—
BY THE FINAL YEAR of his life, 1956, Pollock was visibly unraveling in front of an appalled and fascinated world. He was the most famous artist in America, but he hadn’t painted anything in eighteen months. People used to turn up at the Cedar Tavern, where he went to drink after sessions with his latest therapist, and try to touch him for good luck. They would buy him drinks in the hope of getting him to act out—which he reliably did. If there was a couple having supper together in the bar, he would sit down at their table, and—ignoring the man—throw all his addled attention at the woman. When the man protested, he would sweep his arm theatrically over the surface of the table, knocking salt, pepper, silverware, cream pitcher, Parmesan, bread, place mats, and drinks to the floor. It was all a performance. Pollock knew it was what people expected from him. And conforming to expectations was all he could manage.
His face, as photos show, gave away his condition: It was gluey, and strangely characterless. His eyes, which used to seethe with ferocious intent, seemed weak and sheeplike, as if reconciled to a state of permanent, underlying apology. His liver, too, was diseased and swollen, ravaged by years of alcoholism. But he couldn’t stop drinking, and in fact was drinking more than ever. Beer mostly. Scotch, too. And then, whatever was poured into his glass. Along with the drinking came rolling waves of maudlin weeping and ragged boasting and general incoherence. In company, he had become the phony that in private he had always secretly feared he was. At parties and gatherings he was treated as a kind of jester, despised or sentimentally loved, but always with a certain reserve. To almost everyone in his ambit—from his wife to his friends, his dealer, the critics who had written in praise of his breakthrough work, and the smattering of bold collectors who had bought it—his behavior had become embarrassing.
He and Krasner had been a formidable team. Even as their relationship had lurched from crisis to crisis, it had generated stupendous things. Her determination to remain in control of a situation that had been sliding toward chaos for years had been heroic, if also, to many who knew her, disconcerting: Did she exert too much control over him? friends wondered. Was her own devotion to his career, her fierce need to protect and promote him, ultimately good for him, or good for her? Did it not isolate them both further? In any case, having endured years of psychological abuse and even (according to some) physical beatings, she had reached a breaking point. What was between them had been slowly but thoroughly poisoned. Month by month, year by year, the toxicity had accumulated, until it was no longer endurable.
—
AND THEN, IN THE SUMMER of 1956, Pollock, as if to goad Krasner—but also, perhaps, out of other kinds of desperation—took up with a glamorous younger woman. Her name was Ruth Kligman. From the outside, nothing about the affair seemed quite serious. Kligman was an artist and an art student. She was also trying to run a gallery. In the circle of avant-garde artists and enablers known to Pollock and Krasner she was a stranger, until she appeared one day at the Cedar Tavern. Kligman related to the world around her in a breathless way. The writer John Gruen said she “looked like a plumper and taller Elizabeth Taylor,” and “had a kind of film star image of herself.” She wore tight dresses and had a seductive, whispering manner that men found arousing and women tended to resent. Elaine de Kooning called her “pink mink.”
But if Kligman was in some ways calculating when it came to attracting men, she was also shy and naïve. Clinging to a deeply romantic notion of creative genius, she yearned to have some contact with it. When Pollock, puffy and glowering, walked into the Cedar Tavern, most people saw pathos. To Kligman, “he was monumental and magical.” “A genius walked in, and we all knew it,” she wrote in her memoir, Love Affair. “The trumpet had sounded, the greatest of the matadors had arrived…”
Kligman had never had a boyfriend. Unlike many of the women artists and the various wives and girlfriends of male artists who made up the rambunctious, bohemian downtown artists’ scene, she felt defenseless without makeup. The bustle and backslapping of the Cedar Tavern (“Finally I was with a group of real artists,” she wrote) reduced her to an awed silence. She felt out of place, and on some level like a fraud.
And maybe all of that is what attracted Pollock to her. For he, too, felt fraudulent, insecure, defenseless—“a clam without a shell,” as he said. He, too, was sexually inexperienced (Krasner had been his only long-term partner). He, too, was obsessed with the idea of genius.
