Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  CG, “The Pollock Market Soars,” NYT Magazine, Apr. 16, 1961; Vivien Raynor, “JP in Retrospect—‘He Broke the Ice,’” NYT Magazine, Apr. 2, 1967; Amei Wallach, “LK: Out of JP’s Shadow,” Newsday, Aug. 23, 1981.

  Frank A. Seixas, “JP: An Appreciation” (unpub. ms.).

  CG, int. by Kathleen Shorthall for Life, Nov. 9, 1959, Time/Life Archives; CG, int. by James T. Vallière, Mar. 20, 1968, AAA; JP, int. by Dorothy Seiberling for Life, July 18, 1949, Time/Life Archives.

  Interviews

  T. P. Benton; Fritz Bultman; Peter Busa; Jeremy Capillé; Nicholas Carone; Dorothy Dehner; Audrey Flack; Cynthia Goodman; Ron Gorchov; Chaim Gross; Robert Beverly Hale; Ben Heller; Budd Hopkins; Paul Jenkins; Buffie Johnson; Reuben Kadish; Lillian Olaney Kiesler; Hilton Kramer; LK; Harold Lehman; Joe LeSueur; Herbert Matter; Mercedes Matter; George McNeil; John Millwater; Philip Pavia; Vita Peterson; FLP; MJP; Milton Resnick; May Tabak Rosenberg; Irving Sandler; Gertrude Shibley; Patsy Southgate; Michael Stolbach; Araks Tolegian; Samuel Wagstaff; Roger Wilcox.

  NOTES

  Description of painting process: Hale; LK; Mercedes Matter; Peterson; Wilcox; Friedman, p. 184; Goodnough, “Pollock Paints a Picture,” p. 40; FVOC, “Hans Namuth’s Photographs of JP,” p. 49; O’Hara, p. 26. Recalcitrant pen; “dribble and blob”: Wilcox. Beginning with William Rubin in 1967, there has been a campaign to delete the word “drip” from the vocabulary of Pollock criticism: “Poured pictures is a more apposite term,” Rubin wrote in that year; “JP and the Modern Tradition, Part I,” p. 19. O’Connor addressed the terminological problem at great length in “Hans Namuth’s Photographs of JP,” pp. 48–49. Rubin, O’Connor, and the critics following their lead consider the word “drip” demeaning (it did, after all, play into the hands of critics who dubbed Pollock “Jack the Dripper”) and dismissive of the artistic intent in JP’s working style. The term is in some ways inadequate—it by no means conveys the many different ways in which JP deposited paint on the canvas—but as a generic term there is none better: it is the term that JP himself used, and it had a psychological significance for him that no other term could have.

  Stories of style by accident: Friedman, p. 97. Pot kicked over: Sandler. Discovery while drunk: Richard Talmage, q. in Potter, p. 103; see Rubin, “JP and the Modern Tradition, Part I,” p. 17: “The critical tradition by which innovations in modern painting are derided as the products of drink goes back to the time of Courbet and the Impressionists.” Throwing paint: Fuller Potter, q. in Potter, p. 99. Onslow-Ford: Carmean and Rathbone, p. 128 n. 7. Baziotes: Busa, q. in Simon, “Concerning the Beginnings,” p. 17. De Kooning; Resnick: Resnick. Kamrowski: Bultman. Gorky; Reznikoff: Resnick: JP was also fascinated by an artist named Max Schnitzler who began painting allover abstractions of “marks of paint” as early as 1937. “They were on the project together. They knew each other very well.” During a trip into the city at this time, Schnitzler was apparently directed to JP’s show at the Betty Parsons Gallery. “He stood around and looked at those paintings and said, ‘That son of a bitch!’ Not much later, Jackson came to the Waldorf Cafeteria and saw Max. He said, ‘I heard you called me a son of a bitch’—and smiled.” Others: Rubin, “JP and the Modern Tradition, Part IV,” p. 31: “[pouring paint] was not at all uncommon as a marginal or ‘coloristic’ effect.” Paul Jenkins notes, in particular, Gianni Dova and Enrico Donati. “I did drip”: Smith, q. by Dehner.

  Hofmann: Little, q. in Potter, p. 100. Early Hofmanns: Miz was referring especially to Spring, 1940, and Fantasia, 1943; see FVOC, “The Genesis of JP,” p. 236 n. 18. Hunter (p. 20) called Spring “something of a ‘sport’ or maverick” in Hofmann’s career, arguing that the technique was not used again for three years and was “never again to be given such exclusive attention.” Stealing from Hofmann: Kiesler: “Miz said that Jackson had come up to his studio, had seen his first drip painting, and that that’s how he first learned about drip painting. I never took it too seriously.” See Johnson, q. in Potter, p. 100. Goodman, p. 45: “Evidence suggests that all of Hofmann’s so-called dripped paintings may have been erroneously dated.”

