The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

  Excavation was de Kooning’s masterpiece. It was painted with brushes, not with poured or dripped paint. But it was, in the manner of Pollock’s drip paintings, an “all-over” composition. The painting’s energy and interest were evenly distributed from top to bottom and from left to right. There may have been wisps of figurative imagery, but the painting was essentially abstract. Looking at a reproduction of it in 1983, de Kooning described its making to the writer Curtis Bill Pepper, for a story in The New York Times Magazine:

  “ ‘I think I started here,’ he observed, pointing to the upper left-hand corner. ‘I said, “We’ll make a stab at it here.” I wasn’t thinking about any method or manner that had realities. So you do a little bit, and you feel comfortable with it. Then you say, “I’ll make it open here and closed here,” and that way you go around and around, a little bit at a time. It’s always coming out nice, because you can keep going on what’s connected to it. Because if you keep a section you’re comfortable with, you can build out from it, little by little.’ ”

  De Kooning’s way of getting into the canvas appeared to relate to Pollock’s notion of being in the canvas; but there remained one crucial difference: Pollock didn’t work “little by little.”

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  SUDDENLY, BOTH MEN WERE riding high. Pollock had become famous in a way that even he could never have imagined. His work was talked about by all the people who counted and was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. He was being described as the best painter in America, an artist who made even Picasso look dated.

  De Kooning’s first major financial windfall did not come until the following year, when Excavation was awarded a prize by the Art Institute of Chicago (and was subsequently purchased by the museum). But other rewards were already coming his way. In April 1950, Alfred Barr chose Excavation and three other de Kooning paintings to represent the United States, alongside work by Pollock and six other painters, at the 25th Venice Biennale. (Four years later, both Bacon and Freud represented Great Britain at the same event.) Both men’s works were purchased by the Museum of Modern Art and by major collectors. They were featured in popular magazines, debated by high-minded critics.

  But having painted Excavation, de Kooning chose to retreat from abstraction. He embarked instead on a series of huge, aggressive works showing big-busted women with monstrous faces and bared teeth who all seemed to have emerged, in a vengeful mood, from behind the scrim of paint in Excavation. Their presence was conjured by a welter of agitated brushstrokes, repeatedly blurred, erased, and reapplied in unruly colors. De Kooning struggled with the first of them, Woman I, for almost two years. Pollock’s influence may have helped to free him in some ways. But he was still tortured by doubts, and by a technique that did not allow for anything like the freedom Pollock had embraced. At one point, despairing of ever finishing Woman I, de Kooning actually threw it out. He was only persuaded to retrieve it from the trash by the critic Meyer Schapiro.

  The struggle to pull off the Woman paintings set off rising anxiety and heart palpitations in de Kooning. To quell these symptoms he turned to alcohol. Still, at least on the face of it, success was tangibly his; it was no longer just a future possibility.

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  FOR POLLOCK, ON THE OTHER HAND, 1950 marked the beginning of a sudden decline—a fall so precipitous, in fact, that, looking back, it is as if his life had simply imploded; as if all the straining and striving and—finally—the fertile gushing forth had simply been switched off, his life forced into a sudden, ignominious, and directionless collapse.

  What happened? Pollock’s fame, when it finally arrived, was unmanageable. His creative breakthrough had been made possible by the absence in his personality of the very tools he now needed to cope: a sense of restraint and proportion; what in the social realm is called perspective or maturity; what the short story writer Alice Munro once witheringly called the “decent narrowness of range” of most responsible men. The lack of these very things was what de Kooning, for one, found so attractive in Pollock. But if these absent constraints were engines of creativity and excitement, they were also, in the social sense—and perhaps even in the existential sense—deep flaws: Pollock’s drinking bore directly on his capacity to survive.