The two began seeing each other. Pollock flaunted her in front of Krasner. He would have held on to both women if he could, and in fact he behaved almost as if he were merely waiting to be told that he couldn’t. Krasner saw Kligman emerge one morning from the studio just beyond their house on Long Island, and quickly made her position clear: The new relationship was not something she could tolerate. He would have to choose. But he continued to ignore reality, and in the end, Krasner had no choice but to act. She resolved to travel to Europe, leaving Pollock and Kligman to their own devices.
For a short time, the lovers were euphoric. Pollock felt liberated from Krasner’s controlling, frustrated, and suffocating presence. Kligman, meanwhile, was at last free to indulge her adolescent dream of being with a great artist without having to think about the fact that he was married to Krasner (and helpless without her).
But sure enough, after a few brief weeks of happiness, the chaos and self-loathing that were always sloshing at the edges of Pollock’s psyche flooded back in. Krasner had been powerless to do anything about it. And so, too, now, was Kligman.
On the night of August 11, driving drunk and at high speed along Fireplace Road at ten thirty at night, with two passengers, Kligman and her friend Edith Metzger, in the car with him, Pollock lost control. The car, a 1950 Oldsmobile convertible he had recently bought on impulse, veered off the road and plowed into two elm trees. The impact killed him instantly. It also killed Metzger.
Kligman was the sole survivor.
—
AT POLLOCK’S FUNERAL, DE KOONING was among the last of the mourners to leave. Afterward, he was at the artist Conrad Marca-Relli’s home, not far from Fireplace Road. Unable to find their master, Pollock’s dogs came into the house. “It gave me the creeps,” recalled Marca-Relli. “I said something and Bill said: ‘It’s all right. That’s enough. I saw Jackson in his grave. And he’s dead. It’s over. I’m number one.’ ”
He went into the garden, where he was later discovered in tears.
—
DE KOONING WAS INDEED now number one. But of course, in most people’s eyes, he already had been. Clearly, while Pollock was alive, de Kooning—acutely aware of his debt to Pollock—had remained unconvinced.
Now there could be no doubt.
Or could there? De Kooning behaved now as if he still had a point to prove. Within a year of Pollock’s death, he began an affair with his dead rival’s girlfriend, Ruth Kligman. Acquaintances and friends were astonished. The news was the equivalent of a dream that, upon waking, seems so nakedly available to interpretation that it embarrasses the dreamer into silence. “Going with Ruth,” as one onlooker said, “really put the stone on Jackson’s grave.”
The relationship between de Kooning and Kligman actually lasted several years—many times longer than the brief and doomed dalliance between Kligman and Pollock. And yet, perhaps because it lacked the romantic drama that violent death had imposed on Kligman’s relationship with Pollock, it seems it had nothing like the same significance, for either party. When Kligman later wrote Love Affair, it was not about her time with de Kooning—it was about her much briefer time with Pollock. De Kooning, likewise, when asked about Kligman by Jeffrey Potter many years later, answered that she “must have cared for him [Pollock] a lot.” And then, trailing off: “She kind of cared for me, too, later. She meant it,” he continued, speaking of Kligman’s feelings for him, “but not like, you know, a great passion or anything like that.”
—
THREE YEARS AFTER POLLOCK’S DEATH, de Kooning a
nd Kligman spent the summer and fall in Europe. Things between them were beginning to fester. De Kooning was struggling with the same problems that had overwhelmed Pollock. Five years earlier, barely anyone outside a circle of art lovers in Manhattan had heard of him. He was an illegal immigrant who didn’t even have a bank account. Now he was internationally famous. The incessant adulation and toadying, the partying, the hard drinking—which de Kooning had now taken to with a vengeance—were undermining him. He was continuously irritable, and that irritability slid regularly into outright belligerence.
Just as Pollock had done at regular intervals throughout his adult life, he began roaming the streets at night, inciting needless arguments, which often turned violent. He provoked one woman to strike at his head with a bottle; he knocked out another man’s teeth, prompting a lawsuit.
