The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

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  EGAN DID ALL HE COULD to generate interest in de Kooning’s show. In a letter to Alfred Barr, the Museum of Modern Art curator, he claimed that de Kooning was “creating the most important paintings of our time.” But as the show’s scheduled one-month run came to a close, Egan’s efforts looked to have failed. Nothing had sold. With little to lose, he decided to extend the show for a second month. Again, there were no bites. The longer it went on, the more humiliated de Kooning felt. “It made things seem more hopeless,” remembered Elaine, still closely involved with de Kooning, despite their separation.

  And yet all was not lost. The show may have been ignored by the mainstream press, but critics from several art magazines showed up. Their reviews were intelligent, and in some cases enthusiastic. Sam Hunter couldn’t decide whether de Kooning’s method added up to “an impression of imprisonment…or one of lugubrious vacillation”—an amazingly acute observation. The ambivalence in de Kooning’s work was precisely what Greenberg warmed to. Ever on guard against the tendency for artistic virtuosity to descend into kitsch, Greenberg appreciated work that made a virtue of its own birth pangs. Gaucheness, evidence of effort, and a lack of finish were all signs of sincerity in Greenberg’s eyes, signs of genuine striving rather than spiritual coasting. “Having chosen at last, in his early forties, to show his work, [de Kooning] comes before us in his maturity, in possession of himself, with his means under control, and with enough knowledge of himself to exclude all irrelevancies,” he wrote. He was alert to the tension in de Kooning’s work between virtuosity and the search for a truthful originality. “Emotion that demands singular, original expression tends to be censored out by a really great facility, for facility has a stubbornness of its own and is loath to abandon easy satisfactions.” The “indeterminateness or ambiguity” in de Kooning’s paintings was the outcome, he suggested, of the artist’s heroic “effort to suppress his facility.” At this stage, believed Greenberg, de Kooning still lacked “the force of Pollock” and the “sensuousness of Gorky,” and he was “more enmeshed in contradictions than either,” but he had it in him “to attain a more clarified art and to provide more viable solutions to the problems of painting.” All that was enough, according to Greenberg, to make him “one of the four or five most important painters in the country.”

  Thanks largely to Egan’s persistence, a handful of works from the show did eventually sell, including one to the Museum of Modern Art. And now, suddenly, there was a wider buzz around de Kooning—almost comparable to the excitement Pollock had generated three years earlier. This expatriate Dutchman, so widely admired by his fellow painters, so full of integrity that he had refused to show his work as he struggled through years of poverty, was at last revealing himself to the world. And what he had to show looked good.

  To his fellow painters, moreover, it pointed a way forward. Where Pollock’s outlandish manner of dripping and pouring paint remained beyond the pale for many artists who were still committed to varieties of easel painting based in drawing, de Kooning had come up with a manner of painting that was direct, robust, and even explosive, but still within the bounds of tradition.

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  POLLOCK, BY THIS TIME, was again careening about in a state of despair and rising panic. Despite many warm reviews (and de Kooning’s evident enthusiasm), his breakthrough Betty Parsons show had been a financial disaster. Abstract art remained a hard sell in New York. Abstract art made by a man from the Midwest who splattered paint onto a canvas on the floor was harder yet. That was the reality. What’s more, Peggy Guggenheim’s precipitous departure for Venice had left Pollock and Krasner without crucial financial support. They had received their last check from her when the Parsons show closed. Pollock wouldn’t get a comparable contract out of Parsons until the following June. By March, he and Krasner were in a hole.

  So when de Kooning’s show started winning plaudits—quietly at first, but snowballing, so that the excitement continued to build well after the show had closed—Pollock felt threatened and lost his composure. Conscious that all the young painters were suddenly talking about de Kooning, he arrived at a party for artists at Jack the Oysterman’s fish restaurant on 8th Street with anarchy in his eyes. “He lashed out at everyone, and no-one could say anything to please him,” remembered Ethel Baziotes. “He was insulting to his good friends in a way I’d never seen before.” The episode culminated in a confrontation not with de Kooning but with de Kooning’s former mentor and comrade-in-arms Arshile Gorky.

