock”: Int. by Paul Cummings, Mar. 24, 1968, q. in Landau, p. 227. “Was immediately recognized”: Elaine de Kooning, q. in Brooks et al., “JP,” p. 64. “[Pollock] was never a student”: Q. by Bultman. “Any ultimate assessment”: Lynton, “London Letter,” p. 33. Efforts to “convert” Jackson: Bunce: During this period, they were “constantly talking painting … very excitedly and very intensely.” “Not [being] abstract enongh”: Q. by Busa. Jackson not understanding Cubism: Busa. Jackson not caring for Cubism: Wheeler. Lee pooh-poohing Jung: LK; see also LK, int. by Seckler, Dec. 14, 1967: She particularly distrusted Jung’s ideas on art. Lee revising works: LK. “Preferred a one-shot deal”: Busa. Jackson not appreciating Matisse: LK; Landau. Jackson not appreciating Mondrian: JP “made faces about Mondrian”; Bell, q. in Potter, p. 72. Lee reviling Siqueiros: Landau, p. 91: Lee remembered a violent argument with JP about Siqueiros. “Could take [Benton] seriously”: LK: “I didn’t hammer it in or anything. It wasn’t like I said it every day at eleven o’clock.” “Just shut up and paint”: Q. by Wheeler. Different attitudes toward Guernica: Landau. “A violent transition”: LK, int. by Seckler, Nov. 2, 1964.

  Lee picking up Jackson’s brush: Busa. Months before relationship recovered; “shop talk”: LK. “[Jackson] would … speak”: Int. by Seckler, Nov. 2, 1964. “Shorthand”: Myers, int. by Landau, Jan. 18, 1979, q. in Landau, p. 228. “Great painting!”: LK, q. in Landau, p. 228 n. 41. “I practically had to hit him”: Q. in Lewis, “Two Paris Shows à la Pollock, NYT, Oct. 3, 1979. “We didn’t talk art”: Int. by Seckler, Nov. 2, 1964. “From inside”; “the way Jackson did”: LK; see also LK, int. by Seckler, Dec. 14, 1967. “Lose Cubism”: Rose, “American Great,” p. 154. “To jettison all”: Land
au, p. 211. Setting out to convert, being converted: Wheeler. “Pollock was too demanding”: Jackson. Kiesler, who was closer to Lee at the time than to JP: “For those first years, I always objected that Lee was being swallowed by Jackson when she was the real artist.”

  “I daresay”: Int. by Holmes, q. in Landau, p. 207. Shift in colors: See Landau, p. 206. Lee Jackson’s editor: Sande complimented Lee on her “good eye,” and for “encouraging him to take chances”; SLM int. by CG, c. 1956. “Jackson was a person”: Southgate. See also Donald Braider to Norman Kotker, Mar. 8, 1971, q. in Landau, p. 223 n. 4.

  27. A WELLSPRING OF INSPIRATION

  SOURCES

  Books, articles, manuscripts, and transcripts

  Ades, Dada and Surrealism; Ashton, The New York School; Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art; Diamonstein, ed., The Art World; Diamonstein, ed., Inside New York’s Art World; Ernst, A Not-So-Still Life; Friedman, JP; PG, Out of This Century; Haslam, The Real World of the Surrealists; Lane and Larsen, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America; McCoy, ed., David Smith; Myers, Tracking the Marvelous; New York Panorama; OC&T, JP; Picon, Surrealists and Surrealism; Potter, To a Violent Grave; Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art; Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage; Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting; Tuchman, New York School; Weld, Peggy.