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  HIS DISINTEGRATION BEGAN AT the height of his acclaim when, in March 1950, his therapist, Dr. Edwin Heller—who had done so much to keep Pollock’s alcoholism at bay—died in a car crash. Then, in July, Pollock’s family descended on the house at Fireplace Road for a reunion. Rather than basking in the glow of newfound fame and the massive validation it implied, Pollock was a soul in turmoil during these few days. In front of his family—including the brothers he had tried so hard to emulate, and who had rescued him from abjection time and time again—he did not know how to handle himself. His behavior lurched dementedly between sweet hospitality and insufferable showing off. His brothers and their skeptical spouses were initially dismayed, then disgusted. And so Pollock’s proudest, most triumphant moment turned acrid.

  A few months later, after repeatedly visiting the studio to take photographs, Hans Namuth came to film Pollock at work. The filming, which took place out of doors, dragged on over several excruciating weeks as the temperatures slowly fell. Namuth had no compunction about directing Pollock in front of the camera, telling him what to do and how to do it. He was looking for imagery that would be as dramatic and compelling as possible. And indeed the finished film is intensely memorable. It shows the painter hypnotically absorbed in what he is doing. Concentrating fiercely, he seems as in tune with nature and magic and instinct as one of the “Indian sand painters of the West” for whom, in a brief voiceover, the artist expresses a special affinity. “Because a painting has a life of its own,” he says at one point—“I try to let it live.” And: “There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.”

  Ironically, given the tremendous psychological toll it would take on Pollock, Namuth’s footage went on to seal the painter’s legend. The images, as much as Pollock’s actual paintings, prepared the way for an endless cultural unfurling over the following decades. They were understood and transposed in countless ways. They led to—or tangentially inspired—everything from avant-garde dance, performance art, “happenings,” Land Art, and graffiti art to Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire at Monterey in 1967 and Andy Warhol urinating on copper to produce his so-called piss paintings in the 1970s. But what they communicated, above all, was abandon—a yearning for liberation and a volatility that might as easily result in destruction as creation.

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  POLLOCK BEGAN NAMUTH’S FILMING as a willing participant. But he had always detested the idea of “phoniness.” As the sessions went on he felt more and more like a fraud, so that by the end, he was spiritually scooped out. The weather had turned frigid as Pollock was posed, now pulling on paint-splattered boots, now painting on glass with Namuth’s camera recording his drips and flicks and puddling pools from beneath. When the sessions finally ended, Krasner had a belated Thanksgiving dinner waiting for everyone inside. The ordeal of filming day after grinding day had reduced Pollock to despair. His faith in what he was doing and what he had done, in his whole achievement to date, had seemed to drain from him visibly as the camera rolled. He now came inside and poured himself a drink.

  And that was the beginning of the end. By 1951, after three years off alcohol—years when anything seemed possible—Pollock was once more a violent, drunken wreck, who could find no convincing way to advance his art.

  It’s easy to say that Pollock’s problems began and ended with drinking. But what is not so clear—what is never clear, since blurred vision is the whole point of drinking—is why he drank. Naifeh and Smith wrote that for Pollock, “drunkenness was humiliation.” But, they added, “it was manly humiliation.” That was surely part of its attraction. There was a framework, an established tolerance, for the macho drunk who rumbled and caroused and called out abuse, like Hemingway, or who grew menacing like St
anley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. (Interestingly, Williams wrote his play after spending time with Pollock in Provincetown.) Pollock’s exaggerated displays of machismo were in sync, moreover, with the times. They were one more symptom of a homophobic reaction in American art in the 1930s against the perceived threat of “sissification”—of an effete and enfeebled culture. Benton’s Regionalist polemics, which played up narrowly masculine values as much as rural American ones, were one aspect of this. In many ways, the heroic, existentialist, and very macho rhetoric of the Abstract Expressionists who came to prominence in the late 1940s was but a continuation of the same theme.

