The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

  “He said terrible, terrible things,” May told Naifeh and Smith, “threatening what he was going to do to me, using the foulest language, saying that I’d never have it so good.” The Rosenbergs’ seven-year-old daughter was woken by the abuse and appeared in due course, crying hysterically and waving a huge kitchen knife at Pollock. May had come to the window to shoo him away. It was only then that she saw Krasner in the car. It was immediately clear to her that Pollock was abusing her simply to get at Krasner. “He was taunting her and she was just taking it,” she said.

  Unlike de Kooning, who had quick wits and a gangster’s feeling for sophistry, Pollock didn’t have an intellectual bone in his body. If this was a source of insecurity in him, it was also a cause of ongoing frustration and dismay for Rosenberg, who thrived on intellectual disputation and soon came to the conclusion that Pollock just wasn’t up to it.

  Rosenberg’s authority over Pollock was not just intellectual, however; it was physical. “Harold was a big man,” remembered de Kooning. “He wasn’t scared of anybody. Not that he wanted to fight, but he would take anybody on…Jackson couldn’t do nothing, particularly when he was drunk.” Pollock was powerless before Rosenberg’s rising contempt. And after so many years, the critic was well and truly fed up. He was tired of Pollock’s alcoholism, his fumbling inarticulacy, his social disruptiveness. On one occasion, when Pollock came to visit, he once again began acting abrasively. Rosenberg rose to his full height (a good six feet five inches), took a very tall glass, filled it to the top with liquor, and handed it to Pollock. “Drink it,” he said.

  Pollock took a few sips and then left.

  —

  IN EARLY 1953, DE KOONING came over to the Pollock-Krasner residence in a buoyant mood. He had recently read an article by Rosenberg published in ARTNews. Pollock and Krasner had both already read the essay. “American Action Painters,” as it was called, was the critic’s first serious—and truly influential—foray into art criticism after more than a dozen years spent fraternizing with artists. Without mentioning any names, it championed the work that Rosenberg saw emerging from New York studios at midcentury—a time when, as he wrote, “the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined.”

  In ringing, rhythmic sentences that expressed an almost Olympian self-confidence, Rosenberg argued that this new work constituted a radical break from the art of the past. For the new American artists, what mattered, he said, was now no longer the image, be it abstract or representational, but the act of painting. “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture,” he wrote, “but an event.”

  Rosenberg’s essay was in many ways a high-minded reprise of the old Romantic trope of the individual pitted against the world. But his idea of the individual was very much in tune with his own historical moment—with a world that had just seen Europe and Japan reduced to rubble, had witnessed the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and was now studded with long-range nuclear weapons pointing at one another. The individual—unless he could muster up some real heroics—stood ready to be crushed. In such a world, insisted Rosenberg, important art could only be made by great individuals—individuals who accepted the new, existential realities, and were in revolt against false consciousness. Artists who were utterly sincere in the moment of creation.

  On the face of it, Rosenberg’s prescriptions sounded like a resounding validation of Pollock—his liberating new method; his treatment of the canvas as a physical arena; his willingness to risk all; his decisive break with the past. Even today, more than half a century after Rosenberg’s essay appeared, the terms drip painting (coined to describe Pollock’s method) and action painting are all but interchangeable.

  So de Kooning was surprised when, after he mentioned the essay approvingly, Krasner blew up. She attacked Rosenberg’s motives and integrity. She accused him of an underhanded attack on her husband, and of stealing the phrase action painting from a conversation he’d had with Pollock. Taken aback, de Kooning tried defending Rosenberg. But Krasner was in a vengeful mood, and before long, de Kooning beat a retreat. The following day, in a flurry of phone calls to friends, she accused de Kooning himself of “betraying her, betraying Jackson, betraying art.”

