Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  No visits to other galleries: Bell. No marriages without permission: Salemme. Hiring spies: Bell; Salemme. “Write down”: Bell. Feeling free to “improve” canvases: Bell; see also Bell, q. in Potter, p. 73. “We have another”: Q. by Salemme. Bing Crosby record: Bell; Salemme. Jackson cleaning and hanging pictures: Joe Meert to FVOC, June 12, 1964, q. in FVOC, “The Genesis of JP,” p. 82. Running elevator: LK, int. by Landau, May 1, 1979, q. in Landau, “LK,” p. 233. Duties of De Niro and Xceron: Bell: JP might also have had contact with I. Rice Pereira, Ralph Rosenborg, and Attilio Salemme. Basement flooding: Bell. “For leaving the basement”; “drunk and wrecking”: Salemme.

  Putzel staying for dinner: LK. “He told Jackson”: Q. in Weld, p. 307. “Jackson was thoroughly”: LK. Date of Peggy’s visit: Datable because it was also the day Busa was married. Lee wanting to skip wedding: Busa. Fifteenth Street house: The house, at 212 West Fifteenth Street, belonged to Busa’s bride’s sister. Lee discovering Jackson best man; other guests: Busa. “What a dumb thing”: Q. by Busa. Lee handing Busa ring: Busa. “[Jackson] suggested”; “almost incoherent”: LK, q. in Nemser, p. 88. Description of Peggy: Sterne. Peggy cursing stairs: LK, q. in Nemser, p. 88. Weak ankles: Sterne: “She used to continuously twist or break her ankles.” Denouncing Putzel and Lee: LK. Lee relinquishing studio; storing work at Jackson’s: Busa. “LK. LK.”: Q. by LK. “I didn’t come”: Q. by LK, q. in Nemser, p. 88. LK: “That was really like a hard thrust. I thought, ‘What a bitch.’” Johnson, q. in Weld, p. 256: “Peggy had … almost a mannerism of making it clear to others that they really didn’t count for much.”

  Burning Landscape: Bought later that Summer; see Putzel to JP, summer 1943; also LK to SMP, July–Aug., 1943. Cornell show: Nov. 30–Dec. 1942; see Lader, p. 368. Hélion show: Feb. 8–Mar. 6; see Lader, pp. 371–72. Peggy preferring Baziotes: Lader, p. 260, citing PG, int. by Lader, Apr. 3, 1978. “The most beautiful”: Q. in LK to SMP, July–Aug. 1943. Duchamp’s reaction to Stenographic Figure: Weld, p. 305. “You know where”: Q. by Denise Hare, q. in Potter, p. 72. Bell fired: Bell. “[Duchamp] didn’t give a goddam”: Q. in Weld, p. 277. “Didn’t mind wearing”: Q. in Weld, p. 278. “Pas mal”: See Weld, p. 305. LK: “Vail, and the whole outgoing group, were furious at her for taking on someone like Pollock.”

  Putzel handling details: LK. “Work in peace”: PG, q. in Lader, p. 215, citing PG, Confessions of an Art Addict (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 105. Financial arrangement: Lader, p. 215, citing PG, p. 105. “Whether a larger scale”: Weld, p. 306. Unprecedented deal: Abel: “Matta was one of the few painters who had a dealer who gave him money every month, Pierre Matisse.” CG, q. in Weld, p. 306: “The contracts [with Guggenheim and Parsons] were utterly unique for that generation of artists. … [John] Marin, Milton Avery might have contracts. [But generally] it wasn’t done and dealers wouldn’t buy.” André Breton, at the urging of Kay Sage, also received $200 a month from Peggy; Lader, p. 90.

  “Have signed”: JP to LK, July 1943. The letter is undated, but Lee was in Huntington Station, Long Island, the week of July 15 and returned on Saturday, July 17. “Left and didn’t”: Ossorio, recalling JP. “Canned for talking”: Bell. “Between the canned music”: Q. in Myers, p. 81. “Quit my dreaming”: JP to SMP, Mar. 8, 1933. Wall 9 by 20 feet: Exact proportions, 8‘11½” by 19′9″; JP to CCP, July 1943. “It looks pretty big”: JP to CCP, July 1943.

  29. BEHIND THE VEIL

  SOURCES

  Books, articles, manuscripts, film, documents, and transcripts

  Alloway, JP; Art of This Century, JP; Friedman, JP; PG, Out of This Century; Janis, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America; Janis, Abstract and Surrealist Art in the United States; Lane and Larsen, eds., Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America; FVOC, JP; OC&T, JP; Potter, To a Violent Grave; Weld, Peggy; Wysuph, JP.