  Many commentators also believe that Pollock’s psychic confusion—and thus also his drinking—was entangled to some uncertain degree with sexual confusion. When Jeffrey Potter was composing an oral history of Pollock, he delicately asked de Kooning about the rumors that Pollock may have been gay. De Kooning called it “the most bizarre idea I ever heard in my life.” Pressed, however, he remembered how Pollock might “put you in his arms and give you a big kiss and I [would] kiss him back.” But this, he said, was hardly unusual: “Maybe artists are a little bit more sentimental or romantic about kissing each other,” he speculated, a combination of irritation and amusement in his voice. If Pollock was gay, he concluded, “it was so deep inside of him [that] every man has it too.”

  Pollock’s biographers, Naifeh and Smith, laid out masses of evidence to undermine de Kooning’s certitude. And yet it may be that Pollock was simply as confused in his sexual identity as he was in other aspects of his identity. This confusion bubbled to the surface as anguish, self-loathing, and extreme social behavior that routinely spilled over into physicality. Misogynistic outbursts blurred into clumsy passes (made with no apparent expectation that they might lead anywhere), unwanted groping, and actual assaults on women, all on a regular basis. Rumbling with men—especially fellow artists who triggered confused feelings of admiration and competition—was also routine, and the line between friendly high jinks, actual ardor, and frightening aggression was extremely permeable.

  The stories of Pollock’s physical fights with other men are legion. In 1945, Pollock’s old and frequently tense friendship with Philip Guston, who had been a fellow student back at Manual Arts in California, had come to a head at a party thrown by Sande. Pollock had already embraced abstraction at this point and was entering his most fruitful phase. He turned on Guston, who was painting allegorical works in a figurative style that was beginning to look old hat. “Goddamn it,” exploded Pollock, “I won’t stand for the way you’re painting! I won’t stand for it!” He threatened to throw Guston out the window. A drawn-out fistfight ensued.

  Three years later, Pollock was at a dinner party held by John Little and Ward Bennett. (Bennett, who was gay, later claimed he could tell that Pollock was sexually interested in him.) Igor Pantuhoff, Krasner’s former lover, was also at the party. Pollock began drunkenly chasing him through the house. The two men, in front of a mortified Krasner, ended up outside on the rain-soaked lawn. According to Bennett, “They started rolling in the mud, but it was very bizarre. They weren’t really fighting, they were sort of wrestling and sort of kissing each other at the same time” (not unlike the men in Two Figures, Francis Bacon’s 1953 painting of wrestlers, or lovers, which Lucian Freud had acquired).

  In the 1950s, as Pollock and de Kooning’s fame peaked, drinking, braggadocio, and violence became a fixture in the bars they frequented—most famously, the Cedar Tavern. Shoves and punches were par for the course. Stevens and Swan tell of a time when Pollock kept pushing Franz Kline, de Kooning’s closest friend, off his barstool. “He did it once, he did it twice, and then Kline, suddenly, turned on Pollock, slammed him against the wall, and slugged him in the gut with a left and then a right. ‘Jackson was much taller,’ said an observer, ‘and so surprised, and happy—he laughed in his pain and bent over, as Franz told me, [and] whispered, ‘Not so hard.’ ”

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  POLLOCK MAY HAVE ACHIEVED fame by midcentury, but despite all the notoriety and critical acclaim, most people still found his paintings intolerably radical. His shows were failing to sell, which led to fights with his dealer, Betty Parsons, over money. For a period of two years, between 1951 and 1953, he virtually banished color from his painting, turning out dozens of works of overlapping skeins of black enamel paint that meshed with one another and with the canvas itself. Many were powerful: Pollock’s November 1951 show at the Betty Parsons Gallery was filled with these paintings of diluted black enamel squirted and flicked and dripped onto unprimed beige cotton duck, and the cumulative impact was nothing if not arresting. Most had recognizable figurative elements—faces and bodies that were demarcated by clear lines and carved out by patches of pitch black. These elements were obscured and tangled up in other lines, but they were indisputably a return to figurative drawing, and they suggested the deep interest with which Pollock had been looking both at the black-and-white paintings de Kooning had been making over the previous four years, and at the spectral figures that haunted Excavation.