  —

  ROSENBERG LATER TRIED TO DENY that his essay was aimed at Pollock. But Krasner was right. She had read “The American Action Painters” all the way through. She had seen how, having laid out his case for greatness in contemporary painting, Rosenberg proceeded to rail against the kind of painting that, though it seems to answer to all his criteria, lacks integrity and is actually fraudulent. Even as the essay valorized de Kooning’s idea of painting as an ongoing struggle, combining thousands of decisions and calculated risks, it seemed to disparage Pollock for producing canvases that “lacked the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will,” and were merely decorated with the artist’s “own daily annihilation.” Using phrases that seemed to be aimed specifically at Pollock—like “commodity with a trademark” and “apocalyptic wallpaper”—he savaged art that peddled in mysticism and was corrupted by commerce.

  Even so, in the end, the essay was perhaps less an attack on Pollock than an intellectual assault on Pollock’s preeminent champion, Clement Greenberg. It was the most concerted offensive so far in Rosenberg’s hitherto unsuccessful struggle against Greenberg’s dominant influence over New York’s burgeoning avant-garde art scene.

  —

  IN THE SPACE OF just a few years, Greenberg had developed from being a mediocre Marxist literary critic with scant knowledge of art to an immensely influential tastemaker. His success was galling to Rosenberg. The two critics—both brilliant and bellicose—detested each other and had to be kept apart socially; their encounters too often descended into fistfights. Ironically, it had been Rosenberg who had introduced Greenberg to the editors of the Communist journal Partisan Review, which went on to publish Greenberg’s most important early essays on art—including “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and “Towards a Newer Laocoön.” In these now canonical pieces, Greenberg, following Trotsky, had insisted on the need for avant-garde art to retain its independence not only from bourgeois values, but also from explicitly leftist habits of thought: Only by retaining total independence, believed Greenberg, could art offer effective resistance to forces of standardization and control in society at large. To maintain this autonomy, he argued, progressive art had to burn away everything that was incidental to the medium itself. That meant ridding painting of its traditional preoccupation with creating illusions of three-dimensionality and depth. And it meant the end of all other gambits that were in less-than-total accord with the innate properties of the medium. The artwork, he believed, must be made to surrender to “the resistance of the medium.”

  To bolster this rather flimflam argument, Greenberg laid out a historical trajectory of modern artists who had advanced art by making pictures that were increasingly self-critical, or “honest,” about their own construction, and less and less concerned with the game of illusionism. His roll call of approved artists led from Manet, who dispensed with traditional modeling, to Cézanne and Matisse, whose styles dispensed in ever-greater degrees with the illusion of depth. And now, with Pollock’s drip paintings (which Greenberg himself had encouraged into being), a new chapter was beginning. Here was a whole new style of painting—a style that was abstract (there was no subject matter), direct (there was no underdrawing), depthless (his paint had been splattered straight onto the canvas), and “all-over” (there was no composition; the painting established an even field without center or edge).

  Rosenberg’s “American Action Painters” framed developments in recent American avant-garde art differently, and in so doing, it triggered a proxy war between the two critics—a war in which Pollock and de Kooning were essentially used as pawns. When the essay appeared, Greenberg declined to respond. But the crit
ics’ tussle for supremacy fanned out into the wider scene. The majority of critics and artists rallied around de Kooning and Rosenberg, turning on Pollock and on his main champion, Greenberg. The artists’ and critics’ wives joined the battle, with Elaine de Kooning and May Rosenberg pitting themselves against the “pompous” Greenberg and the “abrasive” Lee Krasner, both of whom, they felt, manipulated Pollock, promoting him at the expense of other artists. The atmosphere became toxic—and quite the reverse of the camaraderie that had reigned among these same people during the difficult WPA days and the war.

  The money, success, and public attention they craved had finally arrived—but they were unevenly distributed, and the party was spoiled.

  —

  THE INTELLECTUAL TUSSLE BETWEEN Greenberg and his foes was partly an argument over whether the future of painting lay solely in abstract (or “non-objective”) imagery, as Greenberg believed, or whether figurative imagery still had a place. De Kooning’s masterpiece Excavation had seemed to most observers to be entirely abstract and was praised accordingly by Greenberg. But de Kooning himself saw no clear distinction between abstract and figurative idioms. And in the immediate aftermath of Excavation, he had returned to painting figures.

