—
THROUGH ALL THIS PERIOD, de Kooning had remained, if not exactly stuck, then at least thwarted. He was like a dancer performing arabesques inside a cramped and shadowy labyrinth. And yet he was stubborn. He put almost as much effort into scraping back his own paintings as actually applying paint. His reputation as an artist who spent long hours in his studio, struggling with problems that were partially self-imposed, was a perverse source of pride.
Howard Putzel, who had done so much to persuade Guggenheim to back Pollock, tried to do the same for de Kooning, about whose work he was equally enthusiastic. But his efforts misfired. De Kooning himself—more proof of his perversity—might have been partly to blame: Putzel one day brought Guggenheim to de Kooning’s downtown studio. Expensively attired, she appeared bored and complained extravagantly about having a hangover. Her arrogant, distracted state aroused all of de Kooning’s deep-dyed animosity toward the well-off, fashionably rich. He said little as she looked over his work. She finally selected a single painting, saying she wished it to be delivered to Art of This Century.
“It’s not finished,” replied de Kooning. Unperturbed, Guggenheim replied that he could finish it and bring it over himself in two weeks. At which point she left.
“Bill made sure the painting was even less finished two weeks later,” said de Kooning’s friend Rudy Burckhardt.
—
AT THE TIME, DE KOONING was living with his wife, the artist Elaine Fried, in an apartment on Carmine Street. They had met in 1938, when she was a twenty-year-old art student. Seeing him in a bar she was struck, she later said, by “his seaman’s eyes that seemed as if they were staring at very wide spaces all day.” He invited her to his studio, and was more or less immediately smitten. He adored her forthrightness, her beautiful hair, her strange, unplaceable accent. He admired her frank ambition, too. Fried had studied for several years at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on the Lower East Side, and then the American Artists School, where the modernist Stuart Davis taught. She cared deeply about painting, which mattered enormously to de Kooning. Elaine was slight, but she had a natural physical confidence and a circle of admirers, many of whom came to depend on her advice and her extroverted, adamant persona. When she met de Kooning, she was earning money modeling for artists, and painting city scenes and portraits in a Social Realist vein. They married in December 1943. She later told her friend, the artist Hedda Sterne, that she had married him “because someone told her he would be the greatest painter.”
The couple enjoyed an intense period of happiness in the early 1940s, but after that their relationship was forever fraught. They were both, in different ways, excessive and unreasonable. Elaine was gregarious, sociable, and theatrical, while de Kooning preferred solitude. He was, for all his native charisma, anxious and self-absorbed. They painted together, but at different rates, and in different states of mind. Elaine, who needed silence when she painted, nevertheless worked quickly, with a headlong bravura that was utterly foreign to de Kooning. Neither liked to cook or had any interest at all in keeping house. (A famous story has de Kooning standing in their apartment, surveying the chaos, and declaring to Elaine: “Vot ve need is a vife!”) There were blistering fights, and numerous infidelities on both sides.
Eventually, in the late 1940s, the marriage unraveled. But through all the turbulence, the couple had forged a permanent bond. Long after their split, Elaine actively promoted de Kooning’s career, especially when it seemed under threat. She was always especially combative in the company of Lee Krasner.
—
IN LATE NOVEMBER 1946, de Kooning rented a studio opposite Grace Church on Fourth Avenue, between East 10th and East 11th streets. Increasingly, he slept there at night. He had very little money. (When he went to fill out an income tax form, he found that he hadn’t earned enough to owe any.) He soon began painting abstract works primarily in black and white—largely, he later claimed, because there was no money to buy paints more expensive than black and white enamels. They featured transient shapes that came in and out of focus: Picasso-inspired heads, biomorphic blobs, buttocks, breasts, stretched-out arms, dementedly grinning teeth, and monstrous bodies. They recalled the teeming, fantastical forms of Bosch and Bruegel, and bore similarities to the recent work of the young Francis Bacon, who was forging his own compelling new painterly language on the other side of the Atlantic.