  Gorky was not in a good way at the time, as Pollock must have known. Two years previously, his studio had burned down. He had then undergone a colostomy for cancer of the colon. He now had to rely on a bag attached to an opening in his abdomen to eliminate waste. At the party, he was using a knife to whittle away at a pencil when Pollock approached and started shouting insults at him, mocking his paintings. There was a tense standoff. Gorky held his tongue and simply kept on whittling. The tirade ended only when the artist William Baziotes cut in, insisting that Pollock shut up.

  Pollock was not one to calculate far in advance. But it’s likely that, given de Kooning’s earlier attachment to Gorky, Pollock saw an attack on him as an indirect way of discharging his jealousy over de Kooning’s success. If so, it wouldn’t be the last time Pollock suppressed and garbled his emotions in such a way.

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  BOTH POLLOCK AND DE KOONING were acutely conscious of the roles in which they had already been cast by critics and contemporaries: trailblazers, leaders, and therefore—inevitably—rivals. They were naturally wary of each other. Yet whatever tensions existed between them soon relaxed into a gruff camaraderie and a sincere, mutual admiration.

  That spring, before taking up an invitation to teach over the summer at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, de Kooning made his first trip to Long Island. He visited Pollock and Krasner in the company of Elaine, Franz Kline, and Charlie Egan. Nothing is recorded of what passed between them. But the trip evidently had its effect: Over the next few years, de Kooning spent more and more time in the region, and eventually moved to East Hampton. He chose a house just a few minutes away from Pollock and Krasner—right across from the cemetery where Pollock is now buried.

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  POLLOCK WAS PRODUCTIVE THAT summer and fall as he continued to develop his new style of painting. But he was as erratic and dangerous as ever. He had purchased a used and battered Model A Ford for $90 and was now driving about Long Island in various states of inebriation. Krasner worried. Pollock’s mother, Stella, who heard about the car, wrote an eerie admonition to his brother Frank: “He should not drive & drink [or] he will kill himself or someone.”

  At a party in Manhattan, Pollock’s behavior veered from the bewildering to the terrifying. Having picked a fight with William Phillips, the editor of Partisan Review, he prepared to launch himself at him, before suddenly choosing instead to seize the expensive shoe of Clement Greenberg’s girlfriend, Sue Mitchell, and, in front of everyone, rip it to pieces. He then went to the window, which was several stories up, and began to climb out, seemingly ready to jump. Mark Rothko and Phillips got to him just in time, pulling him to the floor.

  Gorky was also at the party. To add to his woes—the studio fire, the cancer—his neck had recently been broken in a car accident. The driver of the car was his dealer, Julien Levy. The catastrophe came shortly after he discovered that his beloved wife, Agnes, had had an affair with the artist Roberto Matta. He could take no more. He hanged himself in July.

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  IT COULDN’T GO ON. It went on, and on. And then, for a while, it didn’t: Pollock stopped drinking.

  The ostensible catalyst was straightforward: He had begun seeing a new doctor. His name was Edwin Heller, and immediately, Pollock trusted him. That was enough. Living at Springs with Krasner, enveloped in space and light, surrounded by Long Island’s flat, sandy terrain cradled by swampy inlets and open seas, he was clearheaded for the first time in years, and creatively on f
ire. The couple’s money worries were eased by a one-year grant—four quarterly payments of $1,500. And then, midway through 1949, Pollock obtained a contract with Parsons along the same lines as his earlier arrangement with Guggenheim. More important, he was now beginning to get the kind of attention he had always wanted. He was becoming, that is, spectacularly famous.

  Pollock had his second solo show at Betty Parsons in January 1949: twenty-six works, including large drip paintings and various works on paper. Once again, the critical responses varied hugely. One reviewer said the paintings reminded her of “a tangled mop of hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out.” But Greenberg held firm: Writing in The Nation, he said Pollock had done more than enough to justify the claim that he was “one of the major painters of our time.” Addressing Pollock’s painting Number One (since renamed Number 1A and acquired in 1950 by the Museum of Modern Art) , he declared: “I do not know of any other painting by an American that I could safely put next to this huge baroque scrawl in aluminum, black, white, madder, and blue. Beneath the apparent monotony of its surface composition it reveals a sumptuous variety of design and incident, and as a whole it is as well contained in its canvas as anything by a Quattrocento master.”