  Dispute: See, e.g., Rubin, “JP and the Modern Tradition, Part II,” p. 33; “Part IV,” p. 28. Rubin, “Part II,” p. 33: “Far too much emphasis tends to be placed upon the historical precedence in the invention of new techniques (the fuss about who invented dripping is a case in point) as opposed to what is done with them.” Shamanistic rituals: Brach, “Tandem Paint,” p. 95. “Fundamental rhythms”: Kagan, “Improvisations,” pp. 97–98. “A different edge”: CG, int. by Shorthall, Nov. 9, 1959. “Divisionist preoccupation”: Rose, p. 54. On the basis of statements from many people, we believe that Lee’s allover canvases are misdated; that they did not begin until after the mosaic table, which was created in 1947. European tradition: Rubin, “JP and the Modern Tradition, Part III,” p. 20.

  “I do not think it exaggerated”: CG, “The Pollock Market Soars.” In the pursuit of what Kramer calls a “fixed morphology”—“this, leading to this, leading to the next thing, in perfect relationship”—historians like William Rubin have focused on the modernist antecedents, with a bow to the Surrealists—but only the abstract Surrealists. Rubin, “Part IV,” p. 28: “In the broadest sense, Pollock’s drip paintings descend from a line within the modern tradition bent on increasingly loosening the fabric of the picture sunace in a ‘painterly’ way.” “Part III,” p. 20: “Like Pollock’s poetry, which shifted from an explicit to an implicit state, the Cubism had gone underground. There, it gave his allover drip pictures precisely that architectonic tautness of structure which had been missing from the Impressionism which, I believe, also profoundly—though even more indirectly—informed their style.” [Emphasis in Original.] “Wagner’s Ring”: Kramer.

  “Flinging a pot”: Ruskin, q. in Prawn, p. 107. “Marginal or ‘coloristic’”: Rubin, “Part IV,” p. 31. Ernst poking holes: Waldberg, p. 388: When two paintings created by Ernst using the drip method—The Mad Planet and Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidian Fly—were exhibited by Betty Parsons at the Wakefield bookshop in 1942, JP and Motherwell “were astounded by the delicacy of their structures and begged Max Ernst to tell them their secret It was a simple one: [that is, dripping paint from a can (with a hole pierced in the bottom) swung from a string]. Jackson Pollock later used this technique, called ‘dripping’—or ‘pouring’—most systematically and he was later credited with its invention.” Rubin, “Part IV,” p. 30: “Ernst told the French critic Françoise Choay that Pollock discovered the [drip] technique through his pictures.”

  Ernst’s experiment: Waldberg, p. 388. Schwankovsky’s classroom: Araks Tolegian, recalling Manuel. Formal reasons: See Burning Landscape, OC&T 95, I, p. 86; also Composition with Pouring I, OC&T 92, I, pp. 82–83. It is difficult to believe the two fully realized drip paintings dated 1943—Water Birds (OC&T 93, I, p. 84) and Composition with Pouring II (OC&T 94, I, p. 85)—were actually painted that year. The provenance for OC&T 92 does suggest that some version of the painting was completed in 1943, although JP may have taken a 1943 work and subsequently dripped paint on it.

  “Painting is self-discovery”: Q. in Rodman, p. 82. Reticence: “The network of line serves as the protective shield which could be expected of an artist who has been characterized as private and nonverbal”; David S. Rubin, “A Case for Content,” p. 108; see Bultman, q. in Potter, p. 204. “Continue the flattening-out”: CG, “Art,” June 9, 1945, p. 657. “Purity in art”: CG, “Towards a Newer Laocoön,” p. 305. “A habit of discipline”: CG, “Art,” Apr. 13, 1946, p. 445. “If there is anything”: Q. in Carmean, p. 38, citing interview of Mar. 1978. “Heads, parts”; “‘I choose to veil’”: Q. by LK, q. in Friedman, “An Interview with LK Pollock,” n.p.