  Arts & Architecture, Feb. 1944; Robert Alan Aurthur, “Hitting the Boiling Point, Freakwise, at East Hampton,” Esquire, June 1972; George Biddle, “The Surrealists—Isolationists of Art,” New Republic, Oct. 27, 1941; Blendon Reed Campbell, “Surrealism, New School of Native Art,” Literary Digest, Dec. 15, 1934; Barbara Cavaliere and Richard C. Hobbs, “Against a Newer Laocoön,” Arts, Apr. 1977; Thomas Craven, “Our Decadent Art Museums,” American Mercury, Dec. 1941; “Dali’s Display,” Time, Mar. 27, 1939; Martha Davidson, “Surrealism from 1450 to Dada & Dali,” Art News, Dec. 12, 1936; Jimmy Ernst, “The Artist Speaks,” Art in America, Nov. 1968; B. H. Friedman, “The New Baroque,” Arts Digest, Sept. 15, 1954; Matthew Josephson, “The Superrealists,” New Republic, Feb. 3, 1932; Max Kozloff, “An Interview with Matta,” Artforum, Sept. 1965; Lewis Mumford, “Surrealism and Civilization,” New Yorker, Dec. 19, 1936; John Bernard Myers, “Surrealism and New York Painting, 1940–1948: A Reminiscence,” Artforum, Apr. 1977; Gordon Onslow-Ford, “The Painter Looks Within Himself,” London Bulletin, June 1940; Wolfgang Paalen, “The New Image,” trans. by Robert Motherwell, Dyn, Apr.–May 1942; David Rubin, “A Case for Content: JP’s Subject Was the Automatic Gesture,” Arts, Mar. 1979; William Rubin, “Notes on Masson and Pollock,” Arts, Nov. 1959; William Rubin, “Toward a Critical Framework: l. Notes on Surrealism and Fantasy Art,” Artforum, Sept. 1966; Sibilla Skidelsky, “The Sham of It,” Art Digest, Feb. 1, 1937; Sidney Simon, “Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School: 1939–1943, An Interview with Peter Busa and Matta” (“Busa and Matta”), Art International, Summer 1967; Sidney Simon, “Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School: 1939–1943, An Interview with Robert Motherwell” (“Motherwell”), Art International, Summer 1967; Amei Wallach, “Krasner’s Triumph,” Vogue, Nov. 1983; Simon Watson-Taylor, “Exquisite Corpses and Strange Apparitions,” Art and Artists, Dec. 1967; Jeffrey Wechsler, “Surrealism’s Automatic Painting Lesson” (Wechsler), Art News, Apr. 1977.

  “Art Changed, Dali Goes on Rampage in Store, Crashes Through Window into Arms of Law,” NYT, Mar. 17, 1939.

  FVOC, “The Genesis of JP: 1912 to 1943” (Ph.D. thesis), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1965; Melvin Paul Lader, “PG’s Art of This Century: The Surrealist Milieu and the American Avant-Garde, 1942–1947” (Lader) (Ph.D. thesis), Newark: University of Delaware, 1981; Ellen Gross Landau, “LK: A Study of Her Early Career (1926–1949)” (Ph.D. thesis), Newark: University of Delaware, 1981; May Natalie Tabak, “A Collage” (unpub. ms.), n.d.

  Bultman, int. by Irving Sandler, Jan. 6, 1968, AAA; Robert Motherwell, int. by Paul Cummings, Nov. 24, 1971; Feb. 21, 1972; Mar. 30, 1972; May 1, 1974, AAA.

  Interviews

  Lionel Abel; Ethel Baziotes; James Brooks; Fritz Bultman; Peter Busa; Matthew Carone; Nicholas Carone; Giorgio Cavallon; Phyllis Fleiss; CG; Harry Holtzman; Reuben Kadish; Gerome Kamrowski; Hilton Kramer; LK; Ernestine Lassaw; Harold Lehman; Roberto Matta; Mercedes Matter; John Bernard Myers; Gordon Onslow-Ford; Becky Reis; May Tabak Rosenberg; Irving Sandler; Martika Sawin; Hedda Sterne; Steve Wheeler; Roger Wilcox.

  NOTES

  “Screwy”: “Dali’s Display.” “Risqué”: “Art Changed,” NYT, Mar. 17, 1939. “Extreme”; “the World’s No. 1 Surrealist”: “Dali’s Display.” “It’s not art”: Busa. Arrival from Paris: “Art Changed,” NYT, Mar. 17, 1939. Working all night; description of windows; “a stuffed trophy”: “Dali’s Display.” “Water buffalo”: “Art Changed,” NYT, Mar. 17, 1939. “Decapitated head”: Q. in “Dali’s Display.” Jackson and Busa present; “what work of art”: Busa. Dali asleep at St. Moritz; Dali screamed and “stormed”: “Art Changed,” NYT, Mar. 17, 1939. “Sizzling”: “Dali’s Display.” “Hired to do”: Q. in “Art Changed,” NYT, Mar. 17, 1939. Dali unappeased: “Art Changed,” NYT, Mar. 17, 1939. “These are some”: Magistrate Louis B. Brodsky, q. in “Dali’s Display.”