  The previous fall, 1948, Life magazine had organized a roundtable discussion in which a panel of invited participants was asked to address the question of whether “modern art, considered as a whole, [was] a good or bad development.” Life felt that it had a stake in the debate. A mildly conservative publication, it was, with a weekly readership of around five million people, the largest-selling magazine in America. Its editors’ concern was that modern art appeared to have divorced itself from morality, that it had no “ethical or theological references.” And so, with a view to exploring the issue, it assembled a panel of public intellectuals and critics, including Aldous Huxley and Clement Greenberg, to consider various modern works, one of the more “extreme” of which was Pollock’s vertically oriented 1947 drip painting Cathedral.

  Huxley, for one, was unimpressed: “It seems to me,” he said, “like a panel for a wallpaper which is repeated indefinitely around the wall.” Another participant, a professor of philosophy, thought Pollock’s painting would make “a pleasant design for a necktie.”

  Greenberg, however, was there to defend Pollock, and modern art in general, and he did so with his usual punchy vigor. He was a man who loved passing judgment. Over the next few years, he vigorously promoted his own particular vision of art and its place in the postwar world. If the criteria he applied did not always withstand skeptical scrutiny, his writing was nonetheless trenchant and clear and he always impressed with the speed and confidence of his appraisals.

  Later on, as Greenberg’s influence flourished, he became notorious for coming to artists’ studios and telling them how and what to paint. De Kooning experienced this himself: Greenberg had visited his studio and, unbidden, offered advice. “He knew all about everything,” remembered de Kooning, who quickly tired of the encounter and “got rid of him. I said, ‘Get out of my house.’ ” Yet in truth, Greenberg’s advice could often be helpful. It certainly had been for Pollock in 1946. And now, at the discussion organized by Life, he was defending not just modern art, but the modern artists he most admired. Speaking up fearlessly, he called Cathedral a “first-class example of Pollock’s work, and one of the best paintings recently produced in this country.”

  Life knew it was onto something. It had a vigorous culture department, and its chief editor, Henry Luce, enjoyed stirring up debate with editorials denouncing modern art as a hoax. So a few months after the issue with the discussion of modern art appeared, the magazine sent the portrait photographer Arnold Newman to Pollock’s studio to take pictures of him at work.

  The results of Newman’s sessions at the Fireplace Road studio were so compelling that Life’s editors decided to go ahead with an article they had been pondering since the roundtable discussion. They commissioned new photographs of Pollock at work—this time taken by Martha Holmes—and in July, Pollock and Krasner turned up at the offices of Life in Rockefeller Center to be interviewed by a young journalist called Dorothy Seiberling. The ensuing conversation was wide-ranging. In the transcript, Krasner’s contributions are not differentiated from Pollock’s, so it’s hard to be sure of who said what. But some of what was said Pollock must later have regretted—including the claim, which appears in the transcript, that Pollock was the first painter in his family. The implication, left dangling, was that Charles and Sande had been inspired to take up art by him, rather than the other way around.

  But if that claim was a blatant fabrication, another claim Pollock made in the interview was touchingly sincere. Asked to name his favorite artists, he nominated two: Wassily Kandinsky—a familiar name, long established as a central figure in modernist abstraction—and then a name almost no reader of Life would have recognized: Willem de Kooning.

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  THE FOLLOWING MONTH, A two-and-a-half-page spread appeared in the magazine under the title: IS HE THE GREATEST LIVING PAINTER IN THE UNITED STATES? The spread had a photo of Pollock posing in front of one of his long, horizontal drip paintings. His arms were folded, his head cocked arrogantly to one side, and a cigarette dangled from his lips. With his right leg crossed in front of the weight-bearing left, he seemed to be leaning back against the painting as if it were an old pickup truck. He looked for all the world, said de Kooning, “like some guy who works at a service station pumping gas.”