Now, in Europe with Kligman, he bickered and fought. The lovers separated in Venice and met up again later in Rome—the Rome of Fellini. They were photographed by paparazzi as they went to a hotel and thence to a nightclub. And there, in the early hours of the morning, they began to fight.
“It was absolutely awful,” Gabriella Drudi, a friend who was there, told Stevens and Swan. “They were screaming at each other. Finally Bill said, ‘Why don’t you go into the grave with your Jackson Pollock.’…And Ruth said, ‘I had two months with Jackson Pollock but he’s jealous.’ ”
—
THE FINAL YEARS OF the 1950s saw de Kooning achieve the kind of near-universal endorsement that Pollock had craved, and improbably achieved, but enjoyed all too briefly. Thomas Hess talked of “l’école de Kooning,” and wrote the first monograph on his work. Published in 1959, it was part of a series called Great American Artists. The Dutch stowaway had become a US citizen just as his paintings were being sent abroad to represent the apex of American visual culture during the Cold War. The critics were crazy for his cavalier, liberated painting style. The popular press, too, swung behind de Kooning and his tough, romantic persona.
A scene—far larger and more dynamic than the intimate huddle of avant-garde artists in the 1930s and ’40s—had coalesced and achieved a kind of critical mass. De Kooning was crowned its king. “He took a whole generation with him, like the pied piper,” Greenberg later noted.
Better still, a healthy market for contemporary painting had magically sprouted. At the opening of his 1959 solo show at Sidney Janis’s, collectors began queuing outside by 8:15 A.M. By midday, nineteen of the show’s twenty-two paintings were sold. De Kooning, observed Fairfield Porter, was “rich now for the first time in his life.”
But he was far from content. Even as the adulation peaked, he seemed increasingly harried, frustrated, and petulant. Alone at the top, he behaved as if under permanent threat—just as Pollock had. He was pining, too, for lost comrades—“imaginary brothers” gone missing. He was missing Gorky, his old sidekick, long dead. And he was pining, obscurely, for Pollock. More than anyone else, Pollock would have understood what de Kooning was now going through; what it was like to be at the top of the pile; what forces buffeted you up there and made you want to drink yourself to oblivion.
For that is what, by now, de Kooning was doing. And he didn’t really stop—not for more than three decades (he died in 1997). De Kooning drank to quell his anxieties, and the heart palpitations they set off. He once woke Marca-Relli at 2 A.M., banging on his door and saying, “Jesus Christ I think I’m going to die. I can’t stop.” Marca-Relli told Stevens and Swan that de Kooning’s doctor had told him to calm himself: “You’re over-anxious. This whole idea of painting a figure and destroying it…this is doing something to you.” Over the next few decades, de Kooning was regularly hospitalized; he sabotaged his relationships, one after the other, through alcohol and infidelities, and his body was subjected to all manner of ignominy, from feet so swollen that he couldn’t put on shoes to tremors so savage he couldn’t sign his name. “Don’t forget,” said Marca-Relli, de Kooning “could draw like Ingres and could paint with the sweet quality of any master. And yet he had to cut it off, destroy it all, slap it off, all these violent strokes.”
—
DE KOONING’S LIFE WAS LONG, but his ascendancy, like Pollock’s, was surprisingly brief. By the early 1960s, his reputation was in eclipse. A new generation of artists was emerging, and they had little interest in de Kooning’s kind of painting—still less in the grandiloquent rhetoric that bore it aloft. More and more, the heroic aura around de Kooning the “action painter” seemed ripe for ridicule. He was a massive, cynically inflated target just asking to be punctured. The younger generation—beginning with Robert Rauschenberg (who convinced de Kooning to give him a drawing so he could erase it and present it as a work of his own called Erased de Kooning Drawing) and Jasper Johns, followed by the Pop Artists, then the Minimalists, the Conceptualists, and so on—were more or less allergic to the idea of easel painting pursued passionately and in earnest. Their tastes were cooler, more cerebral, wittier. They were turned off by the outsized personalities of the Abstract Expressionists and the rampant mythmaking of their boosters. To them, de Kooning’s masterly way with contour and color, his ardent relationship with oil paint, his love of landscape, the sea, and all things sensuous and visceral seemed increasingly passé.