  Veiling the image: In “Part II, p. 86,” William Rubin writes that Lee told him in June 1979 that “Pollock made the remark about ‘veiling’ in reference to There Were Seven in Eight, and it doesn’t necessarily apply to other paintings—cert
ainly not to such pictures as Autumn Rhythm, One, etc.” Rubin, “Part II, p. 84,” describes There Were Seven in Eight as a painting in which JP painted a “‘frieze’ of totemic forms,” then “added the web of arabesqued drawing.” Rubin, “Part II, p. 83”: “There is only one poured canvas, Galaxy, 1947—one of the first Pollock painted—in which there is the unmistakable presence of figurative forms under the abstract web.” But Lee’s disdain for writers was well known. Stolbach notes that she would often tell a writer what he or she wanted to hear, usually assuming that that is what would end up being written anyway. On March 13, 1983, Lee told Elizabeth Frank (q. in Frank, p. 43) that her conversation with JP referred to Guardians of the Secret, not only a different painting, but a painting from an entirely different period. To Amei Wallach, one of the few writers with whom Lee spoke openly, she said (q. in “LK”) that “Pollock never was a completely abstract painter. Stolbach remembers Lee saying that she “never determined that Pollock ever stopped being a figurative painter.” She told Wysuph (recalled in “Behind the Veil,” p. 55) that the drip paintings are “no less figurative” than his earlier ones and that “the figures and ‘veils’ are so integrated as to be indistinguishable.” Many of JP’s friends and colleagues echo these latter sentiments. Kadish: “His work always started with images. And I think it always maintained the particular force of those images. The paintings were never abstractions. Never, never, never abstractions.” Tillim, “The Alloway International,” p. 59: “I don’t believe he ever conceived of a painting apart from some kind of subject matter.” JP’s own statement on the subject (q. in Rodman, p. 8) is remarkably clear: “I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all the time. But when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.”

  Galaxy: OC&T 169, I, pp. 166–67. Images discernible: Rubin, “Part II,” p. 83; see also Bultman q. in Potter, p. 204, to the effect that the dripped paint in Shooting Star (1947), also covers an earlier image. Watery Paths: OC&T 171, I, pp. 168–69. Magic Lantern: OC&T 172, I, p. 170. The Nest: OC&T 174, I, p. 172. Vortex: OC&T 178, I, p. 176. New way of creating imagery: See Composition with Black Pouring (OC&T 170, I, p. 168), probably the first work in which JP clearly used the drip technique to create a recognizable image. “Crawl inside them”: MJP. Jungian framework: See David S. Rubin, “A Case for Content,” p. 109: The “collective unconscious [was] conceived by the artist as energy in constant flux in an infinite space.” See also p. 104.

  Eye problem, including dating: Wilcox: “It had been going on for many years. He didn’t know when it occurred for the first time.” “A temporary malfunction”: Wilcox. “Nothing wrong”: Q. by Wilcox. Journals: Wilcox: There was a society of physiological optics which was commonly known as the Helmholtz Society in England.” Medical terminology: For the current literature, see: Aring, “The Migrainous Scintillating Scotoma,” pp. 519–22; Hare, “Personal Observations,” 259–64; Lashley, “Patterns of Cerebral Integration,” pp. 331–39; Raskin and Appenzeller, Headache; Richards, ‘The Fortification Illusions of Migraine,” pp. 89–96; Rose and Gawel, Migraine; Ryan, Sr., and Ryan, Jr., Headache and Head Pain; Saper, Headache Disorders. Given Wilcox’s description, Dr. Millwater, an eye expert at Vanderbilt University, said JP was “probably describing ocular migraine, which is the visual imagery or aura that occurs before you have a headache. The visual image results from an electrical discharge from the occipital cortex—from the posterior part of the visual pathway. Some people describe a flashing light. Some describe wavy lines. Some describe a little light that gets bigger and bigger. Or a fortification spectrum—a sawtoothed effect like the top edge of a saw. Some describe a gossamer-like veil.”

  Realization that the imagery had occurred in his paintings: Wilcox: “The drip paintings were totally like the electrical discharges he was experiencing. But he didn’t try to paint the discharges. Curiously, it was only after he made several of the drip paintings that he recognized the connection.” Freedom from tools: See Tillim, “The Alloway International,” p. 56; Wilcox: “All I know absolutely for certain is that JP expressed to me enough ways and enough times that his purpose was to separate himself physically from the surface on which he was making the impression.” Dripping vitiated the need to draw. JP, int. by Seiberling for Life, July 18, 1949: “He insists that it is only necessary to be a master of your own mode of expression—that there are no real ABCs that an artist has to learn other than those which facilitate his own expression. ‘If an artist is interested in a typewriter,’ Pollock remarks indifferently, ‘he should be able to draw it.’” Dripping substituted for the traditional pencil or brush an entirely new kind of draftsmanship.