  Pollock’s relationship with Krasner, meanwhile, was deeply strained. As Pollock’s drinking had resumed, Krasner was in the invidious position of being the only one close enough to him to impose even a semblance of control on his life. She accepted the role, and even played it to the hilt. Some who knew the couple accused her of being too controlling, and exacerbating his problems. But there are no winners in such situations, and no right answers. Pollock’s alcoholism was extreme. In her attempts at dealing with it, Krasner was trying to protect not only his reputation and his ability to function as a creative artist but his life. No one—least of all a spouse—can play such a role and escape recriminations.

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  WITH HIS UNBOUNDED, CHILDLIKE PERSONALITY, Pollock was poorly equipped for fame. According to his friend, the artist Cile Downs: “He never got over the fact that people don’t love you as much when you’re big and successful as they did when you are poor and a nonentity.” Like all boasters (and Pollock’s boasting bordered on the hysterical), he was undermined by self-doubt. He simply didn’t know if he could continue to produce work as commanding as his early drip paintings. And for all his bluster, he remained vulnerable to criticisms even of those works. He never quite accepted their legitimacy.

  By 1952, a backlash had set in. Critics who had formerly championed him had turned against him. Fellow artists, envying his success but doubting its validity, bickered about him. They mocked him openly, ignoring his incessant demands for attention and respect, preferring instead the company of the more good-humored and socially fluent de Kooning. An artists’ club had formed—it was called, with ominous literal-mindedness, “The Club.” De Kooning presided. Pollock, who rarely attended, was pointedly marginalized when he did.

  The impulse, perhaps, is to shake one’s head and think, Poor misguided Pollock. He was a genius. If only he had believed in himself. But it is not so simple. His decline has been analyzed binge by binge, month by month, each disastrous misdeed appropriately cross-referenced with childhood episodes and other early warning signs. What emerges most strongly is a sense of his incredible loneliness during these final years. Constantly seeking connections, Pollock found himself instead on a permanent war footing. He was a tormented man withdrawing step by step into the solitude of a private catastrophe. But he was not, throughout this time, wrestling only with his private demons. He was wrestling, often literally, with others, continually butting heads with the individuals—including de Kooning—whose camaraderie he craved the most.

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  LOOKING BACK, IT CAN sometimes seem as if, from 1950 on, Pollock and de Kooning were both playing parts in a play, an intimate two-hander, acted out before a vast crowd obscured in the proximate dark. They knew they were being watched more closely than any of their fellow artists. “Everyone’s shit but de Kooning and me,” as Pollock bluntly told the artist Grace Hartigan in 1950.

 
But even as both artists grasped what was at stake (triumph, vindication, lasting acclaim), they both seemed to register the essential absurdity of the “Who is the greatest?” game that was presently taken up all around them. It’s possible that, had Pollock and de Kooning been left alone, their relationship may have continued to be good-humored, intimate, and creatively generative. But they were not left alone. Instead, extras poured onto the stage in increasing numbers, drowning out the two leads.

  None of these bit players was louder, more hectoring and possessive than the era’s two leading critics, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg.

  A familiar presence on the downtown art scene since before the war, Rosenberg was a tall, voluble, mustachioed man bristling with intellectual ambition. He was also a regular fixture in de Kooning’s studio. He had a meaty lower lip and dark, lavish eyebrows, and he was—for all his intellectual hauteur—a congenial and witty companion who loved to carouse and be one of the boys.

  Rosenberg had known Pollock, too, since the WPA days. His wife, May, had been the only witness to Pollock’s wedding to Krasner. Rosenberg admired Pollock as a painter, but had begun to find his behavior hard to tolerate. Their friendship had been souring for several years. It was hard for Rosenberg to forgive the night Pollock drove Krasner over to the house the Rosenbergs were renting in the Springs. Leaving a mortified Krasner in the car, he had banged on the door yelling for May. (Harold was away in Manhattan.) Pollock was intoxicated and out of control, and out to prove something to Krasner. Standing at the door, he began yelling.