Ironically, Pollock’s posthumous reputation soared. It had been languishing—if not cratering—while he was still alive. But death purified him, made him freshly eligible for sanctification. More important, his work began to look more and more relevant, and even unexpectedly prescient. Conceptually, technically, and spiritually, it pulsed with possibilities, and to succeeding generations of artists it was constantly suggesting new ways forward. Pollock’s method of dancing around the canvas on the floor, for instance, attacking it from all angles, inspired new modes of experimental performance art. The gap between his touch and the surface he marked gave his paintings a curiously objective quality, too: Color Field painters, hard edge abstractionists, Minimalists, and even Land Artists found this compelling, and in many ways an antidote to the histrionic, blowsy self-expression they perceived in de Kooning’s manner.
With every new development in avant-garde art, and with every passing year, Pollock looked more and more deserving of his reputation as a revolutionary, a trailblazer. De Kooning, on the other hand, looked admirable enough, but somehow slightly shopworn—someone operating valiantly at the end of a tradition rather than boldly inaugurating a new one.
Reflecting on their achievements, Irving Sandler called de Kooning “the painter” and Pollock the “genius.”
—
DE KOONING CAME TO TERMS with all this. He was the painter, instinctual and sensuous, and he didn’t try to hide from it—not even when historical currents were against him. In an era that increasingly celebrated coolness, minimalism, and impersonality in art, he was more than happy to go against the grain. “Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure,” he had said in 1951. “I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity.”
His painting had always been more carnal than Pollock’s. “Flesh,” he famously said, “is the reason oil paint was invented.” It was an attitude that was to resonate profoundly with, among others, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
—
THE STORY OF DE KOONING’S post-Pollock life is not just the story of a long string of audacious advances as a painter, or of a body of work that was so bold, so expressive, and so ambitious that it finally transcended the fads and moods of its historical moment. It is also, sadly, the story of an endless concatenation of self-annihilating binges.
And it is something else, too: It is the story of a life that was never entirely “post-Pollock,” and that perhaps never could be. De Kooning was at once too indebted to Pollock and too caught up in admiration and rivalry ever to leave him behind. His whole attitude toward Pollock was deeply ambivalent. He lived his own life, and it was certainly not contained or defined by Pollock. But through his relationship with Kligman, and even through his 1963 move t
o the Springs—to a house directly opposite the cemetery where Pollock was buried—he seemed bent on maintaining a connection with his dead friend and rival.
PLATE 1
Lucian Freud, Portrait of Francis Bacon, 1952. Tate, London / Art Resource, NY. © The Estate of Lucian Freud. All rights reserved / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London.
PLATE 2
Francis Bacon, Painting 1946. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © 2016 The Estate of Francis Bacon / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London.
PLATE 3
Lucian Freud, Girl with a Kitten, 1947 (oil on canvas) / Private Collection / © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images.
PLATE 4
Lucian Freud, Girl in Bed, 1952 / Private Collection / © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images.
PLATE 5
Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953. Private collection. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS 2016. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
PLATE 6
Edgar Degas, Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet, c. 1868–69, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art.
PLATE 7
Edgar Degas, Interior (The Rape), c. 1868–69. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Accession #1986-26-10. The Henry P. McIlhenny Collection in memory of Frances P. McIlhenny, 1986.
PLATE 8
Édouard Manet, Le Repos (Repose), c. 1870–1871, Oil on canvas; 150.2 x 114 cm (59 ⅛ x 44 ⅞ inches). Bequest of Mrs. Edith Stuyvesant Vanderbilt Gerry. 59.027. Museum of Art, Providence, Rhode Island, USA/Bridgeman Images.
The Art of Rivalry Page 32