  The Life article played a crucial role not just in the story of Pollock’s life but, soon enough, in the annals of American culture. Its appearance went beyond mere controversy. The article, and all the interest it generated, acted as a seed crystal for inchoate forces in American culture that cannot easily be summarized. They included both America’s vaunting postwar confidence—a confidence that yearned to see a reflection of itself in art—and a post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima consciousness of existential extremity. A consciousness that yearned, above all, perhaps, for transcendence. Pollock became famous, in part, because his paintings seemed to answer to these collective yearnings. They were indubitably modern, they were aggressive, they were difficult. And yet they could also be seen as beautiful, decorative, and transcendent, too. They looked like nothing that had come before them. Even as they triggered widespread dismay among many of Life’s readers, the sheer jolt of their appearance—and the photogenic force of Pollock himself—was enough to overcome any attempt to downplay their significance—to dismiss them as “wallpaper” or “a mop of tangled hair” or any of the other pejoratives they picked up.

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  WHEN POLLOCK’S THIRD SHOW at Betty Parsons opened in November 1949, it was clear that everything had changed. The gallery overflowed, not just with the usual crowd of artists and strivers, but with bejeweled women in fashionable dresses and men in sharp suits. De Kooning turned up with his friend Milton Resnick, who remembered noticing, as he walked in the door, that “people were shaking hands. Most of the time when you went to an opening, all you saw were other people that you knew, but there were a lot of people there that I’d never seen before. I said to Bill, ‘What’s all this shaking about?’ And he said, ‘Look around. These are the big shots. Jackson has broken the ice.’ ”

  Pollock’s triumph made de Kooning acutely conscious that he, like every other struggling American avant-garde artist, was in Pollock’s shadow. But he was smart enough to realize that the game had changed. Pollock had achieved what none of them had hitherto looked capable of: He had forced people to look at his work. And he had made sure that once they did, they would not look away without having formed a response that was geared to the aggression in the art itself. He had done more than just break the ice; he had put his fist through the glass pane separating modern American art from its potentially enormous public. New vistas opened up.

  De Kooning saw all this. But of course, Pollock’s achievement wasn’t simply about connecting modern art with a public. It was
about generating possibilities for the creation of art itself.

  Pollock’s new pictorial language was in many ways a dauntingly private one—skeins of paint veiling imagery inscribed in the air—and it gestured precisely at what Pollock could never directly communicate: his dramatic and oftentimes intolerable inner life. But it was expansive, it was urgent, and it was full of potential.

  Now, as de Kooning built on breakthroughs at least partly inspired by Pollock’s shows at Betty Parsons, he seemed to sense that all bets were off. Nothing need hold him back any longer. The moment was his to seize.

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  AND YET DE KOONING, ever the equivocator, still seemed hesitant. It was as if he were standing on a threshold, trying to decide which room he wanted to be in, and relishing the uncertainty; a state of ambivalence was his creative sweet spot. In his own work he was alternating between figurative and abstract imagery—between, on the one hand, luridly colored canvases of seated women and, on the other, predominantly black-on-white abstractions that, like Pollock’s drip paintings, had no focal points, just curved and hooking black lines that went in and out of focus, the overall effect recalling the Cubism of Picasso and Braque but with more Matissean voluptuousness, more explosiveness, more mess. His paintings were heavily worked, full of erasures and second thoughts. “Whenever a figure would start to appear de Kooning would cross-hatch it out,” explained the artist Ruth Abrams. But the end results were much freer, and also more unified, than his earlier pictures. Loaded with doubts and ambiguities, they nevertheless managed to carve out what felt like a coherent pocket of space and time, rather than an endless and anguished unspooling in dissonant registers.

  At the beginning of 1950, de Kooning started work on Excavation [see Plate 14]. More than six feet high by more than eight feet wide, it was the largest canvas he had ever painted. He worked on it for four or five months. It began as a multi-figure composition—most likely three figures in an interior—but slowly the figures dissolved into their surroundings, and the pictorial space flattened out into a stretched scrim of fleeting forms twisting and breaking and puncturing the surface. The dominant color is an off-white, tinged with a yellow-green, and differentiated by black and gray lines of different widths, hooking and curving as if twisting against the painting’s vertical and horizontal limits. Glimpses of bright, lavish, colors—especially the three primaries: red, yellow, and blue—burst through at seemingly random points, as do glimpses of grinning teeth and leering eyes. And yet, as Harold Rosenberg wrote in 1964, “For all the protracted agitation that produced it, ‘Excavation’ was a classical painting, majestic and distant, like a formula wrung out of testing explosives.”