  Paul Brach, “Tandem Paint: Krasner/Pollock,” Art in America, Mar. 1982; Robert M. Coates, review, New Yorker, Nov. 20, 1943; DP&G, “Who Was JP?” Art in America, May–June 1967; Manny Farber, “JP,” New Republic, June 25, 1945; David Freke, “JP: A Psychological Self-Portrait,” Studio International, Dec. 1973; CG, “Marc Chagall, Lyonel Feininger, JP,” Nation, Nov. 27, 1943; Elizabeth Langhorne, “JP’s ‘The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle,’” Arts, Mar. 1979; Robert Motherwell, “Painters’ Objects,” Partisan Review, Winter 1944; Stephen Polcari, “JP and THB,” Arts, Mar. 1979; Review, Art News, Nov. 15, 1943; Maude Riley, “Fifty-Seventh Street in Review,” Art Digest, Nov. 15, 1943; William Rubin, “Notes on Masson and Pollock,” Arts, Nov. 1959; William Rubin, “Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological Criticism, Part I,” Art in America, Nov. 1979; William Rubin, “Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological Criticism, Part II,” Art in America, Dec. 1979; Jonathan Welch, “JP’s ‘The White Angel’ and the Origins of Alchemy,” Arts, Mar. 1979; Judith Wolfe, “Jungian Aspects of JP’s Imagery,” Artforum, Nov. 1972; C. L. Wysuph, “Behind the Veil,” Art News, Oct. 1970; “Young Man from Wyoming,” Art Digest, Nov. 1, 1943.

  Edward Alden Jewell, review, NYT, Nov. 14, 1943; Hilton Kramer, “The Inflation of JP,” NYT, Apr. 9, 1967.

  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.

  Strokes of Genius: JP (film), Court Productions, 1984.

  The William Baziotes Collection, AAA.

  James Brooks, int. by James T. Vallière, n.d., AAA; CG, int. by Kathleen Shorthall, Nov. 9, 1959, Time/Life Archives; JP, int. by William Wright, 1951, for radio program, WERI, Westerly, Rhode Island.

  Interviews

  Ethel Baziotes; James Brooks; Peter Busa; Violet de Laszlo; Jimmy Ernst; CG; Balcomb Greene; Harry Holtzman; Axel Horn; Harry Jackson; Sidney Janis; Buffie Johnson; Reuben Kadish; Gerome Kamrowski; LK; Harold Lehman; John Little; Mercedes Matter; ACM; George Mercer; FLP; MJP; David Porter; Becky Reis; May Tabak Rosenberg; Herman Somberg; Hedda Sterne; James Johnson Sweeney; Roger Wilcox; Reginald Wilson; Betsy Zogbaum.

  NOTES

  Behind the Veil: The phrase was used by Wysuph as the title for his article in Art News. Rate of production: About twelve paintings in about eight weeks. “Like somebody had knocked”; painting had looked finished: Little. Moon Woman Cuts the Circle: Langhorne, “JP’s ‘The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle,’” pp. 128–29; Wolfe; “Jungian Aspects of JP’s Imagery,” pp. 65–73. Jungian analysis of paintings: During the 1970s, a host of Jungian scholars (Freke, Langhorne, Welch, Wolfe, Wysuph) turned to Jung’s writings for help in interpreting JP’s paintings, especially those from the 1942–43 period. Langhorne (“JP’s ‘The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle,’” p. 128) argues that the paintings lend themselves “to quite precise interpretation in the light of Jungian psychology.” Freke (“JP,” p. 221) maintains that JP undertook “a consciously Jungian programme for his work.” “Such a position,” writes Rubin (“Pollock as Jungian Illustrator, Part II,” p. 86), “requires that Pollock be seen as consciously and deliberately elaborating an iconographic scheme—and this was not his way of working, either as he describes it or as we see it operating.” Oddly, the same scholars who argue that JP was consciously aware of Jungian ideas also argue that the Jungian archetypes in his painting emerged from his unconscious. Langhorne, “JP’s ‘The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle,’” p. 131: “Though Pollock quit Jungian analysis in 1942, he in effect continues his autopsychoanalysis, mediated by the images of his art.”

  Of course, Rubin (“Pollock as Jungian Illustrator, Part I,” p. 110) proposes an alternative subject matter—the Minotaur legend, pointing to its “ubiquitousness” in both Picasso and late Surrealism as “a more immediate and likely candidate for absorption in Pollock’s personal mythology than many of the references—some very obscure—which Jungian critics deduce from books by Jung that Pollock almost certainly never re
ad.” JP does appear to be have been aware of Jung’s writings. He appears to have attended a meeting of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York City and noted certain books, including The Concept of the Collective Unconscious by Jung and Initiate History by Henderson (undated note in JP Papers). But JP encountered those references—the tail-eating serpent, for example—not in Jungian writings, as some scholars have suggested (Langhorne, “JP’s ‘The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle,’” p. 133), but in his sessions with Henderson and De Laszlo. Langhorne (p. 128) admits that JP’s “four years of Jungian psychotherapy” were “at the core of his involvement with Jung.”