  Greenberg was appalled by this. But for Pollock, who so admired de Kooning, it was more complicated. He felt torn. Part of the problem was that he was confused about where to take his own painting. Friends were urging him to try new things, to develop his work. He remained intrigued by the possibilities of figurative imagery, which he had returned to in his black paintings of the previous two years. He was sensitive to the criticism that his drip paintings were empty and decorative. He worried that the champions of abstract painting, especially Greenberg, would be “disturbed” by the reappearance of recognizable shapes in his work—a face here, a body there. But he was also getting a lot of heat, both in the press and from a skeptical public, for the apparent ease of his drip painting method, and he wanted to prove a point to “the kids who think it’s simple to splash a ‘Pollock’ out.” The resulting paintings were compelling, but they had failed to sell at Betty Parsons, and Pollock reverted to a state of creative block.

  —

  JUST A FEW MONTHS after Rosenberg’s “American Action Painters” appeared, de Kooning showed his Woman series for the first time, at Sidney Janis’s. Pollock came to the opening. He was surely impressed. The paintings conveyed feelings about women—a fascinated loathing and ecstatic dread, bordering on bruising defeat—he surely recognized. And de Kooning’s violent, splashy idiom, full of bravura brushwork but nonetheless boldly chancy, released from the painstaking methods of his earlier work, may have reminded him of his own breakthroughs.

  But Pollock was also confused by the paintings. They were figurative, not abstract. These were unmistakably representations of women. Pollock was still ripped up about the role figurative images had, or might go on to have, in his own faltering work. Had his own renewed experiments with figurative imagery constituted a retreat, a failure of nerve, as he suspected—and as he knew Greenberg believed? Or had they been a legitimate step forward? One thing was certain: The Woman paintings were at odds with the drive toward abstraction that Greenberg had so pungently theorized, using Pollock as his heroic exemplar.

  At the opening, feeling anything but heroic, Pollock became drunk—drunker than at least one friend, George Mercer, had ever seen him. Then, at a certain point, seeing de Kooning across the room, Pollock yelled at him: “Bill, you’ve betrayed it. You’re doing the figure, you’re still doing the same goddamn thing. You know you never got out of being a figure painter.”

  De Kooning’s response, according to onlookers, was cool. It was his show, there were supporters around. He said, “Well, what are you doing, Jackson?”

  It has never been clear what de Kooning intended by the question. Was he merely trying to remind Pollock that he, too, had tentatively included figurative imagery in his last show at Betty Parsons? Or was it instead a taunting reference to the situation everyone knew about by now: Pollock’s creative block, his struggle to come up with something new, and even to paint at all?

  However he took the question, Pollock was hushed by it. He left the opening and went to a bar. A short while later, he stepped out from the curb in front of an oncoming car. It had to swerve wildly to avoid him.

  —

  POLLOCK WAS INDEBTED TO GREENBERG. The critic had done so much to boost his success at crucial junctures—not just by offering him advice in the studio and declaiming his “greatness” on many occasions, but also by using him as the prime exemplar of his theories about the development of advanced art. It was not surprising, then, that Pollock depended on Greenberg’s approval. So when others began to attack him, to question his achievement or remark on his having lost his way, he naturally looked to Greenberg for support.

  But Greenberg by now had bigger, more cerebral battles to fight. Watching Pollock’s personal decline, he seems to have realized that he could not afford to hitch his reputation to a self-destructive drunk. And so over the next few years, as Pollock’s work seemed to fall off in quality and the creative gush of the late 1940s slowed to a desultory trickle, he quietly withdrew his support. He did organize a retrospective of Pollock’s work—eight paintings at Bennington College in Vermont—in 1952. And he wrote two articles to try to boost Pollock’s late-1951 show at Betty Parsons. But prior to that, he hadn’t reviewed Pollock’s work for three years. When, unhappy with her inability to find buyers, Pollock left Betty Parsons in 1952 to go to Sidney Janis (who by now was also de Kooning’s dealer), Greenberg described his first show there as “wobbly.”