De Kooning’s friend Charles Egan, who had opened a gallery in a tiny studio apartment on 57th Street, was desperate to give him a show. He was also, as it happened, in love with Elaine, and sometime in 1947, not long after marrying another woman, Betsy Duhrssen, he began a long-running but surreptitious affair with her. De Kooning’s relationship with Elaine had already sputtered out by this time, and when he eventually learned of the affair, he carried on as if nothing were different. Monogamy was evidently low on the ladder of expectation in their bohemian milieu; there were plenty of women already offering themselves up to de Kooning. His friendship with Egan, whose company he liked, and whose championing of de Kooning was sincere, could apparently withstand it.
Egan and Elaine were by no means the only ones who believed passionately in de Kooning: To many of the struggling downtown painters, the Dutchman’s presence had become almost talismanic. De Kooning stood for authenticity, for struggle, and he was wrapped in all the earthy glamour and charisma that can attach to such qualities. He was onto something.
—
FOR POLLOCK, THINGS HAD calmed down after the confusion and disarray prompted by his successes with Peggy Guggenheim. And as the war, whose privations and shocks had done so much to color their lives, came to a close, he and Krasner made the decision to marry. They enjoyed an idyllic summer on Long Island, where Pollock seemed both soothed and creatively energized by the open sky and far-stretching sea (the Atlantic, he had said, was the one thing that could compare to the open landscapes of the West). Then, to the surprise of many, they took out a mortgage on a nineteenth-century clapboard farmhouse on Fireplace Road in the Springs. The house had neither plumbing nor heating, and they had to endure a brutal first winter without a bathroom or a car. But they made it through, working together to make the place habitable. Pollock, after not painting at all for several months, soon resumed, and embarked on the most sustained and fruitful effort of his career.
The year 1946 turned out to be the happiest of Pollock’s life. “He always slept very late,” recalled Krasner. “Drinking or not, he never got up in the morning…While he had his breakfast I had my lunch…He would sit over that damn cup of coffee for two hours. By that time it was afternoon. He’d get off and work until it was dark. There were no lights in his studio. When the days were short he could only work for a few hours, but what he managed to do in those few hours was incredible.” On Long Island, he was freed from the competitiveness and social confusions of New York. He had Krasner attending to all his needs and constantly professing her belief in him. And slowly, over a period of liberated experimentation, he hit upon a way of painting that was to revolutionize Western art.
—
LATE IN HIS LIFE, LUCIAN FREUD liked to tell the story of the cartoon strip writer who went on vacation, leaving his hero “chained up at the bottom of the sea with an enormous shark advancing from the left and a huge octopus approaching. And the man who takes over the job can’t figure out how to get the hero out of danger, and after several sleepless nights, he finally sends a telegram to the writer, asking him what to do. And the telegram comes back: WITH ONE TREMENDOUS BOUND THE HERO IS FREE.”
Pollock’s signal achievements, beginning with the mural of 1943–44 and climaxing with his even bigger breakthrough in 1946, have this quality of improbable escape, a Houdini-like liberation from a self-imposed prison. In truth, the process was somewhat more gradual. But Pollock’s creativity at this point did have a volcanic quality. It was fired by a species of inner conviction that had no regard for rules, and was willing, in a spirit of almost naïvely unguarded play, to invent new
ones.
In his new studio on Fireplace Road, Pollock began by using the wrong end of his brush and even sticks to gouge marks into the surfaces of his paintings. This had been common practice among painters for centuries, but Pollock took to it with unusual aggression. He bought fluid industrial paints so that he didn’t have to go through the wearisome business of mixing paint from tubes with thinner. Discovering that the industrial paints had properties of their own, he began to explore them by spreading his canvas on the studio floor and moving himself around it so that he could approach from every angle. And then he began dripping and pouring paint—or, more accurately, dipping sticks, and sometimes a brush, into cans of paint and drawing in the air above the canvas. He let the paint fall in looping skeins onto the surface as he lunged forward and back, waving his wrist and arm like a grimly controlled conductor transported by the music in his head.