  JP undoubtedly looked to Jungian theory as a source of subject matter. Holtzman, who had been reading Jung since he was eighteen (he describes himself as a “poor Jung man”), remembers visiting JP on Eighth Street and discussing their common “involvement with Jungian views.” Bultman says, “Jackson was trying to dissociate himself from the past, trying to find a whole different vocabulary, and Jungian analysis was full of a new vocabulary.” Kamrowski says JP was “using Jungian imagery as a device” to come up with an original style. Johnson, a friend of JP’s and an avid Jungian who knew Jung personally, says the scholars who have looked to Jung’s writings to interpret JP’s paintings don’t understand the kind of person JP was, even in Jungian terms: “Oh, my dear, the Jungians are awfully academic. Not Jung himself, but his followers. As an ‘intuitive,’ JP can’t be fit into this kind of criticism. It’s really not pertinent.”

  What JP derived from Jungian analysis—in addition to a few specific motifs, as opposed to elaborated myths—was permission to engage in his own myth-making. Alloway, n.p.: “Myth in Pollock’s hands was never an exercise in classical allusion but kept that enigmatic center which it is the function of myth to preserve.” Rubin, “Pollock as Jungian Illustrator, Part II,” p. 86: “Pollock’s pictures are mythopoetic in the truly creative sense; he did not paint Jungian glosses or paradigms but created his own private myths whose elusive meanings are inseparable from the pictorial language he invented to recount them. To attribute their symbols to a study of Jung or even to the broader literature of mythology itself is to deprive them of their originality.” De Laszlo says JP had to work from the unconscious: “He was enormously introverted. He was introverted to a pathological extent—meaning that he was in one way enormously unconscious.”

  The myths that JP created were extremely personal and obscure. Rubin, “Pollock as Jungian Illustrator, Part I,” p. 117: “While I think Pollock considered all his images to have psychological content, their precise definition or identification—given how little we know of the artist’s intimate life and thought—is a chancy if not impossible (and most likely wrongheaded) task, even if we do not misread the forms.” Indeed, subjects can seldom be inferred from titles (see Rubin, “Pollock as Jungian Illustrator, Part II,” p. 73), which were often later changed (Pasiphaë) or else are clearly unrelated (She-Wolf). To some extent, this was probably as JP wanted it. In one of his most famous statements on his paintings, especially applicable to works from this period, he said that “She-Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt an explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it”; q. in Janis, p. 112. Freke (“JP,” p. 220) notes that “this only means that Pollock was not prepared to explain it, not that it had no meaning nor that the meaning is too vague—it may indeed have been too precise for a man who is known to have been extremely reserved.”

  Occasional clues to JP’s mythology can be found, however. On the margin of a drawing, he wrote, “The rock the fish was winged and split of two—so one could grow to be and was the son” (frame 256, from a Pollock drawing, 51B2, Marlborough period, in JP Papers). We can envision a rock being transformed into a fish, the fish sprouting wings, then splitting in two, as a way of giving birth to the son. Freke (“JP,” p. 221) notes a myth in Jung of “monstrous fish and the sea journeys associated with them … they symbolize the all-devouring Mother, that is, the hero’s ‘anima.’ To gain immortality the hero must go back to the Mother in her aspect of death and conquer her, and the fish is the symbol often chosen to represent her; the hero’s eventual emergence from its belly symbolizes his rebirth as immortal.”

  On another drawing (c. 1943, OC&T 704, III, p. 211), JP wrote, “Thick thin Chinese Am. indian sun snake woman / life effort / reality total shoes foot.” He then added the numbers 13 (the unlucky number) and 46 (JP’s lucky number) to the image. This does not seem to be so much a Jungian pairing of opposites as it is a set of personal associations: some obvious, as in “thick” and “thin,” “shoes” and “foot”; some more personal, as in “Chinese” and “American Indian”; and some quite poignant, as in the equivalence of “effort” and “reality.” A similar set of personal associations exists on an ink and gouache drawing on paper (c. 1943, OC&T 963, IV, p. 43): “Male Woman goat deer / [illegible].”