  European émigrés: “One of the great war aims is to get to New York”; Yehudi Menuhin, q. in Alfred Kazin, Introduction to New York Panorama, p. xv. Other artists: Also, Josef Albers, Marc Chagall, Fritz Glarner, Jacques Lipchitz, Amédée Ozenfant, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Ossip Zadkine, among others; see Ashton, p. 118; Weld, p. 254.

  Duchamp’s Mona Lisa: Picon, p. 18. Picabia’s “Portrait of Rembrandt”: Haslam, p. 59. “ART does not exist”: Q. in Ades, p. 6. Duchamp giving up “anti-art”: Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, p. 113. Nothing coming of nothing: Hugo Ball (q. in Ades, p. 5) called Dada a “harlequinade made of nothingness” in his diary, Flight out of Time. “Dialectical transformation”: Georges Hugnet, q. in Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, p. 115. “The most touching”: Q. in Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, p. 116. Window on the inner world; “without too much respect”: Ades, p. 31. Breton’s ways to tap unconscious: Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, pp. 116, 121. “Dictated in the absence”; “outside”; “Psychic automatism”; “true function”; “superior reality”: From the definition of Surrealism in the first Manifesto of 1924, q. in Ades, p. 33. “I believe”: Q. in Ades, p. 32. The word “surrealism” had first been used by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917 in a program for Parade, the ballet by Erik Satie; Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, p. 115.

  “Illustrated”: Busa. Dali’s artistic vocabulary: Picon, p. 138. Dali was the only Surrealist artist who truly interested Freud; see Freud to Stefan Zweig, July 20, 1939, cited in Picon, p. 138. “Hand-painted dream”: Q. in Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, p. 40. Dali and Magritte relying on literal images: In 1942, Wolfgang Paalen (“The New Image,” p. 9) wrote: “Salvador Dali has … never made paintings which could be qualified as automatic. This point has to be clearly established, because his defenders pretend that his academic style does not matter since he uses it as a means to relate automatically experienced images [of dreams]. But it is precisely for this reason that his painting instead of being automatic is simply an academic copy of a previously terminated psychological experience.”

  Dominguez’s process: Called décalomanie; see Picon, 164, quoting Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme, Paris, 1938. Frottage: Picon, p. 95. Fumage: Picon, p. 167. “Finessed mechanics”: William Rubin, “Notes on Masson and Pollock,” p. 39. Masson’s background: See Picon, p. 226. “Let[ting] his hand”: William Rubin, “Notes on Masson and Pollock,” p. 39: Masson “occasionally clarified these nascent images but never allowed them to become literal.” Glue technique: Rubin, “Notes on Masson and Pollock,” p. 40: “Unlike the Surrealist techniques known as décalcomanie and frottage, this was not a trick discovered accidentally and subsequently exploited for artistic possibilities; it represented, rather, a solution called forth by a pressing painterly problem. Just such a need brought Poll
ock to his drip method.” Squeezing paint from above: Ades, pp. 36–37.

  “The subconscious a wellspring”: Q. in Weld, p. 274, citing “Answers to Questions,” Possibilities, Winter 1947–48. Breton’s preference for literature: Such Romantic-Symbolist figures as Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, and Apollinaire were “resurrected” from Dada ignominy to join certain Dada heroes such as Jarry and Lautréamont; Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, p. 115. Breton’s word games: Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, pp. 116, 121. “Lamentable expedient”: William Rubin, “Toward a Critical Framework,” p. 36. “Pictorial themes”; “transposable”: Sandler, p. 34. Masson leaving movement; Dali replacing him: Lader, p. 69.

  “Newer Super-Realism”: Nov.–Dec., Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Conn.; Levy gallery, New York, Jan. 1932. “The return of trompe l’oeil”: Lader, p. 66. For an example of a critic equating Surrealism with illusionistic painting, see Josephson, “The Superrealists,” p. 76. “The artist sees”: Campbell, “Surrealism,” p. 19. Regionalist reaction to Surrealism: Biddle, “The Surrealists,” p. 538: “There is no danger to the Republic from this band of weazened, sapless, and occasionally loudmouthed homunculi. Let them play with the melting watches.” See also Craven, “Our Decadent Art Museums,” p. 686. Suggesting an American subject: Campbell, “Surrealism,” p. 19; see Lader, pp. 67–68. Awareness of Surrealism’s other side: Lader, p. 80.