In the midst of these experiments, the critic Clement Greenberg came to visit Krasner and Pollock. He saw, on the floor of Pollock’s studio, an unfinished painting covered in a tangle of yellow lines stretching from one end of the canvas to the other. On the walls were other, finished paintings that seemed less bold, since most of the paint had been applied more traditionally. But Greenberg squinted at the work on the floor and said, “That’s interesting. Why don’t you do eight or ten of those?”
Pollock took his advice. Working like this, day after day, he created paintings that covered his large canvases from edge to edge. The results were not just arrestingly physical and direct; they were also remarkably various—in color, texture, and emotional key. Some, with their pools of aluminum paint crisscrossed by meandering splatter lines or slashed by thin flicks, like streaking comets or wind-whipped rain, had an overall gauzy or spidery look. The resulting images twinkled and pulsed, evoking distant galaxies and the deep recession of space. Henry McBride, writing in The New York Sun in 1949, described the spattering of one such painting as “handsome and organized,” creating the effect of “a flat, war-shattered city, possibly Hiroshima, as seen from a great height in the moonlight.” Others were heavily congested, with thick layers of paint buttressed by foot- and handprints or pebbles or studio detritus, all of it vying tumultuously on the surface. Alert to their idiosyncrasies, Pollock gave them fittingly evocative titles, from Galaxy and Phosphorescence to Full Fathom Five, Enchanted Forest, Lucifer, and Cathedral [see Plate 13].
According to the critic Parker Tyler, writing in 1950, “Pollock’s paint flies through space like elongating bodies of comets and, striking the blind alley of the flat canvas, bursts into frozen visibilities.” His skeins of paint were like a labyrinth that “has no main exit any more than it has a main entrance, for every movement is automatically a liberation—simultaneously entrance and exit.”
—
PEGGY GUGGENHEIM WAS ONE of the first people to see these paintings and to acquire them. She would also have been the first to show them, but she had been growing tired of New York, and in 1947 she decided to close Art of This Century and move to Venice. Before she left, she managed to cajole another dealer, Betty Parsons, into taking on Pollock. So it was at the Betty Parsons Gallery that the drip paintings were first displayed en masse.
They were by no means universally admired. Some critics decried them as infantile and primitive blurts. Others found them decorative, complacent, devoid of tension. But everyone could see that they were unprecedented. No one had painted like this before. And something about them caught on in people’s imaginations—in the minds not only of critics such as Greenberg (who continued to encourage Pollock down the path he was on), but also of Pollock’s fellow artists. Few of these artists could articulate what excited them about Pollock’s achievement. Fewer still had anything openly admiring to say. But several of the best of them—including de Kooning—sensed that something extraordinary had happened, and watched all the more intently.
—
BACK IN DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN, stories of Pollock’s anarchic behavior—his penchant for picking fights, lewdly propositioning women, and shattering decorum wherever he sniffed it—had spread all through the fledgling avant-garde artist scene. For most people, Pollock’s behavior suggested a disturbed psychology. It was hard to fathom, harder to abide. But de Kooning, who would spend time with Pollock whenever Pollock came down from Long Island (usually in the company of other artists, such as Franz Kline), responded with instinctive sympathy. He was himself a man in whom ruthlessness, perversity, and a yearning for freedom ran deep. He talked unexpectedly about the younger man’s joy—his “desperate joy”—and he looked at Pollock—the person as much as the artist—with frank envy:
I was jealous of him—his talent. But he was a remarkable person. He’d do things that were so terrific…He had this way of sizing up new people very quickly. We’d be sitting at a table and some young fellow would come in. Pollock wouldn’t even look at him, he’d just nod his head—like a cowboy—as if to say, “fuck off.” That was his favorite expression—“Fuck off.” It was really funny, he wouldn’t even look at him…
De Kooning continued:
Franz Kline told me a story about one day when Pollock came by all dressed up. He was going to take Franz to lunch—they were going to a fancy place. Halfway through the meal Pollock noticed that Franz’s glass was empty. He said, “Franz, have some more wine.” He filled the glass and became so involved in watching the wine pour out of the bottle that he emptied the whole bottle. It covered the food, the table, everything. He said, “Franz, have some more wine.” Like a child he thought it was a terrific idea—all that wine going all over. Then he took the four corners of the table cloth—pick[ed] it up and set it on the floor. In front of all those people! He put the goddamn thing on the floor—paid for it and they let him go. Wonderful that he could do that. Those waiters didn’t take any shit and there was a guy at the door and everything. It was such an emotion—such life.