  All artists, said Greenberg, “have their run,” and Pollock’s “run was over.” Greenberg didn’t review the Janis show, or Pollock’s next show in 1954. And then, in 1955, with Pollock at his lowest ebb, he wrote an essay in Partisan Review announcing openly that Pollock had lost it—that his latest work was “forced,” “pumped,” and “dressed up,” that creatively he was washed up.

  Reviewing a survey of Pollock’s work at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1955, the young critic Leo Steinberg noted that “more than any other living artist’s, Pollock’s work has become a shibboleth; I have heard the question ‘What d’you think of Jackson Pollock’ shouted from the floor of a public gathering in a tone of ‘Are you with us or against us?’ ” For Steinberg, the work itself “blasted” all such questions “out of relevance.” To him Pollock’s paintings were “manifestations of Herculean effort,…evidence of mortal struggle between the man and his art.” But by then, to most people who had any contact with him, Pollock was looking less and less herculean, and more and more pathetic.

  —

  POLLOCK CONTINUED LOOKING FOR FIGHTS. At the Cedar Tavern he once goaded de Kooning into punching him in the mouth. The blow drew blood, and the gathered crowd urged Pollock to retaliate, but Pollock refused: “What? Me hit an artist?” he said.

  The nadir of the two artists’ physical relationship came in the summer of 1954. De Kooning had gone with friends to help Carol and Donald Braider move house. The Braiders owned the House of Books and Music, a sanctuary in East Hampton beloved by artists and poets alike. They had named their son Jackson after Pollock. De Kooning was hoping to take some furniture from the Braiders back to the Red House, a property he was renting in nearby Bridgehampton. Pollock arrived at the Red House, a little inebriated, before de Kooning got there. He was in a mood to cause trouble. Elaine de Kooning was there and, seeing Pollock’s state, she called her husband, suggesting he return soon. When de Kooning and Franz Kline, de Kooning’s closest friend, arrived, remembered Elaine, “they threw their arms around Jackson, and began to horse around.” They hugged and refused to let go, lurching around the yard until they came upon an outside path that was deeply recessed through years of use. The sudden dip caused Pollock to fall heavily, pulling de Kooning on top of him. Pollock’s ankle snapped under the weight.

  He was immobilized for most
of the rest of the summer. The injury coincided with, and to some degree exacerbated, his accelerating decline. He grew more dependent on Krasner, who had only recently returned to making her own art with real resolve (she was combining strips cut out of her own old paintings with those cut from Pollock’s discarded works to make collages inspired in part by Matisse). Pollock’s dependence—physical now, as well as psychological—only made him more resentful, and jealous of her return to art-making. His physical helplessness, and everyone’s awareness of what had caused it, made it all too clear that he was helpless in other ways, too.

  Whatever invisible battle it was he’d been fighting, Pollock was now visibly defeated. A year later the ankle was rebroken after another reckless rumble. But somehow, that first intimate break—de Kooning landing on top of Pollock, Pollock coming off second best—came to represent the new reality of their relationship.

  —

  NEAR THE END OF POLLOCK’S LIFE, Robert Motherwell was hosting a party at his Upper East Side townhouse. De Kooning and Franz Kline and about sixty others were there. Pollock had not been invited.

  “I knew that there was an effort to replace Pollock with them [de Kooning, Kline, and other members of The Club] and…I didn’t want him to get wildly drunk and disrupt everything,” explained Motherwell. “Everyone had arrived and the party was in full swing when the doorbell rang. Pollock was standing sort of sheepishly and asked if he could come in…He was absolutely sober. De Kooning and Kline were high, and the two of them began to taunt Pollock as a has-been, etc. He had every right to get drunk or to slug them, but in fact he just took it. Obviously, he had made up his mind to keep his cool and after a while he left…Strange way to see Pollock for the last time.”