  Line becomes lyrical: See William Rubin, “Part I,” p. 15: “In the style that realized his full identity, the Expressionist element disappeared and the violence, frustration, and tension were largely transformed into a passionate lyricism.” Profile of head: Wilcox: A head was one of the first images JP painted with the drip technique. Automatism and control: William Rubin, “Part II,” p. 31: “The artist himself has said, ‘I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.’ Yet even a cursory glance at a drip Pollock shows that on a purely operational level this was not entirely true despite the remarkable virtuosity he developed in his technique. There are numerous small spots and puddlings which were manifestly not one hundred percent controlled as they happened. But they are accidental only then; in the final work they have been transmuted into esthetic decision.” See also O’Doherty, p. 105. “He painted like a machine”: Q. in Friedman, p. 100. “I don’t know where”: Q. by CG.

  Breakthrough: Wilcox: JP “discovered” the drip technique when “he was trying to draw a head without contacting the paper. And he did.” Since JP had “discovered” the drip technique years before, Wilcox may be referring to the first instance when JP painted an image “in the air.” Carone’s description: Wilcox: “JP talked to Nick more than anybody else that I know of about his art, about painting.” “Working in the air”: Q. in Namuth, n.p. “Aerial form[s]”: Int. by Barbara Rose, q. in Namuth, n.p. “Take his stick”: Namuth, n.p.

  “Alien code”: Stuckey, “Another Side of JP,” p. 82. Figures emerging: JP, q. in Rodman, p. 82. Wilcox argues persuasively that JP, for the first time, “discovered the truth of psychoanalysis while he was doing his drip paintings.” Always figurative: LK, q. by Stolbach. “Skins”: Carone: “Those are layered paintings, but they’re skins of dimensions, they’re skins. It’s not overlaying like in a Cubist painting, it’s like overlaying to synthesize and bring it to the surface again. It’s like he’s digging in by layers to bring it up to the surface. That’s why it’s so packed with energy. They could explode, those paintings.” A dimension away: Jenkins: “He was not involved with the figure, but he transformed our notion of the figure. He took it out of or away from Cubism and was able to discover an astral possibility.” “Memories arrested in space”: JP, c. 1950, q. in OC&T IV, p. 253.

  “Loveliness”: See O’Doherty, p. 106. Joseph Meyer’s: Lehman. “Feeling for matière: Tyler, “Nature and Madness Among the Younger Painters,” p. 30. “His feeling for the land”: Q. in DP&G, “Who Was JP?” p. 52. “Popped into his head”: Wilcox. Urinating from seated position: Kligman, q. by Wagstaff: “It was very strange—he always sat down on the john to take a piss”; see also LeSueur, recalling Kligman. “Peeing competitions”: FLP; MJP. “I’m from the West”: JP, q. by Busa. Urinating in Rosenberg’s house: Rosenberg. In Wilcox’s house: Wilcox. In Meert’s house: Shibley. In Lee’s bed: Wilcox.

  “How do you know”: Q. in Seixas, “JP,” n.p. But JP’s view of lovemaking was a child’s-eye view, part possession and part assault. When JP’s twelve-year-old niece, Jeremy, visited the studio, she was struck by the violence of her uncle’s relationship with the canvas. “It was almost as if what was in his hand wasn’t a stick, it was a knife or a hatchet or weapon of some sort. I remember being made terribly uneasy by it.” Another visitor thought JP “t
ore into a canvas the way Joe Louis destroyed Max Schmeling”; Aurthur, “Hitting the Boiling Point,” p. 200. In the late forties, JP began to “abuse” his canvases, using knives and trowels instead of sticks and brushes, lacing the paint with nails, tacks, broken glass, and lit cigarettes; Friedman, p. 99. He kicked them, stepped on them, and loaded them for the trips to New York “as if they were so many bags of potatoes”; Raynor, “JP in Retrospect.”

  “Tchelitchew had it”: Q. by Jenkins. Rumors of urinating: Benton; Gross. Busa: A similar fascination with feces is involved in the thickly pigmented canvases that preceded the drip paintings: “He was what you might call anal-erotic. … He could play with paint. He could make a painting called Shimmering Substance like you would make a mud pie.” Slapdash art”: Q. by Gorchov.

  Always Stella: See O’Doherty, p. 106. Flack: “Part of what is so important about him is his maleness, his virility. And yet look what it comes from, and why it was so insisted upon—fragility, and the association with the female.” Heller: “Jackson was one of the few painters that I know who was both masculine and feminine. When a painter has that power, but also that delicacy and exquisiteness, you’ve got to be in the presence of something great.” “Lifted the instrument”: Kozloff, p. 146.