  Busa says, “I found it easy to hear him talk about his work, which he wouldn’t do if there were more than four or five people, because he was terribly self-conscious—quite withdrawn and reserved. But when he talked about the work, he always talked about it in psychoanalytic terms. He would relate a story. He would say, ‘This is the apex,’ and ‘here is the relationship of the id to the superego,’ and ‘this is what the sensor plays,’ and ‘this is the line of the orbit of the division. …’ He would go into it like that. It wasn’t all Jungian. He knew a lot about Freudian psychology, too.”

  Only a “general notion”: Alloway, n.p.: “The figurative works are not pre-planned but improvised.” “No, because it hasn’t been”: JP, int. by Wright, 1951. “Of course I did”: Q. in Weld, p. 323. Jackson detesting titles: LK. “[Jackson’s] unconscious”; “in a sense”: Brooks, int. by Vallière, n.d. Kadish: “Before he’d have a show scheduled, there would be this tremendous explosive kind of work period.”

  Three weeks begun late 1942: The evidence is that Search for a Symbol was painted around November or December 1942 and that Pasiphaë was completed after the Guggenheim show, although one report suggests that Pasiphaë was still wet when it was first exhibited at Art of This Century, from April 11 to April 30, 1944, in the “First Exhibition in America of Twenty Paintings”; see Lader, p. 242. Search for a Symbol: The original title, Male and Female in Search of a Symbol, was shortened for the 1945 showing at Art of This Century; see OC&T 89, I, pp. 78–79. We accept Freke’s contention (“JP,” p. 221, supported by OC&T 89, I, pp. 78–79) that this painting’s “stylistic place is very early in 1943 or even 1942.” “Personage[s] over”: Janis to JP, Sept. 27, 1943. Guardians of the Secret: In a photo that Kadish took of JP (in Kadish’s possession) while the painting was still in process, the table can be seen in perspective, as it is in Search for a Symbol.

  Title of Pasiphaë: For some time, the title led scholars to assume that the painting depicted the myth of Pasiphaë, the queen of Crete, making love to her bull. Rubin, in particular, writing in 1959 (“Notes on Masson and Pollock,” p. 42), compared JP’s painting to an early painting called Pasiphaë by Masson, only to find that JP’s painting was originally entitled Moby-Dick. Rubin (“Pollock as Jungian Illustrator, Part II,” p. 74), writing twenty years later: “On a visit to Pollock’s studio in the company of James Johnson Sweeney, PG expressed some dislike of the title Moby-Dick, and Pollock said he was willing to change it. After some discussion, Sweeney—who had that morning come upon a reference to the Minoan Queen in some work he was doing on Pound and Eliot—suggested the title Pasiphaë. According to his wife, Pollock said something to the effect of ‘Who the hell is Pasiphaë?’ Sweeney recounted the tale, which Pollock found very interesting because it concerned the mother of the Minotaur and dealt with a combination of eros and bestiality. (He later jotted down an outline of the story, which survives among his papers.)”

  Putzel’s address: 67 East Fifty-seventh Street; Lader, p. 171, citing postcard from Putzel to William Baziotes, Sept. 16, 1
943. Lee’s perception of Putzel: LK. “Small pictures”: Putzel to JP, Oct. 2, 1943. Jackson obliging: Putzel to JP, Nov. 1, 1943. Wounded Animal: OC&T 97, I, p. 87. Both Wounded Animal and Male and Female in Search of a Symbol appear to have been added late, since they did not appear by name in the catalogue; see FVOC, “The Genesis of JP,” p. 29. Abstract exercises: OC&T 92–94, I, pp. 82–85; see Putzel to JP, Nov. 1, 1943. Paintings finished and delivered: Putzel to JP, Oct. 2, 1943. More small-scale works: Lader, p. 225. Gouaches: OC&T 972–73, IV, pp. 50–51. Drawings: E.g., OC&T 697, III, p. 206. Segovia concert: Putzel to JP, Nov. 1, 1943: see also Landau, “LK,” p. 237.

  “She really flipped”: Q. in Weld, p. 310. Macpherson married and homosexual: See Weld, pp. 308–09. “[He] came into my life”: PG, caption facing p. 197. Sixty-first Street apartment: 155 East Sixty-first Street; Weld, p. 313. “Less as a lover”: Weld, p. 311. “You can have an affair”: Q. in Weld, p. 311. Divorce from Ernst: On Macpherson’s advice, she forced Ernst, who was continuing to paint at her residence, Hale House, while living elsewhere with Tanning, to vacate the premises altogether; Weld, p. 311. “In a man/child”: Ernst. Jackson making Peggy uncomfortable: Weld, p. 323. “A trapped animal”: Ernst, q. in Potter, p. 74. Peggy speaking to Krasner: Porter: “I had the impression that Lee did all of Jackson’s talking for him, including with Peggy.”