Another time we were at Franz’s place. Fantastic. It was small, very warm and packed with people drinking. The windows were little panes of glass. Pollock looked at this guy and said, “You need a little more air,” and he punched a window out with his fist. At the moment it was so delicious—so belligerent. Like children we broke all the windows. To do things like that. Terrific.
What de Kooning admired in Pollock, in other words, was not unlike what Freud saw in Francis Bacon: It was a quality that had as much to do with Pollock’s perspective on life as with his achievement as an artist—although what seemed most marvelous, perhaps, was that the two things were impossible to separate. If the attraction was linked in some way to aesthetics, it was not primarily about the beauty of paint on canvas. It was about the beauty of life unshackled. It was about the appeal of liberating oneself—from expectations, from decorum, from morality—and touching an inner core of innocence.
And so when de Kooning saw Pollock’s Betty Parsons show in 1948—eighteen paintings in all—he took notice. When he began to pay attention to Pollock’s intoxicating attitude, his outrageous behavior, and above all his manner of painting, he could see exactly what it was he was missing in his own work. “On the floor I am more at ease,” Pollock had explained. “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting…When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I am doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about.”
De Kooning wanted a share of this same feeling—this sense of being in his paintings, unaware of what he was doing. Pollock’s lack of self-consciousness, the sense of unimpeded, rippling release his paintings conveyed, offered an antidote to everything—all the endless revisions and erasures—that were holding de Kooning back. The eighteen paintings Pollock showed at Betty Parsons gave off a feeling almost of impudence. They weren’t waiting for anyone’s approval.
—
SO DE KOONING BEGAN now to cut loose in his own painting. He embraced a level of sp
ontaneity he had resisted up until then, slathering on paint with a loaded brush—and, as he put it, “going to town.” Unlike Pollock, he still worked primarily with brushes, and at an upright easel. But he painted wet-into-wet, making use of drips and different levels of viscosity and resistance, not all of it under his control. And he often, like Pollock, rotated the canvas. (You can tell because some of the drips change direction.) On the strength of the resulting work, a series of abstract paintings in black and white, de Kooning finally consented—after years of resisting, saying he wasn’t yet ready—to making his first real stand in public: a solo show at Charlie Egan’s.
The show opened in April 1948. It included ten pictures, all painted within the previous year. Touches of bright color showed through the blacks and dirty whites in glimpses that tickled and mobilized the eye. Ostensibly abstract, many of the works actually had incidental figurative elements. Others were made up of large letters or numbers in random formations. Contours that begin to suggest three-dimensional forms fall back into shadow; others fasten the eye to their surfaces with passages of drips or textured impasto. The Dutchman frequently mixed his paints on the canvas, so that his curved and hooking white lines smeared into shades of gray. Fluid white paint that was applied on top of the more settled and glossy blacks often broke up into textured marks suggesting speed and blur, or animal fur. Positive forms and negative space continually switched places as de Kooning tried both to compress space and to carve it out, now with line, now with tone, now with the paint’s facture, with erasures and ghost contours, with smudges, scrapes, and swipes. There is something ferocious and hard-won about the results. They testify to de Kooning’s excitement. You know as you look at them that the artist is in the grip of something—and murderously close to finding it.
The Art of Rivalry Page 28
